PGC – File this under, would you look at the proverbials on that guy, as Google decides, well, almost decided, to en an antitrust lawsuit against a plaintiff, Epic Games, by buying them out.
Epic Games filed documents that showed Google was contemplating buying out Epic Games for fear of its potential successful efforts to get around Google’s 30 percent commission charge. They knew if they closed the loophole, they were vulnerable to an antitrust lawsuit.
To prove that they are not a monopoly using monopolistic market advantage to coercively manipulate the market to control competition, Google almost decided to buy out Epic Games, in a move to expend its monopolistic market advantage AND silence competition at the same time.
Fortunately for all of humanity, the deal never went through.
Google considered silencing Epic’s antitrust complaints… by buying them
From www.techspot.com
2021-08-07 11:18:00
Excerpt:
While its ongoing feud with Apple is rather well documented, Epic Games is also in the middle of an antitrust complaint against Google over the removal of Fortnite from the Play Store. According to newly released court documents, Google at some point considered simply buying out the company in order to quash legal action.
In the documents, Epic claims that Google was afraid of Epic’s moves to dodge the 30% commission charged on payments through Google Play and offer Fortnite (and its very lucrative associated microtransactions) directly, quoting an internal document describing Epic’s plans as a “contagion” that could spread to other developers and platforms. In Epic’s own words:
Google has gone so far as to share its monopoly profits with business partners to secure their agreement to fence out competition, has developed a series of internal projects to address the “contagion” it perceived from efforts by Epic and others to offer consumers and developers competitive alternatives, and has even contemplated buying some or all of Epic to squelch this threat.
