Photo Credit: Pawel Czerwinski
Google failed to persuade a U.S. appeals court to overturn the federal court order requiring the company to revamp its app store.
On Thursday, Google lost its appeal to overturn a jury verdict and federal court order requiring the company to overhaul its app store. In a unanimous ruling, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco rejected claims from Google that the trial judge had made legal errors in the antitrust case that concluded in favor of “Fortnite” publisher Epic Games. Epic initially filed the lawsuit in 2020.
But Epic’s lawsuit was “replete with evidence that Google’s anticompetitive conduct entrenched its dominance,” wrote Circuit Judge M. Margaret McKeown, who was joined by Circuit Judges Danielle Forrest and Gabriel Sanchez.
This ruling dealt a blow to Google as the company is battling lawsuits on multiple fronts, including a case by the U.S. Justice Department. That case alleges various aspects of the tech giant’s business violate antitrust law.
In Epic’s case, the game publisher accused Google of monopolizing the way consumers access apps on Android devices and pay for transactions within apps. In 2023, a San Francisco jury ruled that Google illegally stifled its competition.
In October, U.S. District Judge James Donato ordered Google to restore competition in a number of ways. Chiefly among those, Google must enable users to download rival app stores within its Play Store, and also make the Play Store’s catalog available to those competitors. However, that order was on hold pending the outcome of the appeal.
Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s vice president of regulatory affairs, said the appeals court’s ruling “will significantly harm user safety, limit choice, and undermine the innovation that has always been central to the Android ecosystem.”
Meanwhile, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney took to social media to celebrate the ruling. “Thanks to the verdict, the Epic Games Store for Android will be coming to the Google Play Store!”
As Google battles the Department of Justice, Epic is fighting another legal battle with Apple. That fight stems from a U.S. judge’s order requiring the iPhone creator to give developers more freedom to direct customers to make purchases outside its App Store. Similar to Google, Apple filed an appeal related to the ruling that it violated a prior injunction in the lawsuit Epic filed in 2020.
