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Comment by JamesBaxter | Hacker News Reader

I'm not smart enough to know whether Google is breaking antitrust rules or not but if they are I don't see how Apple aren't too.

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The law which allows the EU to investigate Google’s alleged anti-competitive behaviour has the requirement of being between 2+ parties (i.e. Google and manufacturer), so that’s why Apple is exempt. I'm not sure if their dominant market share is actually a consideration, but it certainly gets the attention of the EU.

Because Apple builds its own phones and nobody else can use iOS. Google wouldn't be subject to this investigation if it didn't licence Android. If it built its own Nexus phones they would be in the same position Apple is. Instead it's in the position Microsoft was in the 90's.

So if Google were less open then they wouldn't have to deal with this?

Licencing an OS is being open? Because, remember, on (for example) a Samsung mobile only the Android frameworks and the kernel are open. The rest, including kernel drivers (SoC, etc), built-in apps, the Google frameworks and apps, etc are completely closed.

I think it's because things like Google Maps and Google Search are absolutely dominant in their industry and they try to use default Android apps (forced on manufacturers via the Play Store contract) to try to break into additional industries (like Google+, Photos, etc).

The idea being that forcing these additional apps, just to get Play Store is anti-competitive. I'm not sure I'd agree, but there's an argument to be had at least.

It's possible Apple could be too, but they've not used this to try to break into as many industries as Google has AFAIK.

Apple doesn't have a dominant market position, especially in the EU.

What about the aspect where Google prevents Samsung from selling any phone based on AOSP that wouldn't be Android (tm) (i.e. Google ecosystem)? Can you explain how you relate this to the Apple ecosystem?

The main beef with Google is all or nothing for ALL phones produced by manufacturer.

If you want Google Android on one phone you can't ship another model with AOSP version.

There's a gray area there: While you surely will not be allowed to ship a phone with Yandex ecosystem and a phone with a Google ecosystem, you can probably get away with AOSP embedded in a washing machine or something like that. The "anti-fragmentation" agreement is enforced by Google retaining a final sign-off on the production version of products with the Google logo.

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