Google just lost another appeal as it attempts to maintain a death grip on its app store monopoly.
Google and Epic Games have been embroiled in an ongoing lawsuit since 2023 after the tech giant removed the video game Fortnite from the Google Play Store. On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) denied another appeal from Google in favor of Fortnite’s distributor Epic Games as Google attempted to block parts of a previous ruling, per Business Insider.
In Epic Games v. Google the tech giant accused Epic’s Fortnite of noncompliance with its terms of service when Epic embedded secret code into the app’s software. The added code allowed in-app purchases that bypassed Google’s required payment-processing systems for the App Store and the tech giant’s 30 percent commission. Insider noted that Google appealed the ruling at least twice to avoid changing its App Store to stop favoring apps that benefit Google.
This most recent ruling comes about a month after the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Antitrust Division won significant remedies in its online search monopoly case in United States et al. v. Google.
The September case found Google guilty of exclusive contracts and failure to share relevant data with its rivals regarding Chrome, Google Search, Gemini AI app and Google Assistant. Attorney General Pamela Bondi announced at the time, “Under President Trump’s leadership, we will continue our legal efforts to hold companies accountable for monopolistic practices.”
Google’s monopoly is dangerous, however, not only because of its outsized business power but also because it enables harsh censorship. In fact, the App Store has previously been a free speech battlefield. For example, Google kicked PragerU’s app out of the App Store twice last year before later restoring the app. The tech giant also banned The Babylon Bee’s app in 2022 and Parler in 2021.
Last month, in a letter to U.S. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, Google’s parent company Alphabet blamed the Biden administration for attempting to pressure for speech suppression on YouTube and claimed that it would restore non-violative COVID-19-related content that it had removed during the pandemic. But unfortunately, Google did not commit to any meaningful reform, nor did it even confess to censorship that was not previously revealed by MRC and other entities.
And it seems Google has not changed its tune. Google News still displayed extreme leftist bias in its results on the government shutdown as of Sept. 30, as revealed by MRC Free Speech America. Furthermore, on the anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, MRC found that Google’s home page promoted just two sources on the war and peace negotiations from The Associated Press and The Guardian. The Guardian piece explicitly smeared Israel and glossed over critical details about the initial attack.
Free speech is under attack! Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
