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.

Comments

What do people expect?

[jellomizer]

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.

Works for me

[rsilvergun]

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.

EEA

[Jogar the Barbarian]

EEA stands for European Economic Area, in case anyone [else] is curious.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re: Wuddabout Apple?

[Aristos Mazer]

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.

Sounds like Google is offended

[zarmanto]

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.

Re:Awful and stupid

[neo-mkrey]

And as an Alphabet shareholder, I think this is wise. Why should I suffer for the EUs shortsightedness? If they had any common sense, they should have known this would be the outcome. Somebody has to pay.

Re:Awful and stupid

[alexgieg]

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.

Why? Other phone makers might go for any store, from Google's own to Samsung's to Amazon's to F-Droid. That kind of forced competition is good. It encourages app developers to actually provide their apps in multiple stores, thus reducing the need for Google's.

And if users are worried about losing their app investment if they change stores, well, just give preference to apps that allow the pro version of their apps to be activated irrespective of the store they were bought in. For example, by providing a key screen with a code that can be copied and applied to the free version downloaded from another store to turn it into the pro one, or something along those lines.

Nothing is really being lost with this change.