Jury to decide outcome of Google antitrust trial centered on payments in Android app store

The deliberations of a federal court jury are about to commence in an antitrust trial that centers around the question of whether Google’s actions to generate profits from its Android smartphone app store have unlawfully harmed consumers and hindered innovation.

Before a nine-person jury in San Francisco begins weighing evidence Monday, lawyers for opposing sides of the trial will present their closing arguments in the three-year-old case filed by Epic Games, the maker of the popular Fortnite video game. .

The four-week trial included testimony from both Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who sometimes looked like a professor explaining complex topics while standing behind a lectern because of a health problem, and Epic CEO Tim Sweeney, who painted himself as a video game lover. the mission is to defeat a greedy tech titan.

Epic argued that Google has used its wealth and control over the Android software that powers most of the world’s smartphones to protect a lucrative payment system in the Play Store for distributing Android apps. Just like Apple does with its iPhone app store, Google collects a 15% to 30% commission on digital transactions made within its apps – an arrangement that generates billions of dollars a year.

Google has staunchly defended the fees as a way to help cover the huge investment in building Android software that it has doled out since 2007 to manufacturers to compete against the iPhone, pointing to rival Android app stores, such as the one Samsung installs on its popular smartphones, as evidence of a free market.

However, Epic presented evidence that reinforced the idea that Google welcomes the competition as an excuse, citing the hundreds of billions of dollars it has given to companies like game maker Activision Blizzard to prevent them from opening rival app stores.

The jury’s verdict in the case will likely depend on how the smartphone app market is defined. Although Epic has argued that Google’s Play Store is a de facto monopoly that raises prices for consumers and prevents app makers from creating new products, Google painted a picture of extensive and fierce competition that includes Apple’s iPhone app store in addition to Android. alternatives to its Play Store.

Google’s insistence that it competes against Apple in app distribution despite the company’s reliance on incompatible mobile operating systems has put a spotlight on the two companies’ cozy relationship in online search — the subject of another major antitrust lawsuit in Washington that will be decided by a federal judge after hearing final arguments in May.

The Washington lawsuit centers on allegations by the US Justice Department that Google has abused its dominant position in the online search market, in part by paying billions of dollars to be an automatic place to send queries to personal computers and mobile devices, including the iPhone.

Evidence presented in both San Francisco and Washington revealed that Google paid $26.3 billion in 2021 to make its search the default choice on a number of web browsers and smartphones, with most of the money going to Apple. Without an exact dollar amount, Pichai confirmed that Google would share 36 percent of its Safari browser search revenue with Apple in 2021.

Epic’s lawsuit against Google’s Android app store mirrors another case filed by the video game maker against Apple and its iPhone app store. Apple’s lawsuit led to a month-long trial in 2021 amid the pandemic, where Epic lost all of its key arguments.

But Apple’s trial was decided by a federal judge, unlike the jury that delivers the verdict in Google’s case.