Google Seeks Pause in Play Store Antitrust Ruling

Google wants to pause a ruling requiring it to open its Play Store to rivals.

The tech giant argues that U.S. District Judge James Donato’s injunction order from earlier this month would hurt its business and bring “serious safety, security and privacy risks into the Android ecosystem,” Reuters reported Saturday (Oct. 12), citing a court filing.

Donato’s order — which was handed down last week and goes into effect Nov. 1 — blocks Google from paying developers to exclusively use its app store, and stops it from prohibiting developers from telling customers how to download the app directly.

The order also stops Google from making developers use its billing features, and says it must allow rival app stores to access its catalog.

The ruling was part of an antitrust case brought by Epic Games and followed a jury verdict that the Google Play Store policies constituted an abuse of power by Google.

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said in a post on X that Epic’s victory in the lawsuit means that his company’s store and other other app stores will come to the Google Play Store in 2025 in the U.S., “without Google’s scare screens and Google’s 30% app tax.”

According to Reuters, Google wants the judge to stay his ruling while it appeals. If the judge denies the company’s request, Google can ask Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco for a stay as it appeals the antitrust verdict.

This is happening as Google is facing an even larger antitrust threat, with the Department of Justice last week asking a federal court to compel the company to break up its core businesses to prevent what it says are anti-competitive practices.

According to a court filing, the government is weighing remedies to address what it says are “four categories of harms” involving Google: search distribution and revenue sharing, generation and display of search results, the scale and monetization of its advertising, and data accumulation and usage.

“For each area, the remedies necessary to prevent and restrain monopoly maintenance could include contract requirements and prohibitions; non-discrimination product requirements; data and interoperability requirements; and structural requirements,” the filing said.

Google criticized the Justice Department’s “radical and sweeping proposals” in a statement shared with PYMNTS.

The statement added that “the DOJ’s outline also comes at a time when competition in how people find information is blooming, with all sorts of new entrants emerging and new technologies like [artificial intelligence] transforming the industry.”