> In its notice of compliance and at the May 2024 hearing, Apple claimed that restrictions on link placement protect against “security risks.” Again, Apple attempted to mislead. Mr. Schiller asserted that having an external link appear on the same page as IAP can increase the risk of a user’s exposure to fraudulent conduct. [...] Given the lack of any document identifying this alleged concern, the Court finds these justifications pretextual; said differently, the proffered rationales are nothing more than after-the-fact litigation posturing or outright misrepresentations to the Court.
> At the end of the day, Apple’s internal documents reflect the underlying motivation to stifle competition by cabining developers’ ability to attract users to alternate payment methods: “How much can we limit what devs do with the text and links?
> In other words, to stifle competition, Apple was modeling the tipping point where external links would cease to be advantageous for developers due to friction in the purchase flow
> Apple willfully chose not to comply with this Court’s Injunction. 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. As always, the cover- up made it worse. For this Court, there is no second bite at the apple.
[1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.36...
This is the company that is trying to subvert the DMA with Core technology fees that they're not entitled to, and notarization which allows them to retain the gatekeeping power that they're not entitled to. That's the same company that attempted to maliciously comply with a US court order which forced them to allow developers to provide external payment options by instituting a new imaginary 27% fee on external payments, making alternative non-viable.
Apple are grand masters of malicious compliance. Attempting to portray this fact as a "meme conspiracy" is intellectually dishonest bordering on gaslighting, and weaponizing your paper thin veil of "intellectual curiosity" to attack this criticism makes me not want to participate.