BAD APPLE

By Alex Trelinski

SPAIN'S competition watchdog, the CNMC, has fined Amazon and Apple a total of €194 million for collusion in the sale of products.

The two firms had limited the sale of Apple products on Amazon’s Spanish websites ‘which restricted competition’, a CNMC spokesman said. It launched a probe in July 2021 for ‘possible anti-competition practices in the sectors of internet sales of electronic products and the provision of marketing services to third-party retailers

Colluding giants fined €194mn for restricting competition

through online platforms’.

The CNMC said at the time that it had access to ‘certain information’ from which it had found ‘rational indications’ that Amazon and Apple were in breach of laws related to the defence of competition and the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. Both firms agreed in 2018 to sign two contracts in which they updated Amazon’s role as an authorised distributor of Apple products.

The CNMC discovered that