Associations for German publishers, media agencies and advertisers have said Apple’s suggested adjustments to its app tracking framework fail to resolve the antitrust problems the groups and the national competition authority have identified in the mobile advertising market.
The collective response, delivered on Tuesday, followed a request from Germany’s antitrust authority for feedback on Apple’s proposed changes to its App Tracking Transparency tool three months earlier. The industry group roster included media agencies and the German Association of the Branded Goods Industry.
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the associations' statement. The company has described the ATT tool as a privacy control that enables users to block advertisers from tracking them across different apps.
Complaints over the tool have come from a range of advertising-dependent businesses, including publishers, advertisers and app developers. Those concerns prompted the German competition enforcer to charge Apple with abusing its market power in February of last year.
To address the regulator’s worries, Apple in December proposed multiple amendments to how consent is requested and managed. The company offered to deploy neutral consent prompts consistently for both its own services and third-party apps, to harmonize the wording, content and visual presentation of those prompts, and to simplify the consent process so developers could obtain user permission for advertising-related data processing in a manner that complies with data protection law.
But the associations said those proposals fall short. "The proposed commitments would not change the negative effects of the App Tracking Transparency Framework," Bernd Nauen, chief executive of the German Advertising Federation, said in a joint letter signed by the trade bodies. Nauen added that Apple would remain the "data gatekeeper" and would still determine who can access advertising-relevant data and how companies may communicate with their end customers.
The industry groups urged the competition authority to reject Apple’s commitments, to order the company to halt the app tracking tool and to impose a fine. Under German antitrust law, firms found to have breached the rules can face fines of up to 10% of their annual turnover.
With the regulator having already brought charges earlier, the associations’ submission reinforces the push for stronger enforcement. The debate centers on whether Apple’s proposed procedural and design changes are sufficient to alleviate the market-power concerns raised by advertisers and publishers whose business models rely on cross-app advertising data.
At present, the associations maintain that the offered technical and user-interface modifications do not alter the fundamental control Apple exercises over access to advertising-related data, and therefore do not remove the competitive distortions the watchdog identified.