Google Play Developer Antitrust Litigation
googleplaydevelopersettlement.com
googleplaydevelopersettlement.com
That last part has always irked me in settlements like this. Like how is it not an admission of wrongdoing if you finally say "Ok, I'll give you money for this problem to go away". You might say that you're not admitting you're at fault but the conclusion of you paying "victims" what they are "owed", you are admitting you're at fault.
Imagine someone stole something from you, that you value at 100 USD. Then when you try to convince them to give it back because they took it from you, they say "Ok, I'll give you 100 USD but that doesn't mean I'm admitting I took it, I just don't want to deal with it", wouldn't you take it as that person actually admitting they took it, although they don't want to confess to it?
That's not to say Google aren't 104% at fault here though. It's even possible that they're at fault but don't realise it (or can't admit it) and so think they're paying to make a false accusation go away, despite the legal reality.
That said, how does Google monopolize Android app distribution? You're free to install APKs yourself. So why isn't Apple being prosecuted? There's no such ability on that platform. Why does it always feel like Google is constantly being hounded about stuff that Apple gets off scot-free for? Not that Google should go scot-free, but Apple should be dealt with first as it's the bigger offender and has far more marketshare.
Android maintained its position as the leading mobile operating system worldwide in the fourth quarter of 2022, controlling the mobile OS market with a close to 71.8 percent share, while iOS accounted for around 27.6 percent of the mobile operating system market.Jan 17, 2023
https://www.statista.com/statistics/272698/global-market-sha....
Correct [1].
So for the purposes of this case, the global figure is quite relevant.
I would relate it somewhat to what insurance gives you. There, you are paying a fee to help stave off extreme expense.
God no.
For starters, civil litigation does not have a goal of proving right or wrong, but settling disputes between two parties. This is actually a good thing. But what you are suggesting goes against the very basis of civil litigation systems :).
You see the same thing in say, divorces. People fight in court because they want a judge to tell them they are right and their ex is wrong, and mostly the judges tell them to grow up and act like adults.
One reason it's a good thing is that it enables you to use lower evidence standards to resolve disputes.
Most civil lawsuits (at least in the US) are preponderance of the evidence as a result - whose evidence is slightly better. This isn't always true, mind, you, but the point is that the goal of the system overall is to resolve disputes, hopefully efficiently and reasonably.
If you are looking for a system to decide who is right, that would be a very different system, and a very scary one at that, IMHO. It would also, among other things, take ~forever to resolve anything, and be even higher cost.
You would be raising the stakes dramatically - everyone would be much less willing to settle, and much more willing to fight about every little thing.
I'm not sure who or what such a system would serve. In reality, you want as few people in civil court as possible, for as short a time as possible. It is an amazingly high over head way to resolve a dispute, and the vast majority of disputes simply don't need it.
IE if you broke a simply contract with someone, it should not take 10 years, a judge, and a jury, to come to an agreement on how much to pay for it.
Serving some greater end would be a bad mismatch for how it was built, because in most cases, the main type of relief is monetary.
I am hedging in various places because there are specific laws and statutes that grant courts specific powers/remedies for certain types of cases.
Absent that, it is expect that monetary relief is the primary form of relief, and forcing people to do things only happens in the rare case money doesn't work.
The system actually sucks (relatively) for those other types of cases too because it wasn't really built for it. We've built special courts here and there to try to make up for it.
Beyond that, this is actually right. For civil disputes, the main historical goal has always been compensation for injuries/damages. That's it.
Speed is actually a goal because you want people to be put back into a good place as fast as possible.
Otherwise, the goal of a number is reasonable. Not perfect. Just reasonable.
Again, it's a dispute resolving system. One that was mainly meant to be used when all other forms of negotiation/mediation fail.
So it was not meant as a system of first resort, it's a system of last resort.
Trying to use it for social change/et al is a relatively new concept.
The ability for a corporation or whatever to cause widespread injury to a large class of people is a relatively new thing. As a result, mass torts were historically uncommon, etc.
Like maybe a building fell down or something, but even if someone sued someone else because all their cattle died after their neighbor seemed to put something in the water didn't affect (and couldn't be detected to affect) anywhere near as many people as happens now.
From what I heard juges say nothing. Meanwhile lawers of both sides drain money from them until one of the sides concludes that it's not worth to continue.
Again, I can even buy that you may see differences between say NYC and Albany, but at least what i saw was pretty consistent.
The family law judges did not have a lot of tolerance for adults pissing on each other, and made it clear they wanted parties to resolve most things without them.
>So why isn't Apple being prosecuted?
They had a nearly identical settlement in 2021 [1], main difference is that the Google settlement applies to developers with revenues up to $2 million in a year while the Apple one is up to $1 million.
Also, richer people (which includes polititians) are using iPhones, why would they hurt the corporation they love?
Google would far rather defend their position in a lawsuit like this if they had a case for a multitude of reasons outside of plain cost, except for the fact that they are aware they are liable and can avoid the heaviest penalties by settling.
Criminal litigation, or the SEC/EPA/FEC/etc. going after someone for a civil violation? Less (although variably) so.
This is actually what gets so many people upset - people see it as, like, "they killed my son" and the civil court's #1 job is literally to figure out "how much should someone pay for killing your son".
That is a mismatch for how people often feel about it (they really want the court to help prevent it from happening, etc), but for the most part, civil courts can't do that effectively It's a little more nuanced than that, since there are "punitive damages" and such, but as far as mechanisms to improve society go, it's not necessarily the right hammer for all the nails.
So like I said, there is a small amount of injunctive relief/etc, but the vast majority of civil litigation has a monetary outcome.
If you are interested, it may be worth reading some of the history of how these systems came about - the transformation from two people walking in front of the king and asking him to settle their issue, to what we have now.
I mean… maybe there’d an idea in there, but I’m not sure it’s practical.
No need to find an alternative. Same outcome but remove the "Ok, sure I'm guilty, but I don't admit to actually doing it". If you agree to lose the case, agree that you're in the wrong.
Mind you I don’t have any answers and I’m not intending on being adversarial. I just don’t immediately see how this can work.
Just to be clear I don't think settlements are always bad. But there are definitely cases (in both directions), where settlements result in a worse outcome for society.
It's worth noting that that's not at all what Newegg claims happened.[0] So "accidentally" in this case is probably more accurately states as biting off more than one can chew.
[0]: https://www.newegg.com/insider/patent-trolls-learn-mess-newe...
But, maybe somebody messed up and didn't check who was on the other end of the suit.
I think the poster meant "accidentally targeted someone who would not only fight back, but also hurt the patent troll", not "accidentally filed a suit".
Because an admission could be used against you in future litigation, thus defeating the purpose of settling in the first place. Settlement functions as a method of allowing litigants to liquidate their conflicts without wasting court resources and expending exorbitant amounts of money going through all steps of the court mandated conflict resolution procedure.
Even if you don't agree that you are at fault, there is some chance that a judge may not agree with you. If you think that chance is 10%, and the suit is worth 100M + you expect to pay 20M in fees, wouldn't it make sense for you to settle for 10M? Regardless of how the case turns out, you're 10M ahead of your anticipated fee spend and 20M ahead of your risk adjusted expected result, and the other side ends up with the risk adjusted value of their claim.
But the larger question is about whether this state of affairs is good for society. As citizens of a democracy, we (theoretically) get to have a say in how courts are run, and if the way the courts are run permits wealthy corporations to buy their way of repeated violations and be utterly unrepentant about it, maybe the rules need re-examining.
That’s not the point of civil cases between 2 private parties.
If you want your say, call your congress person and vote for platforms which intend to introduce legislation. (Or whichever process your country uses).
Not every proceeding has to be about deciding good vs evil. Things have their place.
They don't. Hence 'settled out of court'
That is what the comment is talking about. It says "maybe the rules need re-examining". That is not about a particular civil case. That is proposing exactly what you are saying.
> If you want your say, call your congress person and vote for platforms which intend to introduce legislation.
Or they also can post publicly on a forum where people discuss things. Such as this one. As such raising awareness about the issue by bringing it into the public consciousness, thus making it vastly more likely that the issue will be addressed.
You are acting as if that is not a valid use of this forum. As if private letters to your congress person are the only permissible avenue to discuss issues like this.
I didn't read it that way. GP wasn't suggesting calling a congressman as an alternative to posting on a forum, but as an alternative to a civil suit.
AIUI their point is that the purpose of civil suits is to settle disputes between two parties and (unlike calling your congressman) not about establishing laws defining good and bad.
How would you solve the problem that class action suits are trying to solve while fixing the problem that someone else might end up speaking for you without you wanting them to? Note that this feature isn't specific to settlements; it also happens with judgments.
Company causes significant harm to millions of people, gets shut down or massive fines seems like a better solution than having them send out a token payment vastly smaller than the harm caused. The first is an existential threat, the second just becomes the cost of doing business.
Class action lawsuits sit in a strange middle ground where reputation damage isn’t enough but the government doesn’t care or the penalties are too small.
Have you never paid a fine or penalty that you totally did not deserve and that you could probably have gotten out of if you made a mountain out of a mole hill?
just insulting all around.
This is like someone stole $100 from you, and you _think_ it's Henry, and Henry says "it wasn't me, but I'll give you $10 to stop bothering me." Maybe Henry did it, maybe he didn't.
If it'll cost you Y to settle, and Y is substantially less than the cost across defending yourself, PR Hit, and time spent not on core business. You might want to settle.
Sure you could fight, win, sue for damages, etc. BUT that's really unlikely to win when the plaintiff isn't another multi-national court and the lawsuit wasn't totally frivolous.
Imagine that defending yourself in court was going to cost you $250,000 regardless of whether you won or lost. Wouldn't you just give them $100 with the caveat that it's not an admission of guilt?
Now reverse it and imagine that someone accuses you of stealing something from them that they value at 100 USD. They say they have witnesses and video surveillance camera recordings to prove they're right! You would never do something like that, but considering the costs of litigations in tens of thousands, would you agree to say
> "Ok, I'll give you 100 USD but that doesn't mean I'm admitting I took it, I just don't want to deal with it"
Where you using the same content rating as Twitter?
Not just compared to Android/Google, but also the way they bundle programs in their operating systems, compared to Microsoft browser case in the US/EU.
To my untrained eyes, they're worse in almost every aspect.
Is it just the boring answer "they have better lawyers", or are there things fundamentally different?
Microsoft got in trouble for forcing their hardware suppliers to only ship windows machines. By taking the hardware in house, Apple does the same but it's legal.
Google loses an antitrust case for monopolizing app stores on Android. By making alternative app stores technically impossible, Apple doesn't have the same issue.
It really feels like the went mega-monopoly so hard that the law doesn't apply to them.
Not accurate. They required their licensees to pay a license fee for every machine they sold, whether it was sold with Windows or another OS. This meant that any machine that didn't ship with Windows was burdened with two licensing fees, one to Microsoft and one to whatever other OS provider.
And punished rightfully so.
Note that they didn't lose; they settled. It was in their best interest not to put the question to the courts in the first place.
(As, apparnently, did Apple according to adjacent threads).
Cupertino plays in the super-premium segment, leaving the value end of the spectrum open to competition.
Microsoft was blocking competitors by requiring a fee for every processor sold by a manufacturer that offered Windows, whether that machine was sold with Windows or not, causing any other operating system sold on licensee machines to be more expensive for consumers. It wasn't bundling that was the issue in Microsoft Corp v Commission, it was tying applications together, such that if you purchase one application, you are forced to purchase another.
I don't see how it relates. Apple bundles software but does not sell what it bundles, nor even the OS, which is also free, nor is the consumer unable to remove that software or required to pay a licensing fee to Apple whether they run their OS or not, unlike with Microsoft Windows and Explorer. You can delete Safari and every application Apple bundles, including the OS, and you can not purchase it because it's free with the hardware. Apple is not tying applications, and there's nothing anti-competitive with their bundling.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/disabling...
[1] https://nektony.com/how-to/uninstall-default-apple-apps-on-m...
Second, and perhaps more awkward, is you're actually still wrong. I didn't assume that what you claimed couldn't be done because I didn't know how to do it, but because of, for example, the fact that I was actually at Apple when this change was rolled out, or that I've gone through the processes in the article you linked enough times to know how they work.
Anyways, turning off SIP does let you just go rm everything you want. That used to be the case, until Catalina, but it isn't anymore. In macOS Catalina those files were on a separate mount that was read-only, but with SIP disabled you could remount it as read/write and then work with it as usual. In Big Sur the entire volume has been turned into a signed APFS snapshot that you cannot modify, period. Even if you pull off hacks to patch it the system will panic on the next boot (as several iOS jailbreaks have found out the hard way). What you can do on macOS is shut down the computer, boot into recovery, disable signature verification, and from there create an entirely new snapshot with the modifications you like. With just SIP disabled and root permissions you can't do this, and even if you go through the process I described it's irrelevant whether macOS is a BSD or apps are in bundles because you're literally constructing a new copy of a APFS volume with the contents you want.
This is not possible on iPhone though. You can't even run any other browser than (reskinned) Safari.
mobile Safari is embedded in iOS. It can be deleted by jailbreaking and gaining root access, but removing it would cause iOS to malfunction. You can't delete it entirely from iPhone, but you can effectively delete it by removing it from the Springboard, entirely disable it in Settings (using Content & Privacy Restrictions, toggle the switch next to it in Allowed apps), and make it undiscoverable.
And although all web browsers on iOS use WebKit, there are effectively only two browser rendering engines still used today, WebKit and Gecko. And only FireFox uses Gecko. Every other browser uses WebKit or an engine derived from WebKit. So while Apple considers allowing the other rendering engine,[1] Gecko, I guess you're stuck using any other browser other than the official Gecko version of FireFox. There's a WebKit version of FireFox for iOS, if you can stand to use it.
[1] https://9to5mac.com/2022/12/13/apple-mulls-opening-browser-e...
Thankfully, the EU is forcing Apple's hands, and soon we'll see better browser engines running on iOS.
Same situation with personal computing, Windows was like 80% of the consumer/business market when the whole browser thing took place. MacOS was something like 5%. Also I've never really heard of someone complain about Safari compared to IE/Edge so maybe there wasn't any traction for something like that
Maybe someone has a better/more accurate answer than that but thats just how I've been perceiving it.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1045192/share-of-mobile-....
And younger generation, sub-30, overwhelmingly prefer iPhone.
Well, when Apple was letting other people ship hardware with their OS, I don't think they bundled a browser or restricted their hardware partners from bundling one. Also, in those days, Safari didn't exist. I think Apple may have bundled IE 5.5 for a while, but I'm not totally sure.
People do complain about Safari being the only browser engine on Mac. But on desktop, might as well have Safari so you can download something else without using the command line; which is also what IE/Edge is good for (especially since windows's ftp command line wasn't very good and ftp is mostly dead)
The settlement website: https://smallappdeveloperassistance.com/
Summary of the settlement: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/08/26/app-store-changes-devel...
Funny that when apple announced the changes, they made it sound like they were being altruistic.
Apple (and several other big tech companies) do that every time they have to give up a modicum of control or are forced to admit wrongdoing.
They will deny critical design glass in their hardware but "altruisticly" open up free repairs for a few months so their customers don't realise they're effectively just making use of their warranty when these flaws come to light. I'm pretty sure they still haven't admitted that the butterfly keyboard was a mistake.
Every time a big company pretends to care about their customers, look for lawsuits or product flaws, especially if they're in a duopoly position like Google vs Apple or Microsoft vs Apple.
Are class actions always at the federal level and not the state level?
Also lawyers wouldn't like that very much, camp lejune is being a pile of pain.
I’m tired of the “phishing or real?” game with these things.
[class action identifier].settlements.gov
Parent is asking why not:
settlements.gov/[class action identifier]
Using a different page rather than subdomain wouldn’t have any real phishing downsides and would avoid polluting DNS entirely, so seems better.