What Are You Hiding, Google?

People are growing suspicious of Google after the tech titan requested that details of its partnership with Spotify remain sealed in court last week amid its ongoing legal battle with Epic Games. The question is: what don’t they want us to see?

Some background: Google has been duking it out with Epic since 2020 over the tech company’s app store policy of charging sellers a 30% tax on sales. Epic and Spotify used to be allied against such practices and were both part of the Coalition for App Fairness; however, when Google introduced its “User Choice Billing” pilot program in 2022, Spotify went to the so-called dark side and partnered with Google to try out the beta payment plan.

Their deal reportedly allows Spotify to use its own payment system for subscriptions, bypass Google’s full fee on Android and pay the tech company a lower cut than the previous 30%. The specifics, however, remain a mystery – and Google wants to keep it that way. Arguing that publishing terms of the User Choice deal with Spotify could be bad for business, Google’s legal team asked the court to seal parts of the contract in an upcoming exhibit.

What they’re saying: “Disclosure of the Spotify deal would be very, very detrimental for the negotiation we’d be having with those other parties,” said Google attorney Glenn Pomerantz in court. He did no specify who those other parties were but conceded that “two numbers” could be presented to the jury, as long as they weren’t revealed out loud.

Epic’s attorney Gary Bornstein, however, thinks that Google’s resistance indicates that Spotify is getting special treatment that wouldn’t be offered to other developers who sign on with User Choice Billing. “There is a rate set much much lower than the rates you’ve been hearing about at trial,” he told Judge James Donato, according to The Verge.