Sounds a lot how Microsoft abused licensing agreements with OEMs to discourage them from selling PCs not bundled with Windows.
Also, two wrongs don't make a right. Microsoft getting off way too easy does not mean that Google should get off easy, too.
There are lots of cheap Chinese Android phones simply filled with malware from the factory.
If Google allowed phone makers to ship Android forks, this whole problem would become a lot worse. I think this Google policy is actually pro-consumer, and the EU is wrong on this point.
No, I don’t think that reducing choice and locking them in Google’s ecosystem is pro-consumer, even if done for the right reasons.
Let’s remember that Android was welcomed by many of us as a free (as in freedom) alternative to iOS.
If you want a locked-down, secure and polished OS, then Apple’s iOS is far better at this game. The only reason why Android is dominating the market right now is because it gave freedom to users and freedom to phone makers. And Google dialing that freedom down after becoming so popular is anti-competitive.
It’s essentially a bait and switch, which is why I believe Google deserves that fine.
I would say that the biggest reason it's dominating is because it's cheap. For most people I've talked to, they don't like Android, but prefer to pay 20% of the cost of an iPhone.
Seems like you're projecting your own expectations onto what Google has really been selling all along. Google doesn't advertise Android as "free as in freedom." OEMs comply with their conditions. It's how it works.
Andy Rubin in 2010 speaking on how open Android is:
>the definition of open: "mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make"
And as far as “free as in freedom” goes, the US law agrees with me via “estoppel”.
(And it's not just an abstract "what if I want to shoot my own foot off" issue. Consider e.g. sandboxing, which by its very nature kills interoperability. In a non-sandboxed environment, you can write code that forces two applications to interoperate, whether their authors like it or not. In a sandboxed environment, you're limited to what vendors allow you.)
I kind of agree with them, actually.
You'd just have to give several huge, clear warnings of what that means before allowing it.
And, by the way, security? Come on, if they really cared about the security/privacy of their users the permissions' systems would not be made of those huge blankets that are more like websites' cookie banners than real useable security controls.
Besides the fine maybe Google should also be forcing existing installs to provide a choice?
There may or may not be overlap on many of these but there's never a 1:1 relationship between any of them.
It's crazy to say a product only succeeded because Google pushed it hard. Google (and Microsoft, Yahoo, etc) has a LONG list of failed products they pushed hard (Wave, Google Plus, etc).
Did it play a role? Sure. But prominent advertising is not the same as forcing hardware manufacturers to pre-install software. Nor does it suddenly make customers want a shitty product they wouldn't otherwise use.
Firefox and IE were riddled with code debt issues so they couldn’t move fast.
Chrome was a great example of software written by a company with resources to dominate a huge market segment relatively quickly. I’m guessing Chrome earned Sundar Picchai a lot of good karma within Google to later become CEO.
For instance, by default, the installer for AVG's free antivirus program would install Google Chrome and make it the default browser.
It's only a problem when you squeeze out competition by doing exclusive contracts with all major distributors in a particular distribution channel.
However, the point was that Chrome didn't mysteriously gain market share solely based on some sort of technical superiority.
Google paid to gain market share with the sorts of clueless users who click next during install wizards without reading anything.
Although, it helps to remember that in the EU, you don't need nearly as big a market share before their competition law kicks in and places restrictions on your behavior, so things that you can still get away with in the US can be quite illegal in the EU.
Chrome's quality was a necessary, but probably not sufficient condition for it to gain the market traction that it did.
Firefox has rapidly improved since it's inception and was rapidly stealing IE market share prior to Chrome.
Had Chrome not been rammed down people's throats then we might have a more even landscape than we do today.
Plus email-SPAM(!!!) about installing Chrome when you signed in to your Google-account on a new computer using a non-Chrome browser.
It also used dubious wording: “You need to upgrade your browser. Click here”
And paying to have it bundled as a drive-by installation with other software.
And Chrome-only websites. And the list just goes on and on.
It was spyware tactics + SPAM all over the place. And the sheer amount of it was mind-blowing.
Even technical people who explicitly didn’t want Chrome had a hard time avoiding it. Imagine the effect on regular, non-technical users.
Saying it was all down to technical merit is just appoligist and delusional.
With Chrome’s dominance and semi-monoculture undeniably in place, Google is now using that position to force new things, like subverting open web-standards with DRM.
I can’t believe people are so non-chalantly allowing this to happen.
When doing PC support for layusers, I've found that: Most people don't know what Chrome is, and don't know the difference between it, Edge, IE, and the malicious Chromium fork they have installed on their PCs. (Side note: May the soulless individuals behind the "WebDiscover Browser" suffer a life of misery and despair as punishment for their crimes.) They end up with Chrome (or a malicious fork thereof) due to a bundle installer.
IT actually exists to help ensure people can do their job, and do their job faster. As a general goal, I like to learn about people's business processes for the exact purpose of seeing how our IT environment can be improved to expedite their work.
And having five browsers on a PC doesn't make it easier for end users. I have no problem dealing with five browsers, but I get a lot of complaints from people when they open link A in browser B and link C in browser D and don't understand why things don't work.
You may have experienced poor IT departments in the past, or thought you experienced poor IT departments because you didn't understand the other considerations in play, but that's hardly an excuse to assume any given IT choice is some sort of attempt to prevent employees from doing their jobs.
That's a faulty assumption right there. Usually, people providing workers with their computers and software have limited idea what those workers actually need to work efficiently. This works out fine when workflows are defined so well a trained monkey could do the job, and fails miserably when the worker needs any sort of creative control over their workflow or work output (programmers, designers, all sorts of engineers and technicians, etc.). Most corporate work is probably closer to monkey level than to creative level, but enterprises love to do company-wide policy changes, making all work conform to lowest common denominator.
> You may have experienced poor IT departments in the past, or thought you experienced poor IT departments because you didn't understand the other considerations in play, but that's hardly an excuse to assume any given IT choice is some sort of attempt to prevent employees from doing their jobs.
I've experienced one competent IT department in my life, and their best quality was helping shield our programming team from policies like application whitelisting or limiting admin access, that they were forced to deploy company-wide. For other IT departments I dealt with, most of their actions were explainable if viewed through the lens of caring about the infrastructure to the extreme - that is, "if no one uses it, no one will break it" approach.
You accuse me of making a "faulty assumption" about my own environment, and then proceed to assume that you can speak for most/all IT environments.
When I state "if you need Chrome, we'll provide Chrome", that's true of my environment. It's also true of my environment, if we don't provide Chrome, and you find a way to install it yourself, you'd be violating policy, and barring the casual mistake of not knowing that, potentially referred to HR. Obviously, in the ideal "don't need to involve HR" case, we just make sure you can't install it.
Now, what isn't just true of my environment, but true of all environments, is that users installing random web browsers is incredibly dangerous, and something every IT department should be preventing if they own the hardware. I don't think that's even a controversial statement, I'm confused why it's being treated like one.
Software developers often didn’t bother testing or ensuring that their software would install (or even run properly) without admin rights.
Mechanics bring their own tools frequently but their employers don't try to repo their personal vehicles just because the mechanic used the same tools at home and at work
Even in a BYOD environment, an organization should be ensuring any devices granted access to resources are appropriately patched and secured.
It's a bit shady to make it 'automatically the default browser'. But that is a problem with the OS. An installer shouldn't be able to make that choice for the user.
Microsoft can never let the marketing people stop having control and ruining their products. They are trying to make it more useable and user friendlier, but it's funny seeing the push back within the product.
Windows 10 telemetry is a great example: They shot themselves in the foot PR-wise on an otherwise excellent operating system, chasing a pile of metadata that won't really be significantly more useful than what they get from people who voluntarily agree to be Windows Insiders. There isn't a good business case for preventing people from shutting off error reporting, and it's had a huge impact on mitigating all of their other efforts to repair their image.
It's a shame, really, because Windows 10 is a decent OS, and it fixed most of the issues with 8.
It doesn't matter how much goodwill a specific department might have, power struggle and department differences always end up impacting it.
I mean, you really could have said the same thing about IE 4 when it came out. It was actually better than Communicator at the time, which was a bloated, unfocused, mess of a browser.
It's hard to find news and reviews from 1997 to back me up, but here are a couple accounts I found recollecting their experiences with the browsers: https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Netscape-lose-ground-to-IE
Equally, IE was far superior to Netscape when it came out ;)
This is not to say Chrome is (now) the inferior browser but saying their marketing push has nothing to do with its market share is ignoring reality.
To this day Google is pushing their browser if you dare to use their services with Edge.
On the other hand, building "web" apps that only run on chrome, that was a shocker for me.
Wow, I wasn't aware of this. Do you recall any examples?
I don’t think we should dismis doing what customers want and try to find reasons for succes only from marketing.
With Chrome Google kind of repeated what they did with search.
I also wonder how they come up with the multi-billion dollar values? How does that massive amount of money actually help repair whatever "economical damage" that was inflicted by not having some sort of app pre-installed on a device?
Massive fines discourage monopolistic behavior, if nothing else.
The problem is businesses may take it as a signal that the EU is against foreign businesses rather than against monopolistic practices, in which case the thing being deterred is doing business in the EU rather than monopolistic practices. To show otherwise they would have to levy equally large fines against local businesses engaged in the same sort of practices, which they haven't and likely won't.
If they really wanted to signal discouragement of monopolistic behavior rather than a cash grab they would be ordering specific conduct rather than excessive fines. For example, if the issue is that they promoted Google Chrome in an unacceptable way, prohibit them from distributing Google Chrome in the EU for five years. And then do the same thing to Microsoft just to be even-handed, because they're still bundling their browser with Windows. And likewise with Apple and Safari.
Let everyone use Firefox for five years and see how much browser bundling happens after that.
And if that actually restores competition then you don't need a five billion dollar fine.
That's basic proportionality.
That is entirely tautological. It omits the reasoning under which that spectacular amount of irreparable damages have actually occurred to consumers.
"They have a lot of money and we would like to have that" is not a valid method of calculating damages.
the fine has been calculated on the basis of the value of Google's revenue from search advertising services on Android devices in the EEA.
In other words, Google had an unfair advantage for search on android devices and leveraged that into revenue. The fine is a percentage of that ill-gotten revenue.
There’s an official guideline for calculating damages when anticompetitive behavior is found: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=CELEX:52...
"They have a lot of money and we would like to have that."
The actual "damages" have nothing to do with their total revenue, only the revenue incident to the behavior in question, which is an independent value and not a percentage of total revenue.
For example, if they improve their search engine which causes more people to use it, it doesn't change the actual amount of damage from separate actions -- it may even reduce it by transitioning some of the defaulted users into users who would make an affirmative choice in their favor -- but it would have increased the amount of the fine when calculated as a percentage of revenue because it would have increased their total revenue.
If the revenue related to wrong doing is in the billions and the harm is in the thousands, attempting to prohibit the conduct instead of imposing a small tax and using the money to compensate the victims is obviously a large dead-weight economic loss.
You do understand that doing that would probably cost those companies (and everyone else) a lot more?
We only want a level playing field. Giving companies a real fine is just a way to make sure the board and the shareholders actually gets the message ;-)
It's punishment. If somebody wants it then somebody has a perverse incentive.
> You do understand that doing that would probably cost those companies (and everyone else) a lot more?
Exactly. You actually punish them, in the way directly contrary the the goal they were trying to achieve with their bad behavior, without suspiciously enriching yourselves in a way that calls your true motives into question.
> We only want a level playing field. Giving companies a real fine is just a way to make sure the board and the shareholders actually gets the message ;-)
But what message are they getting?
It's not as if there is a clear roadmap for how to avoid this sort of thing. Antitrust laws are super vague and prohibit a wide variety of common business practices, to make it effective to use them against powerful nefarious entities with many lawyers. The theory is that the government will only use them against bad actors. But if the government considers you a bad actor just because you're a foreign company, what are you supposed to do then?
Most foreign companies aren't considered bad actors.
We are talking about 1) the old Microsoft here - definitely a bad actor - getting rid of it seems to have been refreshing even for Microsoft shareholders.
- 2) Google, a company we many of us loved at some point but who might now be in need of some refreshing at least in some areas.
Google wasn't considered a bad actor until then they were.
> the old Microsoft here - definitely a bad actor - getting rid of it seems to have been refreshing even for Microsoft shareholders.
The old Microsoft deserved everything they got and then some. But even then, it would have been nice for the penalties to be more "actually effective in increasing competition in PC desktop operating systems" and less "suspiciously convenient transfer of large sums of money."
The alternative (where they are considered a bad actor before they were) seems a lot worse ;-)
I think EU might even have cut them a good slack here based on their previous status as good guys.
> and less "suspiciously convenient transfer of large sums of money."
In a EU perspective I think we'll find this doesn't matter much to them.
By creating an incentive for Google (and other corporations) not to do it again.
I am really glad that EU did this, been waiting years for this to happen. Other fines will surly come. You can’t eat and kill your competition too long before someone starts to sett the records straight.
A happy day for us consumers!