According to Open Web Advocacy (OWA), Apple appears to have misled the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) in a regulatory filing that seeks to play down competition concerns.
Why is Britain's competition watchdog investigating Apple and Google? | Kalkine Media
OWA, a web technology lobby group, on Wednesday flagged the alleged inaccuracy in a document [PDF] submitted by Apple last month in connection with the CMA's competition inquiry into the mobile browser and cloud gaming markets.
In footnote 142 on page 47, Apple says that the CMA's analysis of the mobile browser market appears to "rely on an OWA report on an alleged 'dark pattern' involving the use of different user interfaces to prefer Safari to be set as the default browser (para 3.48) by not showing the default browser setting in the Settings app's Safari tab where the default browser is Safari."
This gets to the heart of the competition investigation – whether Apple has favored its own Safari by making it unfairly difficult to choose a competing mobile browser as the device's default.
