Sean Hollister

We didn’t get to see the document ourselves for more than a moment; we’re mostly hearing it described by lawyers.

He’s spent years and countless dollars waiting for his day(s) in court, so I get it. It took 1,180 days for the Google case to make it to trial.

We’re on lunch break for a bit.

The proposal for Project Banyan (the scrapped deal with Samsung) begins:

What does that mean? “It means the most important question for Play,” Kochikar says.

She tried to add that “it’s just one of the questions.”

Epic lawyer Hueston replied: “Well, actually it’s the only question here on the slide, which you just described as the most important question.”

Then he dropped the mic — pointing out that Google Play’s “existential question” had nothing to do with competing with Apple and everything to do with maintaining Android.

Google has suggested at least once during this trial that the Google witnesses were employed to act strategically and decisively to win business (and thus may have been seen saying inflammatory things as a result).

We’re now looking at a Google employee’s suggestion that Play could “partner with Apple to change the industry tide around subscriptions,” and Kochikar defended it this way:

“This is a very junior person adding ideas in a brainstorming session... was a very junior person on my team”.

But she also pointed out that Spotify “was one of the biggest ad customers as well,” and said Spotify was an important partner because it’s “excellent at investing with us in nacent platforms before they become critical,” like Android Auto.

Spotify was an agitator, though — and got a special, secret deal from Google.

“We could; it’d be a very bad thing,” replies Kochikar. “Because most users across most apps use it for free — if the developer had to pay for it, it would be expensive and stop innovation from happening from small developers.”

Earlier, she said that Google developed its business model having seen how free-to-play mobile gaming took off: “A very small number of people pay, and yet everyone else gets it for free.”

Google lawyer Chiu is now coming around to addressing the $147M Google offered Epic to launch Fortnite on the Play Store. Instead of tackling the $147M head-on, though, we’re redefining “contagion.”

“It means someone would make a decision that Play is not attractive,” says Kochikar. “It means we don’t meet our goal in keeping devices in the hands of people.”

Chiu points out that Epic skipped one slide: under the “strategic value” of the deal, there’s no mention of contagion. The first “strategic value” to Google is improving the perception of YouTube Live among gamers.

Kochikar said the game was making a million dollars a day on iOS at the time. She clarified that she doesn’t have exact numbers.

The goal was to pitch all 22 by August 2019.

As of a later document, Google says 20 out of 21 devs signed. I’m not clear whether those were the same 21 or different ones — we also heard that Supercell rejected a deal.

And in a 2019 presentation, Google explicitly says it’s not a goal to block other stores:

“It is important to note that this is not an exclusivity program,” reads a line in a Google email discussing the presentation.