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Google To Charge Smartphone Makers For Google Play in Europe (reuters.com)
Google will charge smartphone makers a licensing fee for using its popular Google Play app store and also allow them to use rival versions of its Android mobile operating system to comply with an EU antitrust order, it said Tuesday. From a report: Google, an Alphabet subsidiary, announced the changes on Tuesday, three months after the European Commission handed it a landmark 4.34 billion euro ($5 billion) fine for using its popular Android mobile operating system to hinder rivals. The company said the licensing fees will offset revenue lost as a result of its compliance efforts. "Since the pre-installation of Google Search and Chrome together with our other apps helped us fund the development and free distribution of Android, we will introduce a new paid licensing agreement for smartphones and tablets shipped into the EEA," Hiroshi Lockheimer, senior vice president for platforms and ecosystems, said in a blog. In a blog post, Lockheimer wrote: Second, device manufacturers will be able to license the Google mobile application suite separately from the Google Search App or the Chrome browser. Since the pre-installation of Google Search and Chrome together with our other apps helped us fund the development and free distribution of Android, we will introduce a new paid licensing agreement for smartphones and tablets shipped into the EEA. Android will remain free and open source.
Third, we will offer separate licenses to the Google Search app and to Chrome.
We'll also offer new commercial agreements to partners for the non-exclusive pre-installation and placement of Google Search and Chrome. As before, competing apps may be pre-installed alongside ours. These new licensing options will come into effect on October 29, 2018, for all new smartphones and tablets launched in the EEA.
We'll also offer new commercial agreements to partners for the non-exclusive pre-installation and placement of Google Search and Chrome. As before, competing apps may be pre-installed alongside ours. These new licensing options will come into effect on October 29, 2018, for all new smartphones and tablets launched in the EEA.
For big companies such large fines rarely if ever get paid, if they do there are tricks to get the people who fined them to pay them for it.
Sure for a normal guy like me a fine of $100,000 would be enough to set me back and lower my standard of living for a long time. But I wouldn't have much recourse, After the verdict is finalized. I either pay a fine or go to jail.
However for a company like Google, 5 billion dollars would hurt them a little bit, however they have resources to work around it. Turing a free service to a paid service. Knowing that they are a monopoly because there isn't much competition will just mean they will get paid for a service they use to offer for free.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
You'll pay $10-$20 bucks more for an Android but get privacy and consumer options.
It might be less. You can be Microsoft will be happy to pay a handset manufacturer to make Bing the default. That said, I can run alternatives to google services on my phone and, well, I don't. Not because I can't but because their software tends to be the best, at least for low end phones like my old LG Note.
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EEA stands for European Economic Area, in case anyone [else] is curious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
3. Profit!
2. ???
1. On Soviet Slashdot, a Beowulf cluster of alien Natalie Portman overlords welcomes YOU!
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If I understand EU refs right, Apple markets a complete device. When you buy it, thatâ(TM)s what you get. Google markets an OS to other companies and was applying rules that reached beyond first sale to those companies and bound what those companies could offer their customers. Itâ(TM)s fine to sell a closed device. Itâ(TM)s not fine to sell part of a device that comes with strings that affect the rest of the device.
Seems to me that Google is basically saying, "You don't like free?!? FINE! -- then we'll just charge you for everything!" and then sticking their middle finger up at the EU courts.
I mean, I'm not saying that Google is right necessarily... but that's certainly how their response reads, to my mind.
This is both awful and stupid. The point of fines is not to have someone else pay them for you. It's punishment for an unfair advantage you created for yourself. This fine should come out of those profits.
But charging a fee for access to the Google Play Store is probably going to mean that we're going to have to get our apps at a Samsung store from now on, and that would definitely be terrible for everybody involved.
A better option would be an open store that sold the best and most popular Android apps, but with a better percentage of the revenue going to the app makers. That would give users less crap to wade through, it would give app makers a bigger share of the profit, and the app store itself could mostly leech off the work that Google has already done. A win for everybody except Google.
I think it would honestly be better for Google to just take the loss instead of ruining their business out of a misguided attempt to dodge this fine.
In unrelated news. Samsung today announced they will start selling a version of the Galaxy and Note 9 phones running their Tizen OS in the EU.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
My barebones Alcatel comes with the Android Mail application (as well as GMail et al) installed. I don't think I've had an Android phone since my first that didn't come with it - sounds like a "Nokia" problem, not an Android problem.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Bad analogy guy, is that you? Computer manufacturers absolutely sell bare-bones systems for people who want to kit them out. Google prohibits this for Android vendors. They simply are not allowed to sell phones without Google apps.
Err.. Apple does restrict 3rd party browsers. Every iOS browser has to use Apple's Safari for rendering, despite having their own backend. So iOS Chrome, Edge, etc. are just fronts of Safari.
That's a far more severe restriction than Google has ever had, despite Chrome being very useful to Google's business model.
Until you actually need those warranties. Then you realize it is only valid if you currently live in the US. You have to pay for shipping and handling out of your own pocket. And if they refuse to pay out, there is not much you can do.