Google Says It’s ‘Entitled’ to Partial Summary Judgment in Play Store Litigation

The plaintiffs’ opposition to Google’s April 20 motion for partial summary judgment in the consolidated Google Play store antitrust litigation doesn’t identify “any material fact in dispute, and this Court accordingly need decide only pure legal issues,” said Google’s reply Thursday (docket 3:21-md-02981) in U.S. District Court for Northern California in San Francisco in support of its motion. The plaintiffs “ignore or misconstrue” governing antitrust law in an effort to save their “flawed claims,” and the “relevant precedent” makes clear that Google is entitled to summary judgment on each ground it has raised in its “targeted motion,” it said. The plaintiffs’ claim that Google must distribute rival app stores is “baseless,” said the reply. Google’s decision not to distribute rival app stores through the Google Play store is lawful, and courts already correctly rejected the plaintiffs’ theory that this decision “becomes unlawful merely because it is combined with other conduct,” it said. The plaintiffs’ claims based on Google’s revenue-sharing agreements with the wireless carriers are “time-barred,” said the reply. There’s no dispute those agreements “ended outside of the limitations period,” it said. Precedent makes clear that the plaintiffs can’t use “later conduct within the limitations period as a bootstrap to recover for supposed injuries from those early agreements,” it said. All of the plaintiffs’ claims for damages from subscriptions and in-app purchases fail “because antitrust law requires plaintiffs to have suffered injury in the market where competition is allegedly restrained,” it said. But the plaintiffs’ own experts demonstrate that the plaintiffs can’t “satisfy that requirement,” it said.