Epic v. Google: Where Things Stand After the Withdrawal
A day after Epic and Google withdrew their proposed settlement, Judge Donato held a status conference in San Francisco to go over Google's compliance with the injunction and the rollout of the remedies already ordered. Nothing new was decided, but the tone of the session tells us something about how the next stretch of this case is likely to run.
The clock is running, and the judge made a point of saying so
Donato made clear the settlement talks are behind everyone now, and that the court's attention turns fully to enforcing the injunction as written. He was explicit that any discussion of extending the order is off the table for now, and left no doubt that he sees a fixed runway rather than an indefinite one.
That is not the posture of a judge easing into open-ended supervision. It reads as a judge who wants the remaining time used, not stretched or reopened for negotiation.
Monthly reporting changes what gets watched
The mechanism behind that urgency is a new reporting cadence. Google will now have to provide monthly data covering how the injunction is playing out in practice, including how often link-outs are being used and what fees, if any, are being collected in connection with the ordered changes. The court also plans to check in with both sides on a monthly basis rather than waiting for the next major filing.
Until now, the 0% status on external links in the US sat quietly on a Google support page. Going forward, the real state of link-out usage and fees becomes a recurring data point in front of the same judge, reviewed monthly instead of left to surface on its own.
Reading the room
Put the urgency and the new reporting cadence together, and the picture that emerges is of a court intent on catching drift early rather than addressing it after the fact. We want to be careful here: this is our reading of what the reporting suggests, not a prediction of any specific ruling. But it fits a pattern this case has shown consistently. Every attempt to soften the practical effect of this injunction has met resistance from the bench, and nothing about yesterday suggests that has changed.
Bottom line
Nothing changes operationally today, as we've already said. External links in the US remain at 0%, and that is the baseline the next several monthly reports will be measured against.
On the fee question specifically, we don't read this reporting requirement as a sign that a fee is coming. Asking for the amount of fees currently being collected is a transparency measure across everything the injunction touches, not a signal tied to external links. Google's US position continues to state that it is not assessing fees on link-outs, and the settlement that would have given Google an explicit path to introduce one has already been withdrawn.
If anything, a monthly, judge-reviewed record makes it harder for a fee to appear quietly, since any change would now show up immediately in a filing in front of a court with little patience for manoeuvring. It's also why we keep coming back to the same point: a web store, reached outside the app through your own channels, sits outside all of this entirely, and remains the one channel no monitoring or future ruling touches.
