OREANDA-NEWS. Anton Gorelkin, a member of the Russian State Duma Committee on Information Policy, appealed to the Federal Antimonopoly Service with a request to conduct a check of the activities of the American corporation Apple in terms of abuse of monopoly position in the Russian market.

According to the publication of the newspaper Kommersant, the deputy’s appeal is dated August 28. Gorelkin claims that Russian developers have repeatedly contacted him with complaints about the impossibility of registering an account in the Apple system, without which the application cannot appear in the App Store. The parliamentarian explained that because of this, Russian developers have to purchase accounts registered in the United States and China on the black market. On average, their cost ranges from 300 to 500 US dollars.

As Gorelkin noted, the problem is that in order to verify the identity, Apple asks for a billing address from the bank through which the developer must pay for the account, but the data format provided by Russian banks does not meet Apple’s requirements. According to the deputy, for developers from the United States and China, there is a different algorithm for confirming identity, which is not available to Russian companies. “In fact, Apple is pursuing a discriminatory policy based on citizenship of developers for a number of countries, including Russia,” Gorelkin said.