Shane Cole
French authorities have opened yet another investigation into Apple's business practices as the country's finance ministry begins probing contracts between Apple and its French carrier partners.
Apple's Carrousel du Louvre store in Paris
The investigation, which is said to be part of a larger probe into the relationships between mobile phone makers and wireless carriers, was first reported by French television news channel BFM TV and echoed by the Wall Street Journal's MarketWatch. It joins a similar inquiry underway by the European Commission.
Tensions are high between foreign government regulators and American tech companies as events like the recent NSA spying scandal spark concerns about privacy and data protection. Apple, Google (with its Android operating system), and Microsoft (in concert with recent acquistion Nokia) control almost 100 percent of the European smartphone market.
The finance ministry's probe appears to be unrelated to Cupertino's other legal troubles in the western European country — the iPhone maker is already the subject of two ongoing antitrust examinations by France's Autorite de la Concurrence, the rough French equivalent of the United States's Federal Trade Commission. One investigation focuses on claims that Apple puts its French resellers at an unfair disadvantage compared to the company's first-party retail stores, while the other is looking into the practices of mobile application stores like Apple's App Store and Google's Google Play store.
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22 Comments
France wants their blood money.
There is lots of FUD this morning.
Good. I hope they also check HTC and Samsung though.
DCRF probes are routine. Perhaps 1 in 20 of those end going in formal inquiry and/or trial. More, the carriers had a lot of troubles with DCRF lately, and if the latter found anything even vaguely troubling, they would launch another probe. We already know that parts of the carriers/mobile contracts were illegal with the fault on the carrier side. So, without more precise information, that is just the continuation of something existing. There is a third probe on stores due to an independant retailer bankrupt. This one afaik led nowhere.
It's a Socialist thing, you wouldn't understand.