IANAL but you identified the core issue. I'm having trouble finding precedent for this, mainly because private businesses are legally allowed to choose who they do business with, which can be a form of legally protected discrimination.

The closest thing I found is the 2023 Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard Supreme Court decision which effectively ended affirmative action in the US, since Harvard is a private college "doing business with" its students (customers):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v...

https://www.scotusblog.com/2023/06/supreme-court-strikes-dow...

SCOTUS said that race/ethnicity and gender identity are protected classes, so discriminating by them is illegal, meaning that affirmative action can't legally be imposed on universities anymore.

Now, there are extenuating circumstances with that due to the US's civil rights battles and entrenched practices in other areas like policing and access to capital which impose additional struggle on individuals, depending on which protected classes apply to them. So throwing out affirmative action may give individuals unaffected by those practices an additional advantage (privilage). Meaning that the court's decision may have an effect opposite to the one intended, as stated by the dissenting justices. I'm providing this for context, because it's an example of how the letter of the law can be in conflict with the spirit of the law.

As a private entity, Unity must still follow federal antidiscrimination laws. It's not allowed to remove an app from its store based on the race/ethnicity/gender of its author(s) for example.

But prominance/budget and potential liabilities from lawsuits by intellectual property trolls are not protected classes. Currently Unity appears to be free to de-list any app for any reason outside protected classes.

But that discriminitory freedom is also being challenged for antitrust reasons. If a store is dominant to the point that competitors are not widely known by the mainstream, then any type of discrimination could potentially become collusion. For example if Apple delisted an app that competed with its own in order to noncompetitively boost its own sales, then that can be challenged in court. And two or more companies collaborating to remove competing apps in each other's stores can also be challenged in court.

The realities of software development are daunting. It often takes many years of work by countless individuals and budgets in the multiple thousands or even millions of dollars to ship an app. The libraries which the app relies upon are also unique in that an alternative may not be available, either for budgetary reasons around refactoring or for compliance with controversial laws like the DMCA. So an app's dependencies and licenses could be thought of as an ethnic identity for software because they can't be changed in practice. It's what they are.

Main takeaways:

1. A unilateral ban of an app by a company can represent a power imbalance resulting in injustice because the guidelines the app must follow to regain entry are not tenable. In other words dependencies, licences and other nonfungible aspects of software may need to become protected classes.

2. Is the law being applied unequaly between VLC and other apps with LGPL dependencies, or with preferential treatment?

3. What recourse do developers have other than to sue? Will their case have merit? Are there financial barriers and opportunity costs to such actions? The realities of such recourse can impose such hardship on injured parties that their involuntary surrender represents a kind of injustice that favors moneyed parties.

Keywords and avenues to pursue:

unequal application

preferential treatment

protected class

Would lawsuits against other companies along these lines reduce productivity in the tech sector by making it more difficult to do business, highlighting a need to reform legislation around this issue?