[realusername]

Apple has nothing on their side aside from a few tweets criticizing them, that just won't cut it as an exemption to the DMA. It's not like Epic released malware or anything.

Remember that the whole goal of the DMA is that actors like Apple and Google can't decide to block competiton on a whim, the exact thing they are doing right now.

[scarface_74]

According to the article, they have the official court ruling…

[jsnell]

They don't have a court ruling on this that has any relevance in Europe.

[SllX]

Do EU courts consider sworn foreign testimony entirely inadmissible as evidence? It is a fact that Epic swore before a court of law, a foreign court but still a recognized court of law, that they did all this on purpose. EU law might still not allow for its submission into evidence, I don’t know, but that isn’t nothing either. Unless prohibited by law, a Judge in his professional judgement might still allow it.

[johnnyanmac]

Depends on the ruling, judge, and arguments. Law does pay attention to overseas precedence, but it's just another piece of evidence to consider, not final worldwide judgement.

In the case here, Epic doing a behavior to go around a store policy that EU specifically is considering bad may mean they cast aside the US rulings.

[dwaite]

I suspect if the disagreement is in Epic refusing to commit to honoring a contract and the CEO referring to it as requiring "sworn fealty", the actual resolution would be for Apple to show the actual harm in a marketplace violating said contract.

From there a lot of things can happen to negotiate a resolution, such as negotiating penalties for not following said contract.

I don't think Epic will be able to convince a court that there is no resolution when Apple has already said before and now what they would require for Epic to resume their business relationship with Apple.

[SllX]

I think we’re at least 95% or more in agreement here.

[scarface_74]

Since the article was talking about Epics worldwide license….

[jsnell]

The article is talking about the license for Epic's EU subsidiary, which would have been used to launch an app store only in EU (as the only region where Apple is obligated to make competing app stores possible). When the EC, and possibly later the courts, evaluate whether this is breaking the DMA, a US court ruling permitting the closure of Epic's developer accounts has no bearing.

The EU is a sovereign entity, enforcing its own laws in its own territory. A US court ruling can't compel the EU to allow Apple to violate EU laws when operating in the EU. How would that even work?

[nozzlegear]

> The EU is a sovereign entity, enforcing its own laws in its own territory. A US court ruling can't compel the EU to allow Apple to violate EU laws when operating in the EU. How would that even work?

In a word: treaties. Usual disclaimer that I'm not a lawyer yada yada, but treaties are generally why one country's laws or legal proceedings might affect another country in some way. Think stuff like US copyright law being applied to Europe [1]. I don't actually know how or if anything would even apply in this specific scenario (not a lawyer and I think it's pretty unlikely that the US court ruling would affect the EU DMA here), but treaties are what you'd look at to find out.

[1] Technically those countries passed their own versions of the US law, but it's all hammered out in the World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treaty.

[realusername]

In the US and in most countries, sure that'll be enough but in the EU, the DMA superseded their contracts. Apple might have got away with it if they had limited the ban to outside the EU but as I understand, they didn't.