Tech giant Apple violated a U.S. court order requiring it to change its App Store rules to allow greater competition among developers and will now be referred to federal prosecutors, a federal judge in California ruled April 30.
U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland said in the ruling that the iPhone maker was in “willful violation” of her 2021 injunction aimed at prohibiting its alleged anticompetitive conduct and anticompetitive pricing.
“Apple willfully chose not to comply with this Court’s Injunction,” Gonzalez Rogers wrote. “It did so with the express intent to create new anticompetitive barriers which would, by design and in effect, maintain a valued revenue stream; a revenue stream previously found to be anticompetitive. That it thought this Court would tolerate such insubordination was a gross miscalculation … For this Court, there is no second bite at the apple.”…