Three years after Fortnite-maker Epic Games sued Apple and Google for allegedly running illegal app store monopolies, Epic has a win. The jury in Epic v. Google has just delivered its verdict — and it found that Google turned its Google Play app store and Google Play Billing service into an illegal monopoly.
After just a few hours of deliberation, the jury unanimously answered yes to every question put before them — that Google has monopoly power in the Android app distribution markets and in-app billing services markets, that Google did anticompetitive things in those markets, and that Epic was injured by that behavior. They decided Google has an illegal tie between its Google Play app store and its Google Play Billing payment services, too, and that its distribution agreement, Project Hug deals with game developers, and deals with OEMs were all anticompetitive.
↫ Sean Hollister for The Verge
Good news, of course, but it does make one wonder why a judge in Epic’s case versus Apple ruled the exact opposite as the jury did today. We don’t yet know what this verdict will mean for Google in a practical sense – that’s up to the judge, and Google intends to appeal, for course – so if consumers will actually see any benefit from this remains to be seen.
Oracle VirtualBox is pretty OK. I use it non-professionally and it is very easy to set up. I run it under Windows.
Beware: Virtual Box does not forward all CPU capabilities to the Guest!
I had to learn that hard when suddenly FMA was not supported on the Host (beside the fact that every decent CPU supports it) and got emulated via slow BigDecimal operations.
The VirtualBox team did never even answer to the ticket: https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/15471
Also, you can’t emulate architctures different from the host (e.g. AARCH64 on X64).
Use QEMU instead and thank me later.
Andreas Reichel,
I haven’t tested this, but that is very curious since it’s not something that should even require anything to be implemented in the hypervisor. Unprivileged operations like that should come for free using hardware based virtualization. Reading your link it seems that FMA does actually work, the bug in virtualbox is simply not reporting the feature as supported under CPUID…
Given how trivial that would be to fix, it seems a bit ridiculous that oracle couldn’t been bothered to fix it in nearly a decade.
Both have worked well for me, but I lean QEMU for my own environments on linux.
Here’s my setup:
Windows -> VirtualBox -> Ubuntu -> Simh (PDP-11 emulator) -> BSD UNIX 2.11. Pretty cool.
Thom Holwerda,
Apple’s restrictions are objectively worse, however the thing that nobody likes to admit about our legal system is that justice is extremely inconsistent. The technicalities may be different, jurors have different opinions, judges have different opinions. There’s some luck involved and Apple has a more favorable reputation than google in the US, which may have influenced the verdict regardless of the case, So I for one am not surprised.
Alfman,
spot on as usual: Google is very much optional and pretty much Open Source. If you ignore the ARM hardware constraints and proprietary blobs (which again are not Google’s fault), you can install any Android and App store you want. It’s beyond me how they own a monopoly.
Contrary to that Apple is completely locked without any option or alternative.
Another concern: all the “social media platforms” are pressed into content regulation. They tried that even on DNS and Access Providers in the EU. At the same time they condemn Google for content regulation and call it a monopoly?
And don’t get me wrong, I am not Pro Google, I don’t care about “Social Media Providers” and I am definitely not a Trump supporter.
But I do care very much about consistent and transparent rules and also do not like witch hunts, because you will never know who the mob will burn on a stake next.
What they have a monopoly on is the user base… after all remember the User is the product not the apps or content.
So from the perspective of the developer, both Apple and Google have monopolies on their users.
Also the US Jury system is just nuts: Playing roullette, you can hit 12x black in a row with a decent likelihood — now imagine a bunch of hill billies deciding about a matter of algorithms, networks, routing, encryption and stuff. shutter!
Google’s monopoly is much more subtle:
1) Google changed the API of Android a few times in such a way that you have to use Firebase for push notifications (Google tracking) and to be able to put applications in the background. Apps like Fairemail have to work around this by having a permanent Notification on screen.
2) You can use AOSP code base but you can’t really contribute or change the politics so it’s all Google controlled.
3) Google hides behind difficult to modify defaults and phone makers make it more and more difficult to unlock bootloader and root the device.
I know this because I use an Android phone without Google but every year it’s getting harder. For instance e.foudation has support but the phones are less and updated with new models. Signal is not working properly without Google services 🙁
Wondercool2,
I do as well, and I encounter the same troubles as you, however the restrictions are even worse on IOS. Power users like us may be the ones suffering the most from lack of competition 🙁
I might be out of my depth here, but this discussion will be really interesting.
From the outset… This made not too much sense.
It is interesting, as Google Play, while being the default, is almost never the only app store on Android phones. (Except Google’s Pixel, of course). Mine came with Samsung store, Xiaomi does not even have Google Play, and in the past Amazon had theirs in Fire Phones.
Not saying more competition would not be welcome, but I think this is not the app store, but API issue.
Because (most) Android phones allow sideloading, including that of an alternate app store. (If you are looking for an excellent open source store, there is always F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/en/)
I think the problem here is that the base Android APIs (which are part of AOSP) is severely limited (it was not the case before). And while the jury may or may not be knowledgable about the distinction, they are clearly able to see the end results (cannot for example to payment processing, without being tied to rest of the Google ecosystem as well).
Epic’s lawyer answered the why google and not Apple answer somewhere in an interview. Basically, Google made the cardinal sin of documenting their decisions in great detail. Things like
” Lets pay league of legends $20 million in a “marketing fee” so they don’t launch their own app store, because we make so much money on the app store and we don’t want anyone else to make a successful one. ”
Then when the executives who wrote those got on the stand all of a sudden they had very different reasons for doing what they did. It was clear to the jury they were being evasive and contradicting their own emails and documents outlying the company strategy. Apple, didn’t do that, so the testimony was more believable.
Bill Shooter of Bul,
Technicalities win and loose cases, but from an ethics point of view, the fact that apple is less transparent shouldn’t grant them any more leniency in terms of their monopolistic abuse. That just encourages companies to become more effective at running operations under a veil of secrecy “the courts condone market abuse so long as they don’t hear us say the quiet part out loud”.
Calling evidence Technicalities is a stretch and a half. It is a bad incentive, but its the justice system that presumes innocence. I don’t think I want to get a way from that just for this case. This is why in the movies & tv shows the Mafia go for walks in the park away from any surveillance and never over the phone. Its very surprising to me that Apple was able to avoid documenting anything here. That’s very rare.
Bill Shooter of Bul,
|t is a technicality though. It’s what a company does that should matter for antitrust, not what they say. Let’s put it a different way: had google done the exact same thing but managed to keep their talks off the record, does that change the ethics of anti-competitive behaviors? No of course not. This creates a legal environment where actions get overlooked as long as your not transparent about them. Whatever that system is, we should not conflate it with justice.
Again though, when their abuses are happening in the open air clear for everyone to see, talking about it in secret shouldn’t be a defense. Regardless of what they said apple’s market restrictions are objectively worse. I’m not defending google, but it flies in the face of justice to have courts throw the book at the lessor offender while letting the greater offender off the hook.
Google has emails talking about paying devs to use their app store to supress competitor app stores.
If Apple’s app store is a monopoly, so is Nintendo, PlayStation, and Xbox’s.
Marcus1991,
I’m not defending google, my opinion is that suppressing competitors is bad, but… apple are guilty of doing that every single day. It takes some biased mental gymnastics to criticize google competitor suppression without implicating apple as well.
You could try and make that case, although I think the duopoly situation on mobile is far more dire based on the numbers…
https://gonintendo.com/contents/16868-new-report-shows-market-share-and-more-between-nintendo-sony-and-microsoft
https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held-by-smartphone-platforms-in-the-united-states/
Yes, that’s true – each of those platforms has a vertical monopoly. US regulators don’t currently have much interest in vertical monopolies.
The argument against Google and Apple’s mobile phone app stores is that they represent a horizontal monopoly. Just to clarify, because everyone’s definition of monopoly is wrong – you don’t need to control 100% of a market to be a horizontal monopoly, you just need to control enough of it to effect prices and keep competitors out. Both Google and Apple unquestionably have this position, and any judges who say otherwise are likely ideologically biased toward some stupid economic fantasy, or have been paid (directly with cash, or indirectly with campaign promises).
Epic has actually made the argument that with multiple game platforms in the games market (Playstation, Xbox, Switch, and PC) there are enough players, that the market is competitive, and their app stores don’t constitute a horizontal monopoly. I’d still like to see the same rules applied to these platforms. I want to be able to install my own software on all of them (not pirated games, I go out of my way to make sure I have legit licenses to things when that’s available, even when I emulate them), and the fact that I can’t has actively kept me from getting a PS5.
By going out of my way to obtain licenses, I mean that I crack and dump my own hardware, when it’s possible. PS3, Wii U, and Switch. I have dumped my own games from all of those.
Is this the Google trial that the judge found Google was deleting evidence and directed the jury that they can infer negative, guilty implications from missing evidence? That’s one meaningful difference from the Apple case. Another argument I read between the two cases is that Apple makes phones for themselves, with an OS that only they use, and an app store that is only on their own phones. Google gives away the OS “for free” but adds restrictions with Google Play services, so it’s a market of multiple phone manufacturers (including Google itself) on a platform that technically allows other stores and systems, but as a whole Google tries hard to make using non-Google stuff difficult, including financially, from a privileged position as the platform maker. I think that’s the meaningful difference between Google and Apple.
In America judges are usually lawyers, and you can usually convince lawyer of all kinds of things that don’t make sense in reality, as long as you make a grandiose enough argument.