Apple Epic wars escalate again: dozens of U.S. states collectively appealed to Apple

Financial Associated Press (Shanghai editor Liu Rui) news, at the time when the balance of apple and Epic's judicial victory gradually fell to Apple, the prosecutors of dozens of states in the United States collectively joined the battlefield and sided with Epic.

On Thursday, attorneys generals in 34 U.S. states and the District of Columbia collectively said Apple was stifling competition through its mobile app store. In apple and epic's antitrust case, they appealed the court's ruling that allowed Apple to continue some restrictive practices.

Since August 2020, apple and Epic's antitrust case has been fought for more than a year, and the dust has not yet settled. Last September, U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled on the pros and cons of each side, but essentially sided with Apple, dismissing Epic's allegations of an Apple monopoly. The ruling held that Apple's 15 to 30 percent commission charged to some app developers did not violate antitrust laws.

Epic subsequently appealed the ruling before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Apple is expected to respond in March. But the company said optimistically on Thursday that it expected Epic's appeal to fail.

This time, however, Epic has added a new force behind it — attorneys general of dozens of U.S. states.

Recently, under the anti-monopoly wave, the US states have frequently filed anti-monopoly lawsuits against major technology companies, whether it is the social platform Meta (formerly Facebook) or Google's parent company Alphabet. However, no state has previously turned its guns on Apple.

On Thursday, under the leadership of Utah, colorado, Indiana, Texas and dozens of other states joined the queue for appeals against Apple. The states wrote in their appeal documents:

"Apple's actions have hurt and are hurting mobile app developers and millions of citizens, while Apple continues to monopolize the iPhone's app distribution and in-app payment path, limit competition, and accumulate highly competitive profits in this nearly trillion-dollar-a-year smartphone industry."

The states said in their filings that the error in the court's decision was that it failed to adequately balance the pros and cons of Apple's rules and held that antitrust law did not apply to Apple's practice of requiring developers to sign non-negotiable contracts.

"Paradoxically, companies with sufficient market power to unilaterally enforce contracts will be protected by antitrust scrutiny — precisely the ones that attract the most antitrust attention," they said. ”