Spain's competition watchdog says it is investigating possible anti-competitive practices by Apple and Amazon over sales of Apple products on Amazon
talk about capitalism making for strange bedfellows — but I suppose stranger things have happened. https://twitter.com/... @appleinsider : #Apple and #Amazon are being investigated in tandem in Spain, for arrangements the pair have allegedly made to squeeze out third-party sellers of #iPhones, #iPads, and #Macs in the country. https://appleinsider.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Spain's watchdog is joining a widening European pattern rather than acting alone: Italy opened its own probe into an Apple–Amazon arrangement two years earlier over Beats headphones (Italy's antitrust authority investigated the pair over Beats sales), and Brussels was simultaneously preparing App Store charges against Apple after Spotify's complaint (EU antitrust charges over App Store rules).
The Spanish case matters because it targets a different channel — physical device distribution on Amazon's marketplace — and because this exact investigation ended in consequences: the same watchdog ultimately fined Apple and Amazon a combined €194M for limiting which devices could be sold on Amazon's Spanish sites (the €194M fine that closed this case).
First-order effects
- Third-party sellers of iPhones, iPads, and Macs on Amazon's Spanish marketplace are the immediate parties affected — if the alleged arrangement curbed their listings, their access to Amazon's channel is the thing under review.
- Apple and Amazon now face a formal domestic investigation in a major EU market, adding Spain to the list of jurisdictions actively examining their partnership.
Second-order effects
- Italy's earlier probe into the same companies signals that any remedies Spain extracts will be benchmarked by other national authorities examining parallel arrangements.
- Amazon faces pressure on its role as both host and beneficiary of brand-exclusivity deals, forcing it to weigh marketplace exclusivity fees against regulatory exposure across multiple EU markets at once.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — Spain fining the pair, Italy probing them separately, the EU charging Apple over the App Store — enforcement is converging on Apple's distribution model as a whole, treating hardware resale, headphones, and app commerce as one gatekeeping question.
- The eventual Spanish fine suggests national regulators are willing to act unilaterally on cross-border platform arrangements, fragmenting compliance for US platforms operating in Europe.
The trend: European antitrust authorities are converging from separate national probes into a coordinated challenge to Apple's control over how its products reach consumers, whether through apps or authorized resellers.