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Competitors Complain To EC That Free Android Is a 'Trojan Horse'
First time accepted submitter DW100 writes "Microsoft, Nokia and Oracle have taken it upon themselves to moan to the European Commission about Google's Android dominance, which they say is an underhand bid to control the entire mobile market. The firms are part of the FairSearch group, which has just filed a complaint that Google is using Android as a 'Trojan Horse' to take control of the mobile market and all the related advertising revenue. Microsoft would of course know all about this, being at the end of several similar anti-competitive complaints in the past."
Company makes billions of dollars; wants more. Competitors not happy.
Now on to how Justin Bieber's pet monkey was confiscated at an airport...
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
If you don't like it, release your own free operating system where you package your search engine it.
Interesting. What Linux couldn't accomplish on the desktop, it's accomplishing everywhere else.
Proverbs 21:19
They are advertising conduits. Which advertising conduit do you want to purchase? This one has extra advertising!
Thank goodness for large corporations. Who else could properly define the purpose of a telephone?
The group is concerned that as the online advertising market shifts increasingly to mobile platforms with the rise in smartphones and tablets, Google is giving itself an unfair head start.
“Google achieved its dominance in the smartphone operating system market by giving Android to device-makers for ‘free’. But in reality, Android phone makers who want to include must-have Google apps such as Maps, YouTube or Play are required to pre-load an entire suite of Google mobile services and to give them prominent default placement on the phone,” the group argued.
“This disadvantages other providers, and puts Google’s Android in control of consumer data on a majority of smartphones shipped today. Google’s predatory distribution of Android at below-cost makes it difficult for other providers of operating systems to recoup investments in competing with Google’s dominant mobile platform.”
So, this is 'wrong' because Google doesn't charge for their OS? Man, MS is getting blatantly desperate sounding. Make an OS that people will want to use, then you might even get them to buy it!
If you don't like it, release your own free operating system where you package your search engine it.
Google is packaging its entire search engine on Android?! No wonder my Samsung Galaxy Nexus only has a battery life of 10 hours!
Google's nefarious release of Android-related material under the 'Google Public License'(which allows you to use the code; but requires that all web activity be logged and sent to Google) was truly a masterstroke for market dominance.
Oh, wait, you mean that Android is a mixture of Apache and GPL components, and Google has had somewhat indifferent luck with preventing other vendors(Amazon, Samsung, etc.) from quite successfully using it for their own purposes while cutting them out of the picture entirely? Oh, um, never mind then...
Whoa, slow down there. Nobody wants competition here. They want to manipulate the government into giving them an advantage through preferential legislation. You know, capitalism.
giggity
Google is really good at coming into markets and offering a free product and in doing that sort of stymieing the development of alternatives. We can see it with what happened with the introduction of Google Reader - the introduction of a good enough free reader from Google functionally nuked the development of alternatives. I imagine that if Microsoft had started giving away its operating systems for free back in the 90's (and finagling things so that they made their money further up the stack) there would have been less interest in Linux. When any of the world's big companies give away something for nothing, it's worth having a closer look at what the catch is.
Are complaining they can't get revenue from it.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
I think that Microsoft, Nokia and Oracle are going in the stand-up comedy business. Because this complaint is certainly the funniest one I've seen.
:)
Open Source is more popular commercially than they are. Gee, who would have thought of that!
For years, I've always advocated that Microsoft should release DOS and then Windows for free at the very least for non-business use. If you need support, buy it from Microsoft.
They've been scoffing at open source for years and now, it's proven to work and its working on devices such as phones and tablets which are consumed even more than PCs, which is why they are sorely pissed and scared.
Eventually all of this means that tablets, phones and new generations of portable laptops/netbooks will have the powers of PCs and more and won't be running on Windows or any other proprietary platforms.
But that's called competition, and well, the thing is, while Google may be the leaders of Android, as we can plainly see, Android is free and customized by all as they see fit, so, it's not an actually anti-competitive at all.
Good Luck to Microsoft, Nokia and Oracle, for they will need it!
I thought it is more than free, isn't it Open Source?
If I don't like the default application packages, can't I make source code changes to it? I thought Careers or phone makers added their own. My Samsung has their own applications as well.
Monopolies are inherently ineffecient by their nature. There is no incentive to be innovative or productive in a monopoly situation. Standard Oil should be grateful that the government won its case. The sum of the broken up parts became greater than the original company and still thrives today. US Steel won their antitrust case, and their bloated, inefficient monopoly caused them to sink under their own weight. IBM, AT&T, and now Microsoft have all suffered the inefficiencies of being a monopoly. The first two managed to adapt. We'll see if Microsoft can, too.
What you described is not capitalism, it is a variation on fascism. It is one variant of the economic system that you end up with when you ask the government to regulate ever more aspects of the economy in order to protect people from their own bad decisions. All of the variants look pretty much the same, the only question is whether the people who benefit are people who accumulated wealth before you started down that path and use it to acquire political power as this process goes forward or whether the people who benefit are people who accumulated political power before you started down that path and use it to acquire wealth as this process goes forward. Of course what often happens is some combination of the two. The one thing that never happens as the government regulates ever greater parts of the economy is that the common person benefits.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Windows was the thing people had to have, the non-free monopoly-like thing (I was never fully comfortable calling them a monopoly, but the courts disagreed, so whatever). And they gave away an application, MSIE, hoping people would use it to establish new legacies that required it, so they wouldn't be able to switch to standard browsers and MSIE's underlying OS would continue to be required.
The situation here is inverted. Android is the thing nobody really cares about; people they can take it or leave it, or even fork it and compete with Google if they want. But the applications, primarily Google Maps but also (this makes very little sense to me) Youtube and Google Play (seriously, at least we're going to admit these are relatively minor factors, I hope) are the proprietary stuff that Google is taking a hard line on. Google's applications correspond to Microsoft's 1990s OS, and Google's OS corresponds Microsoft's 1990s application.
The big difference, of course, is that nobody, I mean nobody has Google Maps as a dependency. You can throw every single bit of Android and every single Google application away, and not miss it very much, or at least not to the same degree that people suffered 20 years ago, where Windows APIs were required by a majority of "pop" software so lots of people had something they couldn't use without it. I'm not saying they're bad; most people (me included) think Google Maps is very nice. I'm just saying anyone who has the back-end data can fairly easily [*handwave*] build a map application, and if someone else does that, it's easy for users to switch.
Ask any Android user if they're "locked in" to Android. Most of them will laugh. Maybe there really is some particular app which only has an Android version available, which they depend on every day and can't lose and is creating a network effect. I don't know. But I bet it's not a Google application.
Google has lots of neat things for users, but not one single damn thing that a user needs, either directly or indirectly.
BTW, I actually bought an Android 4 tablet which didn't come with the Google applications. It was no problem at all. So people who say an Android box needs this stuff, are totally full of shit. They're not merely wrong; they're liars. This is a non-story.
Actually, my favorite part of TFA was the first sentence:
Looks like the usual suspects and mostly-nonproductive entities, hardly a "diverse group."
By your standard, capitalism has never existed then, because governments have always interfered in labor markets to make capitalism work. The English state forced peasants off their land and to the point of starvation to make them work in factories, and conquered India to crush local cotton manufacturing make markets for its cotton mills, forced China to allow imports of opium, etc. Early American capitalism required slavery to produce the raw materials for export and English cotton mills that were the foundation for northern industry and banking, as well as constant western land grabs through the state's military to be viable. Tell me when capitalism has ever prospered without a strong state to do its dirty work?
Like the cable companies, which keep dropping prices to... oh wait. Like Windows and Office, which got cheaper all of the way through the 1990s and 2000s until... oh wait. Like medical costs, which kept going down so nobody was clamoring for government subsidized health care. Oh wait. Like education, which kept getting cheaper until nobody wanted public schools or government assistance for education.
Look how Intel colluded with PC vendors to lock AMD out of parts of the market, and is in the process of finishing them off. If ARM hadn't started becoming a major player in the processor space, we'd be looking at $500 i3s. Look at the collusion between Intel, Apple, Google, Quicken, and a few other companies to avoid poaching each other's engineers in an artificial means to keep employee costs low.
I'm not a rah-rah-rah fan of big government. But businesses do get a position of power and ruthlessly exploit it. The market has no ethics, it's winner take all and illegal is only wrong if the cost of getting caught exceeds the savings by breaking the law.
OMG PONIES!!! Who doesn't like ponies?
Wow, could that summary be more biased and incorrect? The complaint isn't that Android is an underhanded bid to control the entire mobile market. The complaint is that Android is abusing their (potentially) monopoly position to unfairly position their other products in dominant positions, hindering competition. You know, things like positioning Google Docs in a preferred position on the home screen thereby harming competition with Microsoft Office (as an example).
This is EXACTLY the behaviour that got Microsoft into trouble when they used their dominant market position to push IE on users and hurt competition from other browsers. This is EXACTLY the sort of behaviour that most on Slashdot feel Microsoft was in the wrong for. But, I'm sure most on Slashdot are now going to claim Microsoft is getting their just desserts and its now ok because Google is doing it to them rather than being rightly offended at the actions, regardless of who does it and to whom it is done.
I'm not sure I buy that. My HTC phone has an HTC Sense home screen, even though the word "Googe" is etched across the back of the case.
In fact, I don't think a single widget on my phone's home screen is or ever was unmodified Google code.
I could be missing something, but I was definitely under the impression that the source code for the entire Android system is available for use and abuse (subject to licensing limits like GPL) and that third parties can pretty much adapt it at will. Nor am I aware that Google makes you sign in blood that you will present preferred Google apps over other possible apps before you can build and sell an Android product.
Yes, Android devices tend to like to "keep it in the family" and use other Google apps because they tend to play well together, but unlike Microsoft, Google apps generally don't lock you in to other Google apps, nor are you required by license to include any Google apps if you don't want to.
There's a huge difference actually. Microsoft forced their OS onto computers with predatory contracts that penalized computer manufacturers who wanted to sell competing OSes. Thus they created their first monopoly, and then used that to create another one using Web Browsers.
Unless you know of evidence that Google is forcing manufacturers to use Android at the expense of other systems, then no it's not even close to the same thing. Manufacturers are choosing to user Android. That's not Google's fault.
I find it funny that they are claiming Android is all this and that, but it somehow doesn't occur to them at all that maybe, just maybe, manufacturers would be more interested in using Microsoft and Oracle products if they didn't act like predatory douchebags that abuse their partners and their customers.
Unless you know of evidence that Google is forcing manufacturers to use Android at the expense of other systems, then no it's not even close to the same thing. Manufacturers are choosing to user Android. That's not Google's fault.
Didn't Google strong arm Samsung and HTC into not releasing Windows Mobile/Windows Phone handsets...
Oh wait, they didn't.
Even if they did, Google would be met with a resounding "Fuck you, we've already got the source code".
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.