Google Loses Against Epic Games in Antimonopoly Trial for These Three Reasons

Google lost against Epic Games (photo: dock. Google)

JAKARTA – On Tuesday, December 12, Epic Games successfully defeated Google in the antitrust trial. This is good news because Epic Games has lost against Apple.

Epic sued two big tech companies in 2020, namely Apple and Google. This lawsuit is based on the removal of the game Fortnite on the App Store and Play Store after Epic Game installed a payment system from a third party.

Even though the problem is the same, there are several reasons why Google cannot win like Apple. The following are some of the reasons behind Google's defeat against Epic, quoting from The Verge.

Unfair Deal Contracts

Epic and Google's antitrust hearing some time ago revealed that Google and Spotify had a special, undisclosed agreement. This finding is one of the reasons why Google could lose in court.

Unfairly, Spotify uses its own payment system and does not have to pay Google. In fact, other applications in the Play Store are required to pay 11 percent of their revenue if they use their own payment system.

Apart from Spotify, Google also offers a special deal to Netflix. Specifically, Netflix only has to pay 10 percent of their revenue on the Play Store, but other companies are required to set aside 15 percent of their revenue.

This deal was quite tempting, but Netflix rejected it and kept paying the normal percentage. Due to this special offer, Google is considered to be treating application developers in the Play Store unfairly.

Special Deals That Keep Being Covered

Google repeatedly explained at the hearing that it banned the use of third-party apps because it wanted to compete with the iPhone. They do not prevent third parties from monopolizing the business.

However, Google's entire explanation was immediately refuted due to the discovery of emails and the company's internal plans. It was revealed that Google executives wanted to hinder the success of third parties by blocking them.

Due to this effort, the judges were convinced that Google really wanted to benefit itself. Moreover, Google is trying hard to cover up its deal with Spotify, even though this deal is strong evidence that Google is trying to monopolize the market.

Google Removes Evidence Permanently

Another reason that Epic wins against Google is evidence of deleted Google Chat communications. The content of the communication in the application is not known, but Epic said that the evidence could be detrimental to Google.

This concrete deletion action succeeded in burdening Google. Additionally, Judge James Donato repeatedly reminded the jury that Google had been proven to deliberately delete evidence to avoid litigation.

In fact, these communications were not deleted intentionally, but based on the system. Once every 24 hours, one-on-one chats for Google employees and CEOs will be automatically deleted to remove certain conversations.

Due to this deletion policy, the jury realized there was something wrong with Google's policy. They also didn't believe Google CEO Sundar Pichai's confession during the trial, giving victory to Epic.