However, the judge mostly rejected Epic’s antitrust arguments, except for its challenges to Apple’s anti-steering rules. She issued an injunction, and after an appeals court affirmed her decision, Epic accused Apple of creating new anticompetitive fees to circumvent the court’s injunction.
In response, Judge Gonzalez Rogers has held an evidentiary hearing into Epic’s allegations that kicked off in early May.
Over the course of a multiday witness examination, the judge repeatedly ordered Carson Oliver, senior director of business management of Apple’s App Store, to hand over to the court and Epic’s counsel all of his written communications and notes on Apple’s decision to impose a new 27% fee after her injunction, including any notes he took during the meetings, his email exchanges on the topic, and any correspondence that occurred on Slack and iMessage about it.
But on Friday, Epic’s counsel, Gary A. Bornstein of Cravath Swaine & Moore LLP, said that Apple has only produced a narrow set of emails, Slack and iMessage exchanges. Bornstein said it’s clear from those documents that Apple executives used software called Quip — which he described as a project management repository — to communicate and take notes on the new fees, but the company never produced any Quip documents.
