Google says Epic’s Play Store demands are too much and self-serving

Epic Games won its antitrust case against Google in December when a federal jury found that the latter violated US antitrust laws in how it operates the Play Store. A few months later, the game developer sent his list of requests that, if fulfilled, would blow the Play Store wide open. Now Google has filed for an injunction, telling the court that no, it won’t give Epic what it wants without a fight because the company’s requests “diverge far beyond the court record.”

The remedies Epic filed would require the court not only to create a global regulatory regime for app pricing, Google wrote in the filing, as seen by Engadget, but also to micro-manage “a very complex and dynamic ecosystem’ used by billions of users and app developers around the world. If you recall, Epic wants Google to open up Android to third-party app stores and make its app catalog available to those stores. He also wants restrictions on pre-installed apps to be banned and any Google activity that incentivizes third parties to be banned.

Google said bowing to all of these requirements would “effectively prevent [it] from competition,” which would in turn negatively affect Android users and developers. Epic’s proposals benefit only Epic, Google said in its filing, and would harm other developers by depriving them of control over where their app is distributed. Manufacturers will no longer be able to take advantage of the partnerships that Google normally offers, while users must deal with additional security and privacy risks.

The company also criticized Epic for the “vagueness” of its proposed ban, which would require repeated and ongoing court intervention. Likewise, Epic’s requests would clearly require the court to micromanage Google’s business.

“Epic’s requests would harm the privacy, security and overall experience of users, developers and device manufacturers,” said Wilson White, Google’s vice president of government affairs and public policy, in a statement to Engadget. “Not only does their proposal go far beyond the scope of the recent US court ruling – which we will challenge – it is also unnecessary because of the agreement we reached last year with the attorneys general of each state and multiple territories.” We will continue to vigorously defend our right to a sustainable business model that allows us to keep people safe, partner with developers to innovate and grow their businesses, and maintain a thriving Android ecosystem for everyone.”

Google said that if Epic really wanted to encourage competition instead of creating an “unfair, court-enforceable advantage for itself,” then it would take a cue from its settlement with government officials who previously accused the company of abusing its distribution dominance of Android apps. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney was unsurprisingly unhappy with this arrangement, tweeting at the time: “If Google ends its monopoly on payments without taxing third-party transactions, we will agree and be friends with Google in their new era. But if the settlement simply pays off the other plaintiffs while leaving Google’s tax in place, we will only fight if antitrust enforcement not only opens up markets but also restores price competition.”