> A settlement has been reached with Google LLC, Google Ireland Limited, Google Commerce Limited, Google Asia Pacific Pte. Limited, and Google Payment Corp. (“Google”) in an antitrust class action lawsuit about the Google Play store. The lawsuit was brought by U.S. app developers. The lawsuit alleged that Google monopolized (or attempted to monopolize) alleged markets related to the distribution of Android OS apps and in-app products in violation of U.S. and California law. Google denies all allegations and the settlement is not an admission of wrongdoing by Google.
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?
>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".
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.
There is a risk that settling sweeps chronic, bad behavior under the rug. Which is especially bad when powerful actors can use settlement to coerce victims into hiding the truth, and enabling future bad behaviors.
Consider a similar case where you probably favor the defendants. Random patent troll company registered in Texas files 1000's of lawsuits against companies that it alleges infringes on a trivial patent, i.e. one click checkout. All companies settle because the cost of going to court is greater than the requested settlement amount of $500k. Should we also see these companies admit that they infringed on (likely frivolous) patents?
I get your point, but in that case, I'd rather see it go to court and the patent get invalidated. While settling might be good for the settling parties, it doesn't stop patent troll from making more frivolous suites, and I don't think it is better for society as a whole.
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.
That's always bothered me too. I think someone should be forced to admit to wrongdoing, or else keep battling in court to prove their side.
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.
"That's always bothered me too. I think someone should be forced to admit to wrongdoing, or else keep battling in court to prove their side.
"
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.
I would much prefer if more people settled their disputes without going to court. If they go to court and settle later, that's less great but still more productive than years of litigation.
>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.
Because Apple builds more expensive hardware which is tiny bit less popular than Google's opensource OS. And governments of 2020s hate, HATE solving these problems systematically and ensuring equal markets - the only approach right now is just to randomly slap the biggest company to get some money and let everyone else continue with problematic behaviours.
Also, richer people (which includes polititians) are using iPhones, why would they hurt the corporation they love?
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
> how is it not an admission of wrongdoing if you finally say "Ok, I'll give you money for this problem to go away"
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?
> Imagine someone stole something from you, that you value at 100 USD.
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"
That's because they might not be at fault. Companies settle when they did nothing wrong - they settle because the cost of going to court and paying those fees to prove they did nothing wrong is expected to be higher than settling.
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.
No. It not necessarily. Maybe it is cheaper for them to just pay up. Even if they aren't guilty, there might be a chance a court would find them guilty and the punishment would be far worse.
What alternative is there? For the court to say to both parties, “no, you’re not allowed to come to this mutually agreeable resolution. Keep paying lawyers to litigate this and keep using up the court’s time.” ?
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.
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?
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?
I'm too lazy to dive into the proceedings proper. How did the suit handle the presence of sideloading from arbitrary sources, and the fact that F-Droid is alive and somehow popular?
Or was it mostly about in-app purchases?
It was just about Google Play policies from 2016-2021. App Developers get a pro rata share of the settlement fund based on the commissions they paid Google during that period. It's basically a partial return of commissions over 15%. I for one plan to live a life of excess with mine: a hamburger with cheese and all the toppings. (assuming I even get that much)
It's a settlement, what proceedings? The only proceedings would be the court approving the class action status. What does sideloading or F-Droid have to do with anything?
> 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"
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.
I think for the purposes of law, the statement exists for the purposes of not being admissible in further cases, but in non-legal discussion of if a company did something wrong, we should all be comfortable agreeing they did something wrong.
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.
so I recently say an image of a paper check that was issued for an equifax data breach class action lawsuit settlement and it was for something like $5.71.
If the expected value of (the cost of defending vs the accusation + the cost of losing the defense) is sufficiently greater than $100, it makes sense to pay the $100.
What if you were rich and hated talking to people? If someone falsely accused you if stealing a hundred dollars wouldn't it be rational to just pay them to go away? (ignoring second order effects like reputation)
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.
We developed a free social media application back in 2016 that cost us about $500,000 to build. We provided multiple safety filters including world filters, neural net pornography detection for profile avatars, etc. The application had a user profile search function. We had about 100,000 downloads in less than a year. I'm sure that 99.9% of user profiles did not contain any sexual material. Certainly less than Twitter has, where you can search for explicit porn. Google found a rare edge case that our ML model missed and removed the app from the Play store. With a single automated email half a million dollars was gone from my bootstrapped company. Is there anything I can do?
Be quick at contacting a lawyer, because you may have a limited time frame to act on it. It could even be that the terms already expired, but given the entity of the damage it is well worth paying a good lawyer for a consultancy.
I was banned around that time, myself. I ported to objective-c and applied to iTunes. the exact same app. made it through their manual review process. Still banned in the dev console even after this settlement. If there’s any way to get back in, someone please let us know. Unfortunately, I believe the only answer is to create a LLC.
Genuine question: how was Apple rarely sued in similar fashion?
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?
They vertically integrated beyond the scope of the law.
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.
> Microsoft got in trouble for forcing their hardware suppliers to only ship windows machines.
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.
In my opinion, its based on the perception of the companies combined with the impact they have on the general consumer market. Eg 70% of phones run Android, only 27% run iOS which makes Google a much better target to go after.
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.
> 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.
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)
Because they have cornered the market for top 5% incomes while leaving the rest 95% to their competitors. Since their market share is always less, they always get less scrutiny. Outside of developed world, no one uses apple products unless paid by their workplace (for example mac books) or if they are in the top 1% of their country.
> but also the way they bundle programs in their operating systems, compared to Microsoft browser case in EU.
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.
Wait, you can delete apple music? I never use it, but if I ever touch the soft button on.my right earbud it launches and plays nothing because it has no library or account.
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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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
[1] https://smallappdeveloperassistance.com/
Also, richer people (which includes polititians) are using iPhones, why would they hurt the corporation they love?
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....
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?
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"
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
just insulting all around.
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.
Dead Comment
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.
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.
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.
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-....
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)
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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.
This is not possible on iPhone though. You can't even run any other browser than (reskinned) Safari.
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.
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