EU Opens Competition Probe Into Apple's Bid For Music App Shazam (reuters.com)

EU antitrust regulators opened an investigation on Monday into Apple's bid for British music discovery app Shazam, concerned the deal might give the iPhone maker an unfair advantage in poaching users from its rivals. From a report: Apple announced the deal in December to help it better compete with industry leader Spotify. Shazam lets users identify songs by pointing a smartphone at the audio source. The European Commission said it was concerned about Apple's access to data on Shazam's users who use competing music streaming services in Europe.

Comments

The EU is Retarded

[TheFakeTimCook]

They may be well-meaning; but they seem to be even more Regulation-Happy than the U.S. Congress, and that's saying something!

So now, nobody can have an online service that might POSSIBLY inadvertently gather data that might POSSIBLY be also gathered by a "Competitor"?

I don't know how Shazam works; but do you have to tell it what Streaming Music Service you might (or might not) belong to to use it? If not, then this is a horseshit suggestion.

Re:The EU is Retarded

[SvnLyrBrto]

It's actually fairly unlikely that Apple cares about Shazam as a user-facing app at all. It's really much more likely that they want the dataset, the backend software, and maybe the development team, as a hedge against their current reliance on Gracenote.