Three years after it first brought Google to court, Tim Sweeney and his company, Epic Games, have won a court case against the search engine. In the case of Epic v Google, The jury in US court deliberated and found that the Alphabet-owned company was guilty of turning its Play app store and billing service into an illegal monopoly.
“Today’s verdict is a win for all app developers and consumers around the world. It proves that Google’s app store practices are illegal and they abuse their monopoly to extract exorbitant fees, stifle competition and reduce innovation,” Epic Games posted on its official site over the victory. “Over the course of the trial we saw evidence that Google was willing to pay billions of dollars to stifle alternative app stores by paying developers to abandon their own store efforts and direct distribution plans, and offering highly lucrative agreements with device manufacturers in exchange for excluding competing app stores.”
The feud between Epic Games and Google began years ago, after the former indirectly waged war against the two biggest consumer tech giants, Apple and Google, when it implemented a “direct payment” scheme for Fortnite on iOS, back in 2020. Needless to say, the fruit company was less than appreciative of the move and soon began a long legal wrangle that is ongoing to this day.
That being said, it should be noted that, at the time of writing, it is still unclear on what Epic Games has won, exactly. However, as we mentioned in an earlier report, the Sweeney-owned brand had initially taken Google to court directly, with no intention of settling, simply because its goal wasn’t originally to win the lawsuit but to send a message to other developers that they should not let themselves be bullied by the major companies and the “unfair practices”.
(Source: The Verge, Epic Games)
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