A federal judge wrote on Wednesday that Apple “deliberately chose not to comply” with the court order to relax restrictions on its app store, with one of the executives taking the oath about the company’s plans.
Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers turned the situation to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Francisco to “investigate whether the criminal contempt process is appropriate.”
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In 2021, Gonzalez Rogers presided over the lawsuit filed Fortnite iPhone Maker developer Epic Games, who allegedly has anti-competitive practices, has hampered developers’ ability to generate revenue from the App Store. This includes Apple’s 30% commission policy on certain in-app purchases.
Although Gonzalez Rogers eventually dominated Apple for the most part, she ordered the company to start allowing developers to do the way they use the market outside the App Store ecosystem to sell. Apple’s response was to lower its commissions to purchases made elsewhere, but it also introduced a series of other changes, including displaying so-called intimidation screens to prevent users from making purchases outside of their ecosystem.
Last year, Epic challenged in court how Apple responded to the order, leading Gonzalez Rogers to demand that the tech giant hand over documents that helped defiance the ruling on Wednesday.
Apple has adopted a non-compliance strategy “explained in creating new anti-competitive barriers that will effectively maintain valuable revenue sources by designing and effectively building them into account; previously considered anti-competitive revenue sources,” Gonzalez Rogers wrote in a ruling on Wednesday. “It believes that the court can tolerate such disobedience is a serious miscalculation.”
She also said Apple executives were trying to hide the real motivation for the change. “In stark contrast to Apple’s initial on-field testimony, while the business documents show that Apple knows exactly what it is doing and chooses the most every moment be opposed toCompetitive choice,” Gonzalez Rogers said. She even accused Alex Roman, Apple’s vice president of finance, of lying during the testimony, who spoke about how Apple decided to buy 27% of the purchase committee outside the App Store. Mr. Roman’s testimony was a misleading and phased-out claim.
Roman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Gonzalez Rogers cited internal documents that cited internal documents, saying Apple’s app store chief Phillip Schiller “advocated Apple to comply with the ban,” but CEO Tim Cook ignored Schiller and instead allowed Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri and his finance team to otherwise convince him. ”
The judge asked Apple to comply with her early orders immediately. “This is an injunction, not a negotiation,” she wrote. “One party willfully ignore the court order. Time is essential. The court will not tolerate further delays. As previously ordered, Apple will not hinder competition.”
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney released a new ruling on X that will end “Apple’s 15-30% junk fee”.
