On May 13, 2026, France's Cour de cassation — the highest court in the ordinary judicial order — rejected all four joined appeals in the long-running Apple distribution case, ending a saga that began with a distributor's complaint in 2012. The ruling makes final the Paris Court of Appeal's October 2022 judgment: Apple, together with wholesalers Tech Data and Ingram Micro, unlawfully allocated products and customers between 2005 and 2013 and abused the economic dependence of its network of Apple Premium Resellers (APRs). Apple's penalty stands at roughly €372 million — and that figure, not the original €1.1 billion, is the precedent that matters.
The case the regulator won
The Autorité de la concurrence's Decision 20-D-04, issued March 16, 2020, was the heaviest sanction it had ever imposed on a single company: €1,101,969,952 for Apple, plus €76.1 million and €62.9 million for Tech Data and Ingram Micro, for a total of €1.24 billion. The complaint came from eBizcuss, an independent Apple Premium Reseller that filed in April 2012 and was later forced out of business.
Strip away the headline number and the core findings are serious and well-grounded. Apple divided products and customers between its two approved wholesalers in a way the Autorité said "sterilised" wholesale competition. Independent resellers were starved of supply during product launches while Apple's own stores stayed fully stocked. That is not a privacy feature or a defensible design choice — it is textbook vertical foreclosure, exactly the conduct competition law exists to catch. A regulator that ignored a decade of supply discrimination against independent retailers would be failing at its job. The Cassation court's refusal to disturb the allocation and economic-dependence findings is the right call, and pro-innovation does not mean pro-incumbent.
What the courts pruned
But the same litigation that vindicated those findings also disciplined the regulator. In October 2022 the Paris Court of Appeal struck the third charge entirely — the claim that Apple had fixed APR retail prices — and cut the overall penalty by roughly two-thirds, to about €372 million. The court found the Autorité's calculation rate had been inflated by Apple's sheer financial scale rather than the gravity of the conduct, and it narrowed the timeframe of the wholesaler-restriction count.
That correction is the underappreciated half of the story. The original €1.1 billion was a number engineered to make headlines and signal toughness toward a foreign giant; the courts replaced it with one anchored to actual harm. The Cassation ruling did not revive the bigger fine — it confirmed the smaller one. Six years and three levels of review produced a penalty that is large but proportionate, and a price-fixing theory that did not survive contact with the evidence.
A multi-front campaign
The distribution case is only one front in France's broader campaign against large platforms, and the newer fronts lean increasingly on data and dominance theories. In March 2025 the Autorité fined Apple €150 million under Decision 25-D-02 over its App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework, holding that while ATT's privacy objective was "legitimate," its implementation abused Apple's dominant position by complicating third-party app use and undermining the framework's neutrality. France's data regulator, the CNIL, has run a parallel track of GDPR and ePrivacy enforcement against the same companies over consent banners and tracking.
There is a coherent case for this aggression, and it deserves stating fairly: France argues that scale itself creates leverage — over retailers, over rival developers, over users' attention — and that absent active enforcement, dominant platforms simply write the rules of their own markets. The allocation case proves the point; left unchecked, the conduct ran for eight years.
The risk is that "abuse of dominance" hardens into a catch-all for any decision a large company makes. The ATT fine is the warning sign. A privacy feature that regulators and civil-society groups elsewhere broadly welcomed was recast as an antitrust violation largely because Apple is big enough for its privacy defaults to move a market. When the same conduct is lawful for a small firm and illegal for a large one, enforcement drifts from policing behaviour to penalising size — and that chills exactly the kind of bold product decisions an open, competitive internet depends on.
Why proportionality is the win
There is a sovereignty subtext here too. Nine days after the Cassation ruling, President Macron announced an extra €1 billion for quantum research — bringing France's total public commitment to €3.3 billion — plus €550 million more for semiconductors, framing technological dependence as a strategic threat that "must absolutely be won." France wants simultaneously to discipline foreign incumbents and to grow its own champions. That ambition is legitimate, but it is best served by predictable, evidence-based enforcement, not by record fines that courts later gut.
Read in full, the Apple saga is a good advertisement for that model. Genuine anticompetitive conduct — the allocation, the supply discrimination — was identified, litigated, and upheld across three levels of review. An overreaching penalty and a weak price-fixing theory were trimmed by judges. The €372 million that survived is proportionate; the €1.1 billion that did not was theatre. For regulators across the EU's enforcement-heavy capitals, the lesson is that the courtroom, not the press release, defines the boundary of the law.