Google has come around to Tim Sweeney’s “billions” quote once again, painting Epic as a self-serving company. The antitrust laws do not require Google to give up its services for free, says Kravis.
He also took us back to the testimony of an Epic employee who was more than uncomfortable with Epic’s Project Liberty trap for Google, asking, “Are we just pawns in Tim’s game?”
“I’m sorry, your honor, but I believe this is contrary to the court’s order,” interrupts Epic lead attorney Gary Bornstein, The judge lets Google’s attorney proceed but tells him to “walk carefully.”
“Consider this: the facts remain unchanged. The data remains unchanged,” begins Kravis.
“Time and again during this trial, you saw Epic overreach,” he adds, explaining how Epic wasn’t able to prove things like Project Hug were direct bribes or that Samsung was in collusion with Google.
Perhaps thinking about the judge’s warning, Epic moves on — Kravis is now pointing out that Epic is just trying to get a free ride on Google Play now. Here’s one quote from that:
“Epic can’t pocket the money in its own store and then stand up here and tell you it’s trying to protect the consumer.”
Just a good quote about Google’s testimony, which I don’t think quite lands because Google’s internal emails show the company was actively worried about “other options” arising on Android if Google didn’t take action.
“At the beginning of this trial, Epic told you it would prove three of the 21 Project Hug agreements were payoffs... the evidence has shown nothing like that. The written agreements don’t say anything like this,” Kravis tells the jury.
“You can review them during your deliberations, and when you do, you will see they say nothing — nothing — about developers not being able to open their competing app stores.”
He points out even Epic CEO Tim Sweeney didn’t believe Activision Blizzard truly wanted to open its own app store.
That’s Google, referring us to a Motorola exec’s testimony that Motorola found it was a competitive advantage to ship with Google apps.
“This is an android phone manufacturer telling you this helps us build better phones at a lower cost — this is pro competitive,” says Kravis.
Mind you, the Motorola testimony is also when we saw that Google does directly pay some OEMs not to preload rival app stores.
“Epic’s own expert admitted this is all the Android operating system itself requires for sideloading: three steps. And remember, you only have to go through this process once,” says Kravis. “He just thinks the steps should be compressed.”
“What evidence did you see during this trial that compressing three steps into two steps or one step would fix this alleged harm?” Kravis rhetorically asks the jury.
I’ve thought for a while that Epic mostly lost the sideloading argument, and Google’s really driving it home.
We’re back to Google suggesting the Galaxy Store side by side on the homescreen with the Google Play Store (as it is on modern Samsung phones) is evidence of competition.
“Those consumers choose the Play Store 83 percent of the time — this is Google winning the competition because it has a better store,” says Kravis.
Now we know why Google made this point earlier in the trial.
Kravis just showed the jury a slide showing all the ways to play Fortnite, including the PC, Nintendo Switch, cloud gaming and more.
“Professor Tucker’s market definition is the only one that accounts for all these other choices,” he says.
“What’s missing from [Epic’s economist’s] charts is all the other choices that consumers and developers have.”
Google says the evidence shows that Google competes with Apple on price, that we’ve repeatedly seen the two lower their service fees to compete with one another. “This is not the behavior of a monopolist,” Kravis tells the jury.
“We don’t dispute that Google competes with other stores on Android,” he says, only that he wants to show that competition extends to Apple. (Epic had repeatedly shown Apple wasn’t listed in Google’s internal documents about app store competitors.)