Apple Shot Down Again in US v. Google

A U.S. District Court Judge has once again denied an Apple request to delay the remedy phase of the case so it can represent itself in U.S. v. Google.

“As the court stated in its order denying intervention, this case has been pending for over four years, and the delay from postponing the evidentiary hearing would be months, not weeks,” Judge Amit Mehta wrote in his latest ruling. “The court has concluded that Google violated federal antitrust law by entering into exclusive search distribution agreements with various companies (including Apple) to achieve and maintain a monopoly in both the general search services market and the general text advertising market. Preserving the status quo by granting a stay, as Apple urges, would only perpetuate this unlawful activity and is therefore contrary to the public interest.”

This is the second time Apple has tried to delay the proceedings so that it can protect the $20+ billion it earns from Google each year by configuring Google Search as the default search engine on the iPhone. But as Judge Mehta has now pointed out twice, Apple’s concern has little to do with the remedy in U.S. v. Google and was filed far too late in the schedule regardless.

It’s pretty clear Mehta is growing tired with Apple’s self-serving shenanigans. He notes that “Apple (again) fails to … explain why party status is necessary to offer the evidence it wishes to present, or even how that evidence will differ from what the court already heard during the liability phase. It likewise fails to identify any daylight between the remedy Google has proposed and its own preferred remedy. Lacking such information, the court cannot find that Apple will suffer the ‘certain and great’ harm required to justify a stay.”

Again.