Google Makes $700 Million Anti-Trust Settlement

Google Hum To Search

Google has agreed to settle one of several suits brought against the company [any for what plaintiffs allege are 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 will 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.

In doing so, Google is able to take a cut of the money charged for any apps that cost consumers money. This, in effect, is not only a fee charged to the other companies but one imposed on the users – billions of people worldwide – who use the various apps.

This is possible because Google produces the Android operating system, the only competitor for mobile devices like phones and tablets to Apple’s operating system used on that company’s iPhones and iPads. Android is free to both users and the other companies that use it like Samsung, but the developers of apps for the system have had to pay Google a share of their profits.And Google has other ways of making money from the system.

Now Google will allow third party firms to market their apps independently.

But not everyone is happy with the settlement, including some of the third party firms that claimed they were harmed by Google’s practices like Epic Games. Some feel the deal did not go far enough.

Corie Wright, Epic Games’ vice president of public policy, was highly critical of the settlement saying, “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.”

Google, however, is still dealing with a federal antitrust suit that has not been settled. At the core of the US government’s lawsuit is the allegation that Google paid firms $10 billion to have its search engine placed as the default search engine on mobile devices. This, it says, prevents rivals like DickDuckGo from competing.

And the company’s 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.”