Android users in Europe will be asked which browser and search engine they want
blog.google
blog.google
We're so much in agreement that we're only going to trial that healthy, thriving market in the EU - where we're legally obligated to.
The relevant law is Article 102 of the Treaty of the Functioning of the EU, which prohibits an abuse of a dominant position within the common market. Apple don't have a dominant position in the smartphone market, with a share of around 28%; it's not clear that Safari is in any way abusive, rather than simply a legitimate technical decision.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_competition_law...
Yes, it does: it sells placement on that browser, since it is the default browser.
And that's billions of dollars per year.
> Apple don't have a dominant position in the smartphone market
Apple has 100% market share in the "proprietary mobile operating system", just as Android has 100% market share on the "licensable mobile operating system".
Those are the market definitions the EC used to assess the case, not "the whole mobile operating system market".
Get you facts minimally straight :)
http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-16-1492_en.htm
"At this stage, the Commission considers that Google is dominant in the markets for general internet search services, licensable smart mobile operating systems and app stores for the Android mobile operating system."
Not only the EC used "licensable smart mobile operating systems" but it also used "app stores for the Android mobile operating system".
It assumed that Android does not compete with iOS and that the Play store does not compete with the App store.
So, if Android doesn't compete with iOS, then Apple has a monopoly in it's market: proprietary non-lincesable mobile operating systems.
It's manifestly legal to put your own software on your own hardware - I mean duh. Google is in hot water for working the levers to control software on other peoples' hardware.
They are evaluating Android within the context of "licensable mobile operating systems", within which Android has 100% market share.
Similarly, iOS has 100% market share in the "proprietary mobile operating system" market, and would therefore be subject to the same implications as Google & Android.
The reason why the EC decided to go after Android but not iOS I'll leave for the reader to inquire.
In reality, antitrust law market definition would more likely resort to looking at a customer choice model: as a consumer, I purchase a phone, which can have a given operating system. My choices are between iOS / Android / other. It's that simple.
The "licensable" vs. "proprietary" distinction are distribution models that, from a consumer choice perspective, is irrelevant.
That isn't an argument, that is literally the market definition used by the EC.
> The "licensable" vs. "proprietary" distinction are distribution models that, from a consumer choice perspective, is irrelevant.
You are literally wrong, and clearly didn't do you homework:
http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-16-1492_en.htm
"At this stage, the Commission considers that Google is dominant in the markets for general internet search services, licensable smart mobile operating systems and app stores for the Android mobile operating system."
Not only the EC used "licensable smart mobile operating systems" but it also used "app stores for the Android mobile operating system".
It assumed that Android does not compete with iOS and that the Play store does not compete with the App store.
You seem very sure of a position that nothing you've linked has highlighted in the slightest.
They are concerned because the dominant licensable OS requires proprietary software and services, which is what the document you linked makes very clear.
Doesn't change the fact that it has 100% market share in that market, no matter how you call that market.
You can't have your cake and eat it too: you can't defend the ECs case on Android and not demand the same on iOS.
Well, you can, but then we're not talking about antitrust policy, we're talking about politics and picking winners.
I'm sensing BS here.
Which users, exactly?
The ones who don't know what chrome is other than "my google"? Or even, "my internet"?
cough cough cough, that google search bar in the home screen by default is pretty Google Search specific.
So this is potentially useful information if you've gotten to this point in the thread and are suddenly saying, "wait, I can remove that?"
Example: Mozilla would be able to advertise that Firefox provides ad-blocking, as opposed to Chrome which doesn't. This has the potential to hurt mobile advertising revenue significantly.
> Supporting choice and competition in Europe
Like it was their initiative!
Hey Google, how about supporting choice and competition in the rest of the world?
If this meant the Google stuff was not going to be installed if you choose different and the device was still going to be fully functional (you could still install apps from the store) that would be something but I doubt this is the case.
By the way, why do they use the Chinese《一》character instead of hyphens?
Are you sure that’s not an emdash?
Before that law came in I could install and use an alternative browser with a minimum of fuss. After, Microsoft insisted they were required by law to display a couple of dialogues telling me their browser was the best in the word, and forcing me to acknowledge each one.
The irony is only people who were going to install an alternative browser anyway got to see those warnings multiple times. I very much doubt it had any effect on anybody who continued to use Microsoft's offering.
It's not a matter of difficulty, but rather a matter of awareness. Based on my experience from friends and family, I have reason to believe there is a significant chunk of Android users who don't know they can use an alternative default browser. Most people just click on the Chrome icon that comes built-in at the bottom of their home screen, and that's all for them. It's not the average HN user we are talking about, obviously...
If they were looking at "mobile operating systems", their antitrust ruling would make no sense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_competition_law...
http://fortune.com/2018/09/29/google-apple-safari-search-eng...
(And it totally is a browser and not some keylogger and bitcoin miner with a copy of lynx on top.)
I'm excited for increased choice, but Google is starting this race from a position backed by a decade of anti-competitive licensing agreements around Android. From the press release, this move seems designed to preserve that lead by preventing other vendors from offering meaningful defaults.
I'd be especially curious to hear from the Samsung Internet team, as the press release states that Google will be "asking users of existing and new Android devices" which browser they would like to use.
That's easier than doing your homework.
This rash of Cookie warnings that has infested the internet and pisses me off no end. For the life of me I can't see what useful purpose it serves.
Worse, they's managed to do this twice now.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-google-android-idUSKCN...
> Google could be fined up to 5 percent of Alphabet’s average daily worldwide turnover if it fails to comply with the EU order to stop anti-competitive practices.
Basically like Apple saying that they invest in their products and Spotify just wants a free ride (which I agree with) Google has an even better case as they also let users sideload apps and change defaults.
nobody's going to use a phone that isn't supported by applications. In fact every application provided by developers to the apple ecosystem increases the marginal value of the phone. In what world is that free riding? And why would anyone support this egregious behaviour of giant companies commanding around the rest of the market?
In the world where there exists a platform where paid software on that platform gets 30% of its revenue automatically sucked out just by virtue of existing on that platform
My real issue is that there is no alternative. You can’t opt out and use a different store.
I think this would be a strong point if commissioning the store was the primary means of income for apple. But apple strategically uses the fees to attack their competitors. Squeezing spotify for example with a 30% fee while at the same time pushing out apple music for a ~30% lower price.
That in my mind is not a content agnostic platform seeking to make money as a service provider, but leveraging a platform to attempt to gain monopolistic power by force.
Google already lost their case; they were fined $5bn.
https://www.npr.org/2018/07/18/630030673/eu-hits-google-with...
"Which provider of Google Search results do you want?"
I will cheekily assume Microsoft are still craftily getting Google search queries into Bing somehow. And that Duck Duck Go, Ecosia, Yahoo and everything else are dipping into the Google goodness.
The EU should build their own search engine and browser. That is what is happening in places like Russia and China where they don't want to be reliant on Silicon Valley.
It seems silly to be not view information search and presentation of web pages as a strategic thing in this day and age, particularly when there is Five Eyes snooping in.
What?
It's as easy as setting up a lambda with headless chromium and then integrating those results into whatever internal results your system has (if any) on the fly. Google is fast enough that this could be done without any perceptible performance impact, and that's ignoring the possibility of massive caching of common searches. It will look like normal web traffic to google, and the lambda network will result in a diversity of IP addresses, so it might never get flagged.
lol specifically, what Google search results Bing Toolbar users click on and what query they had entered in Google to get those results.
Yes some fraction of this was on google. That's not cheating. No content from google was transmitted back to Bing. Just the next site the users went to. Is Bing supposed to go through the logs looking for visits to google and then delete the rest of the session because it might indirectly reveal something about what existed on the google page?
I should own my records about what pages I go to, not Google. If I share them with Bing it's nobody else's business.
Your theory cannot explain how Bing associated that "next site" with the specific search term the user had entered in Google.
If you had clicked a link on HackerNews, it wouldn't have shown up in Bing under some random search phrase. It's obvious that Microsoft parsed the search query out of the google.com URL, and the only reason why you'd do that is to mine what results were being presented for each search query.
Firefox for Android uses Gecko, not Webkit/Blink.