Apple will hold back the release of Apple Intelligence, iPhone Mirroring and SharePlay Screen Sharing in the European Union out of concern about regulations in the Digital Markets Act (DMA), according to various press reports.
Apple Intelligence is Apple’s artificial intelligence upgrade. An Apple spokesman “described Apple Intelligence as a collection of ‘highly capable’ large language and ‘diffusion models,’ as well as an ‘on-device semantic index’ that worked across apps to identify data and feed it to models,” according to CNBC. It affected the Siri voice assistant and other functions.
The EU expects Big Tech to behave itself
iPhone mirroring allows users to see and control their iPhones from their Macs. SharePlay Screen Sharing allows FaceTime users to take control of others’ devices during the conversation. Fred Sainz, Apple senior director of corporate communications, told The Verge in a statement:
“We are concerned that the interoperability requirements of the DMA could force us to compromise the integrity of our products in ways that risk user privacy and data security.”
Apple is one of the six corporations the EU has identified as “gatekeepers” with particularly powerful positions in their markets. The gatekeeper corporations besides Apple are Alphabet, Amazon, ByteDance, Meta and Microsoft. The six operate 22 “core platform services,” EU lawmakers say. Gatekeepers are subject to the rules of the Digital Markets Act, which took effect in May 2023.
The EU is a huge market
The rules imposed on the gatekeepers cover interactions with third parties, users’ control over the data their data and the data they generate and businesses’ rights to verify advertising hosting on their platforms, among other things.
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Violations of those rules could lead to penalties of up to 10% of the company’s total worldwide annual turnover, or up to 20% in the case of repeated offenses, as well as additional remedies. Apple is already the subject of a probe of its business practices in the EU.
The EU has 27 member states and a population of 448.4 million.
Cointelegraph contacted the Apple press department and Sainz for confirmation and additional information, but did not receive immediate responses.