Apple surrenders one hour of profit to Russia for antitrust violations

After failing to overturn a 2021 Russian fine regarding abuse of the App Store's alleged dominace, Apple has now paid the country's regulator $12.12 million.

This case is separate to the 2022 App Store antitrust fine, in which Russia's Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) has said it will fine Apple $17.4 million. That case concerns forcing developers to use Apple's in-app payment system, and the $12.12 million fine relates instead to a specific complaint from Kaspersky Lab.

Following that firm's 2019 complaint that an app of its was being forced to reduce functionality because it competed with Apple's own Screen Time, the FAS investigated. In 2020, FAS first ruled that Apple owed $12 million in fines, but then agreed to delay the ruling until Apple had appealed.

Now according to Reuters, Apple has reportedly paid the fine. Apple itself has not commented, but FAS posted a statement on its Telegram channel saying: "Apple has paid a 906 million rouble antitrust fine."

Since the original ruling, Apple has ceased all online sales in Russia following the start of the Ukraine war.

14 Comments

robin huber 22 Years · 4026 comments

About 1 year ago

Hmmm. Guess they figured that if the EU gets away with this kind of economic extortion, they can too.

mystigo 16 Years · 183 comments

Russia -that paragon of justice. They will certainly not think of more fines now that they have this one in the bank.

DAalseth 6 Years · 3067 comments

Why doesn’t paying this fine to Russia violate sanctions. You know that the money will probably fund the war, that is if it hasn’t already been siphoned off by one of Putin’s cronies.

rob53 13 Years · 3312 comments

Trying to think like Apple--there are a lot of consumers in Russia who are not like Putin and who shouldn't be considered as such. It's a difficult decision for Apple to shut down all sales to Russia (or any other country) just because of the person in charge. My hope is real Russians will stay with Apple once Putin goes away. $12M is not that much money to keep a foot in this country IF its citizens find a way to remove Putin.

chadbag 13 Years · 2029 comments

rob53 said:

Trying to think like Apple--there are a lot of consumers in Russia who are not like Putin and who shouldn't be considered as such. It's a difficult decision for Apple to shut down all sales to Russia (or any other country) just because of the person in charge. My hope is real Russians will stay with Apple once Putin goes away. $12M is not that much money to keep a foot in this country IF its citizens find a way to remove Putin.

I think the shutdown of business is more related to sanctions compliance. And like the comment above, I wondered how paying the fine doesn’t violate sanctions itself. Maybe a Russian bank account for Apple was found to pay out of.