- Apple was hit with a second 5-million-euro fine for not complying with a Dutch regulator’s order.
- The regulator told the company to let dating apps in the Netherlands use non-Apple payment methods.
- The regulator told Insider that Apple could face fines beyond the current 50-million-euro maximum.
Apple was fined another €5 million ($5.6 million) this week by a Dutch antitrust regulator because the company failed to comply with an order to let dating apps in the Netherlands access payment methods outside Apple’s own system.
This is the second €5 million fine issued by the Authority for Consumers and Markets against Apple after the regulator reviewed the App Store operator’s response and ruled that the changes didn’t satisfy its order.
“We expect Apple to comply with the order subject to periodic penalty payments,” Murco Mijnlieff, an ACM spokesman, said, referring to the weekly €5 million fine that came with a maximum of €50 million. “After that, (if not), we have the opportunity to impose another order subject to periodic penalty payments.”
Apple currently requires all apps to use its App Store payment system, which takes a 15-30% cut of all in-app transactions. The Dutch order is one of multiple international regulatory efforts to force Apple to let apps use payment systems beyond its own.
The Netherlands was the first country to implement a hard deadline on Apple to allow alternative in-app payment methods, and on January 15, Apple announced new developer options — dubbed “entitlements” — that would let dating apps in the Netherlands App Store use different payment options.
But the new approach requires developers to submit a new “binary” specifically for the Netherlands App Store, which developers slammed because it essentially means they must create a new app just for that country.
The ACM reviewed the changes and announced after one week that the update failed to comply with its order in several aspects.
“The most important one is that Apple has failed to adjust its conditions, as a result of which dating-app providers are still unable to use other payment systems,” ACM wrote in a statement. “In addition, Apple has raised several barriers for dating-app providers to the use of third-party payment systems. That, too, is at odds with ACM’s requirements.”
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