Who would've thought? This isn’t going to fly with the EU.
Article 5.3 of the Digital Markets Act (DMA): "The gatekeeper shall not prevent business users from offering the same products or services to end users through third-party online intermediation services or through their own direct online sales channel at prices or conditions that are different from those offered through the online intermediation services of the gatekeeper."
Friendly reminder that you can sideload apps without jailbreaking or paying for a dev account using TrollStore, which utilises core trust bugs to bypass/spoof some app validation keys, on a iPhone XR or newer on iOS 14.0 up to 16.6.1. (ANY version for iPhone X and older)
Install guide: Trollstore
Apple has also been known to ignore laws and pay fines for breaking them. The store is a major revenue stream so they might just do that.
Yup. If the only penalty is a fine, and that fine doesn’t scale to the business’ profits? A profitable enough business could simply factor in the fines as a cost of doing business.
Imagine you could make $1000 and only get fined $200 after the fact. No extra penalties. Just a flat $200 fine for every time you violate it. So as long as you expect to be able to top that $200 fine, a business will elect to just pay the fine and continue doing the illegal thing.
The regulator has the power to ban sales, so I don't think that particular "cost of doing business" line applies to this dispute.