Britain’s competition watchdog is poised to overhaul Apple and Google’s payment rules, aiming to cut costs for app developers and lower prices for consumers.
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is consulting on compelling the tech giants to allow developers to 'steer' customers away from their proprietary payment systems.
Currently banned by Apple and restricted by Google in the UK, this forces developers to pay mandatory platform-set fees, the CMA highlighted.
The CMA proposes measures to permit 'steering', ensuring any associated fees charged by Apple and Google are 'fair and reasonable'.
The regulator stated: "The CMA would expect steering fees to be lower than current app store charges, with savings passed on to UK customers or invested back into the developers’ businesses to support future innovation."
This intervention follows the CMA’s decision last October to grant Apple and Google 'strategic market status', a designation for the most dominant businesses in the mobile market.
The decision means the regulator can choose to intervene to open them up to more competition that it says will benefit consumers and businesses.
Speaking on Tuesday at the Informa Connect CompLaw conference, the CMA’s executive director for digital markets, Will Hayter, will say: “We are consulting today on draft conduct requirements to support so-called ‘steering’, or the ability for app developers to engage directly with their users outside Apple and Google’s app stores.
“We think it is important to give both app developers and users more choice about how they communicate and how they transact.
“This is not only because choice is inherently valuable but also because we see this as the best way to introduce some competitive pressure in a vital part of the mobile ecosystem that is otherwise sorely lacking such pressure.”
Google insisted it already allows “steering” for developers and changes to fees after unveiling the changes last week, though this is still “subject to certain restrictions”.
The tech giant said: “We have already made the changes that the CMA is proposing today.”
Apple has been approached for comment.
The CMA has now has concluded three strategic market status investigations and launched a fourth into Microsoft’s business software ecosystem since the UK’s digital markets competition regime started 18 months ago.
Mr Hayter will add later in his speech on Tuesday: “In many cases, the market takes enough care of both companies and people – such is the power of competition to give people a choice of innovative products and services at reasonable prices, and to give companies with great ideas the chance to succeed.
“But sometimes that simply doesn’t work in practice. If companies don’t do right by consumers, we may have to step in.”
