Late last year, Google’s Play Store was ruled to be a monopoly in the US, and today the judge in that case has set out what Google must do to address this situation.
Today, Judge James Donato issued his final ruling in Epic v. Google, ordering Google to effectively open up the Google Play app store to competition for three whole years. Google will have to distribute rival third-party app stores within Google Play, and it must give rival third-party app stores access to the full catalog of Google Play apps, unless developers opt out individually.
↫ Sean Hollister at The Verge
On top of these rather big changes, Google also cannot mandate the use of Google’s own billing solution, nor can it prohibit developers from informing users of other ways to download and/or pay for an application. Furthermore, Google can’t make sweetheart deals with device makers to entice them to install the Play Store or to block them from installing other stores, and Google can’t pay developers to only use the Play Store or not use other stores. It’s a rather comprehensive set of remedies that will remain in force for three years.
Many of these remedies are taken straight from the European Union’s Digital Markets Act, but they will be far less effective since they’re only applied to one company, and only for three years. On top of that, Google can appeal, and the company has already stated that it’s going to ask for an immediate stay on these remedies, and if they get that stay, the remedies won’t have to be implemented any time soon. This legal tussling is far from over, and does very little to protect consumer choice. A clear law that simply prohibits this kind of market abuse, like the DMA, is much fairer to everyone involved, and creates a consistent level playing field for everyone, instead of only affecting random companies based on the whims of something as unpredictable as juries.
In other words, I don’t think much is going to change in the United States after this ruling, and we’ll likely be hearing more back and forths in the court room for years to come, all while US consumers are being harmed. It’s better than nothing in lieu of a working Congress actually doing, well, anything, but that’s not saying much.
I’m confused here. Does that mean that developers may unexpectedly start finding their app on third-party app store? How does that work?
That is what it sounds like. The Devil will definitely be in these details, and there are a lot of ways for Google to poison pill such an effort. But I can imagine they’d have to deliver their app binaries (signed, or not, who’s to say) – to third party app stores, and let them sell them. The details matter here though – does Google get to charge for access to that? Or does Google simply get to simply say “third party app stores already have access to binaries – devs just have to upload them” (which is true). Would the third party app store have to sign their own binaries? There are so many chain of custody questions here.
But also, who then is on the hook to pay for the infrastructure to validate those binaries, and sign them, and all the other things the Google Play Store backend does for the developer?
Lot’s of questions here, but also, clearly a step in the right direction.