Supantha Mukherjee and Mike Scarcella, reporting for Reuters:

“Fortnite” video game maker Epic Games on Monday accused Alphabet’s Google and Samsung, the world’s largest Android phone manufacturer, of conspiring to protect Google’s Play store from competition.

Epic filed a lawsuit in U.S. federal court in California alleging that a Samsung mobile security feature called Auto Blocker was intended to deter users from downloading apps from sources other than the Play store or Samsung’s Galaxy store, which the Korean company chose to put on the back burner.

Samsung and Google are violating U.S. antitrust law by reducing consumer choice and preventing competition that would make apps less expensive, said U.S.-based Epic, which is backed by China’s Tencent.

“It’s about unfair competition by misleading users into thinking competitors’ products are inferior to the company’s products themselves,” Epic Chief Executive Tim Sweeney told reporters.

“Google is pretending to keep the user safe saying you’re not allowed to install apps from unknown sources. Well, Google knows what Fortnite is as they have distributed it in the past.”

I’m struggling to understand how a security feature that prevents apps from being sideloaded is a violation of antitrust law. It can be disabled easily after a user authenticates — no scare screens, annoying pop-ups, or any other deterrents. Does Epic seriously think it should be given a free operating system all to itself for free just because Google and Samsung happen to make the most popular mobile operating systems and smartphones? It seems like Sweeney got a rush out of winning against Google last year and now thinks the whole world is his.

Sweeney has a narcissism problem, and that’s one of the most poignant side effects of running a company in Founder Mode, as Paul Graham, the Y Combinator founder, would put it. Everything goes the way he wants it to, and when he isn’t ceded a platform all for himself, he throws a fit and gets his lawyers to write up some fancy legal papers. He did that to Apple in the midst of a worldwide pandemic back in 2020, and it failed miserably — even the Kangaroo Court of the United States didn’t take his case. Sweeney will continue launching these psychopathic attacks on the free market until Epic loses over and over again, and I’m more than confident this case will be a disappointment for Sweeney’s company.

At the heart of the case is an optional feature that can easily be disabled and simply prevents the download of unauthorized apps. Epic Games is free to distribute its app on the Google Play Store or Samsung Galaxy Store for free, but if it insists on having users sideload its product, Google and Samsung are well within their rights — even as monopolists — to put user security first, as the ruling in Epic v. Apple noted. That’s not an antitrust violation because it’s a feature; preventing bad apps from being installed on a user’s device is a practical trade-off to ensure good software hygiene. Samsung advertises Auto Blocker openly and plainly — it’s not some kind of ploy to suppress Epic Games.

This entire lawsuit reeks of Elon Musk and reminds me of his lawsuit against Media Matters for America, which he filed after Media Matters published an exposé detailing how advertisements from Apple and Coca-Cola were appearing next to Nazis on his website. Both lawsuits are absolutely stupid, down to the point of inducing secondhand embarrassment, and clearly aren’t rooted in the law. Google and Samsung are private corporations and have the right to add software features to their operating systems. If Epic doesn’t like those features, it can go pound sand.