The court has made its (seemingly) final ruling in the case of Google vs Epic, with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decided it will not overturn the 2023 jury decision. As such, the injunctions and remedies against Google are still in place, or, as Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney put it: “Total victory in the Epic v Google appeal!”
In response to this decision, Sweeney took to social media to outline the future implications of the court’s decision (as well as that of Epic’s other case against Apple). “We’re really starting to see the outlines of what a fair and competitive digital ecosystem for the future looks like… Can Apple and Google, current mired in ruthless extraction phases, return to their historic vision-driven, whole-market-expanding roots? I think it’s possible.”
Epic originally filed its Google case alongside the one against Apple, ostensibly for the same cause (banning Fortnite). However, Judge M. Margaret McKeown’s opinion on behalf of the Ninth Circuit’s ruling notes that Epic’s cases with Apple and Google are fundamentally different: “The market definition question was neither identical to the issue in this case nor litigated and decided in Apple.”
Sweeney said in his X post that Google and Apple could : “Such a move would cost billions today, but would yield massive future dividends by spurring developer investment and total developer alignment with Apple and Google’s aims to grow their platforms and the world’s technology base. The app malaise of the past decade would be replaced with a new era of software vibrancy as we saw in the 1976-2016 era.”