U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, the Senate’s top Democrat on antitrust issues, said Apple’s announcement that it would introduce the AirTag tracking device was “timely,” as it was the type of conduct her group had. scheduled to discuss at a hearing on Wednesday.
Apple Inc. (AAPL.O) announced Tuesday that it would begin selling AirTags, which can be attached to items like car keys to help users find them when they get lost. The move puts Apple in direct competition with Tile, which has sold a similar tracking device for more than a decade.
At a hearing, Apple’s chief compliance officer, Kyle Andeer, as well as Tile’s attorney general, Kirsten Daru, will testify.
“It’s timely considering that this is the kind of behavior we’ll be talking about in the audience,” said Klobuchar, who added that criticism of Apple and Google app stores had not received the scrutiny that they deserved it. “He had focused a little less on that than I think there should have been.”
Apple said its AirTags were a result of its “FindMy” app, which is used to locate lost Apple devices and to share user locations and was introduced in 2010, before the founding of Tile. Apple last month opened its operating system to third-party item trackers and said Chipolo, a startup that competes with both Tile and Apple’s new AirTags, uses the system.
“We’ve always adopted competition as the best way to generate great experiences for our customers, and we’ve worked hard to build a platform on iOS that allows third-party developers to thrive,” Apple said in a statement.
Others on the witness list are Wilson White, Google’s senior director of government affairs, Spotify’s legal director Horacio Gutierrez, and Match Group’s legal manager Jared Sine.
App creators, such as the Spotify music streaming service and Match dating app, have long complained about the mandatory revenue sharing and strict inclusion rules set by the App Store of Apple for iPhone and iPad, along with Google’s Play Store for Android devices, have anti-competitive behavior.
In his testimony, Match’s Sine is expected to argue that both Google and Apple demand a heavy 30% of any digital transaction, which raises prices for consumers.
Match pays about $ 500 million in annual commissions to the app store, the company’s largest expense, according to Sine.
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