Judge Hammers Apple in Antitrust Suit Over App Store Fees

U.S. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers for the Northern District of California hauled Apple  back into court after finding that Epic Games presented sufficient evidence that Apple violated her 2021 anti-trust injunction against preventing developers from adding external links and other buttons in their apps offered on its App Store. 

The potentially momentous anti-trust enforcement order news was overwhelmed by massive blowback from Apple’s horrendously stupid TV ad featuring a giant black metal press flattening an array of fine musical instruments, creative art tools, and vintage arcade games like Space Invaders into the new 0.6mm thinner iPad.  

Art critic JJ Charlesworth scathingly told the London Telegraph that the dystopian video was, “in the most degraded way, an expression of loathing for material culture, creativity and tactile sensuality.”  Charlesworth added, “Imagine a hell where the only culture that existed was trapped on a screen.”

Apple senior management quickly backtracked by pulling all pre-booked TV advertising slots for the “Crush” and issued an apology: “We missed the mark with this video, and we’re sorry.” 

The “Crush” tarnished Apple’s image with elite snobs, but the Apple app store generated over $89 billion in profit last year.  Any new federal anti-trust enforcement order could cost the company tens of billions of dollars each year.  

Big tech has been in a civil war over fees with its vendors and application partners since the early 2010s.  Many of these parties are multi-billion dollar firms that are angry about how trillion dollar gatekeepers, like Apple, use customer mandates to control markets. 

Epic Games that owns the Fortnite combat video game franchise when they sued Apple in 2020 had 78 million players on consoles, 37 million on PCs, and 357 million on mobile devices.  That number has grown to over 650 million registered users in 2024.

Epic Games is angry about Apple taking 30% monthly revenue fee from companies that offer their games on the Apple in-App Store.  Epic argues that since Apple has almost no monthly costs to administer a continuous game offering, an appropriate monthly commission should be 4% or less.  Apple countered that its users value the simplicity and the tight administrative management of Apple’s “private garden” ecosystem.

Epic Games sued both Apple and Google Android for taking the 30% revenue cut.  Google got to trial much quicker, because the way they managed vendors like Epic was much more arbitrary that Apple.  

An anti-trust jury trail already found Google liable for monopoly practices, and the judge in the case is moving to determine an appropriate legal remedy.  Epic suggests that appropriate remedy would be allowing them the right to open a rival Android app store.

Apple appealed Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers’ 2020 administrative order under federal law requiring Apple to make certain App Store rule changes.  The Supreme Court denied the appeal in January.  

During the four year litigation, Epic Games did win a California law case against Apple for violating state law for unfair competition for barring developers from “steering” users to make digital purchases that bypass Apple's in-app system. 

Apple did release its own guidelines on how it would comply with Judge Rodgers’ order.  But the process according to Matt Stoller is unusable and no single app developer is using Apples’ alternative payment model.

Apple is trying to delay proceedings, but Judge Rogers is pushing for trail this summer that could radically transform the tech industry.