Google has asked a US court to overturn a decision made last year that was made against it by Epic Games.
Google Sued has now filed a petition that it wants the 9th U.S. Court of Appeals to put in hold the order that wants it to open the Play Store for competition. Just to recall, Google faced an antitrust lawsuit from Epic Games which ended with a federal jury verdict in the colour of Google having an unlawful monopoly on app store distribution and in-app purchases for Android devices.
The opportunities of this opening up to competition
Google says that with this opening, 100 million android users in United States are vulnerable to “substantial new security risks”. The company captures it as a prejudicial order in its opinion that the order is extraordinarily ill-founded. Of this, Ozyegin believes that should it be put into practice, it might harm its capacity to “offer a secure and trusted user platform.”
This way, Google states that users may mistake its actions for support of the third-party app stores this makes such availability for download on Google Play create “real risks for [its] users”. These app stores could have offered much “lesser” protection hence putting users at risk of downloading or installing damaging and destructive apps.
Some of the things that Google dislikes about this openness
Google has also argued that the permission of the catalog’s access to these third-party stores can adversely affect companies that do not wish their items to be featured with material that is either vulgar or contains malicious code. The company said the situation could make stores with ‘ill-intentioned’ seem to have ‘legitimate’ status. Furthermore, Google stated that accepting an option for developers to put links outside their apps ‘poses a great probability of having deceptive links’ Since those links can potentially be manipulated by these hackers to steal user’s data and command other things on the device.
Google is questioning why the court sided with Epic in its antitrust lawsuit, when it sided with Apple in a similar case also brought by the video game company. “It’s surprising that Apple, which requires all apps to go through its proprietary App Store, is not considered a monopoly, while Google — which built choice into the Android operating system so that device manufacturers can pre-install and users can download competing app stores — has been condemned for monopolization.”
