Comment on Epic v. Google: everything we’re learning live in Fortnite court
Veraxus@kbin.social 1 year ago
Epic is right about this… but these are American companies, and America loves monopolies. No matter how obvious, justified, or cut-and-dry, this didn’t work against Apple and it won’t work against Google.
huginn@feddit.it 1 year ago
They lost against Apple and you can’t even install another store on iOS
Ain’t got a snowball’s chance in hell against Google.
TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 1 year ago
You’re thinking about it from an end user perspective, not from a legal perspective. The court doesn’t care about which platform gives more user choice.
Yes, Apple’s system is objectively more locked down and dictatorial, but Epic lost because Apple effectively said “so what? These are our devices, ergo our rules. You can’t have access to them without our say so.” The courts agreed. Epic can’t compel Apple to allow sideloading on iOS devices, nor free transactions through the app store.
Google is a bit more complicated. Google purports Android to be open (which compared to iOS, it obviously is, but the courts don’t care about that), yet there are restrictions imposed on the OEMs.
If it turns out that Google blocks, say, Samsung or OnePlus from preinstalling Epic/other app stores, the courts may not like that and may say that Google is abusing the power that they have over these other OEMs. Apple doesn’t have that legal thorn in their side, because they don’t impose rules on other phone makers - their decisions are imposed only on their own devices, and they can do whatever they want with those, as they are their devices.
I’m actually more inclined to believe Epic would win the Google case than the Apple case - courts are always more serious to matters of contracts between companies than they are to what companies are doing on their own devices.
That said, I think Epic will still lose this one too.