The Antitrust Attorney Blog
Author: Luis Blanquez
Google just paid $700 million in the US to close the domestic front of a war it has already lost twice. This month, consumer payouts began under the settlement that resolves the antitrust claims brought by a bipartisan coalition of states, together with a nationwide class of Android users. Judge James Donato of the Northern District of California signaled his approval at an April 2026 hearing, and the money is now moving.
The number is large, but the shadow of the precedent behind it is even larger. Three weeks earlier, the European Court of Justice put the final seal on a €4.1 billion fine for the same company, over the same operating system, and for conduct similar to what the states alleged here. Two legal systems, two very different jurisdictional machines, one defendant—and a question that should interest every company with a platform and a dominant position: which machine really changes a monopoly’s behavior?
Background: The Play Store
Android is free, which was always the star point of Google’s OS. Google gives the operating system away to handset makers, and in 2024 something close to three quarters of the world’s smartphones ran on it. But Google does not make its money selling Android. It makes money by controlling what happens on top of it.
The control worked through two levels. The first was the Play Store itself—the dominant channel for distributing apps to Android devices—and the requirement that developers route in app purchases of digital goods through Google Play Billing, which took a commission of up to 30% on each transaction. The second was contractual. To preinstall the Play Store, a phone maker had to sign Google’s mobile application distribution agreement, which bundled Google’s search and browser as defaults, and an antifragmentation commitment that barred the manufacturer from shipping devices built on rival, “incompatible” versions of Android. A handset maker who wanted the Play Store—and every handset maker wanted the Play Store—took the rest of the package.
The plaintiffs said this was not the natural reward of building a good product. They said it was a closed loop engineered to keep the store dominant and the 30% commission flowing. The consumer and state cases were consolidated in a multidistrict proceeding before Judge Donato, In re Google Play Store Antitrust Litigation, alongside suits from Epic Games and Match Group. The theory drew on both operative provisions of the Sherman Act: unlawful agreements in restraint of trade under section 1, and monopolization and tying under section 2. The relevant markets were defined narrowly—Android app distribution, and Android in app payment solutions—each of them a single brand aftermarket inside the Android ecosystem rather than the whole smartphone economy.
Market definition was the ballgame, as it often is. Define the market as “all mobile app transactions” and Apple’s App Store sits right there as a competitor, and Google’s share looks survivable. Define it as “distribution of apps to Android phones” and Google is close to the whole market, because an Android user cannot shop at Apple’s store. Google argued the broad market, pointed to iOS as fierce competition, and to security as the justification for locking down distribution and payments. The plaintiffs argued the narrow one and pointed to the commercial reality that a Samsung owner lives inside Android, not across the street at Apple.
Epic’s Verdict, and Why the Settlement has Teeth
The states and consumers settled, but Epic did not. It tried its case to a jury, and in December 2023 the jury found that Google had illegally monopolized both markets and unlawfully tied its billing system to its store. Judge Donato followed with an injunction that ordered Google to open Android to competing app stores, let developers use and advertise alternative payment systems, and stop paying manufacturers and developers to foreclose rivals.
Google appealed, and its efforts to delay the injunction have so far been unsuccessful. The Ninth Circuit rejected Google’s attempt to use Epic’s earlier loss against Apple as controlling, recognizing that Apple’s closed iOS ecosystem and Google’s licensed Android ecosystem presented materially different commercial realities. Google also pressed arguments grounded in Trinko, but the remedial question was different: whether a court could impose conduct remedies after a jury found anticompetitive exclusion, not whether antitrust law creates a duty to assist rivals. By this August, Judge Donato was policing compliance, including how easily Android users can find and install competing app stores.
That sequence is what gives the $700 million settlement its weight. Why? Because it sits on top of a fully litigated, appellate affirmed finding that the conduct was illegal. The states did not have to prove the monopoly to a jury. Epic did that for them.
What $700 Million Buys
The money splits into two buckets. Roughly $630 million funds consumer restitution, and $70 million goes to the states. Consumers who bought apps or made in app purchases through Google Play Billing between August 16, 2016, and September 30, 2023, are eligible, and the settlement was engineered so most receive payment automatically—think about Venmo and PayPal accounts—rather than through the usual claims gauntlet. About 100 million plus class members fall inside the window.
But the conduct terms matter even more than the cash, and Google fought hardest over them. For at least five years, Google must let developers offer alternative in-app billing systems and tell their customers—by email and inside the app—that a cheaper price exists outside Google’s tollbooth. For at least seven years, Android must permit users to install apps and app stores from outside Google Play. Google cannot demand that an app launch on the Play Store simultaneously with a rival store, and it must file compliance reports. The behavioral relief tracks, in softer and time limited form, what the Epic injunction imposed by court order.
There is a tell in those durations. Five years. Seven years. The remedy for a monopoly maintained across more than a decade comes with a sunset. Hold that thought.
Europe Got There First, and Made it Permanent
While American courts were still defining markets, Brussels had already decided the question. The European Commission opened its Android investigation in 2015 and, in 2018, fined Google €4.34 billion—then the largest antitrust penalty in its history—for abuse of a dominant position under Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. The Commission identified three abuses, and the overlap with the American case is hard to miss.
First, tying: Google required manufacturers to preinstall Search and Chrome as a condition of licensing the Play Store, leveraging dominance in app distribution into adjacent markets. Second, the antifragmentation agreements: Google conditioned access to its apps on a promise not to sell devices running rival Android forks, foreclosing alternative versions that might have carried rival services. Third, Google conditioned revenue sharing payments to manufacturers and carriers on installing Google Search exclusively.
The General Court largely sided with the Commission in 2022. It upheld the tying and antifragmentation findings, annulled the revenue sharing portion for a flawed economic analysis, and trimmed the fine to €4.125 billion. Google appealed to the Court of Justice—and on July 2, 2026, the court dismissed the appeal and made the fine permanent. No further appeal exists. The infringement is now a legal fact across the European Union.
That last point carries a sting the fine does not. Under the EU’s antitrust damages regime, an established Commission infringement can anchor follow-on damages claims in national courts, where a private claimant need not reprove the violation—only causation and loss. Search engines shut out of defaults, browser makers displaced by Chrome, and manufacturers blocked from shipping forks now hold a liability finding they can carry into court across the block.
From Punishment to Prevention: the DMA
Here the two systems diverge in a way that should reframe how American lawyers think about platform enforcement. Europe concluded that fining Google years after the fact, however large the number, does not restore competition fast enough. So, it changed the instrument.
The Digital Markets Act treats dominance in core platform services not as something to punish after a long investigation over the years, but as something to regulate up front. It designates large platforms as “gatekeepers” and imposes obligations by statute, before any finding of abuse. Google’s Android and Play were designated as gatekeepers, and the obligations read like the Play Store settlement terms turned into standing law: gatekeepers must permit third party app stores and sideloading, cannot stop developers from steering users to cheaper options off platform, and must offer choice screens for defaults. Brussels is already using the DMA against Google Play’s steering restrictions, while also testing whether Google’s search practices continue to favor its own services over rivals.
And the frontier has already moved. In 2026 the European Commission opened proceedings requiring Google to give rival developers effective interoperability with the Android features its own Gemini assistant uses, and to share certain search data with competing engines and AI providers on fair terms. The same distribution and defaults playbook that governed browsers and search engines a decade ago is now being applied, in real time, to AI assistants. The next platform war is being regulated before it is fully fought.
Litigation or Regulation: Which Model Wins?
As expected, the American remedy here came from adversarial litigation—private plaintiffs and state enforcers, a jury, a trial, an appeal, and a negotiated settlement. The European remedy came from an administrative decision, affirmed on appeal, and then generalized into ex ante regulation that binds the whole class of gatekeepers without anyone proving a fresh violation. One system asks whether this defendant broke the law and what to do about it. The other declares in advance what dominant platforms may not do and polices compliance on a rolling basis.
Each approach has strengths and weaknesses.
Litigation is legitimate and concrete. A jury of citizens found specific conduct illegal on a specific record, a court fashioned the remedy, and an appellate court tested it. The result is hard to dismiss as bureaucratic overreach. But it is slow and expensive, the market can shift under it, and its remedies expire. Five years for payments, seven for sideloading.
Regulation is fast and forward looking. The DMA reached AI interoperability before American courts finished the app store fight. But it trades case specific rigor for administrative line drawing, invites the criticism that it regulates success rather than harm, and depends on a regulator to enforce it.
Which one changes the ecosystem? That is the uncomfortable question. A monopoly built over more than a decade does not unwind in a fair-notice window. When the American behavioral terms lapse, nothing in the settlement stops the gravitational pull of defaults, habits, and scale from reasserting itself—and by then the durable advantage may simply have migrated to the next layer, which is precisely where Europe has already trained its fire. The states extracted real money and real, even if only temporary, openness. Europe made a finding permanent and turned it into standing rules that follow the conduct into the next market. A defendant would rather pay $700 million once than live under the DMA indefinitely. That preference, in my opinion, is the answer to which remedy bites.
For companies building and running platforms, the practical lesson is not that one continent is tougher. It is that the two systems now work in tandem, and a global platform cannot arbitrage between them. A litigated American loss becomes an appellate precedent that shapes the next case. A European infringement becomes permanent and most likely the opening move against the following technology, now AI assistants. The 30% commission was the fight of the last decade. Interoperability and data access in AI is the fight of this one. Google is being made to pay for the first while the rules for the second are already being written—on both sides of the Atlantic, and this time, in advance.