US tech giant Apple has decided to challenge the Russian antitrust authority’s $12 million fine over unfair competition.

The Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) claims that the Silicon Valley tech giant abuses its dominant position in the app market. Notably, the dispute has been going on since 2019 after a complaint from Kaspersky Lab. Its management considers the rejection of versions of the parental control program Kaspersky Safe Kids (KSK) by Apple to be unjustified. In their defense, Apple said that it offered Kaspersky Lab to change the application to comply with the AppStore rules established for the protection of children. The company recalled that Kaspersky had 13 applications in the AppStore and hundreds of updates have been released for them. "We worked with Kaspersky to get their app in compliance with rules that were put in place to protect children,” Apple said in a statement. “They now have 13 apps on the App Store and we have processed hundreds of updates for them," Apple pointed out.

The FAS is confident that Apple’s distribution of its own products through its iOS operating system gave the company a competitive advantage and had a negative effect on the distribution of competitors' products. In addition, the corporation must remove from its documentation the provisions that give it the right to reject third-party applications in the AppStore for any reason.

This is not the only complaint against Apple from the FAS. "Gradually we are approaching the kind of seriousness in the conversation with Big Tech that has long been on display in the West," Anton Gorelkin, a member of Russia’s State Duma Committee on information and communications, said.