The world's largest e-commerce company MercadoLibre announced on Monday that it has complained to Brazil and Mexico's antitrust authorities about Apple's anticompetitive practises. The complaint accuses the US-based company of abusing what it calls a monopoly in the distribution of apps for its devices.
The e-commerce behemoth claimed in a statement that Apple had placed a number of limitations on the sale of digital products and in-app purchases, including a prohibition on the distribution of third-party digital products and services like movies, music, video games, books, and written content by apps.
The South American firm criticised Apple for forcing app developers that sell digital products or services to use its own payment system and for prohibiting them from sending customers to their websites in the lawsuit. In a statement, Jacobo Cohen Imach, senior vice president of legal and public affairs, argued that this "obviously damages its rivals, unless they are integrated digital giants themselves, who may even gain from this artificial tilt towards integrated ecosystems." According to MercadoLibre, the accusations against Apple were brought before the Federal Telecommunications Institute and Federal Economic Competition Commission in Mexico, as well as the antitrust agency CADE in Brazil.
A comment from the regulators could not be obtained right away. When asked if they would think about taking similar action against Alphabet's Google, MercadoLibre's antitrust director Paolo Franco Benedetti responded in an interview that they were not entirely satisfied with Google's practises but are now concentrating on the accusations against Apple. According to Benedetti, Google's app store has less restrictions than Apple's.
In Brazil, Apple declined to comment, while in the US, it took the company a while to react to a Reuters request for comment. Google declined to comment on the situation.
Over the past few years, Apple's rules have been contested almost everywhere in the world.
A judge determined that Apple had not broken antitrust law in a U.S. court hearing last year over comparable accusations, in part because its policies provided consumers with security benefits that exceeded any harm to app developers.
However, the decision is being challenged, and a comprehensive solution to the issues seems far off. One of Latin America's largest firms, MercadoLibre, is listed on the Nasdaq and has a market valuation of $47.53 billion, according to Refinitiv data. According to Cohen Imach, the e-commerce behemoth attempted to bargain with Apple "failedly." Undoubtedly, he said, "we would have preferred to avoid a dispute with the largest company in the world, but we are confident that we are acting in the best interests of future competition."
