Full Disclosure:​

Epic wins anti-trust lawsuit against Google​

By Jaysen Sutton​
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Hi Reader 👋🏽,

The most serious and disturbing evidence I have ever seen in my decade on the bench with respect to a party intentionally suppressing relevant evidence.

- the judge in Google v Epic
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There is a game my sister plays on her iPad. You get dropped into a map. You run around as a cartoon character, and you shoot other players until you are the last one standing. In the game, Fortnite, you can use real money to buy V-Bucks, a virtual currency which you can spend on outfits and weapons.

Now, if you wanted to buy V-Bucks before August 2020, depending on whether you had an iPhone or Android, you would also pay a fee to Apple or Google. Both take a 30% cut from in-game payments.

In August 2020, Epic, the maker of Fortnite, tried something big: it introduced a new direct payment option that circumvented the Apple and Google tax. Both technology companies acted quickly and kicked the game off its app stores. Epic sued.

Last Monday, the Google case was heard, and the jury found in favour of Epic.

What is fascinating is all of the internal information that came out during the trial. For example:
  1. Google feared other developers would join Fortnite, so the biggest priority for the play store in the first three months of 2019 was to tackle ‘agitators’ like Epic.

  2. In ‘Project Hug’, the technology company invested millions to keep big game developers on the Play Store. Google flexed the fee for the biggest companies, including Spotify, where Google’s lawyers fought to hide the details of their agreement.

  3. Some employees spoke out internally about the decision by Google to start taking a cut on games in its Play Store:
We have previously said that we don’t make money from Market, we are now lying. Let me repeat that, we are now lying to our developers by not making this change public (for 6 months now!)
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What was most shocking is the allegation that Google ‘automatically deleted chat messages between employees’, with Google’s CEO falsely marking documents as legally privileged to keep them hidden.

What does it mean for you?

Being a dominant player in a market is not illegal, what is illegal is when a company abuses their market power, often when it comes to the way they price their products.

In antitrust cases, lawyers defending a company will often debate about the definition of a market. If the lawyers can argue a company is part of a much bigger market, they can avoid the implication that they are a dominant power to begin with.

In this case, Google tried to argue that it wasn’t a monopoly because you didn’t have to buy an Android - you could buy an iPhone instead. The jury was not convinced.


Have any thoughts? I'd love to hear your perspective below!

❓Contact [email protected] with any queries.