Meta's ad trial lands with the judge who rewrote Apple's App Store pricing

The half of that Epic ruling Apple lost is the one worth reading now. Gonzalez Rogers held that Apple's anti-steering rules violated California competition law, and ordered the company to let developers point users to payment options outside the App Store ^[9]. The claim that failed was federal monopolization; the claim that reached Apple's pricing came from state competition law ^[17]. State attorneys general litigate that second kind.

The sequel matters more for compliance planning. Apple's answer to the injunction was a 27% fee on some purchases linked to the App Store, nine-tenths of the 30% commission that started the fight ^[15]. Gonzalez Rogers found the violation willful and wrote that Apple's vice president of finance "outright lied" to the court about when the fee was decided ^[10]. She added that neither Apple nor its counsel corrected the lies, and that she considered the company to have adopted them ^[11]. She then referred the matter to U.S. attorneys to weigh criminal contempt, though no prosecution emerged ^[12].

Her Apple file is older than Epic. In 2012 she inherited Pepper v. Apple, a challenge to the App Store's 30% commission that she dismissed before the Supreme Court held consumers could sue ^[6]. Around the same period she heard an antitrust case over Apple blocking music from sources other than iTunes, which Apple won ^[7]. Counting the contempt proceeding, that is at least four Apple matters in front of one judge ^[16]. Steve Berman of Hagens Berman, co-lead counsel against Big Tobacco in the 1990s and a repeat litigant against Apple in her courtroom, calls her "a pistol" who goes after lawyers who hand her nonsense ^[13].

Geography does the rest. Her district covers San Francisco, where OpenAI is headquartered, and the whole of Silicon Valley, including Meta and most of its technology peers ^[5]. Companies that set the terms of digital ad markets are defendants where they are headquartered, and the record of what happens to a narrow reading of an injunction in that building is already written.

Whatever the liability verdict, the operative document for Meta's advertising business will be a remedy order, and its author will also be its interpreter for years afterward.