As our friends at 9to5Google reported last night, Epic Games scored a major victory in its legal battle with Google. The jury in the case determined that Google has an “illegal monopoly” with the Play Store and Google Play billing, a far better outcome than what Epic Games achieved in its fight against Apple and the App Store.
In a new interview with CNBC, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney attributed the different outcomes to the fact that “Apple didn’t write anything down.”
Sweeney’s comments are in reference to revelations during the Google trial that the company deleted or failed to keep records of key documents and communications around the Play Store.
“The brazenness of Google executives violating the law, and then deleting all of the records of violating the law,” Sweeney said in the interview. “That was really astonishing. This is very much not a normal court case, you don’t expect a trillion-dollar corporation to operate the way Google operated.”
As CNBC explains, another factor was that Epic “had a harder time finding documentation from inside Apple.” Sweeney said that this also played a big role in the different outcomes in the two cases. Another key factor is that the Google trial was decided by a jury, while the Apple trial was decided by a judge.
“The big difference between Apple and Google is Apple didn’t write anything down. And because they’re a big vertically integrated monopoly, they don’t do deals with developers and carriers to shut down competition, they just simply block at the technical level,” Sweeney explained.
Sweeney also sat down with The Verge to talk about the outcome of the Google lawsuit and how it differed from the Apple case. Once again, he attributed it to the fact that Apple wasn’t putting things in writing.
The thing with Apple is all of their antitrust trickery is internal to the company. They use their store, their payments, they force developers to all have the same terms, they force OEMs and carriers to all have the same terms.
I think the Apple case would be no less interesting if we could see all of their internal thoughts and deliberations, but Apple was not putting it in writing, whereas Google was. You know, I think Apple is… it’s a little bit unfortunate that in a lot of ways Apple’s restrictions on competition are absolute. Thou shalt not have a competing store on iOS and thou shalt not use a competing payment method. And I think Apple should be receiving at least as harsh antitrust scrutiny as Google.
In its legal battle with Apple, Epic Games lost nine out of ten counts. Apple filed an appeal with the Supreme Court in July in an attempt to reverse the one count it lost, which would remove its rule that prohibits developers from directing users away from Apple in-app purchasing.
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