Facebook Is Preparing A Lawsuit Against Apple

You would probably laugh if someone tells you Facebook is accusing another company of having monopolistic tendencies, but it turns out the social giant has spent the last several months building an antitrust lawsuit against Apple.

The Information reported that Facebook has been preparing an antitrust lawsuit against the iPhone maker, claiming that the guidelines in its App Store represent market abuse as third-party developers have to accept the rules while Apple’s apps do not.

The social giant plans to file the lawsuit with similar complaints to those of Epic Games following an event, in which Apple kicked Fortnite out of the App Store. According to the Information, it’s not clear whether Facebook will go through with this lawsuit, but the tensions between Apple and the social giant are surely heating up.

In June, the Cupertino-based firm announced its plan to add nutrition labels to applications with a clearer explanation of how users’ data was used and developers would be required to get their permission before they could use third-party data tracking. But Facebook complained that these changes could destroy revenue created by its ad network, after which Apple decided to delay the launch of the tracking permissions and nutrition labels until this year.

As Facebook relies a lot on the Audience Network on its platform to earn advertising revenue, any changes in the App Store guidelines will be a huge threat to its bottom line. That means the lawsuit is basically a way for Facebook to halt any upcoming change as we all know it’s not in a position to accuse Apple.

On the other hand, Apple wants to let users better control their privacy, meaning we expect to see the conflict go on for a long time.

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