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Comment by roasm | Hacker News Reader

Non-European here. Does iOS have to do the same thing?

No, because Apple do not have a dominant position in the smartphone market within the EU. Google pay Apple billions of dollars a year to make Google the default search engine on iOS devices, which was a significant factor in the European Commission's ruling against Google.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_competition_law...

http://fortune.com/2018/09/29/google-apple-safari-search-eng...

This seems like it would be interesting, given that Google reportedly pays Apple billions of dollars to remain the default on iOS.

Definitely not for search engine, since Apple isn't a potential monopolist in that market. Possibly not for browser either, depending on how popular EU competition authorities think a browser/OS pairing needs to be before looking askance at the cross-promotion.

Probably not since Apple doesn't license iOS to anyone else and solely controls it.

Does that matter? I would think it would have to do with market share more than any licensing. iOS has ~28% share in the EU.

http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/europe

It matters, the EC defined the market as "licensable mobile operating systems", and not "mobile operating systems".

If they were looking at "mobile operating systems", their antitrust ruling would make no sense.

Therefore, if Google and all the Android OEMs merged, no antitrust action would be taken with regards to Android apps. Is that correct?

You're assuming that the action was based on policy, not on politics.

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