Policy change goals are to improve payment UX and ensure ecosystem consistency. Even though we have a defensible plan that achieves goals and made progress with many developers impacted, the sense is we'll likely not want to trigger Spotify agitation and associated noise with a policy change. I.e. the risk of likely Spotify agitation may be higher than the (harder to gauge) risk of status quo.

Option Summary:

• Remove Exception – Require exclusive Google Play Billing integration for all digital IAPs; provide generous grandfathering (2 yrs; minimal reqs). Advantage: removes policy ambiguity, improves payment UX, better positions Google to respond to regulatory inquiry. Key Risk: triggers Spotify agitation (high likelihood) and associated noise.

• Keep Exception; Add Requirements. Advantage: partially achieves improved payment UX; new requirements are defensible. Key Risk: draws attention to ambiguous exception, which may prove hard to justify → contagion.

• No Policy Change. Advantage: Google doesn't trigger noise. Key Risk: Regulator may deem exclusive Google Play Billing requirement unnecessary, partly due to current exception; more apps de-integrate Google Play Billing.

Question raised: Is it worth one more chat with Spotify to better assess how displeased they'd be if we changed policy, but provided generous grandfathering (e.g. 2 years and no requirements)? We owe them a response on their grandfathering counterproposal anyhow.