Futures are up today, after five days of losses marked the longest consecutive stretch of down days since February. The stock market looks to rebound from a rough week. And that, in turn, “gives those pushing to change the laws in Congress pretty good ammunition,” she said. “The ruling shows the gap between the popular perception of what is a monopoly and what the law says,” Fox said. In fact, Judge Gonzalez Rogers argued that a world where Apple had no ability to protect its commissions would be unfair. “Some people are saying it’s a big win for Epic, but that may not be so.”Īpple said that it needs to control the entire App Store ecosystem to ensure privacy and protect consumers from being ripped off, and the judge basically agreed. It’s more evidence of “how narrow our federal antitrust laws are,” Eleanor Fox, an antitrust law scholar at N.Y.U., told DealBook. Legal experts said that the decision was not a road map for future antitrust litigation, but rather another dead end for those who want to rein in tech giants via the courts. This might set up more fights between Apple and developers. If a button, like a shopping cart icon or “pay now” call-out, isn’t the same as a link, then Apple could interpret the ruling as allowing things that look like buttons but don’t take users to external sites when they tap them. There is debate about the difference between buttons and links, which could make the effect of the ruling less significant than it seems.
There is plenty of room for interpretation in the judge’s order on Apple’s steering rules, which said that Apple cannot prohibit developers from “including in their apps and their metadata buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms, in addition to In-App Purchasing,” the judge’s decision said. The main strike against Apple is open to interpretation. “Success is not illegal.” But she said that Apple’s policy against steering, by forcing developers to withhold information from consumers, was anticompetitive under California state law, and therefore should not be allowed, not just within the state, but anywhere. “While the Court finds that Apple enjoys considerable market share of over 55% and extraordinarily high profit margins, these factors alone do not show antitrust conduct,” Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers wrote. The judge sided with Apple on questions of monopoly. Epic, in its suit, said Apple violated antitrust laws by forcing developers to use its payment system and forbidding them from telling app users about alternative ways to pay. Apple said the developer had broken its rules by steering players to make purchases outside of Apple’s app store, circumventing Apple’s ability to collect a commission on in-app purchases. It’s also telling that Epic filed an appeal against the decision yesterday.Ī quick recap: Epic sued Apple in August last year, after the iPhone maker removed Epic’s popular game Fortnite from its app store. That suggests that much of the coverage over the weekend about the ruling representing a meaningful setback to the tech giant, whose shares fell on the news, should be taken with a grain of salt. Spotify, one of those developers, said it was pleased with the ruling.Ĭonversely, so did Apple.
The ruling also set off celebrations among developers who said the ruling would allow them to avoid Apple’s 30 percent commission on in-app purchases. A decision that split in Big Tech’s favorĪ federal judge’s split decision on Friday in the high-profile case between Apple and Epic Games, which stopped short of declaring Apple a monopoly but said it was anticompetitive, allowed parties on both sides of the argument to claim victory.
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