Technically they have, because they have ruled plainly and repeatedly that a company cannot have a monopoly over its own products and that definitions of markets that consist of a single company or product are invalid. It’s well established case law.
The real contention is going to be over whether or not iOS/iPadOS/watchOS/tvOS/refrigeratorOS/etc are intrinsically part of their products or not. And whether the app stores as well fall under that definition.
You have to remember, Apple has made great effort to ensure ONLY their products have their OSs and would immediately sue any other company trying to sell computers running OS X not made by Apple. That was actually where one of the precidents relevant to this case comes from. The company tried to claim OS X as a market which it was entitled access (the right to build computers running OS X) and were defeated on the merit’s and the judgment explicitly stated that OS X as a market was incorrect and invalid, as companies CANNOT have a monopoly over their own products and that markets must include suitable alternatives (in the case of OS X, the alternatives were windows and Linux) and that they were competing in the Personal Computing market and NOT the Mac business.
It was also one of the reasons Apple stoped selling their OS on disk despite the license still explicitly forbid use on non Apple machines but people would use the justification that they paid for it so it was fine.
But as it stands, all Apple products run Apple OS’s, and the ONLY products that run Apple OS’s are Apple products. The same is true of the App Store. And ultimately what you are paying for when you buy an Apple product is The hardware, a license to the software and access to the ecosystem. That is their product. And since they cannot have a monopoly over their own product they will not lose.
Nothing they have done can be shown to be anticompetitive. They aren’t abusing their power and changing the system to be more preferential to them because developers are “locked in”. Developers want in knowing full well the fees because it’s so lucrative to them. That 30% cut is built into their business plans. If it was so anti competitive, the number of app factories and successful apps wouldn’t have ballooned as it has.
All of this would be different if they were like Microsoft or Google, and products with their os were being sold by others. But Google and Microsoft both allow sideloading and alternative app stores. At best someone might rule googles pop up warnings (if they repeat continuously or the language is too harsh) as anti-competitive, but that’s about the only point that is winnable.
But Epic is doomed to fail because they cannot break the link between an iPhone, iOS and the App Store. They are all part of one whole and you cannot get any one piece without the others. And as long as that is the case, they cannot claim Apple has a monopoly on the iOS market, what they have is a monopoly on the Apple Products market, which is fully legal. Not having alternative stores won’t get them anywhere.
That means to prove antitrust in apple’s case you would have to prove active hindrance, and not just a passive one. You would need to prove that Apple is doing something (now that they are huge) that they were not doing when they were small. Some sort of abuse of power to intentionally harm competitors and other businesses, and enforcing longstanding rules isn’t that. If anything you could argue the opposite. Apple has made great effort to create its app ecosystem which has allowed the creation and/or growth of numerous companies in the app business. Among them Epic is likely one of the ones to profit the most.
But now that their revenues have stabilized and aren’t growing like they used to, they need some way to make more money, since in the eyes of most businesses and the markets, if you aren’t growing you are dying. So they are making a play to get direct access to apples customers and products without going through Apple or paying a cent. This isn’t a prosecution, you don’t start with the strongest charges and then negotiate down.
Epic’s entire argument is “we want our own App Store on the apple App Store with root on the iPhone it’s installed on so we can manage it just like Apple does with their store so it’s fair, that way instead of just Apple making profits from their products, we can make some of the profits too, see how fair that is” and that, their intent to use their customers and their own marketshare to force Apple to change their products is itself anticompetitive and could in theory itself be investigated for antitrust. Especially depending on what kind of language they are putting into the Epic Store’s exclusivity contracts regarding other platforms. As if for example they were tying being in their pc store to being in their android (and dreamed of iOS) store(s), then the justice dept could totally nail them.
It’s highly unlikely the US govt has any desire for a company 49% owned by tencent to have that kind of access to half the countries personal device, cause someday when sweeny dies, they will take control (China does love the long game after all).
Either way, unless you can disprove:
iPhone+iOS+iCloud+AppStore+Tv/MovieStore=Product
then no one will ever be able to claim iOS as a market or claim Apple has a monopoly over it. Epic lost this fight simply by starting it. And after the way Apple dropped nVidia like a ball of molten glass for 1 recall (1 instance of bad press) I don’t see Epic returning to Apple products for quite a long time, if ever.
