Epic v. Google: everything we learned in Fortnite court
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Epic’s expert economist (and Stanford professor) Doug Bernheim, explaining why smartphone manufacturers who’ve signed with Google are disincentivized to compete by preloading other app stores — even if they weren’t contractually obligated not to.
He says it gets worse: “If Google ends up reducing its commission rate in response to your competitive entry, you end up reducing your commission on everything else you sell.”
The “20 cents” part isn’t theoretical. Bernheim says he found Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, and OnePlus each get 20 percent from Google. HMD (Nokia) and TCL signed 10 percent revshare deals.
We previously saw Google had planned to offer 16 percent to key Chinese OEMs, but I guess it grew to 20 percent.
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