Just when you thought the Apple v. Epic fight was well and truly over, Apple has managed to bring down fresh ire from the US District Court of Northern California. In an 80 page document filed Wednesday, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers has found Apple to be in violation regarding an injunction which went into effect in January 2024 after the Supreme Court declined to review the case.
To briefly recap:
- May 2021 – The Court issued an injunction against Apple to stop impeding competition with regards to in-app and out-of-app purchases on the App Store.
- April 2023 – The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the injunction.
- January 2024 – The Supreme Court declined to hear the case, which meant the injunction was in place and Apple was required to follow it.
- March 2024 – Epic Games files a motion to enforce the injunction and find Apple in civil contempt.
Apple apparently has not amended its behavior in the wake of the injunction. And Judge Rogers is clearly not amused. “Apple’s response to the Injunction strains credulity,” she wrote. She then continued, “In stark contrast to Apple’s initial in-court testimony, contemporaneous business documents reveal that Apple knew exactly what it was doing and at every turn chose the most anticompetitive option.” She has referred the matter, including testimony from Apple VP of Finance, Alex Roman, which Judge Rogers all but declares as perjury, to the US Attorney for Northern California to investigate with an eye towards criminal contempt charges. She ended the overview in language in rather stark language. “This is an injunction, not a negotiation. There are no do-overs once a party willfully disregards a court order.”
The injunction, at this point, prohibits Apple from charging a fee or commission for any out-of-app purchases. They are also prohibited from interfering with the style, formatting, or placement of links or buttons placed by app developers which lead to an out-of-app purchase option. Apple is further prohibited from interfering with the customer’s choice to go out-of-app by using anything more than a neutral “you are going to a third-party site” message, as well as excluding certain categories of apps and developers from obtaining link access.
Judge Rogers concluded her order rather tartly when she wrote, “For this Court, there is no second bite at the apple.”
Food For Thought
The degree of contempt, hubris, and corporate arrogance laid out by Judge Rogers is utterly staggering. It’s painfully clear that Apple has managed to make a less-than-ideal situation even worse. It’s unclear, however, if they’re counting on current events in the Justice Department and the larger situation with regards to the federal government to provide cover for them or if they genuinely believe that they can simply keep doing business “as usual” regardless of what Judge Rogers and the US Attorney decide to do. One does not necessarily expect a perp walk featuring Tim Cook anytime in the near future, but that scenario is now at least a slim probability instead of a vague possibility.
