Apple Tweaked App Store Ranking Algorithms, Allegedly Resulted in Demotion of Local Apps in China

Laws that address this harm

Policy angle: Classified under Socioeconomic & Environmental Harms (Competitive dynamics) in the MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy; 5 recorded instruments address this use case.

• Colorado AI Act Colorado (United States) · Repealed · binding
• Framework Convention on AI (CETS 225) Council of Europe · Adopted · binding
• India DPDP Act India · Partially applicable · binding
• Law on Artificial Intelligence (2025) Kazakhstan · Adopted · binding
• Law No. 132/2025 on artificial intelligence Italy · In force · binding

Matched from the record's risk domain and country to the instruments recorded here. A reviewer can correct the match in the repository (data/external/incident_overrides.yaml).

News reports (1)

Titles link to the original publisher; report text is not reproduced here.

1. 28 Mar 2012
   Apple Seems to Have Tweaked App Store Ranking Algorithm, Many Chinese Apps Plunge

   techinasia.com · Steven Millward

Who was involved

Alleged deployer

Apple

Alleged developer

Apple

Alleged harmed party

Renren, Buding Movie Tickets, Yi Xia, Dangdang, Chinese Startups, Chinese Companies

Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)

Risk domain

Socioeconomic & Environmental Harms

Risk subdomain

6.4 Competitive dynamics

Causal entity

AI

Intent

Intentional

Timing

Post-deployment

Harm level

—

Sectors

—

Countries

—

Risk entries describing this failure mode

Entries from the MIT AI Risk Repository coded to subdomain 6.4.

• Increased competition

  "Increased competition - The inappropriate or unethical use of technology to gain market share."

  A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

• Geopolitical risk

  "As AI is increasingly seen as a powerful technology, countries are racing to develop it ahead of their geopolitical rivals, a competition that could lead to geopolitical tensions [138], [139]... The emphasis of this ris...

  Dimensional Characterization and Pathway Modeling for Catastrophic AI Risks (Chin2025)

• Worsened conflict

  "Cooperation and conflict: we’re seeing more focus and investment on the kinds of AI capabilities that make conflict more likely and severe, rather than those likely to improve cooperation. So, on our current trajectory,...

  A Survey of the Potential Long-term Impacts of AI: How AI Could Lead to Long-term Changes in Science, Cooperation, Power, Epistemics and Values (Clarke2023)

• Resource conflicts driven by AI development

  "AI development may itself become a new flash point for conflicts—causing more conflict to occur— especially conflicts over AI-relevant resources (such as data centres, semiconductor manufacturing facilities and raw mate...

  A Survey of the Potential Long-term Impacts of AI: How AI Could Lead to Long-term Changes in Science, Cooperation, Power, Epistemics and Values (Clarke2023)

• Type 4: Willful indifference

  As a side effect of a primary goal like profit or influence, AI creators can willfully allow it to cause widespread societal harms like pollution, resource depletion, mental illness, misinformation, or injustice.

  TASRA: a Taxonomy and Analysis of Societal-Scale Risks from AI (Critch2023)

• Opacity (industry opacity)

  "Opacity is not solely due to the technological complexity that limits developers’ and users’ understanding of how generative models function on a technical level. It is further exacerbated by the practices of organizati...

  Regulating under Uncertainty: Governance Options for Generative AI (G'sell2024)

• Competitive pressures in GPAI product release

  "In competitive situations, developers of general-purpose AI systems might cut corners on the safety evaluation of their GPAI model and instead spend more time and effort on the capabilities of those systems [183, 69]. T...

  Risk Sources and Risk Management Measures in Support of Standards for General-Purpose AI Systems (Gipiškis2024)

• Corporate AI Race

  "Although competition between companies can be beneficial, creating more useful products for consumers, there are also pitfalls. First, the benefits of economic activity may be unevenly distributed, incentivizing those w...

  An Overview of Catastrophic AI Risks (Hendrycks2023)

Incidents in the same risk subdomain

• 6 Oct 2020Korean Internet Portal Giant Naver Manipulated Shopping and Video Search Algorithms to Favor In-House Services
• 3 Apr 1996Inefficiencies in the United States Resident Matching Program

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