b) Apple is free to act as payment provider, but can't force businesses to use it.

If they decide to do it anyway:

  In case a gatekeeper does not comply with the obligations laid out in the DMA, the Commission can impose fines up to 10% of the company's total worldwide turnover, which can go up to 20% in case of repeated infringement. In case of systematic infringements, the Commission is also empowered to adopt additional remedies such as obliging a gatekeeper to sell a business or parts of it, or banning the gatekeeper from acquiring additional services related to the systemic non-compliance.

Apples iMessage is also currently evaluated. In a total coincidence Apple also announced recently that RCS support is coming.

So Google can't just make an EU subsidiary that never makes a profit and thus the fines don't have teeth.

It's the global turnover of Alphabet Corporation.

Not that it'd work, but might be amusing.

You are using their developer tools and SDKs and like other tooling e.g. game engines they can recoup this cost through a per-sale model.

They tried similar minded tactics already with the Dutch complaints already and they weren't blindly accepted.

And there is nothing anti-competitive about Apple charging for their developer kit.

$99/year for the development kit will probably be seen as reasonable enough for it to be allowed, though they may have to accept allowing 3rd party alternative solutions to publish things to these other app stores or similar. The fixed price of the development kit isn't really the point when talking about the 30% commission though. That's about revenue from consumer purchases and trying to evade that via moving the pricing to the dev kit wholly then requiring the dev kit will not fly just because the DMA doesn't explicitly reference doing that being an example of a bad gatekeeping action.

Is charging a royalty for using the iOS SDK "gatekeeping"? I don't see why that's the case. Is Epic Games "gatekeeping" Unreal Engine by demanding 5% royalty to use their engine? Why should it be any different for Apple to demand royalty for using their SDK?

Even if EU magically made a law that explicitly banned royalties for operating system SDKs, that won't be the end of the story. Such measures could be construed as anti-free trade (given how it disproportionately affects US companies compared to EU companies), and will probably lead to a trade war and/or WTO arbitration between the EU and the US.

Where they'd get into trouble is by trying to turn these things into ways to move the 30% revenue cut. Just moving the 30% revenue from "rights to be on the one and only store" to "rights to write apps against the device with the one and only SDK" is quite clearly a different motive and forced cost model than having a 5% SDK fee where the developer is free to choose a different SDK.

I.e. "but others charge for an SDK" doesn't allow you to then change your SDK cost model to exactly match what was deemed illegally anticompetitive forced market pricing. It just allows you to charge for your SDK in a competitive way, nothing more.

Not only that but a bunch of iOS apis incur services costs on Apple's side. Certainly seems valid that they should be able to charge to provide push notifications, iCloud storage, etc. There is a wide industry of businesses monetizing development kit usage and/or enterprise services. Nothing in the EU's regulations should preclude Apple from monetizing their investment into the iOS development platform.

"See this one neat legal flaw that EU regulators hate!" isn't an approach a US$350B-revenue-company wants to take, with a regulator who's already signalled their intent.

Are you a lawyer specialising in the topic?

Do you actually know anything about this or is this just your opinion presented as fact?

It's not an outrageous conclusion that the law bans blatantly unfair practices, when that's what it sets out to do.

I don't think Apple can have a requirement to use their proprietary tools. That would be anti-competitive. If they want to make money off the tools... they should just charge a fee to buy the tools.

Yesn’t; I don’t think the regulators would look kindly upon Apple restricting third-party JITs, since it’d give Safari/WebKit an unfair competitive advantage over other browser engines on iOS (something I believe the DMA is also meant to open up.)

It would be interesting to see if people can replace parts of ios (sort of like grapheneos cuts out google)

That would look very much like an anti-competitive move to the same EU regulators who are forcing Apple to open the store for competition reasons.

Apple can continue to enforce their own rules on their own store, but demanding exclusivity probably isn't an option for them.

The EU almost certainly wouldn't allow it.

> b) How will Apple collect their commission. There is nothing in the regulation that says that they can't continue to do this.

See Denmark which has an App Store carveout for in-app purchases within dating apps. Basically, Apple wants records and reserves the right to audit.

Considering this is more than in-app purchases, I would expect a requirement for an Apple Developer account and a legal agreement to get a process similar to notarization on macOS.

Either way third party app stores should end up being noticeably more expensive than using the official. Especially once they start having to deal with fraud, chargebacks etc.

Luckily it can still be avoided by turning off gatekeeper.