Epic Games v. Apple judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers just ruled that, effective immediately, Apple is no longer allowed to collect fees on purchases made outside apps and blocks the company from restricting how developers can point users to where they can make purchases outside of apps.
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The judge also referred the case to the US attorney to review it for possible criminal contempt proceedings.
Good. Operating systems should be neutral. The people who make them should not be allowed to dictate the terms that others use to interact with their platforms.
Hey maybe not fuckepic just this once.
Lmao, the fuckepic and ‘Tim Sweeney is a bastard man’ sentiments were always wildly overblown.
The fact that anyone took Apple’s side in this case (because the Epic game store paid for a couple exclusive games to try and break into the market) is laughably childish.
Apple literally rips off the entire world to the tune of billions of dollars a year through app store mafia extortion fees alone, let alone the rest of their anti-competitive bullshit.
Epic was just trying to break into the Apple / Google / Steam monopolies and made a couple unpopular / anti-consumer business moves on a couple games (all the while taking afar smaller cut of profits than any other store), meanwhile Apple has based their literal entire multi-decade business model on anti-consumer choices and done that for every single hardware and software device they sell you.
They are not remotely comparable. Epic was always fully in the right in their anti-monopoly legal battles.
Epic’s most redeeming quality is their willingness to take bigger companies to court for their trash policies. Now if only we could get the FTC to do their jobs so Epic wouldn’t have to…
Rogers also says that Apple “willfully” chose not to comply with her previous injunction from her original 2021 ruling
Why did it take them 4 years to enforce their own ruling?
Because the legal system is low moving even when major corporations aren’t trying to delay things and you can bet that Apple did everything they could to slow down enforcement. I’m surprised it only took 4 years.
If you’re asking what Apple can do, a lot.
In civil litigation, one of the big steps is discovery, where each party is trying to gather information that they want to use. That can take several months or longer, especially when the two parties disagree on what information ought to be shared.
During discovery, and at other times, each party will file motions asking for certain things, certain rules to be imposed, for example. And then the other party will file a response motion. And then maybe the judge will schedule oral arguments, or maybe they won’t, and the judge will make a ruling. Because the deadlines are usually on the orders of months, and at the very least weeks, it’s easy for the process to get drawn out.
And the judge is typically working other cases. So even if they get some documents on Monday, they might not be able to schedule a meeting until 3 weeks from now, for example. But even if they could rush, there’s typically not a huge necessity to do so. In this situation, the judge could impose massive financial sanctions on Apple for past conduct, should they choose to do so. In the end, this is all about money and because of that it can be resolved by making one party pay the other a lot of money. So delaying is a tactic but it doesn’t necessarily save you money in the end, not if you lose, because the duration of the bad behavior is longer and therefore you owe more.
Apple has $50B+ in literal cash. Epic’s entire revenue is under $7B/yr. Apple can afford to run Epic for decades on their cash reserves alone without impacting their bottom line.
That’s why it took 4 years. I’m surprised Apple didn’t bury them.
I don’t understand what that has to do with anything? It doesn’t cost either of them anything to enforce a ruling the court already made.
To be clear, I’m not defending anyone here…
Apple likely delayed it multiple times.
Sweeney is also offering a “peace proposal” from Epic: “If Apple extends the court’s friction-free, Apple-tax-free framework worldwide, we’ll return Fortnite to the App Store worldwide and drop current and future litigation on the topic.”
Pretty sure this has a 0% chance of working.
