Mercado Libre sued Apple for anticompetitive practices

In the complaint, the company criticized the tech giant for forcing developers who offer digital goods or services within apps to use Apple’s own payment system and preventing them from redirecting shoppers to their web pages.

“This clearly hurts their competitors, unless they are themselves embedded digital giants, who may even benefit from this artificial inclination towards embedded ecosystems.“Jacobo Cohen Imach, senior vice president of legal and public affairs, said in a statement.

MercadoLibre reported that the complaints against Apple had been filed with the Brazilian antitrust body CADE and with the Federal Telecommunications Institute and Mexico’s Federal Economic Competition Commission.

MercadoLibre’s antitrust director, Paolo Franco Benedetti, said in an interview that the company wasn’t entirely comfortable with Google’s policies, but it’s focusing on complaints against Apple right now. Benedetti said Google’s app store had less stringent rules than Apple’s.

highly questioned apple

In a trial last year in the United States on similar charges, a judge ruled that Apple had not broken antitrust laws, in part because its rules provided security advantages for users that outweighed any harm to app creators.

However, the sentence has been appealed and a global resolution of the problems seems distant.

MercadoLibre, listed on Nasdaq, is one of the largest companies in Latin America, with a market capitalization of $47.53 billion, according to Refinitiv data.

Cohen Imach said the e-commerce giant tried “unsuccessfully” to negotiate with Apple. “Certainly, we would have preferred to avoid a conflict with the world’s largest company; however, we are convinced that we are doing the right thing for the future of competition.“, said.