Why Apple Didn’t Lose in the Epic Games Ruling

▤ Summary

A federal judge’s split decision on Friday in the high-profile case between Apple and Epic Games, which stopped short of declaring Apple a monopoly but said it was anticompetitive, allowed parties on both sides of the argument to claim victory. That suggests that much of the coverage over the weekend about the ruling representing a meaningful setback to the tech giant, whose shares fell on the news, should be taken with a grain of salt. A quick recap: Epic sued Apple in August last year, after the iPhone maker removed Epic’s popular game Fortnite from its app store. Epic, in its suit, said Apple violated antitrust laws by forcing developers to use its payment system and forbidding them from telling app users about alternative ways to pay. “While the Court finds that Apple enjoys considerable market share of over 55% and extraordinarily high profit margins, these factors alone do not show antitrust conduct,” Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers wrote.

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