Yesterday saw an Epic Games victory in its court case against Google, a jury finding that the Play Store was indeed operated in an anti-competitive fashion.
This is despite the fact that Epic mostly lost a near-identical case against Apple back in 2021. The differing conclusions in the two cases puts Apple back under pressure …
The dispute in three sentences
If you have your app in the App Store, Apple will take a cut of any in-app purchases made. The iPhone maker bans developers from offering their own app stores to avoid this. Epic Games argues that this ban amounts to illegal anti-competitive behaviour.
The Epic Games victory against Google
Our sister site 9to5Google yesterday reported on the verdict.
Epic Games, in 2020, took Google and Apple to court to challenge the app store and billing rules that dominate Android and iOS. Epic’s case against Apple came to an end earlier this year with Apple ultimately winning the legal battle […]
Google, however, has been declared to have an “illegal monopoly” through the Play Store and Play Billing by Judge James Donato and a jury.
That isn’t the end of things, by any means. First, while a jury has found that Google broke the law, it will now be up to the judge in the case to decide what to do about it. We’ll need to wait for a ruling on what Google needs to do to resolve the problem.
Second, Google has announced that it plans to appeal the verdict, no matter what action it is ordered to take.
How does this differ from the Epic vs Apple case?
In that case, the judge concluded that Apple mainly was not breaking the law. She said that the App Store was not a monopoly, but ruled that Apple must not ban developers from pointing users to other places they could pay for content; a so-called anti-steering provision.
So what does this mean for Apple?
Nothing immediately. But given that both cases were about the same thing, it isn’t tenable that different rulings were reached in each. Either running an App Store in the way both companies do is illegal, or it isn’t.
Both cases are going to appeal, and one of the rulings must be overturned if the legal position on this is to make any kind of sense at all. The smart money here is on Apple losing, for two reasons.
First, the judge in Apple’s case has been accused of erring in law. It’s certainly undeniable that there were clear factual errors in her ruling.
Those misconceptions culminated in a sentence according to which Apple’s market share in smartphones is smaller than in smartphone operating systems, though we all know that no iPhone is sold without iOS and iOS is never sold without an iPhone.
Second, both the US Department of Justice and a whole bunch of US states support Epic’s position.
Apple is already softening its own antitrust stance
One possibility is that Apple will have softened its own position by the time the appeal is heard – possibly even rendering the case irrelevant.
We already know the company is making plans to permit competing app stores in Europe, in order to comply with upcoming antitrust requirements there, and it may well decide the path of least resistance is to do the same thing in the US.
The iPhone maker has already made some big U-turns on antitrust issues. After years of lobbying hard against Right to Repair legislation, for example, the company says that it now supports it. Similarly, after resisting calls for it to support the RCS standard for cross-platform messaging, Apple again made a complete 180. Just this morning, we learned that it has made yet another about-face on giving third-party apps access to the NFC chip for competing mobile wallet apps.
It seems to me that the company is finally facing up the realities that these antitrust issues aren’t just going to go away, and realising that the cost of permitting competition is likely very low. The vast majority of people aren’t going to repair their own devices, use RCS, use a competitor to Apple Wallet – or buy apps from a competing app store.
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