Epic v Apple.

A victory in a largely invisible fight over the soul of antitrust.

Last week, federal Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled in Epic’s antitrust lawsuit against Apple, in which the maker of Fortnite alleged that Apple’s prohibitions on third party app stores and payment processors, combined with its sky-high processing fees for in-app purchases, constituted a violation of US antitrust law.

Depending on who you ask, Apple won big or suffered a crushing loss. The confusion stems from Judge Gonzalez Rogers’ ruling itself, which states that Epic failed to prove that Apple dominated its sector (mobile video games), and that its insistence that iPhone and iPad owners buy their apps from Apple and use Apple’s payment processor was a violation of antitrust law.

For people like me, who advocate for restoring America’s antitrust enforcement to its pre-Reagan state, the ruling was not a surprise. Prior to the Reagan years, antitrust enforcement was muscular and relentless, subjecting mergers, acquisitions, contracting terms and other conduct by large companies to ruthless scrutiny, effectively insisting that large companies prove that they weren’t abusing their dominance to hurt workers, suppliers or customers.

Harmful dominance