Google Hum To Search
Google’s whopping $700 million class action suit settlement may be in jeopardy as a federal judge has expressed concerns that the deal may set a bad precedent for American consumers. US District Judge James Donato is not happy with the fact that the deal would see plaintiffs receive as little as $2 per person.
“It looks to me — just as a matter of basic math — any single person isn’t gonna be getting much,” said the judge in a recent hearing on the matter.
The settlement also grants Google and its Play Store a seven year period in which it will effectively have immunity from additional civil suits.
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On that issue, Judge Donato said, “This seems remarkably broad for the compensation you are proposing to pay for these claims.”
Last December, Google agreed to settle one of several suits brought against the company for what plaintiffs alleged were monopolistic practices. The world’s biggest search engine/operating system producer/email provider/owner of YouTube/… the list goes on, agreed to pay out $700 million in a suit brought by multiple states in America over the firm’s requirement that third party app developers can only sell their services through Google’s app store. $630 million of the settlement is to be used to compensate U.S. consumers for what the states say they were forced to unfairly pay. The rest of the money will be used by states to cover their legal costs.
The settlement was roundly criticized at the time by Google competitors.
Corie Wright, Epic Games’ vice president of public policy, said of it, “In the next phase of the case, Epic will seek meaningful remedies to truly open up the Android ecosystem so consumers and developers will genuinely benefit from the competition that U.S. antitrust laws were designed to promote.”
Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney said, “The State Attorneys General settlement is an injustice to all Android users and developers. It endorses Google’s misleading and anticompetitive scare screens, which Google intentionally designed to disadvantage competing stores and direct downloads.”
