Italy's AGCM opens an investigation into Apple over exempting its own apps from ATT, a day after the EU confirmed sending Apple Pay questionnaires to retailers
Italy's antitrust agency AGCM said on Thursday it had opened a probe into U.S. technology giant Apple (AAPL.O) for alleged abuse of its dominant position in the apps market.
Context & Ripple Effects
Italy's AGCM has a long history of picking at Apple: an alleged software-update slowdown scheme back in 2018, then cloud-contract terms and Beats resale restrictions in 2020. This new probe extends that record into privacy itself — the claim is not that ATT exists, but that Apple exempts its own first-party apps from the tracking prompts every rival developer must serve.
The timing matters: the probe landed a day after Brussels confirmed it had sent questionnaires to retailers about Apple Pay, so Rome and the EU are pressing Apple's platform conduct on two fronts in the same week. That ATT line of attack later produced results — Italy went on to hit Apple with a €98.6M fine calling ATT rules disproportionate and harmful to developers and advertisers.
First-order effects
- Apple now faces a formal abuse-of-dominance investigation in Italy over ATT self-preferencing, putting its own apps' exemption under legal scrutiny while third-party developers and advertisers bear the prompt burden.
- App developers and advertisers get a potential path to relief: if AGCM finds the exemption anticompetitive, ATT's asymmetric application — which suppresses rivals' ad targeting while leaving Apple's own data advantage intact — becomes actionable.
Second-order effects
- Other national regulators watching the EU's Apple Pay questionnaire exercise can adopt the same playbook — probing specific platform features rather than waiting for bloc-wide rulings — raising the compliance cost of running one closed ecosystem across many jurisdictions.
- Apple's advertising ambitions sit directly in the blast radius: a regulator framing ATT as self-preferencing makes any expansion of Apple's own ads business look like compounding the dominance problem rather than diversifying revenue.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — repeated feature-by-feature probes ending in fines like the ATT one — platform gatekeepers face a structural shift from arguing about whether rules like ATT exist to proving their own apps play by them, with enforcement fragmenting across member states until instruments like the DMA consolidate it.
- Privacy tooling and antitrust are converging: regulators increasingly treat a gatekeeper's privacy rules as competitive leverage when applied asymmetrically, meaning future privacy designs will be litigated on market-power grounds, not just user-protection ones.
The trend: European regulators are attacking Apple's platform control feature by feature — ATT exemptions, Apple Pay, and eventually DMA interoperability questions — turning privacy and payments rules into standing antitrust battlegrounds.