Apple must halt non-App Store sales commissions, judge says
Apple Inc. violated an order of the court forcing him to open the App Store to third -party payment options and must cease to invoice commissions on purchases outside of his software market, said a federal judge in a decision resulting from the company who referred the company to prosecutors for a possible criminal investigation.
American district judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers took one side of Wednesday with Epic Maker Epic games on his allegation according to which the iPhone manufacturer did not comply with a prescription that she made in 2021 after finding the company engaged in anti -competitive conduct in violation of Californian law.
Gonzalez Rogers also referred the case to federal prosecutors to investigate the question of whether Apple has committed criminal contempt in court for having flouted its decision in 2021. The American lawyer’s office in San Francisco refused to comment.
The changes that the company must now make could put a considerable bump in the two -digit billions of dollars that the App Store generates each year.
Apple is potentially confronted with another blow of several billion dollars of the loss of payments that Google is the default search engine of its Safari browser, which is the subject of an antitrust case of the Ministry of Justice against the Alphabet Unit Inc.
After several weeks of audiences last year and this year, Gonzalez Rogers concluded on Wednesday that Apple was raped “voluntarily” his injunction.
“He did it with the express intention to create new anti-competitive barriers which, by design and in fact, would maintain a precious source of income; a source of income previously deemed anti-competitive,” she wrote in her 80-page decision. “That he thought that this court would tolerate such insubordination was a raw calculation error.”
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comments.
Epic Games’ chief executive officer Tim Sweeney described the “big victory for developers” decision, saying during a telephone call with journalists that “Force Apple to compete with other payment services rather than blocking them”.
After a trial in 2021, Gonzalez Rogers took largely on the side of Apple, saying that his policies in the App Store did not violate the antitrust law. However, it forced the company to let the developers go around its payment tool in the application to avoid a commission of up to 30%. The decision was confirmed by the United States Supreme Court last year when it refused to hear calls in the case.
Apple allowed developers to point users to the web to make transactions for integrated purchases, but forced developers to pay the company a reduction of 27% of all the income they have generated.
In the decision on Wednesday, the judge said that Apple had tried to cover his non-compliance with his order in 2021.
“After two series of proof audiences, the truth has emerged,” wrote Gonzalez Rogers. “Apple, although it has known its obligations under it, thwarted the objectives of the injunction and pursued its anti-competitive conduct only to maintain its source of income.”
The judge said that Alex Roman, Vice-President of Apple Finance, had lied to the witnesses’ stand.
“He even went so far as to testify that Apple did not examine the comparables to estimate the costs of alternative payment solutions that developers should obtain to facilitate linked purchases,” wrote Gonzalez Rogers, saying that Apple considered it exactly.
Because society and its lawyers have not corrected the testimony of novel, “Apple will be considered that having adopted lies and false statements to this court,” wrote the judge.
Gonzalez Rogers also noted that Apple had abused his use of lawyer confidentiality by trying to protect EPIC information and has to pay the legal costs of the company he spent to combat documents.
Sisco writes for Bloomberg.
