Report from MediaPost
In Brief – With the US Supreme Court considering Google’s final appeal of its loss in the antitrust lawsuit brought by Epic Games, a trade group that represents small and mid-sized app developers urged the court to back Google’s appeal to overturn the lower court injunction requiring it to significantly revise its app marketplace. In December 2023, a jury found that Google illegally monopolized the markets for Android app distribution and Android in-app billing. In October 2024 Judge James Donato imposed an injunction forcing Google to implement sweeping changes to its app marketplace, including requiring Google to have its Play Store host other companies’ app store apps for three years, and give those competing app stores access to all the apps in Google’s store. Trade group ACT – The App Association says that those provisions violate app developers’ intellectual property rights, would create “real security risks in the app ecosystem on which the app developers depend,” and “defaults app developers into relationships with sketchy, knock-off Play stores, with which they want no business.” Google’s appeals in the Ninth Circuit failed. Google is asking the High Court to accept its appeal and also maintain the stay of Judge Donato’s injunction through that process. The justices rejected Google’s request to keep the stay in place beyond October 22.
Context – Epic’s antitrust lawsuits were the opening shots in the global lobbying and litigation campaign by large app developers to force down Apple and Google fees. Apple prevailed over the federal antitrust charges, while Google, despite its much more open ecosystem, lost. However, Apple lost one complaint involving California’s Unfair Competition Law and Epic won an injunction forcing Apple to open its US App Store and no longer charge commissions on apps from other stores, basically paralleling Google’s loss. Both companies are now facing similar demands to open app distribution and lower fees in Europe, Japan, South Korea and India, and with each new result, more officials feel like they have cover to take similar actions. The fact that the Android and Apple ecosystems robustly compete with each other has proven nearly meaningless.