Google faces EU antitrust fine over Android case
reuters.com
reuters.com
> In their Statement of Objections, the European Commission accused Google of the breach of EU antitrust rules in three ways:
> - by requiring mobile manufacturers to pre-install Google Search and Google 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;
> - by preventing manufacturers from selling smart mobile devices running on competing operating systems based on the Android open source code;
> - by giving financial incentives to manufacturers and mobile network operators on condition that they exclusively pre-install Google Search on their devices.
It's like 1998 all over again.
It's patently unfair for Google the invest in most of the R&D got everything Android and not even expect a return.
Both are bundling other products with it, that's the problem.
> - by preventing manufacturers from selling smart mobile devices running on competing operating systems based on the Android open source code;
Google's abdroid has 0% penetration in China
And we have seen the same happen with Apples bookstore. They obviously weren't a monopoly in the past, then or now, but they started drawing up contracts with multiple companies that were meant to be competitors and facilitating collusion between them. That is always an antitrust violation.
In much of Europe, Android is the only choice.
Another commenter said it seems to be that Apple just doesn't have enough market share for anti-trust rules to kick in, which makes sense but also seems unsatisfying. A market dominating company being anti-consumer doesn't seem any worse than a smaller competitor being very anti-consumer, especially when that smaller competitor seems to be making much more money from their practices.
So many times Android is the only option given budget options.
Windows Phone used to be the alternative and was about 10% when Microsoft killed it.
Apple can enforce or restrict whatever software they want on their own hardware. It's not even close to the same thing.
Google - Allows any hardware manufacturer to use their OS, and you can install any application you want.
And yet the EU is going after Google?
You can only abuse your dominant position if you have a dominant position, and Apple does not have one.
AOSP by itself is pretty useless because it can't run any of the apps the public is interested in.
Google will threaten to cancel your Play Services license if you ship services (that have nothing to do with android) competing with them. Classic case of harming competition by product tying IMHO.
Your options are to install Windows on every box, to install it on none (not really an option for big OEMs), or to be at a cost disadvantage to your competitors. In practice, it was "install Windows or lose a big chunk of your business".
People want Android with Google Play store. Google won’t let you do that without restrictions the EU says are anticompetitive.
That isn't that far away from Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. v. Intel Corp. over Intel's exclusivity contracts.
MS had effectively the same rule too, didn’t they? Wasn’t that (one of) the reasons we didn’t see Linux as even a BTO option for the longest time?
Until 1994: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/microsofts-1994-consent...
Note that the MS one was different: OEMs paid license costs based on computers shipped (with/without Windows), whereas Google requires complete exclusivity if you ship one device with Google Play Store.
Thanks.
They’ve been pretty successful in the tablet market.
But go into anywhere that sells phones. Carrier store, Best Buy, Walmart, whatever. Find a single Android phone that DOESN’T have google services on it. I’d be surprised if you can.
People want Android. And by Android they largely mean the Google Play Store and related services.
“It’s an Android phone, but none of the apps you see advertised are available for it!” No normal user is going to be happy with AOSP.
Then it's a choice on the part of manufacturers, not an obligation. Look at Amazon: they decide to do without.
I think it's noteworthy that the only counterexample you can find is a tech behemoth with an even larger market cap than Google. If this was a person with an analogous scenario to be "successful", aka put food on the table, this would clearly be negotiating under duress.
I would argue Kindles are largely successful because they don't compete with proprietary Android in any appreciable metric: Google-flavored Android barely even attempts to compete in the tablet market, and Kindles are e-readers first, and tablets second.
The same analogy can be drawn from Microsoft and the desktop OS market in the 90s/00s. They had a monopoly Ewen though they didn't sell computers directly. They still strong-armed manufacturers, like Google is doing today.
any source for that?
https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/03/27/google-confirms-blo...
https://www.androidpolice.com/2017/10/04/google-announces-ma...
Also, you know, the article here and any evidence the EU produces against Google...
Though the sign of a true monopoly would be issues in trying to cancel the deal. Which is way easier with Android compared to many examples.
I’ve never heard that before as a definition and doubt it would stand up in a court.
And if we're looking at e.g. "tablets", I wouldn't be surprised if they had something like 90% of the market, in some countries.
It's funny how Apple is simultaneously depicted "non-dominant player" and "the only mobile platform where you can make money", sometimes by the same people.
Apple has 100% market share in the iOS market. Due to that fact they’ve got exclusive control over a significant percentage of the population - consider that customers cannot install another OS on the hardware they’ve bought and they cannot move their iOS apps on another Android phone either.
To make an analogy consider that you’d complain about your local electricity provider having a monopoly and I’d tell you that you can always move to another city or country, there, problem solved, it was your fault for staying there.
And Linux has 100% market share in the desktop Linux market. But it probably doesn't count as a monopoly.
I do believe the significant market share of Apple smartphones is an issue, but as far as I know they haven't managed to make it a monopoly yet.
Hard to know since Amazon doesn’t release sales numbers.
Either way Apple isn’t doing anything to shut down tablet competitors other than making a great product at a price people seem to be willing to pay. There aren’t tons of lawsuits or requirements that retailers can’t sell competing devices.
For example, Apple only has 10-40%[1] of the smartphone market (i.e. market share), but they capture north of 80%[2] of the physical device sale profits. There have even been years where they captured more than 100% of the profits[3]..
The same goes for the app store: iOS owners are often more likely to pay for apps, but Android developers make up this difference by including ads and tracking, which isn't 'consumer spend' but still makes money.
[1] depends on who you ask
[2] https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/04/17/apple-grabs-86-of...
[3] https://www.macrumors.com/2016/11/04/apple-smartphone-profit...
What I'd like Google to be investigated for in this Android case, and I don't think it was, is how the company bans virtually all forms of ad-blocking from the Play Store.
Adblockers are not illegal (quite the contrary), but they are a business conflict for Google. Given that Android is found to be a monopoly, Google should be much more restricted in how it decides to cut apps off from the Play Store, especially if those apps are a "problem" for its main business (just like VOIP apps once were for carriers, etc).
Google on the other hand clearly has the largest market share for phone OSes and uses that share to push other products.
Apple has a monopoly on its business model, and on the willingness to eliminate legacy hardware mechanisms. Good luck finding a legal case for an abuse of either of those.
Always interesting to see the arguments people come up with on the internet to justify their position on some other issue.
You're now implying all manufacturers are abusers of their own monopoly.
Xbox games only runs on Xbox, MS should be charged the same way as Apple here.
Sony for Playstation.
Nintendo for Wii.
Etc.
Apple created iOS, just as MS, Sony and other companies. They have the ultimate control over it.
iOS is NOT a public platform nor does it belong to be people. People have no entitlement to anything from Apple in this case. You don't like it, just don't buy it.
Android is an open system, thus where the anti-trust starts to kick in quicker for Google than other companies because Google is demanding something that they have no ownership of. Forcing Android OEMs to use Google services in order to use some parts of Android that supposed to be available to everyone?
I didn’t mean for it to sound violently but maybe I shouldn’t reply on HN too early in the morning.
I wish I could delete my post after a few hours.
The fact that Google forces manufacturers into this arrangement is exactly what makes it illegal. If Google was just selling Pixel phones with Google software, nobody would bat an eye.
Google publishes the stripped down version of Android because the original open source license demands it. It also bend over backwards to make that version as out of date and useless as possible, and as a result, non-Google Android clones make up a negligible part of the market. The official version of Android is tightly licensed, with a proeminent Google controlled app store that the hardware manufacturer cannot override etc.
So in reality, they are doing the same thing as Apple. But I believe you are correct, Apple too should be investigated for the way it runs its app store.
>The EU competition enforcer will also tell Google to stop its anti-competitive practices such as licensing deals which prevent smartphone makers from promoting alternatives to apps such as Google Search and Maps
Apple is not force anything on smartphone makers because they're the maker, so that's fine I guess.
This case seems similar to the one that almost split Microsoft when they forced PC makers to not bundle Netscape.
Because that model was a costly mistake from IBM’s perspective, which they tried (and failed) to crush as soon as they realized what was happening (and later, by promoting a new proprietary architecture with the PS/2).
No one, on the supplier side, wants to repeat that model.
So it wouldn’t even prevent this problem as the OP proposes.
So while I'm happy to be able to run LineageOS on my phone (with GApps installed, for the record) and would prefer it if manufacturers were able to pre-install Firefox, I'm also worried that we may discover the cure to be worse than the disease.
Google wasn't trying to dominate phones or tablets. They were trying to prevent Microsoft dominance in those platforms, because they expected that if Microsoft got dominance there, it would use it to drive all the mobile searches to Bing.
This is in contrast to the old Microsoft that required payments of about $40 for their OS license, and they further restricted browser choice etc. Google is nothing like that, the Android framework and underlying OS is fully open source. There exist non Google forks of Android, Amazon being the most famous.
Then there's the whole worshipping of Apple - the most evil, monopolistic company on the planet. Apple's only recourse seems to be their ~17% hardware market share. Though, that's not really the lens to use. When considering the 'mobile paid apps' market, their position immediately moves into Monopoly territory, and in that segment that fuck with the developers and consumers in every way possible.
Google should simply offer a choice - install whatever competitor's service, but license Android for $30. Like Microsoft does and gets away with. Would that seem fair to you? Because that chat eventually gets passed on to the end user.
Also, I realized I’ve seen you a lot in these sorts of threads posting fanatically pro-Google stuff, what’s with that?
I guess Google is a lot less popular now compared to like two years ago.
That was a common sentiment amongst Americans.
As a European, you don't really think "yeah, screw those American monopolies... but I like the European ones"
They're so far behind in the EU, the US would have to stop all technological progress for at least a decade to allow them to partially catch up. When Britain exits the EU, the EU GDP per capita will nearly be 50% lower than the US. Realistically they have no means to keep up with the US over time, they simply don't have the financial capability to do it, I almost sympathize with their desperation.
The US is booming, it'll add a trillion dollars to its GDP this year alone. Meanwhile half the EU is a perpetual rolling economic disaster still, a decade after the great recession began. Populists keep gaining more and more traction in EU countries, with Italy looking like it might be the next to leave the EU. It really is hard to blame the EU leadership for trying to find some way to extract value from the US economic dominion, given how weak the EU outlook is.
Post history is relevant to assess if the person you're talking to has a very strongly set view on an extremely complex matter. If they do, that suggests that the reasons for the person spending time defending that view might not be motivated by exploration of ideas, but by evangelization of their view.
I think having an estimation of the person's motivation is important because conversations with people motivated by exploration of ideas can make for interesting, insightful and educational conversation, whereas the ones movitated by evangelization tend to be reduced to the same catchy but superficial arguments that they've learned over the years.
Strange, perhaps we have different motivations for debating? My goal is generally to learn and understand why someone would think a certain way in contrast with my own way of thinking. Their motivations for the exchange are irrelevant to this, if at the end of it they agree with me that's nice but it's not the objective. Personally my favorite occasions are when I'm proven to be wrong.
> I think having an estimation of the person's motivation is important because conversations with people motivated by exploration of ideas can make for interesting, insightful and educational conversation, whereas the ones motivated by evangelization tend to be reduced to the same catchy but superficial arguments that they've learned over the years.
This is the part I'm finding confusing, the entire paragraph feels very hypocritical. How can you claim to be open to ideas while simultaneously dismissing the ones you deem unworthy? Is it that your own motivations don't matter but the ones you choose to speak to do? Superficial arguments don't matter when the goal is to understand the reason THEY believe something. If you believe you have heard it all before and choose not to spend your time on it then that's one thing, but you purposefully injected yourself into a discussion without adding anything other than a snarky comment that implied another poster was unworthy of being spoken to due to their more polarized views. How can you justify this?
This is looking less and less certain every day, not helped by the fact that the government has absolutely no idea what it wants or how to achieve it while increasing numbers of people point out that the "no deal" option results in total chaos: food shortages within a week etc.
I have no strong opinion either way. But I was wondering if your belief isn't motivated more by your familiarity (with those scenarios) than anything else.
Personally I would note that in those examples you mentioned you have freedom of movement, which to me seems isn't a politically unacceptable solution in the UK.
Yeah, I am familiar with those scenarios, which kind of allow those countries to benefit from EU agreements without losing too much of their independence, in comparison with other European countries.
I am also regularly in the UK, and for many people it wasn't clear what being outside EU meant regarding European companies with HQ in UK.
Having such agreements would allow a kind of win-win situation, leaving EU while allowing many of those businesses to stay in UK.
That is just a personal opinion, in any case I don't have any vote in UK matters.
I agree that the government doesn't know how to achieve anything positive out of the situation...
Maybe it can be done unilaterally too.
Even if that weren't the case, I think it'd theoretically be possible for EU and UK to have an exit agreement retaining full cooperation, the UK leaving and immediately applying for membership again. That process could be quick, if everyone (which in this case would involve all member states) agrees about it... but could also be a point where some governments might try to strip the UK of privileges from it's current membership.
Or all antitrust cases are not identical on their merits.
Really think the EU risks getting a worse result with this type of thing.
You really think that's going to be somehow treated differently?
MSFT has struck deals with OEMs in the past where windows 8.1 was free for OEMs if Bing was the default search engine, and $10 otherwise (for tablets). You could argue they were not a Monopoly on tablets, but it's one indicator.
Another is the recent Google Shopping fight; the "resolution" to that has been that companies can bid to display their own complete slate of shopping results and Google Shopping now has separate accounting and must run as a profitable business unit. Google is still taking most of the ad traffic since it can afford to bid more than the people who brought the original complaint, but it does provide a way for entities to be there if they have a business not predicated on free traffic from commercial search queries.
It's not totally clear that this will be accepted, but if it is, then you could imagine a similar structural separation argument being used where Search & Android have separate accounting, Android charges $10 and Google pays phone makers $10 (the same way they pay Apple). While leaving a path for the status quo, this would let anyone building a search engine or mobile OS not have to build both at once to provide a competing alternative.
There is almost 2 billion Android phones sold a year. So just a $1 is a lot of money and then almost all goes to the bottom line.
Part of the problem is Google giving away stuff for free and being different. Instead just become more traditional and charge people for things.
I hate it as love how much Google gives back but it is clearly hurting them to give away stuff for free.
I hate it but they should just charge for things instead of giving away. Act more like a typical tech company.
They give away more IP than any other company I am aware of. But they do not get any benefit and get hammered constantly.
Just charge for things and end the open source and problem solved. Look at them giving away Android that is used on majority of Amazon hardware yet Amazon has banned all companies on their market place from selling Google competitive products.
That is just insane. They created SPDY and gave it away to the standards committee. Who then changed it to create http2 and they had to go back and change their code with additional cost.
The normal way is when you own the client and server you just use your own way to do things and use as a competitive advantage.
Borg was a huge competitive advantage and they just give away K8s. Which is just silly.
VP8 and VP9 they not only give it away but also even offer patent infringement protection to anyone that uses it. That is just insane.
It is great because the MPEG-LA was extorting money with license fees and Google giving away caused VP8 ended that.
But Google giving away just gets them hammered anyway and get no good will from doing it.
I have zero idea why Google continues to give so many things away for free and not just charge.
So charge per phone and then credit them if they include the Google services.
That's unlikely to change much if they don't get rid of the criticized policies at the same time. The problem is not that they charge for inclusion of Google services!
Google has made it so people that can't afford to get an iPhone so they can get a smartphone.
They have helped make it so smartphone technology is not only for the rich.
Almost 2 billion Android devices are sold a year so does not take a couple of bucks for it to end up being a ton of money. Pretty much all going to the bottom line.
Either way people will still use Google services.
MS owns desktop yet most use Google search and not Bing.
Even browsers which is a hassle as you have to down load Chrome but still most use Chrome which has about 12x the market share of Edge.
"Firefox dropped below the 10% share value on Netmarketshare"
https://www.ghacks.net/2018/06/04/firefox-dropped-below-the-...
Google has over 5x of iE.
In the end it is just the Google offerings are better.
Really think it is a bad idea to penalize companies just because they offer better products.
Even a $1 per Android phone would get them almost $2B in revenues that goes almost entirely to the bottom line.
Windows on mobile has been gone too long to make a comeback.
It is hard to support two platforms, Android and iOS and doing a third is just too much.
Google just charges and then credits back when use their stuff.
These are the real anti-trust cases.