Italy fines Apple €98m over App Store tracking policy

Italy’s competition authority has fined Apple, Apple Distribution International and Apple Italia €98 million for exploiting its “position of absolute dominance” through the App Store, accusing the company of unfairly burdening app developers with its tracking rules.

Regulators said Apple abused its dominance in the iOS app distribution market by imposing App Tracking Transparency rules that unfairly burden third-party developers.

The authority found that Apple forced developers to seek duplicate user consent for advertising data — going beyond what privacy law requires — undermining ad-based business models without delivering proportionate privacy benefits.

This duplication, the Antitrust Authority concludes, "results in a lack of proportionality in the ATT policy rules, given that Apple should have guaranteed the same level of user privacy by providing developers with the option of obtaining consent for profiling in a single step."

The ruling follows a lengthy investigation carried out in coordination with the European Commission and Italy’s data protection regulator, the Garante per la Protezione dei Dati Personali, examining the impact of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency framework.

Scrutiny of the policy has intensified across Europe: in March, France’s competition authority fined Apple €150 million, finding that the way the feature was implemented placed an undue burden on app developers without being strictly necessary to protect user privacy.

App Tracking Transparency, introduced by Apple in 2021, requires apps distributed via the App Store to request explicit user permission through a standardised pop-up before tracking activity across other apps and websites.

If consent is refused, developers lose access to data commonly used for targeted advertising.

Competition authorities have raised concerns that the system, imposed unilaterally by Apple, may disadvantage third-party developers and advertising intermediaries, while Apple continues to benefit from its own advertising business within the iOS ecosystem