Apple Inc. has called on European Union lawmakers to scrap a piece of tech industry legislation known as the Digital Markets Act.

“The DMA should be repealed while a more appropriate fit for purpose legislative instrument is put in place,” Apple stated in a filing submitted late Wednesday to the European Commission. 

The DMA is a law designed to regulate large tech firms that are designated as gatekeepers by EU officials. The legislation defines gatekeepers as companies with “platforms whose dominant online position make them hard for consumers to avoid.” Apple is among the tech giants that have received that designation.

Last June, the EU found that the company had breached the DMA by placing limits on steering. That term refers to developers’ practice of asking users to make in-app purchases outside the App Store. In March, the EU determined that Apple also ran afoul of the DMA with some iPhone features. Officials found that the smartphone series isn’t sufficiently interoperable with third-party devices.

The DMA’s device interoperability rules are the focus of a blog post that Apple published in conjunction with its request to repeal the law. According to the company, those rules have caused it to delay the release of some software features in the EU. The blog post pointed to the AirPods’ artificial intelligence translation capability as one example.

“Bringing a sophisticated feature like this to other devices creates challenges that take time to solve,” the company wrote.

According to Apple, some iPhone features may be impossible to launch in the EU as a result of the DMA. Among them is a capability that lets users wirelessly interact with the apps on the iPhone via a Mac. The DMA requires Apple to make the feature available on certain competing devices, but the company says it has not yet found a way of doing so. 

“Our teams still have not found a secure way to bring this feature to non-Apple devices without putting all the data on a user’s iPhone at risk,” Apple wrote. “And as a result, we have not been able to bring the feature to the EU.”

The post also takes issue with certain other components of the DMA. Additionally, Apple claims that some DMA rules only apply to its products even though Samsung Electronics Co. has a larger share of the EU mobile market.

“Despite our concerns with the DMA, teams across Apple are spending thousands of hours to bring new features to the European Union while meeting the law’s requirements,” Apple wrote. “But it’s become clear that we can’t solve every problem the DMA creates. That’s why we’re urging regulators to take a closer look at how the law is affecting the EU citizens who use Apple products every day.”

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