Apple Scores Major Win as Judge Decertifies iPhone Antitrust Class Action Lawsuit

A federal judge has decertified a class of millions of iPhone users in a long-running antitrust lawsuit against Apple. The order came after the court excluded the testimony of the plaintiffs' expert, finding his methods for identifying harmed consumers were unreliable and "error-ridden."

The ruling, issued by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, is a major development in the In re Apple iPhone Antitrust Litigation. The case, which the Supreme Court previously allowed to move forward on behalf of consumers, alleges Apple created an illegal monopoly over the App Store. The class of consumer plaintiffs was certified nearly two years ago based on their representation that they could reliably match Apple ID accounts with actual consumers to determine who was harmed and by how much.

To accomplish this, plaintiffs engaged expert Darryl Thompson to deduplicate and match over a billion payor records to individual consumers. In a detailed order, the court found Thompson's methodology was not sound. Apple's own expert, Victoria Stodden, identified several "alarming errors," including Thompson's failure to match records for "Rob Pepper" and "Robert Pepper" as the same person, despite them sharing a home address and credit card information.


Other mistakes highlighted in the ruling include lumping together over 40,000 payment records for individuals who shared the first name "Kim" but had little else in common, and identifying an implausible 1.9 million "unique payors" in King Salmon, Alaska, a town with just 375 residents. During his deposition, Thompson conceded his work contained errors and admitted he could not provide an error rate or confidence interval to validate his results.

The court granted Apple's Daubert motion to exclude Thompson's testimony, finding he was not qualified as a statistician or data scientist for the task. The judge also determined his methods were not testable, had not been peer-reviewed, and lacked a known error rate, rendering them unreliable.

Without Thompson's expert testimony, the plaintiffs were left with no method to prove antitrust injury on a class-wide basis. The court concluded that because individual questions of who was harmed would now predominate over common questions, the requirements for a class action were no longer met. As a result, the court granted Apple's motion to decertify the class. The order terminates several pending motions related to the case.

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