Google has proposed “sweeping changes” to its Play Store and Android to end an ongoing antitrust dispute with Epic Games, reports MacRumors.
The two companies filed a joint settlement agreement with the court last night. It’s awaiting approval. However, Apple continues to refuse to cave to Epic Games.
In its battle with Epic, Apple is asking the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to overturn an April 2021 injunction. Barring that, the tech giant wants a new judge assigned to the case OR the 2021 injunction to be dismissed entirely.
From Apple’s request: The injunction breaches well-established guardrails on the civil contempt power, and its sweeping new restrictions on Apple violate several independent limits, including the Constitution itself.
This Court should reverse the district court’s contempt order and denial of Apple’s Rule 60(b)(5) motion. In the alternative, the court should vacate the new injunction and reassign this case to a different district judge for any further proceedings necessitated by this Court’s decision.
Apple argues that the Epic Games injunction redux goes far beyond the original order and attacks conduct that’s not illegal under California law. In April US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers sided with Fortnite developer Epic Games over its allegation that Apple failed to comply with an order she issued in 2021 after finding the company engaged in anticompetitive conduct in violation of California law.
Gonzalez Rogers also referred the case to federal prosecutors to investigate whether Apple committed criminal contempt of court for flouting her 2021 ruling. Naturally, Apple disagreed with this argument: The district court’s new prohibition against any commission on sales facilitated by Apple’s own platform has no basis in the original injunction, is fundamentally unfair, violates the UCL, and amounts to a taking in violation of the U.S. Constitution. Indeed, the court’s permanent imposition of a royalty of zero for a huge category of transactions can only be understood as a punishment. But civil contempt may not be used to punish. The new injunction’s amped-up provisions barring Apple’s ability to regulate steering are similarly flawed.
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