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Europe Is Going After Google For Anti-Competitive Behavior With Android
Google now faces more competition charges in the European Union. The EU has accused Google of skewing the market against competitors with its Android mobile operating system. The 28-member state bloc's antitrust commissioner concluded in a preliminary decision that the search giant has abused its dominant position in the market by imposing restrictions on Android device makers. "What we found is that Google pursues an overall strategy on mobile devices to protect and expand its dominant position in internet search," said Margrethe Vestager, the EU competition chief. "The commission is concerned that Google's behaviour has harmed consumers by restricting competition and innovation," she added. "Rival search engines and mobile operating systems have not been able to compete on their merits. This is not good." Google has three months to respond to the aforementioned charges. The New York Times reports: Europe's antitrust charges might not necessarily lead to financial or other penalties against Google. If it is found to have broken the region's rules, though, the company may face fines of up to 10 percent of its global revenue, or roughly $7 billion, the maximum allowable amount. Google denies that it has broken European competition rules, saying that its dealings with cellphone manufacturers like Samsung and HTC, among others, are voluntary, and that rival mobile services are readily available on its Android software.According to EU, Google has breached antitrust rules by:1. requiring manufacturers to pre-install Google Search and Google's Chrome browser and requiring them to set Google Search as default search service on their devices, as a condition to license certain Google proprietary apps; 2. preventing manufacturers from selling smart mobile devices running on competing operating systems based on the Android open source code; 3. giving financial incentives to manufacturers and mobile network operators on condition that they exclusively pre-install Google Search on their devices."The joke in Google's cafeteria today will be "let them use bing," said Andrew Parker, VC. "So disappointing that browser dominance on Android is the only thing that the EU can get worked up about," Blaine Cook, co-founder of Poetica noted. "The European Commission's statement of objections against Android lends further credibility to Oracle's $9B copyright claim," Florian Mueller, the founder of FOSS Patents blog wrote.
There's also the thing that web apps suck. The web is a hypertext platform, not an app platform.
Actually, the problem with Google is not the search engine. It's the Play store. Like you said, Android devices without it don't sell. But if you want it, then you have to obey some rather onerous terms. Like you must include ALL the Google apps. And they must be default - doesn't matter if you want to use HERE maps or other map service - the Google Maps must be the default. Also, all Google apps must be one click away from the home screen by default (that's why there's a Google Apps folder on the home screen).
Samsung is probably closest to being able to get rid of Google's apps because they've developed alternatives to every application Google has. But because they still license Google Play, they must include all of Google's apps by default. It's why Samsung phones seem to have duplicates.
That's the real problem - iOS is pretty safe since it's Apple-only, and it's hard to argue that Apple's in a monopoly position when 4 Androids with Google are sold for every iOS.
It's the fact that you can't unbundle the Google apps, or phone developers can't replace it with their own by default, if you want Play, you have to agree to those terms.
Nope. After IE hit about 90% market share, Microsoft figured they'd conquered the market and killed off all competitors. So they decided they'd earned a well-deserved rest and did... nothing. They stopped all development work on IE. For about 13 months they didn't add any new features to IE - the only updates were security updates (this was around 2001-2002 if I remember). This was an eternity in web browser development at the time. When Netscape and IE were competing, they were rolling out new features semi-annually or even quarterly.
That window was what allowed Firefox to take hold. Can you imagine browsing without tabs? Firefox introduced tabs, and that feature alone made it immensely popular. FF made IE look so much like a lump of coal that FF quickly jumped to about 25% market share. By the time the EU browser choice requirement was implemented (Dec 2009), FF was already over 30% market share. Google's Chrome browser had already been steadily growing in popularity for most of that year, and FF actually decreased in market share after the EU-mandated browser choice.
So it'd be more accurate to say Microsoft blew it big time by choosing to stand still because they had a monopoly, but that only cost them about a third of their monopoly. It took another quasi-monopoly (Google search + apps) to break Microsoft's OS-browser monopoly for good. I'm not sure the EU browser choice window had any effect. IE was already on the way down at the end of 2009 when the EU mandate was implemented. And the rate at which IE declined in market share didn't change appreciably from before 1Q 2010 to after.
(That's not to say I disagree with the EU mandate. I was actually more anti-Microsoft back in those days and felt they should've been broken up into an OS company and an apps company. But the problem with government regulation in software is that it just takes too damn long, and by the time it's finally implemented the entire software landscape has already changed for other reasons.)