Apple May Face Criminal Charges for Allegedly Lying to a Federal Judge | EUROtoday

Apple “willfully chose not to comply” with a court docket order to loosen its app retailer restrictions—and one in every of its executives lied underneath oath concerning the firm’s plans, a federal choose wrote on Wednesday.

Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers has referred the scenario to the US Attorney’s Office in San Francisco “to investigate whether criminal contempt proceedings are appropriate.”

Apple didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.

In 2021, Gonzalez Rogers presided over a lawsuit introduced by Fortnite developer Epic Games over the iPhone maker’s allegedly anticompetitive practices that hampered the flexibility of builders to generate income from the App Store. This included Apple’s coverage of taking a 30 % fee on sure in-app purchases.

While Gonzalez Rogers finally dominated in favor of Apple on most counts, she ordered the corporate to start permitting builders to market methods to make in-app purchases exterior of the App Store ecosystem. Apple responded by decreasing its fee to 27 % on purchases made elsewhere, however it additionally launched a sequence of different modifications, together with exhibiting so-called scare screens, to dissuade customers from making purchases exterior its ecosystem.

Last yr, Epic challenged in court docket how Apple was responding to the order, main Gonzalez Rogers to require the tech large to show over paperwork that contributed to Wednesday’s contempt ruling.

Apple pursued its noncompliance technique “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 additionally mentioned that Apple executives tried to cover the true motivations for the modifications. “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 mentioned. She went so far as accusing Alex Roman, a vp of finance at Apple, of mendacity throughout testimony by which he talked about how Apple got here to its resolution to go together with a 27 % fee on purchases made exterior the App Store. “The testimony of Mr. Roman was replete with misdirection and outright lies,” the choose mentioned.

Roman didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.

Citing inner Apple paperwork from 2023, Gonzalez Rogers mentioned Apple’s App Store chief Phillip Schiller “had advocated that Apple comply with the injunction” however that CEO Tim Cook “ignored Schiller and instead allowed Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri and his finance team to convince him otherwise.”

The choose demanded that Apple instantly comply together 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 posted on X that the brand new ruling would convey an finish to “Apple’s 15-30% junk fees.”