The Price of Free in EU Digital Law
Apple’s new business terms for apps in the European Union took effect on October 1, 2026. A developer that sends a user out of its app to buy something on its own website now pays Apple 15% of any sale concluded within seven days of the tap, and 5% of sales made in apps distributed outside the App Store. The Digital Markets Act, in Article 5(4), says that a gatekeeper “shall allow business users, free of charge, to communicate and promote offers” to their users “and to conclude contracts with those end users”. Seventeen months earlier the Commission had fined Apple EUR 500 million for restricting steering and charging a commission on the sales that followed. In August 2026, a Commission spokesperson said the Commission welcomed the new terms. Apple describes its commissions as reflecting “the extensive value Apple provides developers”. Epic Games, in press reports, calls them junk fees. This piece takes no side in that dispute, and no position on whether gratuity is a good regulatory instrument. It measures what the texts say.
Marcel Mauss, the French sociologist, published an essay on the gift in 1925. He had read the ethnographies of the Pacific and the American Northwest and found the same pattern in each. A gift is presented as free and voluntary, and it is neither. It obliges the receiver to accept and to return, and the return is where the value changes hands. Mary Douglas, introducing the English edition in 1990, put the finding in three words, no free gifts.
EU digital law is full of gifts. I wanted to know what they oblige. So I coded every provision in the 34 binding instruments of the EU digital rulebook that fixes what a regulated party may charge a beneficiary for data, access, a service, a switch or a procedure, 244 pricing rules in all. Two thirds of them, 161, set the price at zero.