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Google Responds To EU Antitrust Claims In Android Blog Post
An anonymous reader writes Earlier today the European Union released a Statement of Objection against Google, asserting that the search giant's dominance violating antitrust rules and Android products hindering equal opportunities for market access among its rivals. Google has now released an official blog post in response to the Commission's proposed investigation. Regarding its Android devices, Hiroshi Lockheimer, VP of Engineering at Android writes: "The European Commission has asked questions about our partner agreements. It's important to remember that these are voluntary—again, you can use Android without Google—but provide real benefits to Android users, developers and the broader ecosystem." He continues: "We are thankful for Android's success and we understand that with success comes scrutiny. But it's not just Google that has benefited from Android's success. The Android model has let manufacturers compete on their unique innovations [...] We look forward to discussing these issues in more detail with the European Commission over the months ahead."
Too bad there aren't any other note apps to use on Android. Oh, wait....
Revolution is the opium of the intellectuals.
Is anyone surprised that a cloud based note system needs you to log in? If you don't want to sign in to google, don't use keep - it's not like it's the only way to store notes - there are hundreds of alternative note apps out there on 3rd party market places.
You don't need a google account to use android, you do if you want to use google's services. A bit like you need a Live account to use Microsoft's cloud services, and an iTunes account to use Apple's cloud services.
Or maybe Google really is being more evil, and a Google monopoly really is a net loss for society.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
You can use Android without Google services. But being technically right isn't enough when it comes to antitrust. Google uses its position to make using Android without Google services increasingly more difficult. More and more essential features are moved from Android OSP to the proprietary Google apps package (or added there without first showing up in AOSP), and the OS makes no provisions to use other services as drop-in replacements (i.e. transparently to other apps). For example, almost all apps which provide location based services depend on the Google apps package for the simple task of showing locations on a map, even though there are several other map services which could do the same thing, but have no chance of getting the necessary OS integration.
I don't think the point was this app specifically. The point is that Google tries their hardest to make all apps depend on Google's "services". Sure, it's possible to do without, but it's getting damn hard. And in addition to this they have completely forgotten everything about security implications. Try to install Android and hide your data from third parties. I bet you can't do it while using the phone for very long. I would guess that more than half of the apps in Play could be classified as malware if you define malware as something that spreads data that the user wants to keep private.
I don't think the point was this app specifically. The point is that Google tries their hardest to make all apps depend on Google's "services".
Keep was a FREE app written by Google. What do you expect? The shit is free.
Keep is less than 1% of the note apps available for Android. Almost all of those apps don't depend on any Google service. Some are adware. Some will phone home to someone other than Google with info gathered from your phone. Some you have to pay a small fee for. Some come with a degree of privacy and security. It takes time to sort out which is the best app, but if you don't like Google's services in your apps, don't install the apps that use these services.
Revolution is the opium of the intellectuals.
no, its the app-maker making it difficult to use without google, and for them is taking the "easy way out", no but seriously, why should a app-maker need to make it more difficult for themselves just because you want to have alternatives?
they are not yet charging google for anything about android, considering the latest investigation took 5 years to make an charge we will see how in about that time how this comes about
now is it to google to show that they are not breaking any rules and that they can behave
I couldn't figure out why Google wasn't getting pissy AT ALL over Cyanogen forking and talking smack about them.. Now the other shoe has dropped: Cyanogen's fork (and the company's very existance) is Google's main anti-trust defense, at least at the OS level.
Now Google's ad business, that's a whole 'nother matter...
Google is moving more and more utilities to Play Services, which is not open source.
Play Services is not only about Google-related services, it is also about OAuth for instance.
Unknowing developers rely on Play Services, making their apps incompatible with pure-Android devices.
To solve this problem, an Open Source implementation of Google Play Services is being developed:
http://softwarerecs.stackexcha...
The Android issue is just a minor point in the EU's case, why doesn't Google talk about the fact that their search service pushes people over to their shopping service?
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Everytime I read about this non-sense about Android, I think about Apple.
- No competitng app store possible ...
- App competing with Apple removed from Apple App Store without any explanation
- iTunes locks similar to Google Account but made worse by supra
- Inability to install 3rd party firmware (cyanogen or other)
Why don't EU first attack the worst offender ?
You have completely lost me
... but I got a smartphone recently - a Samsung Ace 3 with Android. My impression is that the concept has huge promise, but that it is set up to disappoint massively, because although it is so-called open-source, you are not likely to be set free from the tie-in. This particular phone comes without Google Play (and as Google say: 'if it isn't installed from the start, you are not supposed to have it'), and all I can find on Samsung's equivalent is ad- and spyware. I have a suspicion the same holds for Google Play, but I don't know. Even if you download Google Play from elsehwere, it will not be allowed to run - it gets killed instantly
Let's see ...
The phone you got is from Samsung
It runs Android
It does NOT have Google Play
And if you want to install Google Play in it, that Samsung phone somehow deletes it, instantly
Am I stating the facts correctly?
The phone's only tie with Google is the OS ( Android )
Fact 1. The Phone is not from Google
Fact 2. Google Play is not allowed to be installed in that phone
But of course, that's not all ...
You just goota bitch about the evilness of Google, even if you have to make it up
Regarding that fucking phone of yours, Google's role is limited to the Android OS, and nothing else
So what the fuck are you trying to prove?
That Google is evil? Just because Google supplies that Android OS that Samsung uses?
That Google is a monopoly? How can Google be a monopoly if Google Play isn't even allowed to be installed???
You got tard for in between your ears, or what?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
You seem to fundamentally misunderstand how antitrust regulations work. You need to have a sufficiently large market share that your actions distort the market to be considered a problem. I could release a smartphone tomorrow that had a single app store and was completely obnoxious in every single way that people have complained about Microsoft, Apple, and Google, but I would be exempt from any antitrust exemptions because no one would buy my CrapPhone and it would have no impact on the market.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Companies have no rights at all. Only human beings have rights. Companies have such privileges as society deems fit to grant them for the benefit of society. Benefit to the companies is purely coincidental and only needed when that benefit happens to benefit society as well.
Those who feel otherwise (and think what they are saying is free-market thinking) REALLY need to go brush up on their Benjamin Franklin and Adam Smith.
Now, having said that, over-regulation is NOT to the benefit of society (but neither is under-regulation) the trick is to find the right balance, regulate against harmful behavior, regulate against the guy who would rather lock the fire escape than hire a security guard and ends up killing 103 people who otherwise almost certainly would have all survived the accidental fire (real case example).
In the case of anti-trust, take your cue from the greatest trust-buster of them all - President Rooseveldt, look at what the guy with the monpoly is actually DOING with that monopoly. Is he harming consumers ? Is he harming workers ? Is he jacking up prices ? Then destroy his monopoly with extreme prejudice. But if he isn't abusing that position, not actively trying to prevent competition from arising, not jacking prices up (but indeed his market shows a continous price-per-value drop over time), not harming consumers in a significant manner, treating workers well and fairly ? Then leave him alone in time the market will bring competitors - and we can AFFORD to wait when he isn't doing bad things.
I am always amazed when people call Obama a liberal president - his policies are center-right at best, Teddy Rooseveldt - now THAT was a Liberal. Probably the most liberal president America ever had. Conservationist, union-defender, workers-rights defender, opposed inequality and lack of social mobility (as he correctly realized: sufficient inequality can and always WILL lead to violent revolution, an outcome he believed ought ot be avoided by preventing that level of inequality from arising in the first place), the man behind some of the strictest anti-trust laws the US ever had - and willing to go to bat personally to get them enforced (as in - he personally had meetings with the CEO's of the companies he targetted - and when push came to shove showed up at the supreme court and took the stand himself).
So on balance ? There are areas where Google is due for some scrutiny, data protection and privacy laws are near the top of the list. They may have a monopoly in advertising and it may indeed be harmful (I'm not convinced but I recognize this as possible) - but android ? Nah, Android is an area where Google has been very well behaved, I don't care if their market share is monopoly level or not because even if they HAVE A monopoly what they've been DOING with it is not significantly harmful in any way.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Your comment is utter rubbish. EU monopoly law is different from that in the US. In the EU we assume that when you have a dominant market position, this already endangers the positive effect of a free market. Therefore, to allow other companies to be able to enter the market, the dominant company must be constraint in a way that it cannot use its size to corner the market. This will allow other companies, such as Microsoft and Yahoo to play a bigger role in that market. BTW: Microsoft was also sued by the EU commission because its dominant position in desktop OSes which they used to push IE. That allowed projects like Firefox, Opera, and Chrome to prosper again.
No it wouldn't. Nokia had tremendous restructuring costs. Microsoft was providing large subsidies in exchange for the exclusive use of WindowsPhone OS. Without those subsidies Nokia's restructuring costs and higher costs of manufacturing means it can't be cost competitive with the Asian manufacturers and goes bankrupt. There is no Nokia if they follow your advice. Instead Elop gets them through the restructuring and then gets the company sold for $7b.
Are you stating as fact that Google is preventing your bank from publishing their app to the Amazon store (or any other android app stores)? Isn't it more likely the case that your Bank chose to only publish to the Play store?
The point is that Google tries their hardest to make all apps depend on Google's "services"
Utter bull. Go get any of the plethora of AOSP-based ROMs, and you can use any app you want.
Of course, MOST free apps get revenue from ads; and ads generally are going to rely on a cloud service, and that has to be provided by an ad provider-- hence play services. EVERYONE does this, though, Google isnt alone here.
The same is true for a lot of other banks. Google has intentionally made sure that they control the app distribution channel,
* WinPhone: Apps MUST be downloaded from the Microsoft Store
* iPhone: Apps MUST be downloaded from the App Store
* Android / AOSP: Alternative stores are explicitly allowed, though off by default. Apps may be sideloaded through a bootloader, through USB, through the official play store, or through third party app stores like Amazon's or F-Droid.
How, exactly, is Google the bad guy here?
It also demonstrates why we Americans have had such a bitch of a time getting something as simple as ISPs regulated as common carriers made policy. There are plenty of monopolies in ISP land, it's only really if you have a municipal service or live somewhere spectacularly progressive (or mundane, that's you Kansas City) that you might get some semblance of choice. Had we a system like Europe, Ma Bell would never have grown as powerful, and ISPs like Comcast, Centurylink, Time Warner and Verizon would not have the ability to move vast markets like they do.
Google is using the fact that they effectively have a monopoly on application distribution (yes, I know about F-Droid and the Amazon store. Most apps I want come from F-Droid, but I'm hardly a typical user and the rest come from Play because they're not in the Amazon store) to gain market share in other areas.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Google's additions are no more or less restrictive than their counterparts.
They are SIGNIFICANTLY less restrictive than their counterparts. I just got a corporate issued iDevice, and coming from android it is infuriating just how much Apple forces you to play with their ecosystem. You can install google maps, but it wont give you lock screen integration, and it cant be made the default for instructions, and it cant prevent screen lock. You can install SwiftKey, but you cant disable the Apple keyboard, nor prevent its mandatory use for password fields. You can install chrome, but cannot force links to open in it.
It is quite obnoxious to see people holding Google up as the bad guy here. Can you imagine if Apple was dominant? Oh wait, they were for a while and it WAS obnoxious, because it WAS horrendously locked down. Google offers an alternative that people have hacked to pieces and done wonderful things with (like Samsung, XIaoMi, OnePlus, Oppo, etc's take on AOSP) and the EU feels the need to crap on them because they hate google for some reason.
Google isnt perfect but theyre the best internet company we've had in a LONG time. Everyone else is worse in just about every category.
Really? Google "forces" other manufacturers to use their app store? Did Amazon get that memo because apparently there are a lot of defective Kindle's out there.
Fanboyism trumps market economics every time. I personally want a healthy Android, and a healthy iOS - both systems push each other to be better, and we all win. Hell, a healthy Windows Phone in the mix wouldn't hurt either. A nice 3-way competition for my money.
Why people figure for one company to win, they have to completely crush the competition is beyond me - it only leads to irrational fanaticism that the company itself doesn't feel, and legal problems just like Google is now facing in the EU.
Apple doesn't give a shit if Android wants to take the bottom 60% of the market - they're perfectly happy owning the top 25%.
Google doesn't give a shit if Apple holds 25% of the market - they're happy with the 70% of the eyeballs looking at their ads, and inputting data into their indexing engines.
Microsoft probably gives a shit, because they've always been ruthless assholes. But, they're under 5% of the mobile market so nobody cares.
Blackberry hardly exists anymore, just like Symbian and the other also-rans.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
None of their competitors even OFFER the option to have an "F-Droid" or to remove their respective equivalents of play services
I'm not sure what your point is. 'Other people are worse' is not a defence in an antitrust investigation, unless those others have enough of a market impact that you're probably not going to be in the antitrust regulator's jurisdiction anyway.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The problem, though, is that anyone has a monopoly when you get specific enough. The airlines have a "monopoly" on the food they serve while you are on their flight. What if I want Au Bon Pain? I can't get it (and ABP can't sell it there, even if they want to), because a set of specific circumstances limit me while I am on the flight. I have to buy the airline's "gourmet sandwich," if that's what I want. It isn't a real monopoly, though, because those circumstances are not universal and I could easily either work around them (bring my own food) or choose a different airline.
If they want to claim that Google is monopolizing "computing devices that are mobile phones (specific 1), running Android (specific 2), that have access to the Play Store (specific 3)," then we are talking about a pretty specific set of circumstances, any of which could easily be varied using existing viable alternatives for each specific circumstance. If you go to eat at a microbrewery, you don't get to complain when they promote their own beer.
Almost all of those apps don't depend on any Google service.
Almost all apps depend on a least the store. Very few offer sideload download links that do not requite google creds.
Someone had to do it.
That's actually a really interesting point. It sounds like you're suggesting that maybe the US is so successful because European companies just know that to create a product in a way that would be hugely successful would be corporate suicide, because if it does end up being successful, then you will regret it. Basically, better to have 7 products that have 5% market share each than 1 product that has 50% market share, because once you cross a certain threshold, regulation will eat up more than that 15% difference. In other words, a "keep your head low" mentality...
I've never heard this before (though in some ways it's really just a recapitulation of one of the core tenets of capitalism, which has plenty of faults itself), and I'm not saying I necessarily believe it -- I just find the idea itself interesting. Can any other Europeans speak to whether or not there might be anything to this (preferably without too much vitriol)?
Show me a phone that has Samsung App store on it, but doesn't have other Samsung apps forced onto it.
Show me an Android phone you can't install competing app stores on.
Thank you for admitting you're wrong.
Really? Tiny? You mean, like the 1B-people-in-China tiny? I guess the Chinese population is nothing more than a rounding error. That and you can't get XiaoMi here without preloaded Google apps, right?
Perhaps. But what can they do to be more open than they already are. You can sideload apps. You can install another app store. Can you do this on iOS or WinPhone? I suppose they could allow OEMs to install the Play store without any Google apps - or at least without all of them. But a lot of stuff migrated to the app store because the OEM's weren't providing OS upgrades and Google wanted a way to keep phones more or less up to date without relying on OS upgrades. And developers that target those services expect them to be there. Maybe they could develop a dependency system that automatically installs services you need along with any app that needs them. But that's getting pretty deep into design details, no? Moving services out of the OS made sense. In any case, Android provides more opportunity for competition than just about any other platform. How else was Blackberry able to support Android apps - as Microsoft is also rumored to be planning. If Android represents unfair monopolization, it's hard to know what that means.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...