San Francisco:
A US judge on Monday ordered Google to open up its Android smartphone operating system to rival app stores, in another legal setback for the tech giant.
The order follows Google’s defeat in an antitrust lawsuit brought by Fortnite creator Epic Games, where a California jury ruled that Google was exercising illegal monopoly power through its Android Play store.
A jury in San Francisco in December took just a few hours to rule against Google, finding that the company had engaged in various illegal strategies to maintain its monopoly on the app store on Android phones.
The order, which Google is appealing, follows a similar setback in August, when another judge found that Google’s world-leading search engine was also an illegal monopoly.
Google also faces an antitrust lawsuit in a third federal lawsuit in Virginia over its dominance of online advertising.
Under Epic Games’ order, Google will be prohibited for the next three years from engaging in several practices that were deemed anti-competitive by the jury in the landmark case.
These prohibitions include sharing revenue with potential competitors and requirements that developers launch apps exclusively on the Play Store.
The judge also ordered the creation of a three-person technical committee to oversee the implementation of the changes and resolve any disputes that may arise.
This ban represents a significant challenge to Google’s dominance of the Android app ecosystem and could change the mobile app landscape in the coming years.
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney urged companies to seize this opportunity to “build a vibrant and competitive Android ecosystem with such critical mass that Google can’t stop it.”
He also emphasized that the changes would only be applicable in the US, but promised that “the legal and regulatory battle will continue around the world.”
– Google appeals –
Google said it will appeal the court order and ask that it be lifted pending the outcome of the ongoing legal challenge.
The judge said the order was effective from November 1, with some provisions given until July 1 to be implemented.
“We will continue to advocate for what’s best for developers, device manufacturers and the billions of Android users around the world,” said Leigh-Anne Mulholland, the company’s vice president of regulatory affairs.
Phones running the Android operating system have about a 70 percent share of the global smartphone market.
Smartphone companies can install the Android app for free, as long as the Play app store remains on the home page and other Google offerings are pre-installed.
The jury found that Google worked illegally to ensure that the Google Play app store was the only channel for making payments to third-party apps like Fortnite and other games.
A significant portion of the app store’s revenue comes from video games, and Epic Games has long pushed for payments for its mobile games, such as Fortnite, to be made outside the Google or Apple app stores, which take commissions of up to 30 percent.
Epic most notably lost a similar case against Apple, where a different US judge largely ruled in favor of the iPhone maker.
Apple and Google regularly argue that their app store commissions are industry standard and that they pay for benefits such as reach, transaction security and malware detection.
Google also claims that the agreement with smartphone makers has helped Android devices better compete with Apple’s iPhone.
But the lawsuit revealed that Google earns tens of billions of dollars in revenue through the app store.
To maintain its one-stop shop for apps, Google paid smartphone makers a cut of its revenue in exchange for the Play Store remaining the exclusive portal.
(Except for the headline, this story was not edited by NDTV staff and was published by a syndicated channel.)
