Jakarta, CNBC Indonesia – Google has been hit by a series of cases. Antitrust lawsuits are still underway in Europe, the United States and Japan, now Google has to accept new lawsuits.
Google is accused of being unfair towards third-party mobile application developers on Android. This week, Google will face off against veteran mobile game developer, Epic Games.
Google’s trial will be monitored by Apple, which operates a rival app store, the App Store, for the iPhone.
Application developers assess that the two technology giants take unfair commissions from in-app payment revenues. Google and Apple are also said to make it difficult for developers to communicate with customers.
If Epic wins, Google will be forced to make major policy changes to the Android platform. Currently, Google takes a 15-30% commission from in-app payments.
Epic Games wants to create its own application store that is automatically loaded (pre-installed) on users’ devices. That way, users can bypass the Google application store system when they want to download games.
The friction between Google and Apple and Epic Games began in August 2020. At that time, Epic Games provided updates for the game Fortnite directly in its application. That way, customer payments don’t need to go through the application store.
As a result, Epic Games was kicked from the Google and Apple app stores. Epic Games also sued the two companies.
Epic Games’ trial against Apple was held in 2021 and earlier this year. Epic lost 9 of the 10 counts.
Meanwhile, the trial with Google will begin this week. Google argues that the commission cut for in-app payments is actually very small.
As many as 99% of payments are cut by around 15%. Only 1% is subject to a 30% discount, quoted from CNBC International, Tuesday (7/11/2023).
Overall, Epic’s case against Google is exactly the same as its case against Apple. The difference is, Google allows ‘sideloading’, namely downloading Android applications outside the application store. This does not apply to Apple.
According to inside sources, Epic will testify that Google’s sideloading policy is ineffective. The reason is, Google’s market dominance makes it difficult for users to get access to applications outside the Google application store.
[Gambas:Video CNBC]
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(fab/fab)