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Comment by jackconnor | Hacker News Reader

Well, that seems to have completely backfired on the EU. I guess there are at least a few companies that will be happy to use Android without Google, but my guess is for the rest this is just more bottom line money out of their pocket going straight to Google. Was this what they were going for?

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> Well, that seems to have completely backfired on the EU.

I'm not sure how you arrived at this conclusion. This seems rational to me, and in line with the antitrust decision as the bundling of apps isn't any more mandatory for manufacturers.

I'm saying the premise as a whole backfired. I assume the end goal was to benefit end consumers. Now, end consumers will have to pay more for something that was previously free, since my gut says that most device companies will choose to pay the licensing agreement and just pass the costs along by increasing the sticker price.

If there's an actual cost to the items it now means other providers could actually compete, which is the goal. It would now be possible to sell cheaper than Google if you can make something the consumer wants at a lower cost. Competition benefits consumers.

More importantly was that Google were doing various forced things (like requiring installing all Google things on all devices, heavily limiting possible competition). Ending that is important, even if it shifts costs around.

Edit - a simple way of viewing this is if this makes more money for Google, why weren't they doing it anyway? If not, can it really be costing consumers more?

> I assume the end goal was to benefit end consumers

I wouldn't assume this. In simple terms, surely they realized punitive measures on a something consumers choose will harm the chooser. They might have some idealistic long-term consumer benefit goal in mind (e.g. magically growing competitors, magic corporate altruism, etc), but it is divorced from reality.

It's going to benefit consumers in the long run because manufacturers have more freedom. If MS gives away Bing and Edge, then manufacturers probably won't pay for Chrome and Google search.

EU antitrust legislation isn't about the end user (as discussed elsewhere in the thread) so much as about keeping fair market conditions. The EU formed as a common market of multiple old nations with country-specific state monopolies and rules for telecommunication, public transport, alcohol, tobacco, an other things. Regulating this common market has been simply a prerequisite for getting countries to evolve state monopolies into publicly traded companies.

It could free space for possible Google "rivals". Russian Yandex for example has its own store for Android, plus alternatives for other Google products. But Google put a spoke into its wheels so Yandex sued them. Don't know the results though.

>Well, that seems to have completely backfired on the EU.

Once you are found guilty, you aren't operating in a vacuum anymore. We have yet to see what sorts of remedies the EU may require of Google if they do not agree with Google's decisions on how to resolve the situation.

For instance, Microsoft was forced to open up its Client/Server protocols as part of their antitrust action.

>Microsoft Wednesday attacked the most contentious part of the European Commission's 2004 antitrust ruling against it -- the decision to force the company to share details of server source code.

>The 2004 ruling ordered the company to open up source code for server communications protocols to rivals, in order to allow them to build server programs that work as smoothly with Windows as Microsoft's own software.

https://www.networkworld.com/article/2311190/software/ms-ant...

I have a feeling the kickback from Chrome will exactly equal the cost of the Play Store so nobody will be paying anything to Google.

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