Google tells court Epic Games injunction is too expensive The Register

Google has asked a California court to deny Epic Games' request for relief, arguing that the changes would be too costly and pose new security risks to Android users after the Play Store was found to be an illegal monopoly.

The Chocolate Factory filed a report. [PDF] The company on Monday disputed Epic's demands, arguing that its internal estimates of up to $137 million to implement catalog access, library porting and third-party app store distribution, plus the ongoing costs of keeping it all running, were simply too great to bear.

“These estimates reflect Google's technical and review costs,” the company said in the filing. “They do not include the potential damage these measures could cause to the Google and Play brands, or the immeasurable costs Google could incur from undermining the security and viability of the Android ecosystem.”

Google reported first-quarter 2024 net income of $23.7 billion.

Google's challenge revolves around three demands from Epic: First, give third-party app stores access to Google Play's catalog of apps that aren't available in its own store, and make it easier for them to link to Google Play. This would allow third-party app stores to freely profit from Google's own catalog of apps, according to Google. According to Google, this would also require it to create new ways to share metadata with third-party stores, which it believes would undermine user security.

Second, Google doesn't want to support library porting, which allows Android users to change ownership of an app they installed via Google Play to the same app available in a third-party store. Google says that Android 14 has already “almost achieved the goals of library porting countermeasures,” so no additional countermeasures are needed.

Third, Google doesn't want to comply with Epic's demands to require third-party app stores to distribute on Google Play because “the current Play Store is designed to distribute apps, not to be an app store” and changing it to do so would be costly and pose security risks to users, Google argues.

The Android maker is seeking more time to file additional briefs on other potential legal issues surrounding Epic's request, on which the judge has yet to rule.

The epic story continues

It's been six months since a California jury ruled that Google Play was an illegal monopoly, but the ruling doesn't settle the issue.

Epic and Google had been in and out of court for months since the ruling, trying to hammer out the terms of an injunction that Epic proposed in April, but the court's decision [PDF] The move to force Google to submit the report follows a discussion among “expert economics” in May, in which Judge James Donato reportedly expressed skepticism about Google's Play Store demise theory.

“Google has a history of engaging in bad faith compliance practices and has attempted to circumvent laws and regulations designed to curb its anti-competitive dominance over Android devices,” Epic said in its request against the search giant. “Our proposed injunction seeks to stop Google from repeating its past bad faith tactics and ensure that Android devices provide competition and choice for all developers and consumers.”

Epic has until July 24 to respond to Google. The developer of Fortnite declined to comment on the matter, and Google did not respond to questions.

The other big app store antitrust lawsuit filed by Epic against Apple, which was decided in 2021, is also not over yet.

The game developer nearly lost its lawsuit against Apple, but U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers of the Northern District of California ruled in Epic Games' favor, finding that Apple can no longer block developers from linking to external payment sources for in-app purchases, a decision that was passively upheld by the Supreme Court last August.

But the fight isn't over yet, with the two sides recently returning to court for a discovery hearing to determine whether Apple has complied with the injunction issued in the case.

According to court documents [PDF] The May 8 hearing, filed last week, “revealed significant deficiencies in Apple's compliance representations,” and additional documents the court requested Apple submit “failed to comply with the court's orders.”

Apple and Epic were back in court yesterday to argue the matter, but the records have not yet been made public.

Sources 1/ https://Google.com/ 2/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/26/google_begs_court_for_relief/ The mention sources can contact us to remove/changing this article

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