Apple may be hit with a big antitrust fine in France over App Tracking Transparency

France is probably going to issue an antitrust fine against Apple in March, as the country's consumer watchdog gears up to rule on whether Apple abused its position over App Tracking Transparency.

In July 2023, the French Competition Authority, the Authorite de la Concurrence, said it would open an antitrust investigation into Apple and App Tracking Transparency. Over a year and a half later, the regulator may be concluding its probe.

Two people with knowledge of the regulator's plans told Reuters on Thursday that a ruling will be arriving in March. "The decision is expected in the spring," the regulator confirmed, but declined to comment further.

That ruling is also likely to be accompanied by an antitrust fine, the sources say, but it is unclear how much the fine will end up being. French antitrust fines can be up to 10% of a company's global revenue, which could stretch to the billions of dollars in the case of Apple.

An ATT probe

The regulator's probe activity goes as far back as 2021, when it said it couldn't find fault in ATT ahead of its launch. At the time, authority chief Isabelle de Silva said the regulator couldn't intervene "just because there might be a negative impact for companies in the ecosystem," certainly without any "flagrant examples of discrimination."

That changed two years later, when it confirmed that it would investigate, after it had received a grievance on the way Apple handles the sale and distribution of apps on the App Store. Apple had apparently "abused its dominant position by implementing discriminatory, non-objective, and non-transparent conditions for the use of user data for advertising purposes."

While the regulator didn't state who had raised the complaint, it is likely to be connected to a 2020 complaint from four online advertising groups, concerning App Tracking Transparency. The IAB France, MMAF, UDECAM, and SRI all insisted in 2020 that Apple's changes to create ATT didn't meet EU privacy rules.

At the time the probe was launched, Apple shared a statement to AppleInsider insisting it holds its advertising business "to a higher standard of privacy than it requires of any other developer by prompting users for explicit permission before delivering any personalized ads."

The French antitrust ruling follows after murmurs in Germany from a federal court deliberating whether Apple should be subject to additional controls to encourage competition in the market. The fight with the Bundeskartellamt antitrust regulator also started in 2023.

Germany also launched an antitrust investigation into ATT in 2022.