Google loses antitrust case vs Epic Games. Jury rules Google Play store constitutes an illegal monopoly
Google loses antitrust case vs Epic Games. Jury rules Google Play store constitutes an illegal monopoly
Victory Royale.
How is Google Play, which is easily circumnavigated with things like F-Droid and APKs, considered a monopoly and the Apple app store isn't?
The Apple case was decided by a judge and this by a jury, which makes a big difference
From what i read about it, Apple has a walled garden but charges a flat fee for everyone and has no special deals. Everyone pays the same and they make a little money off of the store but also the hardware sold.
Whereas Google has been caught treating certain parties differently, such as Spotify, something called Project Hug, where they gave extra benefits to parties at risk of leaving the play store, among other unequal dealings.
So the crux of the question is not about the monopoly itself, but the fact that Google is treating market players differently and throwing its weight around to influence the market to its advantage.
has no special deals.
Spotify and Netflix technically have no special deal but bypass the fee and are not kicked. I would argue favoritism is like a special deal.
Basically Android makes deals with big companies, Apple charges flat rate for everyone
Because 90+% of people don't know what fdroid is and can't get many of the apps they need there.
Google promised an open market in the form of alternate, competing app stores, but signed contract deals with developers under the table to make them publish through Google Play only. Their monopoly was enforced through contract law, which is lawyers’ bread and butter.
Apple never promised any such open market. Their monopoly was enforced through product design, which boomers and juries can’t wrap their heads around.
Regardless, the case will be appealed to the Ninth Circuit, which also ruled in favor of Apple, so it’s possible things will change.
I assume because no one downloads other app stores
You are off-topic. We are talking about in-app purchases percentage rates
This is the best summary I could come up with:
It hinged on secret revenue sharing deals between Google, smartphone makers, and big game developers, ones that Google execs internally believed were designed to keep rival app stores down.
Mind you, we don’t know what Epic has actually won quite yet — that’s up to Judge James Donato, who’ll decide what the appropriate remedies might be.
Epic never sued for monetary damages; it wants the court to tell Google that every app developer has total freedom to introduce its own app stores and its own billing systems on Android, and we don’t yet know how or even whether the judge might grant those wishes.
Both parties will meet with Judge Donato in the second week of January to discuss potential remedies.
Judge Donato has already stated that he will not grant Epic’s additional request for an anti-circumvention provision “just to be sure Google can’t reintroduce the same problems through some alternative creative solution,” as Epic lead attorney Gary Bornstein put it on November 28th.
We’ll replace it with the final signed form once we have access to a digital copy.
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I get the hate on Google. I use a degoogled phone and got rid of google everywhere else. But I am not a fan of this. Its their store. Imagine a goverment comes to your own grocery store that you built and tells you whose products to put where and how much to charge for them. Instead of trying to build an alternative to compete with Play Store we will give more power to goverments. Thats not good.
If your grocery store "willfully acquired or maintained monopoly power by engaging in anticompetitive conduct".. then you'd be actively and purposefully affecting the ability for anyone to "try to build an alternative to compete with [it]".
They aren't asking Google to use a specific price, what they are asking is for them to stop offering special custom-made deals under the table for some of the partners with the intent of preventing competition. Nobody is stopping Google from offering the same fees to everyone indiscriminately... the issue is when they pick and choose with the purpose of minimizing/discouraging competition. Particularly when they are already the biggest one in their market by a wide margin, so they have a higher power/responsibility than a Mom'n'Pop store.
You really need to read the article, and specifically the linked article within that details the court proceedings. Anticompetitive behavior is illegal, and Google did lots of it, and did so blatantly, and deleted evidence of doing so.
The 30% they charge isn't the issue. The issue is the anticompetitive actions they took to keep themselves from ever having to charge less than 30%.
If that were all this was, sure. In your analogy though, Google owns 95% of the grocery stores and has deals with 90% of the food vendors that if they allow you to stock their brands they lose access to sell in the Google grocery store. That practice is anticompetitive, because it functionally prevents you from opening your own store to compete.
Problem is that it not really is "just a store". By using the google store you get access to the google play APIs, which are upgraded separately from the device OS - which is sensible from a security perspective, but they also were created by google specifically for regaining control over what goes on on Android devices.
A lot of applications are needlessly tied to play APIs - either because that way is a bit easier, or just because google is good at marketing them, and the developer didn't think twice about it. Some relatively basic APIs are part of google play - for example maps, which needlessly is tied to google maps. Unlike Android itself the play APIs are not opensource.
Yandex tried about a decade ago to re-implement the play APIs to keep such applications working without the play store, by utilizing other services providing the same functionality, and tried to get other companies to join them. I've visited the Yandex office in Saint Petersburg a few times to discuss that back then (just checked, most of that seems to have been 2014 - that year Yandex was sponsoring my Russian visa). The effort failed for various reasons, unfortunately - the big one being that doing this required reverse engineering API changes on every play update google was pushing to stay compatible. There's the microG project around now, but it seems to be less ambitious than what Yandex was trying to do back then.
My point is, as long as at least the API for play services isn't maintained in a way that allows full open source reimplementations - or better, google releases parts as open source where we can plug different backends in - "use a different store" is not really a possible solution for many.
This is further crippled by how the increasingly tight security measures in Android make harder and harder to add functionality that is considered "system-level" and is as deeply integrated as the Play Store.
You can't simply install F-droid and expect the same level of user friendliness and automatic app updates as in the official Play Store. Without esoteric, hackish and warranty-voiding rooting methods, you need to give manual user confirmation for every small update. You need to update 30 apps that accumulated because you forgot to manually update each of them? get prepared for going 30 times thought the same process of pressing buttons and giving confirmation for each of them.