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> Manufacturers should be able to get only the Google Play store.

Why? Google is a for-profit company that puts time and effort into developing the store. The play store may not actually be self-sustaining in terms of revenue. Perhaps it is paid for by things like Maps and YouTube.

Shouldn't Google be able to specify the terms of use for its closed-source products? It seems sane that those terms might specify a package deal with other products.

By mandating that companies should be able to only get the Play Store, you're asking that Google work for free for others, and that doesn't seem fair.

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Antitrust theory says that a company should not be able to use a product where it has a monopoly to get people to use another product where it lacks a monopoly. If we assume that Google has a monopoly on smart phone platforms with Android/the Google Play Store, (I take no position on whether that's true) it should not be able to leverage that monopoly to get people to use Maps and YouTube, where it has no monopoly.

That doesn't mean that Google has to "work for free." Nothing prevents them from simply charging money for Android and the Play Store. But Google doesn't want to be Symbian, getting a $10-15 one-time license free per phone. Instead, it wants to use Android/GPE as a vehicle for getting people to use apps like YouTube, which generate recurring revenue. That's a great business strategy, but if you're too successful with it, you run into antitrust concerns. (Google's should've probably taken a page from Intel/Microsoft and paid off Symbian or Blackberry to keep working on an Android competitor.)

> Nothing prevents them from simply charging money for Android and the Play Store.

So what happens when they do just that, but the price for Android + Play Store sans Google Apps is ~$150, i.e. the same price as Microsoft Windows?

It's completely fair to ask that they offer an a la carte version for full price, but then almost everyone would choose the free/discounted version that bundles the services.

It's also fair to ask that the user be able to uninstall them, but again most of them won't.

What the hardware vendors are really after is the ability to sell the default position to someone else. The profit from which disappears with the discount Google was giving them for exactly that.

>So what happens when they do just that, but the price for Android + Play Store sans Google Apps is ~$150, i.e. the same price as Microsoft Windows?

In that case other companies, say, Micrsoft could then start to offer a $100 Android version containing Edge, Bing Maps, Hotmail as services.

Exactly what this anti-trust measure try to accomplish. Now, this is not possible since Google forces you to install Chrome if you want Play Store. Which basically leverages it's monopoly on mobile OS to get more market share in the browser game.

> In that case other companies, say, Micrsoft could then start to offer a $100 Android version containing Edge, Bing Maps, Hotmail as services.

Just like Microsoft offers a $100 iOS the same way, right? All you're asking for is for Google to stop developing Android for free. Then Google's version becomes macOS to the legacy Android's FreeBSD, or WINE trying to keep up with every change to Windows.

It would make it harder to develop an alternative to Google Play than it currently is because then you would also have to produce an alternative to Android.

And it does nothing to solve the actual problem, which is that app stores have network effects, so users won't use one with no apps and developers won't use one with no users. Even ignoring Android, suppose the value of Google Play to the OEM is $50 and the value of being default to the highest bidder (e.g. Microsoft) is $20. Then the OEMs have been getting a discount of $30 to get both for net of zero.

Now suppose you price them separately and Google offers Google Play for $35 and pays $35 to be the default. The result is exactly the same. Google Play is worth $50 to the OEM over alternatives, costs $35, so they net $15 by choosing it. Google Apps pay $35 when the alternative pays $20, so they net $15 by choosing it. No change in behavior at all.

If you want to actually fix it you need to break the network effect, e.g. separate the Google Play service from the Google Play app, so that anyone can build a store app that can install apps from multiple stores (even if OEMs still have to pay for access to Google Play). Then explicitly allow app developers to pass the store fee onto customers using that store through differential pricing between stores, so that the same apps from stores with lower fees actually have lower prices. That's how you get more stores, which is how you break Google's leverage with the Play Store.

> Perhaps it is paid for by things like Maps and YouTube.

This is why monopoly rules exist, and why it's not quite so simple. Leveraging strong market position in one market, say search/advertising, to undercut prices in a completely different market is clear-cut anti-competitive behavior.

My retort to your argument would be: why even do hardware / Android at all? Because it's a distribution mechanism for _their_ services. If you leverage market dominance to expand that distribution network with fewer / no alternatives for consumers, that's like anti-trust 101.

> Leveraging strong market position in one market, say search/advertising, to undercut prices in a completely different market is clear-cut anti-competitive behavior.

Is it less clear how monopoly rules work if the price is "free?" If a company can offer a service for free by supplementing the cost with bundling (in a market where the going rate is "free") vs. not offering it at all, I'm not sure that's considered the same by US monopoly law (I have no idea of EU monopoly law).

It's a reasonable question - but the price can never be truly "free," because there's a cost to investment / build that product - meaning costs are non-zero. Therefore the negative profit in the short-term due to pricing is called "undercutting," as other companies (generally) don't have that luxury in the long run.

You have to ask: why is it free?

- A thousand engineers working on a non-revenue product for Google is like "pennies," when it might be a whole company anywhere else.

- How are you funding that negative profit? Using leverage and profit from strong market position elsewhere. Therefore: anti-competitive, as other companies in the space don't have similar leverage.

Now, a startup can, say, operate at negative profit and not count as "anti-competitive," because a startup most likely has fractional market share. But imagine you're building a startup in a brand new space, and Google decides to also enter that space. If you price your product at $10, and Google says "we're pricing at $0," you can imagine how no one could compete with that for the long-term. Hence why monopoly / anti-competitive rules are important.

If we're talking app stores, I think it's free because no consumer would pay for it. F-Droid is also free.

I don't think this argument holds generally. For example people used to pay for GPS apps (iGO, TomTom, etc.) before Google Maps/other navi apps were available for "free" on smartphones. Google, in fact, might have destroyed a market by making Google Maps "free".

> Google, in fact, might have destroyed a market by making Google Maps "free".

Might is an understatement. Google destroyed the market leading to Navteq and Tele Atlas being aquired by Nokia and TomTom.

Well that, AND prioritizing their Maps product above better offerings in the marketplace in search results early on in its lifecycle, when it was trying to get scale and data to improve while hurting competitors.

I don't remember the existence of better offerings early in the Maps lifecycle that Google search prioritized Maps results over. Maybe I'm too young?

There was Mapquest, and to my memory, Google came out of the starting gate with something close to feature parity with them.

Mapquest and Yahoo Maps were the dominant mapping platforms until Google Maps removed competitor links in the search results. [1] Google during this time was pushing for "universal search," which would break away from vertical search paradigms into a single blended set of results.

This was also when traffic spiked to Google Maps and away from MapQuest / other competitors. And when you look at the data, the change in traffic is not due to users searching for "Google Maps" in the query more - but rather Google just linking to its own results more. [2]

It was when I knew the whole "Don't be evil" motto was bullshit.

[1] https://searchengineland.com/google-no-longer-linking-to-yah...

[2] https://searchengineland.com/comscore-to-report-google-maps-...

Maps was always a better product, though...

Google, in fact, might have destroyed a market by making Google Maps "free".

Which is a good thing if it results in more people getting quality services. gcc and Apache destroyed the market for commercial compilers and web servers; should they have been prohibited?

>> gcc and Apache destroyed the market for commercial compilers and web servers; should they have been prohibited?

The difference here is that Apache didn't shove you a PlayStore, maps app and a browser in order to use their libraries. I want the products to "win" on merit not on reach. You also forget that Apache is open source which is not the case with Maps/youtube where your access can be denied at any time.

>> Which is a good thing if it results in more people getting quality services.

This gives no guarantee that Google won't start to charge its users for these services at some point in time. And there really won't be any competition as all the competitors have been killed by the "free" price.

Actually it seems they already set the price. You may argue that the end user doesn't pay for Playstore etc but we both know they pay...just like they paid for Windows. "Google said it would sell a license for a package including its Google Play...."

> The difference here is that Apache didn't shove you a PlayStore, maps app and a browser in order to use their libraries.

That's a completely independent complaint that has nothing to do with Android being available for free. You would have the same tying objection if Android cost money, right?

Quality? I spend two hours in the english countryside trying to find my goal and google kept routing me over a road that was removed years ago. I could mention other cases were google maps was worse than useless, but it boils down to a single issue: With commercial products you could pay and have some quality guaranteed. Google gives the average users the same quality guarantees they pay for: none.

Strange, Maps is the only Google service I like. I'm in the Netherlands right now and their traffic data is always spot on. Literally updated by the minute.

I think that densely populated areas and countries with public up to date cartography are easier to serve.

> It's a reasonable question - but the price can never be truly "free," because there's a cost to investment / build that product - meaning costs are non-zero.

Those are fixed costs which can be amortized in other ways.

For example, Google could make both the OS and the hardware to sell together, like Apple. In fact, they do, with the Nexus/Pixel devices. Once they've done that, the OS development is a sunk cost. Giving it away to others or not has no effect on cost, or has negative cost if some of the others make contributions that you can use on your own devices without paying to develop them internally. And it grows the ecosystem your products are a part of, which is a valuable service the other vendors are providing for which some remuneration is appropriate, which could offset some or all of the cost of the software.

Moreover, software costs money to develop, but how much of the development cost should be apportioned to each unit? That depends how many units there will be. Not have been -- will ever be. This value is not known and can be arbitrarily large. For something like Android it is very large. If you amortize the development cost over the number of devices there are/will be, the cost per device is negligible -- small enough it would be eaten by transaction costs if you tried to collect it.

And claiming that companies can't give away software because they're large is clearly bad policy. It would imply that e.g. they can't contribute to Linux.

The going rate in the smartphone OS market doesn't have to be "free." Symbian charged a license fee. Microsoft charged a license fee. Google decided to release Android for free, because they could make more money using Android as a vehicle for the rest of its platform. Having done that, and pushed all the competitors out of the market by giving Android away for nothing, Google can hardly argue that it should be allowed to bundle because the "going rate" for a smartphone OS is now free.

Remember when giving away a web browser was illegal? Is giving away open source software and selling consulting services an anti-competitive abuse in the software services market?

Giving away a web browser was not what was found to be illegal.

Using a large market share in one area (personal computer operating systems) as a weapon against competitors in another area (web browsers) was found to be illegal.

Microsoft didn’t just “give away” the browser. It also forced OEMs not to bundle a competing browser.

Much like Google would not allow OEMs to both build Google Android devices and non Google Android devices based solely on AOSP.

> Shouldn't Google be able to specify the terms of use for its closed-source products? It seems sane that those terms might specify a package deal with other products.

Not to the extent that it is allowed to decimate competition.

Related: When IBM was trying to find software for the IBM-PC they went to Microsoft initially looking to buy just the languages (like BASIC) to run on it. They wound up buying DOS for pennies on the dollar because Microsoft valued contractual freedom to deal with other businesses over instant bottom-line. IBM low-balled Microsoft expecting them to come back higher, but instead they accepted on the condition that they be allowed to sell their OS to other vendors.

The result was nearly 40 years of market domination because for years nobody could decouple Microsoft Windows from the PC. Even after it slipped out of IBMs grasp; Microsoft held on. Microsoft commoditized the hardware and then strong-armed everyone into license agreements because they had unstoppable market share. It was almost a case of "Give them the razor for free but make them keep coming back for blades." Microsoft could, quite literally, give away their code for free without fear of financial loss because every PC running Windows was infinitely more valuable than that same PC running anything else. By running Windows instead, even a free one, Microsoft was strengthening it's market share.

With Android and mobile devices the hardware is already a commodity. Google has all the market share it needs. They don't need more reward for something that's already been paid off if it just means the rest of the market is limited in their ability to do business outside of Google. The entire market doesn't need to support Google on both sides. We're paying Google in data, in market share, and in advertising revenue. Bending Samsung's arm backwards to install the whole kit just breaks competition. It's triple dipping for Google to the detriment of the rest of us. For what? Just so Google can make sure they're the only Google forever?

They're licensing practices are disingenuous and anti-competitive for the sake of limiting advancement that could threaten Google's bottom line. That potential advancement would be a huge benefit for the rest of the world, but we may never see it if Google is allowed to completely own the tech sector in every conceivable way.

Perhaps Google should charge whatever profit it wants for Google Play store. And here is the beauty: If google charges too much then someone else will offer a "play store" for less thus more competition. If Maps and YouTube are so important to Google then it should advertise them more(i.e. pay the local/global manufacturer or whoever can advertise it). This way the market is open to competition for each product. Bonus: Android could become more privacy oriented.

More choices for end users, more choices for manufactures => happy people, less monopoly.

Side note: I'm not particularly happy with the dictatorships regimes(Google and Apple) in the native apps environment. It just doesn't feel right to have the whole world censored/guarded by two big corporations.

Given the massive 30% cut the Play Store takes on all app sales and in-app purchases, it's likely the Play Store is wildly profitable on it's own.

That being said, this announcement actually revealed the real moneymakers: Everything else Google offers is just what they feel they need to keep you locked into Search and Chrome, which drive Google's real market dominance. The only real reason they're making it hard to get the Play Store (despite it being self-sustainable) is to provide an incentive to let them put Chrome and Search on the phone, and that carries through with this announcement.

They'll charge for the Play Store, but they'll happily pay you more or less the same amount to install Chrome and Search.

> The play store may not actually be self-sustaining in terms of revenue

Really? 30% of every sale and in-app purchase in the entire android ecosystem of billions of users?

I think it's probably profitable. Just a bit.

The rules are different, like in this situation, for companies that are near to or in a monopoly situation. Last I checked Android had over 85% smartphone market share.

Not to mention a situation where a huge megacorp has basically driven every other smartphone OS out of the market by dumping[0] its software on the market and then insidiously making it less free and open with every release.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)

Why? Because they clearly spent a lot of time and effort on making a supposedly FOSS OS dependent on it, while actively encouraging vendors to use said OS by claiming it was FOSS.

They already didn't play fair.

That sort of thinking is the reason millions of people who never watch sports on TV have to pay for ESPN as part of their cable/satellite package, whether they like it or not.

Google play earned $6.2B in 2018Q3

And how much did it cost to develop and operate? Including traffic acquisition.

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