Sean Hollister

“If you win, what are you planning to ask for?” asks the judge — because Epic has not articulated that clearly before now either. (The Verge has also asked Epic and been partly rebuffed.)

Epic says it’s asking for three things: freedom for Epic and other developers to introduce their own stores without restriction, total freedom to use its own billing system, and an anti-circumvention provision “just to be sure Google can’t reintroduce the same problems through some alternative creative solution.”

Judge Donato says the last won’t happen: “We don’t do don’t- break-the-law injunctions... if you have a problem, you can come back.”

He says the first two asks feel like they’re doable in a settlement: “Spotify pays 4 percent or 0 percent and has its own billing... you need to be clear with your client who’s sitting behind you that [settlement negotations are] going to happen.”

(Epic CEO Tim Sweeney is sitting behind him. I don’t see a visible change of expression on Sweeney’s face.)

Google will call Rich Miner, a co-founder of Android, as soon as tomorrow as it begins its case for counterclaims.

The plan is to finish up evidence on Friday the 1st and begin closing arguments on Monday the 11th.

You might say — isn’t that proof that Android isn’t working properly for Epic, that Android is stifling its progress? But now that we know Tucker’s defining the product market as facilitating digital transactions, she can say there’s clearly competition between Android and PlayStation and Xbox and Nintendo, all platforms helping Epic get those dollars.

She says her definition of the relevant product market is “facilitation of digital content transactions.”

“When I say facilitation, I mean making sure these interactions between app developers and app users go well,” she adds.

The skepticism on the judge’s face was palpable. He had her clarify again a few minutes later, then moved on.

Players bought their V-Bucks they used on Android from:

33.8 percent PlayStation 4

27.3 percent Xbox One

13.9 percent Android

9.9 percent PC

8.7 percent Switch

6.5 percent iOS

(The data goes through August 2020 because that’s when Fortnite was booted off the store.)

She also showed us surveys that 87 percent of teenagers went for an iPhone in 2022, and that Meta’s internal research shows 34 percent of its Android monthly active users switched away from Android during the four-year period from 2016 to 2020 and 14 percent just from 2019 to 2020. (She did not show us how many switched from iPhone to Android during that period.)

The judge doesn’t seem quite as enrapt; then again, he’d warned both parties earlier today about time.

Update: She’s also clearly gunning for Dr. Bernheim, who was a force for Epic the other day. She keeps bringing up how he’s mistaken in one way or another, how some finding “wouldn’t be relevant in Dr. Bernheim’s world” for example.

Because Google’s economist Tucker did. “Why does it matter to you as an economist that Apple sees Google as a competitor?” Google’s lawyer just asked her.

Her reply: “It matters when you see a competitor that’s not part of this case actually say we’re competing against Google Play.”

Google is now walking through a series of slides and questions that show where they compete — so far, we’ve seen features (one will launch a new feature, the other will match) and pricing.

Her conclusions are:

Those are some major ways to say Epic’s economists are wrong, and she doesn’t stop there: she says Epic turned “a single really easy to understand market into lots of little things... it allows them to carve off things, but in a way which doesn’t make sense.”

“An equally effective app store would have to compensate not only for the RSA 3.0 revenue, but also for the loss of all the apps and APIs that come with the MADA?” Google attorney Even asked Google’s economist Gentzkow.

Let me translate: if Amazon wanted to put the Amazon Appstore on a flagship Android phone, one which had opted into an RSA 3.0 contract in exchange for a substantial share of Google Play revenue and includes the APIs that let it be a full flagship Android phone (thanks to a MADA contract), wouldn’t Amazon need to pay enough to offset all those things that Google is providing, which would disappear without those contracts?

Gentzkow was not happy with the question, and clearly wanted to say more, but he basically said yes.