GOOGLE MAKES ITS APPEAL TO OVERTURN JURY VERDICT BRANDING THE PLAY STORE AS ILLEGAL MONOPOLY

Google went to appeals court this week in an attempt to convince a three-judge panel to overturn a jury's verdict declaring its app store for Android smartphones as an illegal monopoly and block the penalties imposed by a federal judge to stop the misbehavior.

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Video game maker Epic Games, which brought the case alleging Google's Play Store has been abusing its stranglehold over the Android app market, countered with arguments outlining why both the verdict and punishment should be affirmed to foster more innovation and lower prices.

In a nearly hour-long presentation in San Francisco's Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Google lawyer Jessica Ellsworth explained why the company believes the judge overseeing a month-long trial in 2023 improperly allowed the market in its case to be defined differently than it had in a similar antitrust trial revolving around Apple's antitrust trial in 2021.

Ellsworth also asserted the trial shouldn't have been decided by a jury in the first place because Google exercised its consent to that process and demanded the case be decided by a judge instead, as had the trial by Apple.

Epic, the maker of the popular Fortnite video game, filed separate antitrust cases against Apple and Google on the same day in August 2020 and culminated in dramatically different outcomes. Unlike the jury in Google's trial in San Francisco, U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez-Rogers largely sided with Apple in an 185-decision that defined the Play Store and Apple's iPhone app store as part of a broader competitive market.

Ellsworth told the appeals court that U.S.

District Judge James Donato improperly allowed Epic to turn the Google trial into a "do-over" that excluded the Apple app store as a rival in the market definition that led to the jury's verdict in its case.