A federal judge reversed her earlier dismissal and reinstated all four of WP Engine's antitrust claims, keeping the legal cloud over WordPress governance intact and unresolved.
A client asked us this fall whether it was time to pull off WP Engine entirely. The question was understandable. The WordPress governance fight has been loud, the coverage has ranged from alarmed to dismissive, and neither register helps anyone decide whether to renew a hosting contract. Our answer then was to wait. A September ruling made that advice sharper.
On September 24, 2026, the federal judge overseeing WP Engine v. Automattic reversed her own earlier dismissal and reinstated all four of WP Engine’s antitrust claims: monopolization, attempted monopolization, and two illegal tying counts. The reversal followed WP Engine filing a Second Amended Complaint. The computer-extortion claim remains dismissed. No trial date has been set; discovery continues.
The same ruling carried a second finding with wider reach. According to a September 29 WebHosting Today report, the court ruled that Automattic is not the legal owner of the WordPress trademarks it had asserted in the case. That is a narrow finding — the court did not declare who holds those marks — but it removes a lever Automattic had been wielding in the dispute, and it opens real uncertainty about who can enforce the WordPress brand in commercial hosting agreements.
The antitrust theory is alive. The trademark question is open. Neither will be resolved before discovery ends, and discovery has no end date.
For our clients running WordPress, the practical read is this: the core platform is stable and is not going anywhere. What remains genuinely unsettled is the governance layer — control over WordPress.org, plugin directory access, and trademark licensing in hosting relationships. That uncertainty is real, but it is contained. Sites do not break because a lawsuit continues.
Where we are telling clients to hold is on decisions that depend on the contested infrastructure. If your workflow has a hard dependency on a plugin or service whose licensing terms are bound up in who controls the trademark, it is worth waiting for antitrust discovery to surface what the actual market structure looks like before building further on that layer.
The case has now cleared its first major procedural hurdle in WP Engine’s favor. That means this fight runs longer, not shorter. We are watching it, and we will tell you when something changes that requires action rather than patience.