Epic v. Google: everything we learned in Fortnite court
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That’s Google’s partnerships boss Don Harrison live in court, attempting to explain the Spotify sweetheart deal as a bit of a forced choice. Here’s a passage from his old email as well:
“The reason we are proposing this bespoke deal with Spotify is because of its unprecedented position and bargaining power in the market and we had to offer a creative solution to bring their full value to the Play ecosystem.”
“Listening to music is one of [the phone’s] core purposes... if we don’t have Spotify working properly across play services and core services, people will not buy Android phones,” Harrison said in court.
We also got more insight into what the 6 percent and 10 percent numbers meant in that deal:
One portion of that fee that is tied to processing (10% of Google processes payment, 0% if Spotify processes)
One portion of fee that is processing to capture value that Play adds (6% regardless of who processes)
If I’m reading this right, Google would collect 0 percent when users chose Spotify payments alongside Google payments and 10 percent when the users chose Google. In situations where users didn’t get a choice, Google would collect 6 percent, regardless of who processes the transaction. I’m genuinely not sure, though.
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