Google asks Supreme Court for pause on app store overhaul 

WASHINGTON (CN) — Google sought Supreme Court relief on Friday to avoid overhauling its app store after losing a court battle with Fortnite maker Epic Games.

The tech giant asked the justices to delay a lower court ruling until the high court decided whether to take up its appeal. Google warned that without intervention, millions of Android users would be vulnerable to malicious actors.

“The mandated linkouts make it more likely that malicious actors — including foreign adversaries, scammers, and blackmailers — will be able to deceive Android users into sharing highly sensitive information,” Google wrote. “These bad actors can use that information to inflict irreparable financial harm and invade the intimate details of users’ online lives.”

Epic Games claimed that Google and Apple’s app store policies constituted an illegal monopoly. The game maker wanted the tech giants to distribute Epic’s apps through their stores.

The Ninth Circuit found Apple’s app store to be a lawful form of competition against Google, but a jury held Google liable under the Sherman Act — a federal law prohibiting monopolies and anticompetitive business practices. Google argued that its policies were designed to compete with Apple.

The appeals court disagreed, upholding the jury verdict and affirming an injunction overhauling Google’s app store known as the Play store. Under the injunction, Play’s 2 million-plus apps would be available on demand through competitors’ app stores, and Play must allow competitor stores to be available for download. Google must also permit developers to use external links in their apps on Play.

The tech giant asked the Supreme Court to limit sections of the injunction requiring external links. Google said that the linkout requirement will make it easier for developers to avoid compensating the tech giant.

“All this, in turn, makes it more difficult for Google to sustain the business model that has allowed it to provide those services for free to the vast majority of developers who offer their apps and digital content for free,” Google wrote.

Play store changes are still a year away, but Google pushed the justices to intervene before the company must undertake substantial design and engineering resources to meet deadlines.

“Those measures will come at an enormous cost in terms of lost time and expenditures at least in the tens of millions of dollars,” Google wrote. “A stay pending this court’s review is therefore essential to ensure that any relief this court affords will truly be effective, and to avoid unnecessary harm for the over 100 million nonparty users and hundreds of thousands of nonparty developers who will be affected by these remedies.”

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