EU wants Google to stop anti-competitive Android practices, fine expected
uk.reuters.com
uk.reuters.com
All apps must come from the Apple App Store. No 3rd party allowed.
Problem solved it would seem. Even so, as you mentioned you can get other browsers.
http://www.macworld.co.uk/feature/iosapps/best-iphone-web-br...
There's really no need to make assumptions about my technical capabilities from 6 words and ask me to stop commenting based on those assumptions. That character is unbecoming for this community.
There are still various ways in which third-party browsers are penalized, such as links from other applications being hardwired to open in Safari.
People use Google because most people use the default, and Google pays to be the default.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-22/google-pai...
This reads very much like the EU vs. MS for the exact same reasons.
I suspect the problem is that there's no "I'll pay you, but not include the software" option for Android, but couldn't it be applied to any FLOSS as in "there's no option to pay you, but not contribute back" in the case of the GPL or even "there's not an option to not buy a Mac with MacOS", or something like that?
EDIT: If the problem is using Android's dominant position to bundle Google Search, then I get the similarities to the MS lawsuit, the difference being that people actually want to use it, which is why I think Google should be confident about including a "Bing Search" or "Google Search" option, as 99.99% of people would go with Google, since in Google's case, Search is actually a product people want to use when compared to the alternatives, whereas Explorer wasn't in the MS case.
But couldn't this then also be extended to Chrome and Search on the desktop? i.e. Google used its dominant position in search to push Chrome, (try visiting google.com with Safari or Firefox, notice the top-right Chrome banner?) and once they got to a dominant position with Chrome, they used it to further the dominance of Search, by it being default in Chrome etc.
https://publicpolicy.googleblog.com/2009/02/browsers-powered...
"To understand our position in more detail, it helps to start with the assertion that open systems win."
https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/meaning-of-open.html
That's the answer, full stop. Like it or not, the rules are different for you when you have the majority of market share, and this has been true in both the EU and the US despite their different approaches to antitrust regulation.
The argument hinges on Google not owning or operating Android. AOSP has been a dead dream for a while now due to carriers locking down phones and Google needing to circle the wagons.
As you mention, AOSP alone does not give you much Android and Google is likely to dictate all kinds of terms to use the Play services, Play Store, etc. So, the question is indeed does AOSP give enough to argue that Google does not fully control the Android market.
Personally, I am not sure this is the most problematic aspect of Android though. If we assume for a moment that Android is a near-monopoly in the EU, the more troubling aspect is that people can only choose between having no smartphone (which is becoming harder) or letting Google suck all kinds of data out of them. In other words, only when you are rich enough, you can afford not to let a company suck up a lot of your private data.
There are still a couple of european countries where iOS devices sell extremely poorly. I am not sure if this is because of an absence of subsidies or another reason.
Even if Android is the only option, you can always choose to refuse all data sharing from google, you are not forced to create a google account or to use google play.
Admittedly, it makes things harder for a neophyte.
That's only in the US.
Let's be honest here, AOSP is a dead dream because porting and maintaining AOSP for a device is kinda complicated. Many people do it for free, but you can't rely on that.
GPS includes stuff like location services, Firebase, Chromecast, analytics, Google account authentication, Google Drive APIs, all the game stuff, Android Pay, etc.
Or which things can monopolistic companies do that non-monopolistic companies can't do? Can or do Apple do those things?
Which practices a monopolistic company can do, but is not allowed to, is written clearly in the article: Forcing/Paying other companies to pre-install its proprietary apps. A non-monopolistic company is allowed to do that.
My local corner shop has a market share of 100% of the places I can buy things if I walk 30 seconds but that's hardly relevant when I can drive 10-15 minutes and have 4 different supermarkets at my disposal.
That's not relevant in the phone market, where you're stuck with a specific platform once you've made your initial phone purchase. You can't use it with applications from other platforms, and switching platforms means you need to purchase all the stuff you're using all over again.
Although usually when I hear people misuse antitrust concepts on tech forums, they're not trying to understand complicated legal conflicts, rather they're grasping at straws to use as ammunition in dumb flamewars about platforms/companies/etc. that they don't like.
I guess that the issue is that I am not as much against Google using Android to distribute its services (I would be using most of them anyway and those that I don't use (newsstand, spaces, ..) can be replaced anyway) but against being unable to distribute/install whatever software I want on a general purpose computing device.
And AFAIK, sadly there is no law governing this.
There are no laws against closed products per se.
Antitrust regulations apply only for products with dominant market share (Android has 87.6% market share 2016Q2 according to IDC).
Maybe some more strict rules would be better? Like: any OS on sell in UE can not prohibit installing third party software and tinkering with the hardware, and the user should be asked about pre-installed software on the first launch. Something like that. We got browser choice screen in Windows for a while, and it was good. But it didn't affect iOS, nor Windows 10, nor Android.
Android is both open source and expensive to develop. It seems like a reasonable compromise to me, especially as Google keeps the fragmentation problem somewhat under control this way.
The single highest installed version according to Google is 3 major versions behind and 3 years old.
Give me a fragmented Android any day, 1 build will run across all OEMs 99.9% of the time, rather than 15%
Google clearly has platform power here, but targeting the payments is such an odd one to me. I can't believe phone manufacturers will be happy about this either since competing search engines probably won't pay them as much in light of this.
Microsoft has little market share.
Btw, can you point towards Yahoo paying for crapware to be installed?
It seems like they are participating in a competitive marketplace by offering to pay and being awarded the coveted spot as an equal participant rather than using their position as the upstream to force their way in.
Certainly they have a valuable product and deep pockets making them better able to compete here, but it doesn't seem to exclude anyone from competing on the same field.
I suggest you look up the Android MADA agreement (the ones on the Internet are from 2011), and then consider that by all rumor, they've gotten worse since then.
Maybe the biggest problem is the fact that these agreements are secret, and not subject to public review. I doubt Android's support would be so widespread if the public knew about these contracts from the start.
This is yet another bizarre ruling by the EU - they're saying that a far more proprietary, less competition friendly approach (Apple) is OK, but you can literally give an entire OS away as open source and it's illegal? I don't think tech firms can win here. Nothing they do will ever appease the EU.
Anti-competitive actions are anti-competitive even if you're paying somebody to help you, even if you make a FOSS operating system, and even if Apple engage in their own anti-competitive activities.
(1) = Go to the download page for adobe flash or adobe reader for example and they have preselected the optional download of google chrome.
My read is that Google leverages its dominance in the Android app store market to protect its search business by some sort of deal that makes manufacturers install both. If I understand correctly, the problem is that, say, Bing may match the price Google is paying a manufacturer for search, but Google may then make the manufacturer pay for the Play Store somehow.
Though the article is too vague to be sure.
Edit: Disclosure, I use both major platforms.
(Also, I want to write $14.5G like I would $14.5M or $14.5k, but I don't think it would be understood very well)
"EU antitrust regulators plan to order Alphabet's (GOOGL.O) Google to stop paying financial incentives to smartphone makers to pre-install Google Search exclusively on their devices and warned the company of a large fine, an EU document showed."
Microsoft got nailed because they were popular, not because they forced people to not use Netscape. Now, everyone includes a default browser, and no one sues Apple over forcing all iOS users to use Safari no matter what, even "alternative browsers" must use Safari for their HTML canvas underneath.
It's hard to deny that there's a stinking parallel to Microsoft paying PC manufacturers to bundle IE and exclude other browsers, which resulted in the famous anti-trust suit.
http://variety.com/2016/digital/news/google-home-amazon-echo...
Its is however illegal, when a company uses its monopoly power, to gain an additional monopoly. In this case google using its 3. Party smarthphone os monopoly, to gain/reinforce an additonal monopoly on search and services.
Here's one of the most relevant perspectives on Google's Android I've read, titled Google's Iron Grip on Android: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on-...
Secondly, it would be nice if there were more smartphone OS choices, like Jolla, that could prosper alongside the two main choices.
But Google doesn't deserve to get fined for anti-competitive practices. Amazon's mobile OS drafts off of Google's work on AOSP, and nobody is whining about that. Yandex announced they would do something similar. Chinese OEMs have long had their own app stores on Android. In many ways Android is the basis for open competition in mobile OSs.
If you want something other than the Google ecosystem, you can have it on an Android OS with all the latest OS technologies. But you have to have your own credible ecosystem and customer base for it. I'm not sure what the EU wants that hasn't already been demonstrated can be done in the US, Russia, and China.
Honestly, they don't deserve a fine, because they can afford it, and it's no big deal. Google needs to be forcibly broken up into smaller parts, and banned from colluding with each other. It's time to do to El Goog what the US did to Ma Bell.
But that's not a high barrier. Amazon's tablets are made by some CM/ODM who most likely manufactures Android devices for a number of OEMs. Yandex could have private label phones much the same way. Or they could get phones from China OEMs that don't care about making Google-logo devices.
The Amazon Fire phone was as much a turkey as Echo is a hit. It wasn't Google's fault.
As for China, Google does operate there now, and Lenovo sells Google-logo Androids in China. But the non-Google ecosystems continue.
As far as the Echo... Google hasn't even released Google Home yet, and they're already telling manufacturers they're going to have to choose between supporting Alexa and supporting Google Home.
If China has Google now, it's still not a huge problem: Lenovo is only a small part of the market share there, and most importantly: All of the apps popular in China are already available in other stores. Maybe we should ban the Play Store for a few years in the US until the same situation happens here?
I would, however, agree that it is petty, pointless, and possibly counterproductive for Google not to put apps that use the Google ecosystem on Amazon's app store.
As far as what the Fire phone was missing? I'd say maps and navigation. They should have gotten HERE on board at launch.
It works like traffic law, you receive a fine and if you disagree then you can go to court.
- be available on other app stores,
- apps wouldn't require Google Play Services?
Most manufacturers would still pre-load it, those who don't no longer have a cost disadvantage.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.adblockplu...
I don't use Android (nor any Google product besides search) but I'm pretty sure you can get ad blockers on Android.
This would include an ad blocker that blocks ads in, say, a free game, or the built in Chrome browser.
The common workaround was to run connections through a VPN and your ad blocking happens there. I'm not sure if they started cracking down on that as well.
Having apps that modify other apps can certainly be desired behavior, but it's clear why there would be legitimate concerns about customer security in allowing apps that can do so.
1. Create a browser with ad blocking builtin or possible with addons (like Firefox).
2. Create a local proxy that blocks ads, and make the user configure it as the system proxy.
3. Require root privileges and do whatever you want (2, or maybe change /etc/hosts, like AdAway does). Yes, there are tons of apps in the Play Store that only work with root. Google never cared much about them.
On iOS I use Focus and Safari and that has been pretty good for me. Obviously that's not something that would work on Android.
And you can still get them on Android, but not via the Play Store. You have to go through third-party stores such as F-Droid, Aptoide or Amazon (or just directly download the installer-file off of a webpage).
http://www.androidpolice.com/2013/03/13/breaking-google-has-...
The EU regulators view the OS and Google apps as two seperate spheres.
On the one hand you wonder whether Google will get in a huff and close AOSP (The Android Open Source Project) just to work with a few commercial vendors. They can leave the complainants to work together on an fork where they can do what they wish.
Or, which I hope they would do by now, actually run AOSP like a true open source project.
In the latter case I think the strategy that they've used so far "was" the right one (open source but not open for debate), however Android is now mature enough that I think developing a true open source community would benefit it.
Africa, China and India are doing it.
Nothing prevents vendors from selling devices without the Play store, and some devices like Samsung ones come with their own App Store in addition to Google Play.
Nokia also had a close store.
Also you can side load apps on android devices without rooting them.
Basically, what Google did gradually over the last few years, is fork Android. The APIs developers are encouraged to build their apps on are all proprietary, to ensure that their apps are also tied to the Google ecosystem.
You seem confused. The free market is that where monopolies don't bully to limit choice (and thus freedom).
>Google to stop paying financial incentives to smartphone makers to pre-install Google Search
Is Firefox bullying other search engines by having a default search engine on their browser?
The only thing limiting choice and freedom is the EU decision.
Firefox is not a monopoly, so that's a moot point.