Apple “willfully chose not to comply” with a court order to loosen its app store restrictions—and one of its executives lied under oath about the company’s plans, a federal judge wrote on Wednesday.
Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers has referred the situation to the US attorney’s office in San Francisco “to investigate whether criminal contempt proceedings are appropriate.”
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In 2021, Gonzalez Rogers presided over a lawsuit brought by Fortnite developer Epic Games over the iPhone maker’s allegedly anticompetitive practices that hampered developers’ ability to generate revenue from the App Store. This included Apple’s policy of taking a 30 percent commission on certain in-app purchases.
While Gonzalez Rogers ultimately ruled in favor of Apple on most counts, she ordered the company to begin allowing developers to market ways to make in-app purchases outside of the App Store ecosystem. Apple responded by lowering its commission to 27 percent on purchases made elsewhere, but it also introduced a series of other changes, including showing so-called scare screens, to dissuade users from making purchases outside its ecosystem.
Last year, Epic challenged in court how Apple was responding to the order, leading Gonzalez Rogers to require the tech giant to turn over documents that contributed to Wednesday’s contempt ruling.
Apple pursued its non-compliance strategy “with the express intent to create new anticompetitive barriers which would, by design and in effect, maintain a valued revenue stream; a revenue stream previously found to be anticompetitive,” Gonzalez Rogers wrote in her ruling on Wednesday. “That it thought this court would tolerate such insubordination was a gross miscalculation.”
She also said that Apple executives tried to hide the real motivations for the changes. “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,” Gonzalez Rogers said. She went as far as accusing Alex Roman, a vice president of finance at Apple, of lying during testimony in which he talked about how Apple came to its decision to go with a 27 percent commission on purchases made outside the App Store. “The testimony of Mr. Roman was replete with misdirection and outright lies,” the judge said.
Roman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Citing internal Apple documents from 2023, Gonzalez Rogers said Apple’s App Store chief Phillip Schiller “had advocated that Apple comply with the injunction” but that CEO Tim Cook “ignored Schiller and instead allowed Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri and his finance team to convince him otherwise.”
The judge demanded that Apple immediately comply with her earlier order. “This is an injunction, not a negotiation,” she wrote. “There are no do-overs once a party willfully disregards a court order. Time is of the essence. The Court will not tolerate further delays. As previously ordered, Apple will not impede competition.”
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said on X the new ruling would bring an end to “Apple’s 15-30% junk fees.”
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