Google Customers Obtain Class Action Status in App Store Pricing Lawsuit

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Next summer, courts will decide whether Google is guilty of "cheating" millions of Google Play users by warning them against using other app stores or services to download applications.

A judge this week granted class-action status to an antitrust lawsuit that now affects 21 million Google Play customers in 12 states: Alabama, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Carolina South, Wisconsin, and Wyoming and five U.S. territories, including American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and U.S. Virgin Islands. The lawsuit claims Google's misleading warnings led millions of customers nationwide to pay "artificially inflated" prices for apps they could have downloaded cheaper elsewhere.

Last year, dozens of state attorneys general sued Google on these same antitrust grounds. These law enforcement officials alleged that Google was making it impossible for other app stores to compete and that the company had a monopoly on Android apps. Legal teams of prosecutor clients now partner with prosecutor states; if the customers win, Google owner Alphabet Inc. could have to pay about $4.7 billion in damages for the class action alone.

Google initially opposed the class action designation, saying in part that each of the individual plaintiffs could not demonstrate actual harm, potentially allowing uninjured parties to join the class action. This week, U.S. District Judge James Donato disagreed with Google in his order granting class action status.

"In effect, Google requires each class member to individually prove injury before certification can be granted," Donato wrote in its order. “The law provides otherwise. It is true that a class may not be certified when it is so inclusive that a substantial number of uninjured people populate it. Google hasn't shown this to be a problem here."

The plaintiffs argued that the designation was appropriate because Google Play's allegedly "monopoly" business practices "affected all prices set by developers and paid by consumers to Google".

On Monday, a Google spokesperson told Reuters: "We are evaluating the decision, and after that we will evaluate our options." A Google spokesperson declined to comment further on Ars. Lawyers representing the suing clients did not immediately respond to Ars' request for comment.

The trial deciding the class action is expected to begin in June 2023.

Experts clash over Google Play pricing models

To help the judge decide whether to settle the lawsuit with individual plaintiffs or as a class action, both sides provided expert testimony. This testimonial was primarily aimed at determining whether Google Play app store customers actually paid higher prices across the board.

Google disagreed with the opinion of the plaintiffs' expert, Hal J. Singer, that the company asked Donato to exclude his testimony. Google argued in part that Singer used methods to calculate prices in the Google Play store that Google expert Michelle M. Burtis had "never seen before".

According to Google, another alleged flaw in Singer's analysis was that Singer failed to consider real-world data impacting how developers make decisions to raise or lower prices by based on app store fees. Burtis claimed that Singer's analysis predicted that all developers would have lowered their prices if Google Play had lowered its fees, but Burtis's analysis of how developers actually reacted when fees were lowered