Google has lost its latest battle with European Union regulators. This morning, the EU General Court upheld Google’s record fine for bundling Google Search and Chrome with Android. The initial ruling was reached in July 2018 with a 4.34 billion euro fine attached, and while that number has been knocked down to 4.125 billion euro ($4.13 billion), it’s still the EU’s biggest fine ever.
The EU takes issue with the way Google licenses Android and associated Google apps like the Play Store to manufacturers. The Play Store and Google Play Services are needed to build a competitive smartphone, but getting them from Google requires signing a number of contracts that the EU says stifles competition.
Google breakin’ rocks in the hot sun.
There goes the only successful funding model for open-source software (having some search engine or other online service be your sponsor). Firefox is doing something similar with Google, and its why they will defend the “Firefox” trademark in order to prevent someone from removing the Google search engine and still calling the resulting package “Firefox” (instead, if you want to do that, you’ll have to rename your package to something much less well-known such as “Iceweasel”). Because what is (from a programmer’s perspective) a simple search engine default is actually Mozilla’s entire funding.
Definitely worrying.
That has nothing at all to do with this. The problem is NOT that it is the default search engine… its that the only fully integrated search engine.
Firefox bundles several search engines in a competitive way (they get paid to bundle them). And each engine gets treated basically the same. And you can freely add any others you want.
Google… bundles only its own search engine and you can’t add others easily to their integrated UI.
The USA retaliation on this will be pretty fun. It’s not like they fine EU companies over allegations even though they do exactly the same on the opposite way. Wanna know what it may look like ? Here you go : https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bnp-paribas-settlement-sentencing-idUSKBN0NM41K20150501
Well… if only the US wasn’t the case study of regulatory capture. Now all BNP Paribas or whoever needs to do is to buy a couple of senators and a few congressmen. It’s way cheaper than 4.15 billion.
Even that I love Google paying for their sins, it does not feel to me that bundling your services on an open source operating system should be illegal. Every manufacturer is free to bundle their own Android distro without signing the crappy “Mobile Application Distribution Agreement”. Android is not like Windows or iOS. But on the other side maybe it is good to stop the abuses on this kind of private agreements, where the big one puts abusive terms to the “not that big” hardware manufacturer.
Microsoft was forced to create a Windows edition without the Media Player for Europe and that was a stupid solution. I hope not to see something that dumb with this case.
martini,
I don’t know if it’s still the case, but as I recall part of the problem was that google was forcing manufacturers to sign the agreement if they wanted google play. And since the app store duopoly between google and apple controls nearly the whole market, manufacturers don’t have the luxury of not agreeing to their blanket rules no matter how unfair they are.
I respect your opinion, but I personally disagree with it. I’d rather see innovation and merit play a bigger role than whoever has got the biggest stick.
Ah yeah, that special edition of Windows nobody here in the EU uses because it costs just as much as the regular edition but Windows Media Player does have genuine value (it’s a capable music player and CD ripper, and Windows Media Player can always be trusted to use any H.264 acceleration that the system may have, which is not always the case for other players).
Which shows the futility of the crusade against software bundling: How can you put a value on something that’s ostensibly offered for free and which is sufficiently unique to not have a peer to compare pricing against?
And let’s be honest here: The real reason the EU doesn’t like WMP is because it promotes proprietary standards. But saying that out loud would annoy lots of companies with their own vendor lock-ins, so they can’t, so they go “bundling evil, diddly daddly do, don’t asks us to even define what bundling is” (every OS bundles at least some stuff).
kurkosdr,
Can I ask what you thought about the netscape antitrust lawsuit? IE was ostensibly free too. Obviously for microsoft it wasn’t so much about price, but control.
Same thing as my thoughts on WMP: Bundling isn’t the issue (even the PSP has a bundled browser ffs, and even the most lightweight Desktop Linux distros usually bundle one), it’s the proprietary standards that IE pushed on users that was the problem. But the EU can’t say that out loud, because it would annoy lots of important companies with their own proprietary vendor lock-ins, so they pretend it’s all about “bundling” instead, whatever the official definition of “bundling” is.
Even the ballot screen was a silly measure whose success relied on the fact that IE kind of sucked by then. If IE had stayed a good browser, users were perfectly free to choose it on the ballot screen and inadvertently help Microsoft push its proprietary standards.
It’s the same deal as with DVD region lockout. It clearly violates free trade within the EU single market, and the EU even launched a probe to investigate, but certain very important companies started going “ahem” behind their backs so it went nowhere.
https://variety.com/2001/voices/columns/probes-into-regional-dvd-imperils-studio-strategy-1117800545/
kurkosdr,
I think I understand your view. Antitrust laws generally prohibit using one’s dominance in one market to establish dominance in another. So arguably there is a crystal clear connection behind “bundling” and violations of antitrust laws. However it sounds like you might disagree with antitrust having oversight over this method of establishing dominance in the first place, So I guess I’d step back and ask you the broader question: what’s your opinion about antitrust law in general?
It’s important to remember the goal of antitrust isn’t to make decisions on behalf of consumers for their own good. It’s actually to overcome market manipulation tactics that dominant companies are known to employ. I realize the real world is complex and things are not always going to be perfect, but that’s the rational behind it.
DVD & Blueray regions hurt consumers and it seems like australian politicians agreed. “Copyright Amendment Act 2006 allows for the modification of DVD players to enable them to play DVDs from different countries.”
https://www.smh.com.au/technology/are-regionfree-dvd-players-legal-20120201-1qs42.html
I wonder if the same law makes it legal to bypass streaming region locks too? It’s a raw deal when you’re forced to pay more for less content because the studios want to segregate the market.
My wife has a Nokia X20. The handset has a button on the side to launch Google Assistant, a permanent Google Search widget on the home screen and, if you hold the home navigation button, this also launches Google Assistant. Thankfully the side button can be disabled/reassigned, a custom OS launcher hides the widget, and the navi home button can be reassigned. But it’s not a great experience for someone wanting to avoid Google’s prying eyes.
The permanent Google search widget on the home screen is the reason I cannot stand the standard android launcher. I have always preferred Samsung devices for this and other reasons. I just wish they would fix their messages app to support RCS correctly. Google messages irritate me and are missing other features!