ALBAWABA – Alphabet officially lost the Epic lawsuit on Monday, which was filed by the company that developed the famous Fortnite game against the owners of Google back in 2020.
The Fortnite Vs Google legal battle, or ‘Epic lawsuit’, delivered a major ruling in favor of Epic, developers of the game, who accused Alphabet of running an illegal monopoly and abusing their market power.
Both Google and Apple take percentages off all financial transactions run through their app shops.
This has prompted numerous complaints by developers about what unfair what Agence France-Presse’s (AFP) described as an unfair "tax" imposed by these companies.
Winning the Epic lawsuit sets a precedent and is a rare setback for the American tech giant in a United States (US) court, AFP reported.
Judges have recently, in other lawsuits, ruled in favor of big tech against accusations of running illegal monopolies or abusing their market power.
The San Francisco jury found that Alphabet had embarked on various illegal strategies to maintain its app store monopoly on Android phones.
Google losing the Epic lawsuit sets a precedent as it is the first such ruling by a federal jury after Apple won a similar case ruled on by a single judge - Shutterstock
Epic has spent years railing against the practice, according to Bloomberg, and winning the Epic lawsuit got a federal jury to agree that Alphabet Inc.’s Google unit had acted unfairly as a monopoly.
The case is likely to accelerate the weakening of app store rules, Bloomberg highlighted, which have already come under fire from regulators and lawmakers around the world.
“The dominoes are going to start falling here,” Tim Sweeney, chief executive officer of Epic, said in an interview after the verdict. “The end of 30 percent is in sight.”
Though Apple won a similar case against Epic in 2021, Bloomberg noted, that ruling was made by a single judge.
The nature of the Fortnite Vs Google suit — where a jury sided unanimously with Epic — let actual consumers weigh in on the world of smartphone apps, the New York-based news agency explained.
In under four hours of deliberations, they found that Google had engaged in anticompetitive conduct, harmed Epic and illegally forced its own billing system on developers.
The Epic lawsuit was filed in 2020 after Fortnite was kicked off the Apple and Google Play app stores because the game developer had secretly installed their own payment system.
