SAN FRANCISCO– A federal court jury is about to begin its deliberations in an antitrust trial focused on whether Google's efforts to profit from its Android smartphone app store have illegally targeted consumers and stifled innovation.
Before the nine-member jury in San Francisco weighs the evidence Monday, attorneys for opposing sides of the lawsuit will present their closing arguments in a three-year-old case brought by Epic Games, the maker of the popular Fortnite video game. .
The four-week trial included testimonials from both Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who at times resembled a professor explaining complex topics while standing behind a lectern due to a health problem, and Epic CEO Tim Sweeney, who portrayed himself as a video game enthusiast on a computer. mission to take down a greedy tech titan.
Epic alleged that Google abused its wealth and control over the Android software that powers most of the world's smartphones to protect a lucrative Play Store payment system for the distribution of Android apps. Much like Apple does for its iPhone App Store, Google collects a 15 to 30% commission on digital transactions completed within apps – a setup that generates billions of dollars in profits annually.
Google has staunchly defended the commissions as a way to recoup the huge investments it has put into building the Android software it has been giving away to manufacturers since 2007 to compete with the iPhone and has pointed to rival Android app stores such as that of Google. which Samsung installs on its popular smartphones as proof of a free market.
However, Epic presented evidence that supported the idea that Google welcomes competition as a pretext, citing the hundreds of billions of dollars it has doled out to companies like game maker Activision Blizzard to discourage them from opening competing app stores.
The jury's verdict in the case will likely depend on how the smartphone app market is defined. While Epic claims that Google's Play Store is a de facto monopoly that drives up prices for consumers and prevents app makers from creating new products, Google painted a picture of a broad and fiercely competitive market that, in addition to the Android app, also includes the Apple iPhone app store includes. alternatives to the Play Store.
Google's insistence that it competes with Apple in app distribution, despite the company's dependence on incompatible mobile operating systems, shines a spotlight on the two companies' close 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 focuses on the U.S. Justice Department's allegations that Google abused its dominance of the online search market, in part by paying billions of dollars to be the automated place to answer searches on PCs and mobile devices , including the iPhone.
Evidence presented in both San Francisco and Washington showed that Google paid $26.3 billion in 2021 to become the default choice on a variety of web browsers and smartphones, with the bulk of the money going to Apple. Without giving a precise dollar amount, Pichai confirmed that Google shared 36% of its revenue from searches on the Safari browser with Apple in 2021.
Epic's lawsuit against Google's Android app store mirrors another case the video game maker has filed against Apple and its iPhone app store. The Apple lawsuit resulted in a month-long trial in 2021 during the pandemic, with Epic losing all of its key claims.
But the Apple trial was decided by a federal judge, unlike a jury that will deliver the verdict in the Google case.
