Extract from Michael Gennaro’s article “9th Circuit Affirms Apple Contempt Finding in Epic Games Battle”
A Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal panel on Thursday agreed with a trial judge who held Apple in civil contempt for violating her 2021 injunction that was meant to curtail the tech giant’s anticompetitive practices by allowing consumers to make app purchases other than through Apple’s app store.
In a unanimous 54-page decision, the three-judge panel largely validated U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers’ scathing contempt order from April that found Apple had made a mockery of efforts to create payment competition in the iPhone app store.
In the opinion authored by Circuit Judge Milan D. Smith Jr., the panel found that Apple engaged in bad faith when it claimed compliance with a 2021 injunction requiring it to allow App Store developers to direct customers to external payment options. The court concluded Apple instead “willfully chose to ignore the injunction” by imposing a 27% commission on such purchases and restricting link designs to make them virtually unusable.
