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In this article AAPL ROG Follow your favorite stocks CREATE FREE ACCOUNT A person walks out of an Apple store in Beijing, China, on April 9, 2025. Tingshu Wang | Reuters Apple willfully violated and ignored a 2021 decision that came out of the Epic Games case, judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said in a decision on Wednesday. She wrote that Apple's Vice President of Finance Alex Roman "outright lied" to the court about when Apple had decided to levy a 27% fee on some purchases linked to its App Store.
Rogers added that she referred the matter to U.S. attorneys to investigate whether to pursue criminal contempt proceedings on both Roman and Apple.
The decision is a striking repudiation of Apple's conduct in the Epic Games trial, which concluded in 2021 and was appealed in 2023. While Apple won the vast majority of counts in the original trial, Epic Games did win some concessions tucked inside a 180-page order: Rogers originally ordered Apple to make changes to its app store, allowing app makers to link their websites inside iPhone apps in order for customers to make purchases . Rogers says that it would make sense that those kind of off-app purchases would not have an Apple commission.
But Apple introduced new policies in 2024 that collected a 27% commission from some of those purchases. On Wednesday, Rogers accused Apple of willfully trying to violate her ruling, and held Apple in contempt. Rogers wrote that Apple presented evidence to the court of internal deliberations about its rule that were "tailor-made for litigation," instead of Apple's actual internal discussions.
After the ruling about in-app links, Apple's introduced a policy earlier this year said that it could collect 27% of those purchases, versus its previous 30% commission on in-app purchases. Rogers said that was an anticompetitive move. "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," Rogers wrote.
"To hide the truth, Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied under oath." Rogers ordered, effective immediately, for Apple to stop imposing its commissions on purchases made for iPhone apps through web links inside an app. "This is an injunction, not a negotiation.
There are no do-overs once a party willfully disregards a court order," Rogers wrote. "In short, Apple's conduct lacks any justification: it does not comport with the text of the Injunction, requires a strained and questionable interpretation of that language, completely ignores this Court's 180-page Injunction and the Ninth Circuit's 91-page opinion, and prompted lies on the witness stand This is breaking news. Please check back for updates.
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