The European Union today issued fines worth €700 million to Apple Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc. after finding they had failed to comply with the bloc’s DMA law.

The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, announced the move today. The penalties mark the first “non-compliance decisions” that officials have issued under the DMA. The law, which went into effect in 2022, introduced a raft of new rules for the tech industry spanning areas such as mobile software and e-commerce.

The EU has fined Apple €500 million, or $565 million, over the App Store’s terms of service. The company was found to have breached a section of the DMA that focuses on how mobile developers sell in-app items.

Apple provides a payment system for processing in-store purchases and takes a commission from every transaction. To avoid the fees, developers can ask users to complete purchases via an external website. However, Apple imposes certain restrictions on the practice. An app may direct users to an external website, but it can’t display the price of the in-app items offered via that website.

Under the DMA, Apple must let iOS developers inform users about in-app item offers outside the App Store. The EU found that the iPhone maker’s restrictions don’t comply with this requirement. 

“The Commission has ordered Apple to remove the technical and commercial restrictions on steering and to refrain from perpetuating the non-compliant conduct in the future, which includes adopting conduct with an equivalent object or effect,” the European Commission stated today.

Apple said in a statement that “we have spent hundreds of thousands of engineering hours and made dozens of changes to comply with this law, none of which our users have asked for. Despite countless meetings, the Commission continues to move the goal posts every step of the way.”

The other DMA penalty that the EU issued today is a €200 million, or $226 million, fine against Meta. Officials determined that the company had failed to comply with the law’s targeted advertising provision.

Meta collects data points about users via its different social networks, combines the data points and analyzes them to generate personalized ads. Under the DMA, the company must provide users with a way of opting out of such data mixing. The EU determined that the opt-out option Meta provided last year between March and November fell short of DMA requirements.

During the specified time frame, Meta offered a subscription that allowed users to disable data mixing in exchange for a monthly fee. To comply with the DMA, the subscription should have been implemented as a “service that uses less of their personal data but is otherwise equivalent to” non-paid accounts. EU officials determined that the offering didn’t meet this requirement.

“The European Commission is attempting to handicap successful American businesses while allowing Chinese and European companies to operate under different standards,” Meta said in a statement responding to the decision.

Last November, the company launched a free alternative to the privacy-enhancing subscription that drew the EU’s scrutiny. It’s a setting that allows Facebook and Instagram users to significantly reduce the amount of data Meta uses to generate personalized ads. The European Commission stated today that it’s reviewing whether the setting complies with the DMA.

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