Apple, Visa and Mastercard have successfully won a legal victory in an antitrust lawsuit.
All three firms convinced a federal judge to dismiss the lawsuit accusing them of colluding to stifle competition.
U.S. District Judge David Dugan in Illinois ruled that the merchants who brought the suit did not offer sufficient evidence to back their claims that Apple illegally chose not to launch a payment network to rival that of Mastercard and Visa.
Dugan found that the plaintiffs offered only “a slew of circumstantial allegations” but permitted them to amend their suit to bolster their claims.
The three defendants denied any wrongdoing and urged the judge to dismiss the suit.
The lawsuit, filed in 2023, accused Apple of conspiring with Visa and Mastercard to refrain from competing with the two credit card firms.
The suit claimed that in exchange, Visa and Mastercard paid Apple a large portion of transaction fees for purchases made on their networks by consumers using Apple Pay.
These payments from Visa and Mastercard to Apple amounted to a “very large and ongoing cash bribe” of hundreds of millions of dollars annually, the suit said.
Apple argued that the complaint failed to show that the company had any plan to enter the payments network market and compete with Visa or Mastercard.
In his ruling, Dugan said the plaintiffs’ claims “completely ignore the difficulties, costs and time, risks, and potential for failure associated with such an endeavour,”
