Sure. Which is why alternative stores like F-Droid are under threat now.
> In 2018, the European Commission slapped Google with the record-breaking penalty on the grounds that it abused Android’s mobile dominance to give unfair advantage to its own apps via pre-installation deals with smartphone makers.
While this specific problem is much better today, specially since of the DMA, things also got so much worse. And even if a new anti-trust ruling would occur today, we could expect it to drag on almost a decade again...
At some point when monopoly power tests start turning true then the bar is raised (as it should be).
It's not just preloaded apps, though. A few months ago I prepared a Lenovo tablet for an elderly friend, and if I had just tapped through the OOBE wizard (which presented pages upon pages of optional crapware) without reading, it would have installed 20-30 preselected "popular" apps, mostly games. I had to manually deselect every single one.
Worldwide markets for communications are based on the notion that bandwidth and infrastructure is too limited and expensive to allow competition, so effectively every country has adopted a model of overseeing government-mandated monopolies or oligopolies with consumer-protection regulations to counter the lack of competition. The EU has shown that the more those protections try to crack down, the more they fail, and as long as competition is unfeasible or outright illegal, consumers will suffer.
There's a reason an iPhone costs significantly more than a much more capable iPad, and that iPads had USB-C ports well before iPhones. If we had a cell-phone system that was as open as the ISM bands that WiFi operates on, we would have much better hardware for much cheaper.
I wonder if that could be considered contempt of courts.
> Contempt of court is a legal offense that occurs when an individual or organization interferes with the administration of justice or willfully disrespects a court's authority, dignity, or orders.
I would love to read the internal memos one day when Google decided to make their lifes hard.
I cannot browse youtube with a noscript/basic HTML browser (basic <video> HTML element).
It is not enough, much more is needed to make those companies behave.
Because email is a cesspool ruined by spammers and Google is doing the only sensible thing they can to block the scams and pill ads from reaching their users inboxes.
google is more than anything else (and this has been a few years) following its agenda at making email just a private garden of messaging with a few "chosen ones" of his friends (selection based on $$$). They are presuming de facto anybody who does not fit their technical agenda to be a spammer. This is the same with their "web" with their web engines from the 'whatwg cartel'.
An IP/domain becomes a source of spam until it does. And with their billions of $$$, I guess they have an army of guys to handle that properly: trying hard enough to notify the owner with data, etc. Yes, this is 99% of the work which has to be done at gmail.