Revenge is best served on a baguette.
Apple has been fined €150 million – equivalent to $162.4 million – by France’s antitrust regulator, the French Competition Authority, for allegedly abusing its dominance in mobile app advertising through ATT (App Tracking Transparency). The FCA said the way Apple implemented ATT unfairly disadvantaged competitors by making it harder and more expensive for advertisers—particularly smaller publishers and ad networks—to reach users on Apple devices. As far as we can tell, this is the first antitrust penalty for Apple regarding ATT.
The ruling is based on complaints by several French digital advertising groups, who claimed the ATT rollout hurt their businesses by restricting access to third-party data. While the regulator didn’t mandate specific changes to ATT, it said Apple’s implementation wasn’t “necessary nor proportionate” to its privacy aims.
In response, Apple said, “While we are disappointed with today’s decision, the French Competition Authority has not required any specific changes to ATT.” Apple is also facing related investigations in Germany, Italy, Poland, and Romania.
Why This Matters:
Look, ATT sucks for advertisers. Any regulatory pushback like this is a good thing, as ATT was largely a “scheme” by Apple to present itself as privacy-forward while also working to give its own advertising business preferential treatment.
The great Eric Seufert says it best, regarding the FCA’s decision: “As an early and vocal critic of ATT, this decision is validating. I argued from the moment that ATT was introduced at WWDC 2020 that the framework was self-preferencing, unnecessarily destructive (I called it ‘pyrrhic privacy’), and didn’t provide consumers with real choice.” He adds: “While I don’t believe that ATT will be fully outlawed—I believe Apple will most likely have to implement changes to either the ATT prompt, its own ads personalization opt-in prompt, or both.”
Experts React:
Here are some of the best or most interesting posts on X about the news:
Our Take:
ATT hurt everyone—bigger advertisers, smaller advertisers, even walled gardens. It cost the industry billions and made advertising across iOS significantly harder. Apple sold it as a privacy win, but in practice, it was deeply anti-competitive and reshaped the mobile advertising ecosystem to its own advantage. The fact that it mostly escaped serious regulatory scrutiny in the U.S. is both absurd and disappointing. But, hey, there’s always Europe, who doesn’t hold back on regulating stuff.
