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Comment by phire | Hacker News Reader

Google (like Apple) is trying to claim that the only harm Epic has suffered is fortnite being kicked off the play store.

That's not how Epic see it. Epic think the harm is that they are unable to do payments the way they want and smoothly run their own games store on phones. They even claim that Google is blocking them from making deals with phone manufactures about bundling their games store on certain phones out of the box.

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This is not entirely fair. Here is Epic's claim of harm:

> In retaliation against Epic for introducing competition to Google Play Billing, and in furtherance of Google’s anti-competitive scheme, Google removed Fortnite from the GooglePlay Store. As a result, Epic suffered—and continues to suffer—irreparable harm to its reputation, goodwill, and competitive standing. Each day that Epic remains off the Google Play Store causes Epic unquantifiable harm because Google’s other restraints ensure that downloading apps outside an app store is threatening and technically challenging to most users,which prevents Epic from effectively distributing Fortnite to many Android users.

Epic only calls out their absence from the play store. They don't articulate any other harms. So, it's natural that Google would only react to this one harm, Epic didn't claim any others!

> In retaliation against Epic for introducing competition to Google Play Billing

I think this supports the OP's phrasing.

Yeah, apparently "paying too much for services they don't fully use" isn't "harm" to Google. I doubt they'd see it that way if they were on the other end.

When Epic tried to make the "30% is too much" argument in court last Monday before Judge Gonzalez Rogers, it didn't go well for them, according to an FT reporter who live tweeted at the hearing.

>“The 30% of what you complain seems to be the industry rate, right?

Steam charges 30%. Microsoft: 30% ... If you go to consoles: PlayStation, Xbox Nintendo all charged 30%.

Physical stores: game shop, Amazon, Best Buy, Walmart all charge 30%. Apple and Google charged 30%.”

“it's all 30%, and you just want to gloss over it. You don’t want to address it,” judge YGR says.

Oof, Epic doing poorly on Apple’s 30% fee being excessive.

“There doesn't seem to be evidence to support what you're saying,” Judge YGR says.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1310618271675105282.html

> Steam charges 30%. Microsoft: 30% ... If you go to consoles: PlayStation, Xbox Nintendo all charged 30%.

> Physical stores: game shop, Amazon, Best Buy, Walmart all charge 30%. Apple and Google charged 30%.

How on earth is this not price fixing and/or oligopoly behaviour?

because its an industry standard. Its not illegal to go "looks like everyone else is charging 30%, let's charge the same). And in general, you don't have an incentive to undercut on price in a situation like this since nobody wins a price war - you try to bring some other value to justify listing on your platform (like a captive audience). Its easiest to just go with whatever ends up being the industry standard- and these prices are all public, no secret information has to be shared to see what everyone else is doing.

Contrary to (apparently) popular belief, simply matching the standard industry rate is not legally considered price fixing, which requires active agreement between competitors.

If the difference between this being legal and illegal is active conversation vs knowing looks, we still have a problem ultimately

Because that might actually represent the fair market value that these sorts of storefronts represent?

30% in physical shops is entirely different to 30% on digital shop fronts.

In physical shops you have a lot more capital invested, because that 30% feeds the retailer, the landlord, the construction company whereas the mobile marketplace has gobbled up two layers of the economy and charges the same rate with pretty insanely significant barriers of entry to compete.

It comes down to a question of monopoly and how much is too far which maybe everyone here has differing opinions on when that limit is reached.

Google has invested 100s of billions in Android.

As of 2016, the number was ~$9B given that they had $31B in revenue and $22B in profit.

https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/21/10810834/android-generate...

100s of billions in 2020 seems off by at least an order of magnitude.

Price fixing at least requires an agreement among the parties - which is unlikely here. If I own a gas station and Bob owns the only other gas station in town across the street from mine, and we both agree to set the price to $4/gallon, then that is price fixing.

But if I wake up one day and see Bob set his price to $4/gallon while I'm selling for $2/gallon, I may decide to bump my price up to $4/gallon and that is not price fixing.

Realistically the 30% vig didn't come out of thin air - Apple set the standard, the rest of the world saw apple getting away with it, and decided that they would set their rates the same. But that doesn't mean price fixing resulted in all of us setting the percentage to 30.

I'd consider the gas station situation price fixing, but not illegal price fixing per se - gas station price fixing in general is a much bigger problem in some remote parts of the US or around airports where two or three gas stations set their price to be $3 or more over the rates at the nearest city 10-20 miles away.

EU forced credit card companies to reduce their fees by an order of magnitude and they still operate here so the previous rates were obviously unreasonable. So the argument "Everyone else does it" doesn't hold water. USA still pays the unreasonable rate though, so it seems like they are missing something in their legalization. If American courts refuse to do anything against credit card companies I doubt they will do much in this case either, epic should just have gone to the EU court instead.

https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/economy-budget/26214...

I’m surprised they didn’t. I would think that it’d be a more conducive court!

AFAIK, Microsoft charges less than 30%.

Did Epic really not argue that it's a forced fee? If you don't pay the 30% you're effectively not allowed on the mobile market.

Does Walmart make 30% off all app store sales made on iPhones that were sold in Wallmart? If not, they could be making a killing

physical sale =! digital sale

retail stores have more costs than digital ones.

I'd argue that digital stores are just as expensive, they just have all of their costs associated with building the platforms the store runs on instead of transporting and stocking shelves with product.

Key word is “irreparable” not “harm”.

If you pay too much you can capture that if you get a final judgement later. It’s not “irreparable” unless you go out of business, for example, in the meanwhile due that harm, so there’s no emergency requirement to compel the other party to do something right away.

As a preemptive strike Google changes third party stores rules on Android 12 towards easier operations.

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