The good news is that the tech giant Apple, which has questionable business practices, is to be fined $3 billion for allegedly ripping off consumers and not playing fair by a rival in the music streaming business, namely Spotify.

The bad news is that Apple won’t necessarily change its ways or pay the fine, at least in the short run while it appeals the decision.

The potentially better news is that regulators, courts and maybe one day politicians will have the guts to look at what these big streaming and social media platforms are doing to consumers and crackdown on it.

Only yesterday we learnt that ASIC has shut down 3,500 scam websites as it stepped up surveillance to protect consumers, hitting scammers with $60 million worth of court-imposed penalties. This is great to see but if politicians had the interest in this years ago when it was starting, then many Australians would have been saved from being rorted.

Also yesterday, 9news.com.au reported that “…Australians lost more than $8 million to scams linked to online investment trading platforms largely advertised on social media.”

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) deputy chair Catriona Lowe told 9news that there were 400 reports made to Scamwatch in the last year alone. “We are urging Australians to take their time and do their research before taking up an investment opportunity – particularly those seen on social media,” she said. ”We know of an Australian man who lost $80,000 in cryptocurrency after seeing a deepfake Elon Musk video interview on social media, clicking the link and registering his details through an online form.

“He was provided with an account manager and an online dashboard where he could see his investment supposedly making huge returns.”

On the latest count, the Targeting Scams report has revealed Australians lost a record $3.1 billion to scams in 2022, as government, law enforcement and the private sector look to improve collaborative efforts to support the community in the fight against scams. This is an 80% increase on total losses recorded in 2021.

Back to Apple and the company was accused by the European Union of “…breaking the bloc's competition laws by unfairly favouring its own music streaming service, following an investigation triggered by a complaint from music streaming giant Spotify,” abc.net.au reported overnight.

To that, Apple has argued the decision failed “to uncover any credible evidence of consumer harm” and “ignores the realities” of the market, which is dominated by Spotify.

In a nutshell, the ABC says the European Commission argued that “…Apple banned app developers from ‘fully informing iOS users about alternative and cheaper music subscription services outside of the app’.”

This is illegal in Europe, and it would be good if it was illegal everywhere, but it could cause enormous problems for many big and even small businesses.

Imagine if you created a great advertisement and finished it off by saying: “Oh by the way, there are cheaper, similar products.”

How Apple’s appeal in the European courts plays out will be fascinating, as I’m sure this will attract years of legal battles.

But it won’t come without a sting, because under European law, they’ll have to pay the fine while the appeal progresses.

In case you didn’t know, based in Sweden, Spotify is the largest music streaming app in the world. The ABC says the company “…has met with the European Commission more than 65 times during this investigation".

In its defence, Apple says Spotify pays no commission to it, as it sells its subscriptions on its website and not on Apple's App Store.

It added: “They want to use Apple's tools and technologies, distribute on the App Store and benefit from the trust we've built with users — and to pay Apple nothing for it.”

While the rights and wrongs of this case will be settled in the courts, it’s high time a local politician took on these big tech companies that grab our data, sing us up for contracts and then make it near impossible to get out of the contract.

We have instructed our credit card company to stop making payments to streaming and subscription services, and they say we have to break the contract with the business we signed up with, so they are accessories to what blatantly appears to be a rip off. Someone with the powerful position of Stephen Jones, Minister for Financial Services, needs to take up the cudgel and force credit card companies to help consumers avoid being taken to the cleaners by big tech companies.

The problem is that credit card companies have two clients — us and the businesses they collect money for online and that’s a lot of big bikkies!

We need a gutsy politician to save us. I nominate Jonesy. I hope he can muster the junkyard dog tenacity you’d expect of Peter Dutton if he was told to KO tech and credit card companies hitting and hurting consumers/voters.