The Google/Epic Games store goes to Court of Court | Dianbit

We had a rare peek this week in the legal world to combat monopoly and enforce them in the game industry. Google appeals its loss in a trial to combat monopoly, where epic games persuaded a federal court that Google has behaved illegally as a monopoly in restricting EPIC access to Android users.

Now, Google has transferred the case to the US Court of Appeal and is trying to get the treatments that the epic games have won. The two sides argued before a committee of three federal judges in San Francisco.

The case started again in 2020, when EPIC games filed lawsuits against Apple and Google on the same day, after they removed Fortnite from their stores, after EPIC tried to enable users to download Fortnite or buy Fortnite commodities via Apple and Google Smartones directly inside Epic games app. Apple won the anti -monopoly claim, while it lost Google.

I also had the opportunity to hear Google developers The developer alliance This week, they are talking about the arguments they had about treatments and how they could harm their work. It was a rare opportunity to listen from some parties – the partisans on behalf of Google – for their views, as detailed in Amicus message Foot in favor of Google. Google also faces difficult enforcement treatments in a Google monopoly lawsuit. They have noticed something that Apple and Google repeatedly put forward – that security concerns mean that Epic should not be easily allowed to “download” Fortnite in the user’s phones because they have introduced safety risk. EPIC argued that her safety was good, and this was an attempt to create friction, or to prevent users from moving away from the Google Play store.

In this case, I think Apple won the partially epic games because it was a homogeneous company. Apple can decide its own policies for its store and also impose policies on the phones that make it. However, Google had no control over the entire ecosystem. Instead, she had to persuade phone makers like Samsung to adopt Android and use the Google Play store. But this is the place where it has a problem fighting monopoly with the path of real evidence.

Epic Games argued that Google prompted Samsung to make the Google Play store virtual store on Samsung phones and keep others like the Epic Games. The epic games are called witnesses who were former Google employees, and confirmed that this is Google’s intention to sign these contracts. Since Google has prompted to keep Epic and other Android smartphones that are likely to hurt consumers in higher prices, the jury found that Google violated the Anti -Monopathic Law.

I listened to the arguments before the court because of the live broadcast. I heard a painting of three arguments from both sides for two hours and indicated that it looks skeptical about the attractiveness of Google.

Epic games that Google monopolizes the way the consumer arrives and pays applications on Android devices. In 2023, the jury concluded that Google illegally prevented the competition, and the trial judge ordered the change of the Google Play store. Google is attractive. Meanwhile, Epic Games lost all its Apple claims in the anti -monopoly case, and only won one issue over the right of developers to announce lower prices on alternative applications within their application store apps. Google agreed to pay 700 million dollars to consumers and make changes in response to a lawsuit by state lawyers for the play store.

Hogan Lovells Us Lawyer Jessica Elsworth Google. She said that Apple’s victory over epic games should prevent an opposite result in the Google case.

Jessica Elsworth has argued for Google that Google and Apple are fierce competitors and that this should be taken into account when he argues epic games that they are monopolists. She said that the Apple App Store, Google Play Store and other Android stores are competing for portable game transactions in a competitive market mainly. She noted that Apple won, while she lost Google.

“You can not only lose a problem that fully charges the first time, then pretends that this did not happen and tries to get a different result against a different opponent,” Elsworth said, which means that this is what EPIC did when it was lost to Apple and then won against Google. The discussion focused on whether the Apple case was “previously”, as Apple’s Apple’s victory against EPIC should be prevented an epic victory over Google. One of the judges asked Ellithor if she believed that the second trial should not have occurred at all.

Elsworth also argued that the judge in the Google trial, the American boycott judge James Donato, failed to direct the jury about what was required to prove how the defendants dealt with after -sales sales, while saying that the Apple jurisdiction had received such instructions.

She said, “The same products must be subject to the same legal framework that rules.”

Judge Daniel Joe Forest said every case should stand alone. In the Apple case, Google claimed that the judge asked the jury to determine what the relevant market is to enforce the fight against monopoly. Google assumed that if instructions were directed to do so in its case, you will find the same jury that Google had no monopoly in the relevant market. The judge asked whether the educational error was the reason for the expulsion of the jury’s conclusion.

“What we say is that the jury has not been granted the appropriate instructions on the standard that is to find post -sale, and therefore it was not guided properly, it is supposed to be harmful,” said Google’s lawyer. “We know that it was harmful here because this is the same element as a claim to fight monopoly. This is why the proposed markets of Epic, this strict approach, failed in the Apple case.”

The judge answered that the principle of combating comprehensive monopoly is that you take every case in its facts. There are “clear realistic differences between Android and Apple World.”

Judge Gabriel Sanchez also said that he is having difficulty in the argument that companies were in the same situation, although Apple manufactures phones while Google creates programs.

“Just because they are players in the same market, it does not mean that the Apple case has occurred here.”

Gary Bournenstein, head of litigation at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, talked about EPIC games. The lawyer referred to the differences between Apple phones and the Google Business model, as it did not sell devices but has done transactions with the likes of Samsung.

“The problem is the continued delay in bringing relief to a market that suffers from anti -competition behavior for a better part of a decade.” “Sending it to the provincial court to do the duty of the homework to write opinion is completely unnecessary. My friend made the comment earlier that there is a problem here because we do not face results about the market definition and the results about the competitive effects of the provincial court in the way we did in the Apple case, including It is sufficient to evaluate this court.

He said that there was no contradiction between the two cases because there were overlapping markets. Apple runs everything from creating the phone to creating an application store on it. Google does not run the entire ecosystem, and consumers act under a different structure with Android.

“In order for there to be a delivery, which is really the context in which this problem is presented to the court, there must be some actual contradiction, so that both of them cannot be correct at the same time.” . “This is not true here. You can have overlapping markets, even if one accepts, virtual for a moment, that the result in EPIC and Apple around the nature of the market has been carved in the stone, which will not be prevented because it will not be inconsistent with the presence of the markets The jury found.

Bournenstein was opposed to Google when he argued that the changes requested by Donato would lead to significant harm to the privacy of the user and safety. Tim Sweeney, CEO of EPIC Games, made the fifteen step -step steps required to download Fortnite to “Scare screens” on the Android phone.

Microsoft has provided a summary to support epic games, as did the Federal Trade Committee. David Lawrence, director of politics in the anti -monopoly department at the US Department of Justice, has argued to support EPIC’s victory.

“The provinces of the provinces have a wide and discretionary power of monopoly treatments, and when the law has been violated, competing treatment must be repeated. We are more concerned today that Google’s arguments threaten the principles of the foundation. We would like to urge this court not to adopt class restrictions proposed by the lawyer here regarding the treatment estimated authority For the province’s courts. ” “We are concerned that these restrictions, if adopted, can prevent future courts from carrying out their duty under the law to restore competition to monopolistic markets.”

Lawrence said: “We have illegal behavior that affected the selling point, whether or not the competing application stores are transferred on Android phones. These are Android phones in the hands of millions of Americans today. Loading directly under the phones, without the user wanted to interact with the point of sales in a way And allow it to use this store for a limited period of time as necessary to reopen the market for competition.

The Court of Appeal is expected to rule this year, and it is likely to be appealed to the US Supreme Court.