The U.S tech giant Apple has been fined a whopping $12 million by Russia’s antitrust regulator for allegedly imposing and abusing its dominance in the mobile application market.
This came after the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS), started making its research into the matter that was brought forward by the cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab stating that Apple was limiting the functionality of its Safe Kids app right after Apple had updated its own Screen Time feature for iOS 12.
Initially, Kaspersky Lab complained to the FAS back in March of 2019, and last year in August, FAS ruled that Apple’s App Store was indeed giving its own products a competitive advantage.
According to Reuters, the FAS issued a directive last year in August that Apple was to remove all provisions in its policies that gave it the right to reject third-party apps from its App Store.
This gave Kaspersky a sigh of relief as Apple was limiting the functionality of its Safe Kids app.
Apple said they have worked with Kaspersky and have tried to get their app in compliance with rules that are meant to protect children.
"We worked with Kaspersky to get their app in compliance with rules that were put in place to protect children," Apple said in a statement. "They now have 13 apps on the App Store and we have processed hundreds of updates for them."
According to reports by Reuters other big tech companies have come under fire in the past few months in Russia with Twitter punitively slowed down over its failure to delete content which Moscow said was illegal. Facebook, TikTok, and Google have felt the heat as well.
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