Last Monday, a jury ruled in favour of Epic Games that Google’s Play Market app store was anti-competitive, but Google is unlikely to see major changes anytime soon, and those changes are unlikely to have a significant impact on the company’s bottom line. The ruling could spark a series of new antitrust cases against Google, but those cases could take years to reach a verdict.
Epic Games sued Google back in 2020, claiming that the company was abusing its dominant position in the Android app market by making illegal deals with mobile phone manufacturers and charging consumers additional fees of 15% to 30% of each transaction. Epic tried to circumvent these fees by introducing a direct payment mechanism for purchases in the popular Fortnite game, but Google removed the game from the store, which prompted a lawsuit. The latest hearing in a federal court in Northern California lasted four weeks, and jurors unanimously concluded that Google had established and maintained monopoly power in the market for Android applications and in-app payment services. Epic filed a similar lawsuit against Apple but lost the case, including an appeal.
Shortly, Judge James Donato will decide on remedies: Epic asked the court to change the rules of the Play Market, not for monetary compensation. Google does not separate the acquisition of the application store – it is included in the segment “Google Services”, the revenue of which in the III quarter of 2023 was $67.99 billion, and a year earlier it was $61.38 billion. According to analysts, the acquisition of the Google Play Market for the whole of the 2023 year will be $38.5 billion.
The victory of Epic may force Google to change its transaction model – developers will be removed from the obligation to use only the Play Market payment system as a condition for the presence of the application in the store. According to the results of the case, Google can also be attributed to reducing the commission. Another measure of legal protection may be the expansion of the powers of third-party application stores. Finally, the information made public during the hearings will give Google’s partners new leverage in negotiations – for example, it was previously known that Spotify’s commission is not 15%, but 4%. Apple, on the other hand, receives from Google 36% of the search revenue generated by users of the Safari browser. Before any drastic changes take place, it will take a long time – perhaps several years, according to analysts. Google said that the company did not commit any wrongdoing, and the court’s decision will be appealed. The outcome of the trial may be just the beginning: Google is now the defendant in another antitrust case, where the plaintiff is the US Department of Justice. Shares of the Alphabet holding, which owns the search giant, fell less than 1% as investors await what remedies Judge Donato will choose.
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