Apple has filed a petition at the Delhi High Court challenging India’s updated antitrust regulations, which could expose the U.S. tech giant to fines as high as $38 billion, according to a court document reviewed by Reuters.
This marks the inaugural legal challenge to the antitrust penalty framework, enacted last year, empowering India’s Competition Commission (CCI) to base fines on a company’s worldwide revenue when penalizing violations of market dominance rules.
Reuters:
Since 2022, Tinder-owner Match and Indian startups have been locked in an antitrust battle with Apple at the CCI, where investigators last year issued a report saying the U.S. smartphone company had engaged in “abusive conduct” on the apps market of its iPhone Operating System, iOS.
Apple denied all wrongdoing, and the CCI is yet to make a final decision in the case, including about any penalty.
The company is asking judges to declare as illegal the 2024 law that allowed the CCI to use global turnover, not just that in India, when calculating penalties, according to its 545-page court filing, which is not public.
Apple’s “maximum penalty exposure” at the rate of 10% of its average global turnover derived from all of its services globally for three fiscal years to 2024 could be around $38 billion, it said in the filing.
Such a “penalty based on global turnover…would be manifestly arbitrary, unconstitutional, grossly disproportionate, unjust,” it added.
Companies also risk fines of as much as 10% of their global turnover for antitrust violations in the European Union.
MacDailyNews Take: Any country or consortium of countries trying to grab 10% of Apple’s average global turnover would be committing a grossly disproportionate and patently unjust act.
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