As companies get bigger, we see more antitrust lawsuits being tossed around. Companies like Google are always under the eye of the government for its dominance. According to Engadget, Google settled on a two-year-old antitrust case regarding the Google Play Store.
This is a case that’s had some reverberations throughout the tech world. Back in 2021, the company was dragged into court over its dominance over the Android app market. As you can imagine, the mass majority of purchases on Android phones are made through the Google Play Store. This means that Google earns a ton of money from taxing the Play Store transactions.
An alliance of attorneys general brought Google into court back in 2021, claiming that the company used its power over the Android app market in order to monopolize the market.
Google settled the Play Store antitrust lawsuit
The battle has been raging on for a few years, but the search giant has settled in order to end this case early. At the moment, we don’t know how much the company settled for. All we know is that it was settled for a much more agreeable amount of money.
Settling the case also means that Google is unlikely to bring any drastic changes to the way it operates the Google Play Store. As it stands, Google scrapes a fair amount of money that developers get from purchases. This is something that caused companies like Hulu and Amazon to stop allowing transactions through the Play Store. Instead, their apps force people to go to websites to complete transactions.
This is also something that prompted Epic Games to pull Fortnite from the Play Store and the Apple App Store. The company was paying a ton of money to Apple and Google for each of its transactions.
This is also why Epic Games is not happy with Google’s decision to settle the case. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney voiced his opinion on the matter on Twitter. As time goes on, we’ll learn more about what will happen with this case.