Apple CEO Tim Cook Will Tell House Antitrust Subcommittee That the App Store Doesn't Stifle Competition

At a hearing tomorrow, Apple CEO Tim Cook will tell the House Antitrust Subcommittee that the App Store doesn't stifle competition and has opened the 'gate wider' for developers.

Bloomberg has obtained Cook's opening statement for Wednesday's hearing. In the statement, the Apple CEO says the company is a “uniquely American company” that does “not have a dominant market share in any market where we do business.”

“As much as we believe the iPhone provides the best user experience, we know it is far from the only choice available to consumers,” he will testify.


“After beginning with 500 apps, today the App Store hosts more than 1.7 million -- only 60 of which are Apple software,” Cook says. “Clearly, if Apple is a gatekeeper, what we have done is open the gate wider. We want to get every app we can on the store, not keep them off.”

“When the App Store was created, the prevailing distribution options available to software developers at the time did not work well,” Cook says. “Brick-and-mortar stores charged high fees and had limited reach. Physical media like CDs had to be shipped and were hard to update.”

“In the more than a decade since the App Store debuted, we have never raised the commission or added a single fee. In fact, we have reduced them for subscriptions and exempted additional categories of apps,” Cook wrote. “The App Store evolves with the times, and every change we have made has been in the direction of providing a better experience for our users and a compelling business opportunity for developers.”

The hearing will begin at noon Eastern Daylight Time. Cook will appear alongside Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai.


Please download the iClarified app or follow iClarified on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and RSS for updates.

Read More