Google Loses Appeal Against Epic
Mike Scarcella (MacRumors, Slashdot):
The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in a unanimous ruling, rejected, claims from Google that the trial judge made legal errors in the antitrust case that unfairly benefited “Fortnite” maker Epic Games, which filed the lawsuit in 2020.
[…]
U.S. District Judge James Donato in San Francisco ordered Google in October to restore competition by allowing users to download rival app stores within its Play store and by making Play’s app catalog available to those competitors, among other reforms.
This seems to go much further than what Apple’s been ordered to do.
Total victory in the Epic v Google appeal!
Previously:
- Microsoft Supports Epic Against Apple’s Appeal
- Fortnite Returns to US App Store
- Epic Files Motion to Enforce Injunction
- Apple Appeals Epic Anti-Steering Injunction
- Epic Wins Antitrust Case With Google
- Epic Sues Over Google Play Store, Too
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I think Google were caught making special deals with some app publishers (might have been Netflix and/or Spotify), and this inequal treatment is what weakened their position in this case.
Apple just treats all developers equally badly, which in this kind of case gave them an advantage.
"...in a unanimous ruling, rejected, opens new tab claims from Google..." should be "in a unanimous ruling, rejected claims from Google..."
But that is one hell of a hilarious mis-copypaste. It does it for me too if I copy that section of the article.
> This seems to go much further than what Apple’s been ordered to do.
What really killed Google in this case is that they have constantly claimed to be open and then made secret deals and such to suppress competition. Apple never claimed to be open. They made all kinds of other bogus claims, but not that one. Ben Thompson of Stratechery has a few good articles on the difference. Will link later if I can find them.
@Simone Fixed, thanks. I usually use a script that copies the actual HTML and then cleans up junk like that, but in this case there was a lot of DIV/SVG junk that confused it, so I did it the old-fashioned way. ;-(
