Google used to allow third party payments. It turned out to be expensive.

This is like forcing Walmart to let companies take up space in their stores rent free and process their own payments. When it turns out a bunch of those little stores are stealing personal information and credit card info and money, those customers go to the Walmart service desk and when Walmart employees shrug and say, "I don't know what the fuck those guys are doing. You see, we give you the big store, but once you step into that smaller store hey are you falling asleep?" it's national news and it's Walmart's fault and they're called to testify in front of congress to get yelled at for not protecting customers. This is a weird precedent.

I don't agree with Google's decision to force payments through Google. Since congress and courts and media expect Google to police the safety of all apps downloaded from the Play Store, I can't think of a better solution that also respects privacy, isn't, "We'll monitor everything every app does, but pinky swear it's just so we can make sure they're being nice to you."

This is the best summary I could come up with:

It hinged on secret revenue sharing deals between Google, smartphone makers, and big game developers, ones that Google execs internally believed were designed to keep rival app stores down.

Mind you, we don’t know what Epic has actually won quite yet — that’s up to Judge James Donato, who’ll decide what the appropriate remedies might be.

Epic never sued for monetary damages; it wants the court to tell Google that every app developer has total freedom to introduce its own app stores and its own billing systems on Android, and we don’t yet know how or even whether the judge might grant those wishes.

Both parties will meet with Judge Donato in the second week of January to discuss potential remedies.

Judge Donato has already stated that he will not grant Epic’s additional request for an anti-circumvention provision “just to be sure Google can’t reintroduce the same problems through some alternative creative solution,” as Epic lead attorney Gary Bornstein put it on November 28th.

We’ll replace it with the final signed form once we have access to a digital copy.

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