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.

Comments

Ironic

[danbob999]

Given that Android is the only mobile OS that actually allows phone manufacturers/carriers to change the default search engine or browser.

Re:Ironic

[ooloorie]

Which part of "allows phone manufacturers/carriers to change the default search engine or browser" did you not understand?

Users on Android can change both the search engine and the browser if they like.

Re: Ironic

[tlhIngan]

They used to sell tablets not preloaded with Google apps. No one bought them. Fortunately it was trivial to install them, but users prefer to have a consistent ecosystem.

They should sue Apple for not allowing you to remove and replace the App store. This is a choice for android.

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.

Bing Bong

[fluffernutter]

In all honesty I've tried to use other search engines but none of them come close to Google results, especially when searching on development terms, error messages and the like. Don't even get me started on Bing, it clearly steers the results towards something it can sell you. There seems to be a funny philosophy that Bing was made with.. it seems to be orientated to people, places, and things rather than point me to the actual answer to a development question that is buried in an internet comment somewhere.

Rule #1

[twmcneil]

If you have any respect at all for your own credibility, do not quote Florian Mueller. I'd say he's an ass, but that would be disrespectful to the Donkey.

Re:Vote Leave

[houghi]

Can't we make a deal? We push over the UK to the US and we get Canada in return. We are used to multi-lingual countries.

That way everybody will be happy.

Re:The EU has fucked up antitrust laws

[NotInHere]

claiming that low prices were predatory

Low predatory pricing is *the* tool against destroying competition that's smaller than you. You are the big one, you have the capital to keep the price low (even if it's not profitable for you!), for as long as you want. You just wait until your small competition either gets no customers because their prices aren't competing with your's or they go bankrupt because they used up their much smaller capital much faster than you.

Then, after all small competition is ruled out, you can rise prices again and make much more money than you spent on the aggressive predatory pricing.

Re:The key is the apps

[shawn2772]

Google's lock in system bases not on the google-owned apps (they are just a few, and yes they are very much used by users, but I guess people can come up with an alternative). The main reason to be locked in to Google is their proprietary APIs they offer to app developers. You can't simply take an apk and publish it on an alternative market, if there are no gapps installed on the device, most of the apps won't work.

I don't see that.

Looking at the APIs in question, I see a pretty extensive list, but it's pretty much all just stuff to interact with Google services. There are APIs for:

Google ads
Google analytics
Google search integration (AppIndexing)
Google account authentication
Google cast devices
Google drive integration
Google fit integration
Google games integration
Google cloud messaging integration
Google location services
Google maps integration
Google street view integration
Google+ integration
Google vision integration (server-based service for doing object recognition)
Google wallet integration
Wear integration

Only the last item (Wear integration) isn't obviously tied to some Google server-side systems. And while the above list is a pretty useful set of services for apps that want to use them, there are lots and lots of apps that have absolutely no need for any of the above... with one exception. I suspect what breaks most apps that don't work on non-GMS devices is the lack of the ads API. But there are third-party ads libraries which wrap the GMS ads API as well as other ads APIs so that app developers who don't want to be tied to Google only (and many do like to use other ad networks, so there's a reason for this other than independence of GMS APIs) can use those. Thanks to the run-time class loading and introspection features of Java, it's fairly easy to write code that checks whether a particular class (e.g. com.google.android.gms.ads.MobileAds) is present, and to then do something more useful than crashing if it's not and AFAIK all of the ads aggregation APIs do that.

My perception is that Google tries hard to ensure that as much as possible goes into the core system, and as little as possible goes into the GMS APIs. The exceptions are (a) things that are inherently tied to Google services and (b) things that Google wants to be able to update on its own (e.g. WebView). That second category is stuff that Google will move back to the core system if and when OEMs fix their update process problems, I expect.

(Disclosure: I'm a Google Android engineer. Note that I'm carefully *not* addressing the topic of the EU anti-trust investigation, and I will not, for obvious reasons.)

Re: The EU has fucked up antitrust laws

[zennyboy]

Yes, your internet and TV services are some of the cheapest in the world. Oh, wait... Healthcare? Insurance? As they said, Breaking Bad would have been a very short series in the rest of the developed world...

Re:Google has a browser?

[Solandri]

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.)