Apple “willfully selected to not comply” with a court docket order to loosen its app retailer restrictions—and considered one of its executives lied beneath oath in regards to the firm’s plans, a federal choose wrote on Wednesday.
Choose Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers has referred the state of affairs to the US Lawyer’s Workplace in San Francisco “to analyze whether or not felony contempt proceedings are acceptable.”
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 the power of builders to generate income from the App Retailer. This included Apple’s coverage of taking a 30 % 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 % on purchases made elsewhere, however 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 court docket how Apple was responding to the order, main Gonzalez Rogers to require the tech large to show over paperwork that contributed to Wednesday’s contempt ruling.
Apple pursued its noncompliance technique “with the specific intent to create new anticompetitive boundaries 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 court docket 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 probably the most antiaggressive choice,” Gonzalez Rogers stated. She went so far as accusing Alex Roman, a vp of finance at Apple, of mendacity throughout testimony during which he talked about how Apple got here to its determination to go along with a 27 % 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 a substitute allowed Chief Monetary Officer Luca Maestri and his finance crew 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 are not any do-overs as soon as a celebration willfully disregards a court docket order. Time is of the essence. The Courtroom won’t tolerate additional delays. As beforehand ordered, Apple won’t impede competitors.”
Epic Video games CEO Tim Sweeney posted on X that the brand new ruling would carry an finish to “Apple’s 15-30% junk charges.”
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