Apple “willfully selected to not comply” with a courtroom order to loosen its app retailer restrictions—and one in every of its executives lied underneath 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 legal professional’s workplace in San Francisco “to analyze whether or not legal 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 builders’ capacity 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 in the end dominated 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 sequence of different adjustments, together with displaying so-called scare screens, to dissuade customers from making purchases exterior its ecosystem.
Final 12 months, Epic challenged in courtroom 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 non-compliance technique “with the categorical intent to create new anticompetitive boundaries which might, by design and in impact, keep 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 adjustments. “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 possibility,” 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 along 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 inner 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 Prepare 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 together 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 Courtroom won’t tolerate additional delays. As beforehand ordered, Apple won’t impede competitors.”
Epic Video games CEO Tim Sweeney stated on X the brand new ruling would convey an finish to “Apple’s 15-30% junk charges.”