Google to pay $700 million and make tiny app store changes to settle with 50 states
By Sean Hollister, a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.
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On December 11th, a jury decided that Google has an illegal monopoly with its Google Play app store, handing Epic Games a win. But Epic wasn’t the only one fighting an antitrust case. All 50 state attorneys general settled a similar lawsuit in September, and we’ve just now learned what Google agreed to give up as a result: $700 million and a handful of minor concessions in the way that Google runs its store in the United States.
The biggest change: Google will need to let developers steer consumers away from the Google Play Store for several years, if this settlement is approved.
You can read the full 68-page settlement for yourself at the bottom of this story, but here’s the TL;DR about what it includes:
Does that sound like a lot? If you add it all up, it does make for a slightly different Google app store landscape than we’ve experienced over the past decade and change. But not only does every one of these concessions have an expiration date, many of them are arguably not real concessions.
Google argued during the Epic v. Google trial that users were already perfectly able to install third-party apps on their devices through any number of means, and it claimed many of its agreements with developers, OEMs, and carriers did not require them to, for instance, exclusively put Google Play on a phone or its homescreen.
More importantly, several of the most significant sounding changes here are tied to Google’s User Choice Billing program — which is mostly
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