We saw earlier in the trial that YouTube long resisted switching to Google Play Billing, which seemed... mighty convenient for the Google-owned property when Google pushes other developers that way.

Now, we’re seeing that original Android app store boss Eric Chu helped defend that decision — for a time — when he joined YouTube in 2018.

“Data integration will significantly limit YouTube’s ability to innovate — significant eng efforts at the expense of moving our paid business forward,” he wrote. Later, in 2020, he suggested that YouTube would need to do so to achieve fairness for all developers, both first party and third party, but was still worried about the costs.

His YouTube comments are from a January 2022 deposition, not the original 2021 one I mentioned earlier.