By Mike Scarcella
(Reuters) – Apple has asked a federal appeals court to temporarily pause key provisions in a U.S. judge’s ruling that ordered the tech company to immediately open its lucrative App Store to more competition.
Apple told the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in a filing on Wednesday that it will be irreparably harmed if the April 30 order is not put on hold while the iPhone maker’s legal challenge is pending.
Apple is fighting a ruling that found the company in contempt of an earlier order in a 2020 antitrust lawsuit brought by Epic Games, maker of the online video game Fortnite.
In its filing, Apple said the new ruling blocks the company from “exercising control over core aspects of its business operations.”
U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ordered Apple to end several practices that she said were designed to circumvent the injunction. Apple’s filing focused on two of them, including the court’s ban on a new 27% fee Apple imposed on app developers when its customers complete an app purchase outside the App Store.
Apple in its filing said a federal court can’t “force Apple to permanently give away free access to its products and services.”
Apple is also challenging part of the judge’s order that bars the company from restricting where developers place links to make purchases outside of an app.
Epic Games in a statement called Apple’s bid to stay the trial judge’s order a “last ditch effort to block competition and extract massive junk fees at the expense of consumers and developers.”
Apple has faced a “surge of genuine competition” since the injunction issued last week, as developers updated apps with “better payment methods, better deals, and better consumer choice,” Epic said.
In the underlying lawsuit, Epic Games sued Apple to loosen its control over transactions in applications that use its iOS operating system and how apps are distributed to consumers.
The Cupertino, California-based company willfully failed to comply with a 2021 injunction in the case designed to allow developers to more easily steer consumers to potentially cheaper non-Apple payment options, Gonzalez Rogers said in her decision.
“Apple sought to maintain a revenue stream worth billions in direct defiance of this court’s injunction,” Gonzalez Rogers wrote.
Gonzalez Rogers said Apple had misled the court about its efforts to comply with her injunction and referred the company and one of its executives to federal prosecutors for a possible criminal contempt investigation.
(Reporting by Mike Scarcella; Editing by David Bario, Leslie Adler and Shri Navaratnam)
