Part 7 of a sourced series. Every fact links to its source — court dockets, the parties' own statements, and reputable reporting. This is active litigation: accusations are labeled as allegations and attributed to who made them, court orders are labeled as court orders, and where a claim failed in court I say so plainly. Nothing here says either side broke the law; no court has found that. My opinions are marked. Corrections policy at the bottom; an evidence explorer lets you check every claim.
The small-vendor case study in platform power
Most of this series has been about giants — Microsoft, Amazon, Google — and the levers only giants can pull. This part is smaller, and in a way more instructive. It's about what happens when the thing you depend on to run your business is controlled by the company you compete with.
That's the WordPress story. And it ran straight into a courtroom.
To be clear up front: what follows is a fight that is still being litigated, in which one side's biggest accusation has already been dismissed. I'll keep those two things straight, because the case only makes sense if you do.
The plumbing nobody thinks about
WordPress powers a huge slice of the web, and most of the people running it never think about where the updates come from. They come from WordPress.org — the repository of plugins, themes, and software updates that keeps millions of sites patched and alive.
WordPress.org is not a neutral utility. It is effectively controlled by Matt Mullenweg, who co-created WordPress and runs Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com. WP Engine is a large, independent WordPress hosting company — a competitor that depends on that same shared infrastructure.
So when the relationship soured, the question wasn't abstract. It was: who controls the pipe, and what can they do with it?
The ultimatum, then the cutoff
The break was public and fast. Mullenweg called WP Engine a "cancer to WordPress," and Automattic demanded that WP Engine either license the WordPress trademarks or pay roughly eight percent of its revenue toward WordPress development. WP Engine declined — and on or about September 25, 2024, its access to WordPress.org resources was blocked (TechCrunch; WP Tavern).
Sit with the mechanics for a second. A company asked a competitor for a cut of its revenue. The competitor said no. The shared infrastructure that competitor relied on went dark. Whatever you call that, it's the clearest illustration in this whole series of infrastructure becoming leverage.
WP Engine sues — and calls it "extortion"
On October 2, 2024, WP Engine filed suit against Automattic and Mullenweg in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, WPEngine, Inc. v. Automattic Inc., Case No. 3:24-cv-06917, before Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín (CourtListener docket; complaint, Doc. 1).
In that complaint, WP Engine alleged "extortion" and "abuse of power" — including a threatened "scorched earth nuclear approach" — to coerce it into paying for the WordPress trademarks (TechCrunch; Courthouse News).
Read those quotation marks carefully. "Extortion" and "scorched earth nuclear approach" are WP Engine's words, in WP Engine's filing — allegations, not findings. Hold onto that, because the court's view of the extortion claim turns out to be the whole point of this piece.
The court steps in — and restores the access
This is the part that is not an allegation. It's a court order.
On December 10, 2024, Judge Martínez-Olguín granted WP Engine a preliminary injunction. She ordered Automattic and Mullenweg to restore WP Engine's WordPress.org access to its September 20, 2024 state, restore WP Engine's control of the Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin, remove a login checkbox that required users to disclaim any affiliation with WP Engine, and stop interfering with WP Engine's plugins (TechCrunch; The Register).
In granting it, the court found WP Engine was likely to succeed on its intentional-interference-with-contractual-relations claim and faced irreparable harm without relief (WP Tavern).
One word does a lot of work there: likely. A preliminary injunction is a stopgap to prevent harm while the case proceeds. "Likely to succeed" is a preliminary assessment for that limited purpose — not a final ruling that interference actually happened. Early lead, not final score.
The reversal: the extortion claim gets thrown out
Then the case turned, and it turned against WP Engine's headline.
On September 12, 2025, the court granted in part and denied in part the defendants' motion to dismiss. It dismissed WP Engine's attempted-extortion claim under California law — in the order's own words, "WITHOUT LEAVE TO AMEND" — and knocked out WP Engine's Sherman Act antitrust and monopolization counts (PPC Land; Search Engine Journal).
"Without leave to amend" is legal language for don't bother trying again — the door on that claim is shut. So the single most quotable accusation in this whole saga, the one that made the headlines — "extortion" — failed in court. It was an allegation, the judge rejected it, and it is not coming back.
I want to be the one to tell you that plainly, because a lot of coverage isn't. If you only remembered the dramatic word, you'd have the story exactly backwards.
What survived the motion matters too: the intentional-interference, Lanham Act (trademark), and defamation-related claims were allowed to proceed (Search Engine Journal). So this is not "WP Engine lost." It's "WP Engine's biggest theory lost, and a narrower fight goes on."
Automattic's side — and its own accusations
Automattic and Mullenweg have disputed WP Engine's case from the start. Automattic called the complaint "meritless" and a "gross mischaracterization of reality" (Automattic). After the September 2025 dismissals, Mullenweg declared that "antitrust, monopolization, and extortion have been knocked out," calling it "a win … for all open source maintainers" (ma.tt). On the extortion and antitrust counts, the court's dismissal backs that characterization up.
The accusations also run the other direction. On October 24, 2025, Automattic — with the WordPress Foundation and WooCommerce — filed counterclaims alleging that WP Engine infringed the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks, engaged in deceptive branding and false advertising, and never honored a pledge to commit five percent of its resources to WordPress (Automattic; TechCrunch). Those are Automattic's counterclaim allegations — filed, but not adjudicated, and WP Engine denies them.
And the blast radius reached customers. A separate proposed class action, Keller v. Automattic, No. 3:25-cv-01892, filed in February 2025 by WP Engine customers, alleges the defendants deliberately disrupted customers' contracts by blocking WordPress.org access between roughly September 24 and December 10, 2024; the court dismissed that complaint for inadequate pleading with leave to amend, and the plaintiffs refiled (Tycko & Zavareei; CourtListener docket).
My read
Opinion — Michael. I'm not telling you anyone is guilty. A court rejected the "extortion" framing — bluntly, without leave to amend — and I'm not going to relaunder a dismissed claim as if it were a finding. What I keep looking at instead is the architecture. When the shared infrastructure an entire ecosystem depends on is controlled by one of the competitors in that ecosystem, the access switch is also a negotiating switch — and it doesn't take a villain for that to be dangerous. The early injunction is the tell I come back to: a judge looked at the cutoff and decided, even temporarily, that the lights had to go back on. The legal labels — extortion, antitrust, interference — will get sorted by the court, and some already have. The structural lesson won't change either way. Bad systems, not bad people.
You don't have to take my read. The docket, the injunction order, the dismissal, and both sides' own statements are linked above — judge them yourself.
Sourcing & corrections
The case number, court, and filing date come from the CourtListener docket and the file-stamped complaint; the ultimatum and cutoff from TechCrunch and WP Tavern; WP Engine's allegations from its complaint as reported by TechCrunch and Courthouse News; the preliminary injunction and its terms from the court order as reported by TechCrunch, The Register, and WP Tavern; the September 2025 dismissals (including the verbatim "WITHOUT LEAVE TO AMEND") from PPC Land and Search Engine Journal; Automattic's counterclaims from Automattic's own post and TechCrunch; the Keller class action from plaintiffs' counsel and the docket; and the defendants' rebuttals from Automattic and ma.tt — each linked inline and matched in the explorer. WP Engine alleged extortion; the court dismissed that claim. Automattic's counterclaims are allegations. Spot an error or something unfair? Email mpolzin@zimzap.com or message me on LinkedIn — I'll review and correct.
Next — Part 8: "The AI Compute Loop."
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