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Court issues permanent injunction in Epic vs. Apple case

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Re: Court issues permanent injunction in Epic vs. Apple case

#41

Post by bialpio »

smnrchrds wrote: post #10

> “The court cannot ultimately conclude that apple is a monopolist under either federal or state antitrust laws,” she writes in the ruling. “Nonetheless, the trial did show that apple is engaging in anti-competitive conduct under California’s competition laws.” It's nice to see that you don't have to be a monopolist to be legally barred from anti-competitive behaviour. I hope this puts a permanent stop to all the thr…

> I hope this puts a permanent stop to all the thread on HN arguing one way or another whether Apple is a monopoly.

Why would it? The court basically dodged the question, so we still don't have an answer provided by the court system. Until that happens, we can discuss it to death if we want!

Edit: excerpt from the ruling is: "Given the trial record, the Court cannot ultimately conclude that Apple is a monopolist under either federal or state antitrust laws. (...) The Court does not find that it is impossible; only that Epic Games failed in its burden to demonstrate Apple is an illegal monopolist."

Re: Court issues permanent injunction in Epic vs. Apple case

#42

Post by shkkmo »

sparker72678 wrote: post #13
dannyw wrote: post #5

Does the permanent injuction apply only to Epic, or does it apply to everyone?

It reads like it applies to all developers.

This injuction only applies to Apple, as it says pretty clearly in the decision. That prohibition does benefit all developers using the App Store, not just Epic.

There is a good chance that this precedent will encourage other lawsuits that will lead to more injuctions, such as one that applies to Steam.

Re: Court issues permanent injunction in Epic vs. Apple case

#43

Post by danShumway »

This is somewhat surprising to me. I thought Epic had a reasonable chance of getting an eventual win on some points, or in getting enough attention that regulators stepped in. I also thought Apple had a pretty decent chance of winning.

But I did not think that Epic had a particularly strong chance of getting an injunction like this.

I hope that the takeaway people take from this is "it's tricky to guess what a judge will do during a contentious case", and not, "the judge was always obviously going to issue this injunction." I still personally think knowing what I know now, if I went back to the start of this case I still wouldn't be able to confidently predict this injunction.

But maybe other people are better at reading court signals than I am.

Re: Court issues permanent injunction in Epic vs. Apple case

#44

Post by lacker »

Great news for mobile developers (and for Stripe). Everyone doing in-app purchases has a huge incentive to quickly find some drop-in replacement that charges 3% instead of 30%.

I would be surprised if Apple ends up keeping the fee at 30%. If this injunction holds up, I think they will drop it within the year.

Re: Court issues permanent injunction in Epic vs. Apple case

#46

Post by madeofpalk »

bialpio wrote: post #41
smnrchrds wrote: post #10

> “The court cannot ultimately conclude that apple is a monopolist under either federal or state antitrust laws,” she writes in the ruling. “Nonetheless, the trial did show that apple is engaging in anti-competitive conduct under California’s competition laws.” It's nice to see that you don't have to be a monopolist to be legally barred from anti-competitive behaviour. I hope this puts a permanent stop to all the thr…

> I hope this puts a permanent stop to all the thread on HN arguing one way or another whether Apple is a monopoly. Why would it? The court basically dodged the question, so we still don't have an answer provided by the court system. Until that happens, we can discuss it to death if we want! Edit: excerpt from the ruling is: "Given the trial record, the Court cannot ultimately conclude that Apple is a monopolist unde…

What does an answer actually look like?

Re: Court issues permanent injunction in Epic vs. Apple case

#47

Post by nullspace »

socialist_coder wrote: post #35

This will certainly get appealed and bogged down even more in the legal system, right? What are the chances this actually happens? And when? Secondly, this is such an easy way to increase your take by 20+% that I would imagine almost every publisher is going to be offering their own payments platform, not just the biggest ones like Epic.

Yeah, agree. I think this would kill the App Store model. It's surprising that the stock only dipped by 2%. What am I missing?

Re: Court issues permanent injunction in Epic vs. Apple case

#48

Post by gigel82 »

This would be very good news if it sticks!

But since Apple is known to refuse store submissions for opaque reasons, what would stop them from retaliating against apps that provide links to external payment processors with vague unrelated reasons? I would not put that past them.

Also, I hope the anti-monopoly part gets picked up at the federal level; no one can deny Apple & Google are de-facto duopoly.

Re: Court issues permanent injunction in Epic vs. Apple case

#49

Post by mensetmanusman »

This is a big deal.

I wonder how Apple will respond to dealing with the bandwidth costs of free apps with large bandwidth requirements.

Hopefully they just get rid of free apps, and require customers to pay upfront so that they don’t have to deal with as many advertisements.

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