Seems like Google has really not had any time to catch its breath over the past few months, as it keeps finding itself in a new storm every monthor so. Now, the firm has yet another lawsuit coming its way, as a coalition of attorney generals from 36 states and Washington, DC, has decided to sue the tech giant, alleging it of abusing the power and control it has over the Android Play Store. The case has been filed in the California Federal Court.
The suit calls Google out for claiming a commission of as much as 30 per cent on the sales made by app developers on Google Play, through their applications. How the company does this is rather easy to understand, as the contracts with app developers explicitly force them to sell their in-app products only by using Google Billing as a “middleman”. This comes in the wake of the of the recent expansion of the cover of this commission policy, which has resulted in many firms (which had hitherto managed to evade the taxes), coming under the hammer too. The defendants to the case include Google and parent company Alphabet, as well as their subsidiaries in Asia and Ireland.
The company previously faced a similar suit by Epic Games, the name behind wildly popular game Fortnite. The game maker had accused Google of being the cause behind the higher prices that are being charged by app makers from customers, as they continue to try to grapple with the high commission cuts. It had not met with the desired traction, something that the new AG suit might be able to overcome.
The attorney generals allege that through a number of market malpractices, Google has succeeded in reducing he effective competition among apps, which has resulted in lesser choices and innovations, and higher prices, the brunt of which falls on the app users.
“Google has served as the gatekeeper of the internet for many years, but, more recently, it has also become the gatekeeper of our digital devices — resulting in all of us paying more for the software we use every day”, Letitia James, the Attorney General for the state of New York, who is one of the leaders of the coalition, said about the suit.
This new case becomes the fourth in the growing list of suits that have been filed against Google under the US Federal Law alone. Out of the three prior legal battles that the company is currently engaged in, one comes directly from the US Department of Justice, which has accused the firm of subjecting search advertisments to monopolistic practices, by advertising its own products in the most prominent way possible.
While Play Store was out of the negative limelight for quite a while until fairly recently, the growing number of anti-trust cases against rival Apple Inc., have brought the Google Android app store under scrutiny as well.
Many recent trials have seen questions being thrown against the legal and ethical implications of Google and Apple making their own app stores the default in their products. Additionally, both the firms have lowered the commission bar to 15% for small developers, in a bid to respond to growing public distrust.
