Google says Epic’s Play Store requirements are too high and too selfish

Epic Games won its antitrust lawsuit against Google in December when a federal jury found that Google had violated U.S. antitrust laws in its operation of the Play Store. A few months later, the game developer presented its list of demands that, if implemented, would open up the Play Store wide open. Now Google has submitted a request to the court saying that no, it will not give Epic what it wants without a fight, because the company’s demands “deviate far from the trial protocol.”

Epic’s proposed remedies would require the court to not only create a global regulatory regime to set app prices, as Google wrote in the lawsuit, according to Engadget, but also to micromanage the “highly complex and dynamic ecosystem” used by billions of consumers and app developers all over the world. If you remember, Epic wants Google to open up Android to third-party app stores and make its app catalog available to those stores. He also wants to ban restrictions on pre-installed apps and ban any Google activity that encourages third parties.

Google said that giving in to all of these demands would “effectively make it impossible to compete,” which in turn would have a negative impact on Android users and developers. Google said in its filing that Epic’s proposals only benefit Epic and would harm other developers by removing control over where their apps are distributed. Manufacturers will no longer be able to benefit from the partnerships that Google usually offers, and users will have to deal with additional security and privacy risks.

The company also sharply criticized Epic for the “vagueness” of the proposed injunction, which would require repeated and ongoing intervention by the courts. Similarly, Epic’s demands would apparently require the court to micromanage Google’s operations.

“Epic’s demands would harm the privacy, security and overall experience of consumers, developers and device manufacturers,” Wilson White, Google’s vice president of government affairs and public policy, said in a statement. “Not only does their proposal go far beyond the scope of the recent US trial verdict – which we will be challenging – it is also unnecessary given the agreement we reached last year with attorneys general from all states and many territories. We will continue to vigorously defend our right to a sustainable business model that allows us to keep people safe, work with developers to innovate and grow their businesses, and maintain a thriving Android ecosystem for all.”

Google said that if Epic truly wants to promote competition and not create an “unfair, court-supervised advantage” for itself, it will learn from its settlement with government officials who previously accused the company of abusing its dominant position in Android app distribution. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney was unhappy with this settlement, unsurprisingly tweeting at the time: “If Google ends its payments monopoly without imposing Google Tax on third-party transactions, we will reach a settlement and become Google’s friend in the new era. But if the settlement merely pays off the remaining plaintiffs by eliminating the Google tax introduced, we will continue to fight. “Consumers will only benefit if antitrust enforcement not only opens markets but also restores price competition.”