WP Engine Says Automattic Planned To Shake Down 10 Hosting Companies For WordPress Royalties (techcrunch.com)
(Thursday February 12, 2026 @05:30PM (msmash)
from the nuclear-wordpress dept.)
- Reference: 0180783204
- News link: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/26/02/12/2055249/wp-engine-says-automattic-planned-to-shake-down-10-hosting-companies-for-wordpress-royalties
- Source link: https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/12/automattic-planned-to-target-10-competitors-with-royalty-fees-wp-engine-claims-in-new-filing/
WP Engine's third amended complaint against Automattic and WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg alleges that Mullenweg had plans to [1]impose royalty fees on 10 hosting companies beyond WP Engine for their use of the WordPress trademark.
The amended filing, based on previously sealed information uncovered during discovery, also claims Mullenweg emailed a Stripe executive to pressure the payment processor into canceling WP Engine's contract after WP Engine sued Automattic in October 2024. Newfold, the parent company of Bluehost and HostGator, is already paying Automattic for trademark use, according to the complaint, and Automattic is in conversations with other hosts.
The filing challenges the 8% royalty rate as arbitrary, citing Mullenweg's comments at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 where he said the figure was based on what WP Engine "could afford to pay." Internal Automattic correspondence cited in the complaint includes Mullenweg describing his approach to WP Engine as "nuclear war" and warning that if the hosting company didn't comply, he would start stealing its customers.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/12/automattic-planned-to-target-10-competitors-with-royalty-fees-wp-engine-claims-in-new-filing/
The amended filing, based on previously sealed information uncovered during discovery, also claims Mullenweg emailed a Stripe executive to pressure the payment processor into canceling WP Engine's contract after WP Engine sued Automattic in October 2024. Newfold, the parent company of Bluehost and HostGator, is already paying Automattic for trademark use, according to the complaint, and Automattic is in conversations with other hosts.
The filing challenges the 8% royalty rate as arbitrary, citing Mullenweg's comments at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 where he said the figure was based on what WP Engine "could afford to pay." Internal Automattic correspondence cited in the complaint includes Mullenweg describing his approach to WP Engine as "nuclear war" and warning that if the hosting company didn't comply, he would start stealing its customers.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/12/automattic-planned-to-target-10-competitors-with-royalty-fees-wp-engine-claims-in-new-filing/
And Automattic continues to circle the drain (Score:2)
by karmawarrior ( 311177 )
Matt's actions make Oracle's actions towards Java look nurturing and altruistic. This is suicidal, and I don't see anything coming out of it except moves to other blogging/easy-website-creator platforms.
Tumblr? (Score:2)
by puzzled ( 12525 )
I'm among the half billion Tumblr users that were all excited when they said they were going to support ActivityPub. Automaticc bought it for a song several years ago. I had stopped using Wordpress about two years ago, the interface was as bloated and awful as Wix, and every revision got a little worse. The enshittification spreads ... I'm glad I figured out how to host websites using Cloudflare+Github. Now I gotta figure out how to move that Tumblr ...
Rent seeking is getting crazy (Score:1)
I remember seeing recently The dungeons & dragons fiasco and the mess with the unity game engines.
You keep seeing this where some suit sees a whole shitload of users and they get dollar signs in their eyes and get excited about how much revenue they can suck out of them in exchange for basically nothing.
WordPress isn't magic it's quick and dirty code and that's what made it popular if you add cost to it it's just going to get replaced by something else.
But you never know what you can get awa