Google and Apple scare us, app makers tell Congress
Executives from Match Group, Spotify and Tile told a Senate antitrust subcommittee that the app-store gatekeepers' fees and rules threaten their businesses.
App makers who rely on Apple's and Google's mobile stores for distribution told a Senate Antitrust Subcommittee hearing on April 21, 2021 that they are afraid of how much power the two companies hold over their businesses, according to CNBC's reporting and a summary account republished by MV Telegraph.
Match Group Chief Legal Officer Jared Sine told the subcommittee, chaired by Sen. Amy Klobuchar, "We're all scared" of the tech giants' power, per the MV Telegraph account of the hearing. Spotify Chief Legal Officer Horacio Gutierrez, Tile General Counsel Kirsten Daru, Apple Chief Compliance Officer Kyle Andeer and Google Senior Director of Public Policy Wilson White also testified.
CNBC's original reporting on the hearing could not be directly fetched this session due to a paywall restriction; the quotes and testimony details above are drawn from a secondary account of the same hearing rather than CNBC's article text itself.
What app makers said Apple and Google do
Gutierrez said Apple restricted how Spotify could communicate with its own users about paid upgrades: "They basically threw the book at us to make it difficult for us to uphold our choice to speak up," he said, according to the MV Telegraph account. He also argued Spotify succeeded in spite of, not because of, Apple's platform rules: "We are not successful because of what Apple has done. We succeeded despite Apple's interference."
Witnesses cited commission rates of 15-30% charged by Apple and 30% by Google on in-app purchases, and Tile's representative described Apple restricting the company's access to ultra-broadband technology before Apple later launched its own competing AirTag trackers using similar technology, per the same account.
The bigger picture
The hearing came as lawmakers from both parties were developing updates to antitrust law aimed at platform gatekeepers that both host competitors' apps and sell competing products of their own, according to the retrieved coverage. Apple's and Google's own representatives testified at the same hearing, though their specific rebuttals were not detailed in the sources retrieved this session.
US In News compiled this archived account from contemporaneous coverage of the April 21, 2021 Senate Antitrust Subcommittee hearing, as reported by CNBC and summarized by MV Telegraph. It restores a story originally published on this site in April 2021; figures are as reported at the time.