Apple was struck with a $115 million fine Monday after Italy’s competitors authority declared the tech giant was abusing its dominant position to damage third-party designers in its App Store.

In a news release, the Italian Competition Authority stated that an “App Tracking Transparency” (ATT) personal privacy policy that Apple presented in 2021 required third-party designers to look for approval two times for the exact same information collection.

Needing such “double permission” was “incredibly challenging” and “hazardous” to some designers– specifically the tiniest designers, the regulator stated. Lots of designers had a hard time to make advertisement income after the policy was presented, as users progressively decreased to choose into individualized advertisements.

Apple might have benefited from the ATT limiting designers’ advertisement incomes, either “in the kind of greater commissions gathered from designers through the App Store and, indirectly, in terms of the development of its own marketing service.” Because ATT was embraced, “profits from App Store services increased,” the regulator stated, as designers paid greater commissions and “also, Apple’s marketing department, which is exempt to the exact same rigid guidelines, eventually gained from increased profits and greater volumes of intermediated advertisements.”

Without intervention, Apple would continue needing third-party designers to offer an extra authorization screen, which was “discovered to be out of proportion to the accomplishment of the business’s mentioned information defense goals,” journalism release stated.

“Apple needs to have made sure the exact same level of personal privacy defense for users by enabling designers to get grant profiling in a single action,” the regulator concluded.