This will be another issue determined by EU courts, but Apple is not justifying it as a show of force. They're justifying it based on Epic's prior breach of contract and statements they've made. I think based on the record, courts will side with Apple.
Why would a 4 year old breach of contract warrant a ban today instead of 4 years ago? The trigger was that Epic criticized Apple, that doesn't seem like a warranted reason to ban someone even if they did something bad 4 years ago.
Also since the DMA bans arrangement that Epic breached before, there is no reason to suspect that the EU account will breach anything new now, I really doubt EU will let this slide.
>Epic’s egregious breach of its contractual obligations to Apple led courts to determine that Apple has the right to terminate ‘any or all of Epic Games’ wholly owned subsidiaries, affiliates, and/or other entities under Epic Games’ control at any time and at Apple’s sole discretion.’ In light of Epic’s past and ongoing behavior, Apple chose to exercise that right.
The email I've seen from Schiller presents it as a combination -- it says that Epic has previously broken its agreement with Apple because of disagreements about the rules, and that Epic has publicly disagreed loudly with Apple's DMA rules. The disagreement wouldn't be a problem without the history of violations.
No idea where this will actually go with the EU regulator, but US courts said it was okay for Apple to keep Epic's developer account suspended based on this.
presumably apple's ban on epic games is for life, not just for a year or two. and registering a new account doesn't change that - it's just ban evasion.
to wit: you are still banned from reddit or paypal or any other online service, even if you create a new account. if they can link it they'll ban that one too.
and this is a new account that epic games tried to register recently. so it got banned too. Not that complex/hard a concept really, unless you're trying not to understand it.
again, do you think you have a right to create a second reddit account after your first one got banned from the service? how about a bank account, do you get a do-over if you do some fraud and get your first account banned?
> presumably apple's ban on epic games is for life, not just for a year or two. and registering a new account doesn't change that - it's just ban evasion.
They didn't ban every epic account back then, just the violating account. I am pretty sure most of epic games accounts are still there, just the fortnite account got banned.
Apple has nothing on their side aside from a few tweets criticizing them, that just won't cut it as an exemption to the DMA. It's not like Epic released malware or anything.
Remember that the whole goal of the DMA is that actors like Apple and Google can't decide to block competiton on a whim, the exact thing they are doing right now.
Do EU courts consider sworn foreign testimony entirely inadmissible as evidence? It is a fact that Epic swore before a court of law, a foreign court but still a recognized court of law, that they did all this on purpose. EU law might still not allow for its submission into evidence, I don’t know, but that isn’t nothing either. Unless prohibited by law, a Judge in his professional judgement might still allow it.
Depends on the ruling, judge, and arguments. Law does pay attention to overseas precedence, but it's just another piece of evidence to consider, not final worldwide judgement.
In the case here, Epic doing a behavior to go around a store policy that EU specifically is considering bad may mean they cast aside the US rulings.
I suspect if the disagreement is in Epic refusing to commit to honoring a contract and the CEO referring to it as requiring "sworn fealty", the actual resolution would be for Apple to show the actual harm in a marketplace violating said contract.
From there a lot of things can happen to negotiate a resolution, such as negotiating penalties for not following said contract.
I don't think Epic will be able to convince a court that there is no resolution when Apple has already said before and now what they would require for Epic to resume their business relationship with Apple.
The article is talking about the license for Epic's EU subsidiary, which would have been used to launch an app store only in EU (as the only region where Apple is obligated to make competing app stores possible). When the EC, and possibly later the courts, evaluate whether this is breaking the DMA, a US court ruling permitting the closure of Epic's developer accounts has no bearing.
The EU is a sovereign entity, enforcing its own laws in its own territory. A US court ruling can't compel the EU to allow Apple to violate EU laws when operating in the EU. How would that even work?
> The EU is a sovereign entity, enforcing its own laws in its own territory. A US court ruling can't compel the EU to allow Apple to violate EU laws when operating in the EU. How would that even work?
In a word: treaties. Usual disclaimer that I'm not a lawyer yada yada, but treaties are generally why one country's laws or legal proceedings might affect another country in some way. Think stuff like US copyright law being applied to Europe [1]. I don't actually know how or if anything would even apply in this specific scenario (not a lawyer and I think it's pretty unlikely that the US court ruling would affect the EU DMA here), but treaties are what you'd look at to find out.
[1] Technically those countries passed their own versions of the US law, but it's all hammered out in the World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treaty.
In the US and in most countries, sure that'll be enough but in the EU, the DMA superseded their contracts. Apple might have got away with it if they had limited the ban to outside the EU but as I understand, they didn't.
