The internet giant was ordered by a federal judge to make a series of changes to address its anticompetitive conduct.
In December, a federal jury in San Francisco found that Google had violated antitrust law by imposing high fees and stringent rules on Epic Games and other app developers in Google’s app store.
On Monday, Judge James Donato of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ordered Google to make a series of changes to address its anticompetitive conduct. For three years starting Nov. 1, the company must allow developers to bring their own app stores to the Android mobile operating system. It must also allow app makers to charge users with their own billing systems, outside of the Android ecosystem.
Google will be entitled to charge developers “a reasonable fee for these services,” which must be based on Google’s actual costs.
Judge Donato acknowledged that Google would be unhappy with his decision.
“Google’s modus operandi in this case has been to deluge the court in an ocean of comments, many of which were cursory and undeveloped,” Judge Donato wrote in his ruling. He compared the volume of Google’s arguments to a “blunderbuss.”
The order was a victory for Epic, the maker of the popular video game Fortnite, which has waged legal battles against Google and Apple since 2020 in an effort to weaken their power over the app economy.
Epic had petitioned the court to crack open Google’s Android system so that it could offer its own app store while sidestepping the company’s rules and fees, and Judge Donato’s ruling fulfilled most of those requests, but will still force Epic and other developers to pay Google for Android’s security and content moderation services.