The Russian firm claims in its suit that Apple removed its 'Safe Kids' app from the online marketplace, ostensibly for a configuration violation but in reality to eliminate competition to its own 'Screen Time' feature. Both apps allow parents to monitor and control their children's device usage and to restrict inappropriate content.
"From our point of view, Apple appears to be using its position as platform owner...to dictate terms and prevent other developers from operating on equal terms with it," a spokesperson told WinBuzzer.
Unlike Android, Apple's iOS does not allow users to install apps from any source other than the Apple Store. Kaspersky claims this grants the company unfair power to push its own apps on users.
Music streaming app Spotify filed a similar complaint against Apple with the European Commission earlier this month. Apple applies a 30 percent tax on purchases made through its payment system, including subscription to Spotify's premium service. Paying this tax would force Spotify to up its prices, while refusing to pay would see Spotify locked out of Apple services like Siri, HomePod, and Apple Watch.
In either case, the company's own Apple Music service comes out on top.
Kaspersky's complaint comes less than two weeks after 2020 presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) vowed to use antitrust legislation to break up tech mergers that undermine competition, and to punish firms that simultaneously operate a marketplace and sell their own products on that marketplace.
"We need to stop this generation of big tech companies from throwing around their political power to shape the rules in their favor and throwing around their economic power to snuff out or buy up every potential competitor," Warren said in a statement.
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