EU antitrust chief meets Apple, Alphabet, and Qualcomm chiefs

BRUSSELS: The EU's antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager said she met with the chief executives of Apple, Alphabet and Qualcomm to discuss regulation and competition policy compliance, in posts on social media platform X on Friday.

Last week, Vestager's communications adviser said she would speak to chief executives of Apple, Alphabet, Broadcom and Nvidia in the United States, focusing on European digital regulation including the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and competition policy.

Vestager published updates on X on three meetings.

With Apple's Tim Cook, she said she discussed, among other things, the company's obligation to allow the distribution of its apps outside its proprietary AppStore, as well as ongoing competition cases like the one involving its music streaming service Apple Music.

With Sundar Pichai, the head of Alphabet and Google, she discussed, among other things, design of choice screens, self-preferencing in relation to the DMA, and also Google adtech antitrust case.

Under DMA, companies with more than 45 million monthly active users and a 75-billion-euros ($82 billion) market capitalisation are considered gatekeepers, and labelled as such, they are required for example to make their messaging apps interoperate with rivals and let users decide which apps to pre-install on their devices.

Vestager did not specify what was discussed with Qualcomm's head Cristiano Amon

"#chips power more than just our #digital transition. They’re key to our EU #economic #security. Important mtg w @cristianoamon @Qualcomm," she posted.