Apple “willfully selected to not comply” with a courtroom order to loosen its app retailer restrictions—and one in every of its executives lied beneath oath concerning the firm’s plans, a federal choose wrote on Wednesday.
Choose Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers has referred the scenario to the US legal professional’s workplace in San Francisco “to analyze whether or not legal contempt proceedings are applicable.”
Apple didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
In 2021, Gonzalez Rogers presided over a lawsuit introduced by Fortnite developer Epic Video games over the iPhone maker’s allegedly anticompetitive practices that hampered builders’ means to generate income from the App Retailer. This included Apple’s coverage of taking a 30 p.c fee on sure in-app purchases.
Whereas Gonzalez Rogers ultimately ruled in favor of Apple on most counts, she ordered the corporate to start permitting builders to market methods to make in-app purchases exterior of the App Retailer ecosystem. Apple responded by decreasing its fee to 27 p.c on purchases made elsewhere, nevertheless it additionally launched a collection of different modifications, together with displaying so-called scare screens, to dissuade customers from making purchases exterior its ecosystem.
Final yr, Epic challenged in courtroom how Apple was responding to the order, main Gonzalez Rogers to require the tech big to show over paperwork that contributed to Wednesday’s contempt ruling.
Apple pursued its non-compliance technique “with the specific intent to create new anticompetitive limitations which might, by design and in impact, preserve a valued income stream; a income stream beforehand discovered to be anticompetitive,” Gonzalez Rogers wrote in her ruling on Wednesday. “That it thought this courtroom would tolerate such insubordination was a gross miscalculation.”
She additionally stated that Apple executives tried to cover the true motivations for the modifications. “In stark distinction to Apple’s preliminary in-court testimony, contemporaneous enterprise paperwork reveal that Apple knew precisely what it was doing and at each flip selected essentially the most antiaggressive choice,” Gonzalez Rogers stated. She went so far as accusing Alex Roman, a vice chairman of finance at Apple, of mendacity throughout testimony wherein he talked about how Apple got here to its resolution to go together with a 27 p.c fee on purchases made exterior the App Retailer. “The testimony of Mr. Roman was replete with misdirection and outright lies,” the choose stated.
Roman didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
Citing inside Apple paperwork from 2023, Gonzalez Rogers stated Apple’s App Retailer chief Phillip Schiller “had advocated that Apple adjust to the injunction” however that CEO Tim Cook dinner “ignored Schiller and as an alternative allowed Chief Monetary Officer Luca Maestri and his finance group to persuade him in any other case.”
The choose demanded that Apple instantly comply along with her earlier order. “That is an injunction, not a negotiation,” she wrote. “There aren’t any do-overs as soon as a celebration willfully disregards a courtroom order. Time is of the essence. The Court docket won’t tolerate additional delays. As beforehand ordered, Apple won’t impede competitors.”
Epic Video games CEO Tim Sweeney said on X the brand new ruling would convey an finish to “Apple’s 15-30% junk charges.”
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