On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to defend Google against a one-year-old decision that calls for a significant overhaul of its Android app store in order to increase competition against a system that a jury deemed to be an unlawful monopoly.
Due to the Supreme Court’s one-sentence ruling, Google will soon have to begin revamping its Play Store for apps that run on Android, which powers the majority of smartphones that rival Apple’s iPhone in the United States.
In October of last year, U.S. District Judge James Donato ordered Google to make all of its Android apps available to its rivals and allow them to be downloaded via the Play Store, among other adjustments.
Google informed the U.S. Supreme Court last month that Donato’s ruling would put the more than 100 million American users of the Play Store at “significant security and safety risks by allowing stores that stock malicious, deceptive, or pirated content to proliferate.”
Google added that if the Supreme Court denied its stay request, it would have to start following the judge’s ruling on October 22.
While attempting a last-ditch effort to reverse the December 2023 jury verdict that denounced the Play Store as an abusive monopoly, the Mountain View, California-based company was requesting protection.
Google said in a statement that it will acquiesce to what it considers to be a flawed order while continuing its legal battle in the Supreme Court.
Google cautioned that “the U.S. District Court’s changes will jeopardize users’ ability to safely download apps.”
While attempting to reverse the injunction and the monopoly verdict, Google was shielded from it, but, in a ruling released two months ago, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals denied that endeavor.
Google claimed in its Supreme Court filing that it was being unjustly used as a distributor and supplier for potential competitors.
Donato determined that to combat a pattern of abusive behavior, the digital barriers that protected the Play Store from competition had to be taken down.
Due to its actions, Google was able to generate billions of dollars in profits every year, mostly from its sole control over a payment processing system that charged a 15–30% fee for in-app purchases.
In 2020, video game developer Epic Games launched an antitrust action against Google, focusing on those commissions.
The case went to trial for a month in a federal court in San Francisco, where the jury returned a monopoly verdict.
The Fortnite game developer, Epic, lost a comparable antitrust case against Apple’s iPhone app store.
As part of a reorganization that led to the company’s civil contempt of court earlier this year, U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez-Rodgers ordered Apple to start permitting links to alternative payment systems, despite her conclusion that the iPhone app store wasn’t an unconstitutional monopoly.
The Supreme Court has made it possible for users to select alternate app payment options “without fees, scare screens, and friction,” according to a post by Epic CEO Tim Sweeney.
Google’s profits will probably be hurt by the Play Store adjustments, but the company’s main source of revenue is a digital ad network that is supported by its powerful search engine.
These are the foundations of an online empire that has been targeted on other legal fronts.
Both Google’s search engine and certain of its advertising technologies were ruled to be unlawful monopolies as part of charges filed by the U.S. Department of Justice.
In a ruling generally interpreted as a reprieve for Google, a federal judge in the search engine case earlier this year rejected a proposed breakup laid out by the Justice Department.
In the advertising technology case, which is set to conclude with closing arguments in Alexandria, Virginia, on November 17, the government is now attempting to dismantle Google.
