Apple and Meta receive the first EU DMA antitrust fines — up to $600 million or more if they do not correct themselves in 60 days

Apple and Meta became the first companies to receive financial penalties for violating the new EU Digital Markets Act (DMA).

The European Commission announced fines of 500 million euros ($570 million) for Apple and 200 million euros ($230 million) for Meta. The iPhone manufacturer is accused of anti-competitive practices in the App Store, while Zuckerberg’s company has received similar accusations regarding paid access to Facebook and Instagram without ads.

Both plan to file appeals, while the law provides them with 60 days to eliminate the violation — otherwise, financial sanctions will be increased.

As a reminder, the DMA, which came into force in May 2023, provides for fines of up to 10% of annual revenue for violations of antitrust laws (and 20% for repeated violations) for companies that are recognized as «gatekeepers»The criteria by which the DMA determines companies to be gatekeepers include market capitalization, number of active users on platforms and number of business users, annual turnover in the EU, etc. — In addition to Apple and Meta, this list includes Alphabet, Amazon, ByteDance, and Microsoft.

If we calculate in accordance with the law and take into account the revenues of companies for 2024, then Apple should have been fined $39 billion and Meta $16 billion.

Apple has previously defended its App Store restriction policy by claiming that removing them would put users at greater risk; while Meta has allegedly met the European Commission’s demands and allowed Facebook and Instagram users in the EU who do not pay for ad removal to see fewer full-screen «personalized» unskippable ads.

As we can see, none of the statements or efforts have helped to avoid responsibility. In March, the European Commission announced investigation into potentially anticompetitive practices of Apple, Meta and Alphabet. The Google owner, who has not yet been fined, is suspected of Prioritize the search engine results for your own products

Both companies have already faced EU antitrust penalties unrelated to the DMA: last year, the Cupertino-based company was fined €1.84 billion ($2 billion) within a lawsuit filed by Spotify for blocking alternative music programswhile Meta had to pay 797.7 million euros ($840 million) for granting itself unfair market advantages at the expense of merging Facebook and Marketplace$1.3 billion) for the transfer of Facebook data of EU citizens to the United States.