By Michael Gennaro | Courthouse News
Google asked a federal appeals court Monday to throw out a federal judge’s ruling stemming from the 2023 antitrust trial where a jury found that Google’s Play Store and billing services on Android platforms constituted an illegal monopoly. The tech giant argues that it competes with Apple — and that the trial judge stopped it from hammering that point home.
In October 2024, U.S. District Judge James Donato ordered Google to open up Google Play and carry third-party app stores, and allow those third-party developers to have access to Google Play’s catalog of apps, among other remedies, in order to increase competition on the Android platform.
Epic Games sued Google in 2020 after Google removed Epic’s hit game Fortnite from the Google Play Store — after Epic hotfixed the game to bypass Google’s billing services. Google said this violated an agreement Epic had with Google to use its billing services for in-app purchases. (Epic also filed a parallel suit against Apple, which it mostly lost in front of U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers.)