Google Faces E.U. Antitrust Charges Over Android Apps

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/20/technology/google-android-eu-antitrust.html

by axg • 10 years ago

19 23 10 years ago

enjo• 10 years ago

Surely Apple is going to face the same charge?

pjmlp• 10 years ago

Apple doesn't enjoy the same market share, actually in some European countries the alternative to Android is Windows Phone for the majority of population.

thedevil• 10 years ago

I doubt it. You and I are both going to get heavily downvoted for this by the devout Apple fanatics, but it's unreasonable that Google is held to a much higher standard than Apple.

Google gives away the OS for free (speech and beer), allows competition on the devices, but requires bundling of its app with its store (which has competitors).

Apple not only bundles the apps, it explicitly locks out competitors with code, forbids competitors in their agreements with customers and developers, and IIRC forbids developers who write for its platform to also put the same app on any competing app store (which again are forbidden by contract and locked out with code).

mcintyre19943• 10 years ago

I won't downvote you and I agree that Android is way more open, but I understand antitrust to be about monopolies. I don't think Apple is anywhere close to a monopoly position with iOS in any market, and I'd be surprised if they're above 50% in any European market.

Yetanfou3• 10 years ago

It goes further than this. Android, being free software, can be used without any Google-proprietary code by anyone who so wishes. Running a 'Google-free' phone is not only possible, but practiced by many - without any repercussions from Google as the code is, after all, free. If the user so requires, Google-proprietary apps can be installed on demand, removed on demand, replaced or updated or whatever - under control of the user.

In jail terms, Google puts its users in a light security facility, Apple users are locked up on Alcatraz.

As to why the EU plans this action on Google (first) is a good question. It is clear that the wheels of justice are seldom round, and greased in strange ways...

Arzh• 10 years ago

"and consumers have the last word about which apps they want to use on their devices." Is this true in the EU? Do the carriers and hardware manufacturers not bundle in a bunch of total garbage that you aren't allowed to remove (sometimes you can disable it but like I want any of this crap from LG)?

davorb• 10 years ago

Do the carriers and hardware manufacturers not bundle in a bunch of total garbage that you aren't allowed to remove

I can tell you that they don't do it in most European countries, but I wouldn't be surprised if they did it in a few places (like the UK).

jakubp• 10 years ago

FWIW in Poland at least some of the top 4 carriers force their bloatware on your Android phone, with no way to uninstall (I haven't tried rooting the phone though).

ultramancool• 10 years ago

Hmm, interesting that Google, who allows 3rd party markets and non-Google signed app installs (like Amazon, F-Droid, Aptoide, etc) is getting hit with this.

Perhaps it's more related to stock Google Apps they're shipping with Android devices, similar to the MS bundling IE anti-trust cases? Google's Android apps are pretty great and having them ship on devices for free is probably a pretty big killer of competition, including these apps may even be a requirement to be allowed to ship play store.

dogma1138• 10 years ago

Because Aptoide is a European company and it launched the complaint which started this whole thing.

This absurdity happened because Google isn't outright blocking 3rd party apps and app stores outright.

It does has some restrictions which resulted in Google Play not being available on Kindle devices, and market apps can't be hosted on the Play Store but it leaves them enough room to actually be some what viable which means that companies exist that can cry foul.

This is basically a case of give them a finger and they take the whole hand.

DiabloD32• 10 years ago

They aren't going to make it very far with this. Phones are now required to bundle these services, and Samsung ships phones that uses S replacements for everything (launcher, health, payments, music, app store, cloud storage, camera/photos, and a few others), yet runs Android.

Not only that, Google provides APIs in newer versions of Androids that allow third party apps to provide all this stuff. When installing apps that provide those services, they just need to use the APIs to integrate into the system.

Such as, I have OneDrive installed, and Google Drive and OneDrive appear as accessible from any app that uses the new file loader API (which was introduced in ... 4.x?). Google is working with Microsoft to allow Cortana to be a full replacement for Google Now's "Okay Google" trigger, including "Hey Cortana" trigger while sleeping (on phones that support that).

I can also install any office suite I want without any API support required, I can also install third party music players (and get full music player API support and Chromecast support for players that support it), third party... anything. Even a third party app store.

From what I can tell, this is all about the Google Now launcher supporting Google Search only. You can install any launcher you want. Google Now cannot integrate into other search engines because of THEIR lack of an API, not because Google doesn't want to (I mean, they don't, but it's not their fault).

The EU needs to step off and stop ruining company's products. This is literally a repeat of Microsoft Windows shipping a browser and a media player , where any browser and media player could be used instead. The EU at the time, apparently, could not understand you could have multiple apps installed that do the same thing, and file types and URL types have associations that can be changed by the user.

The EU is dangerously clueless about technology.

And if they're not going after Apple for the same charge, where they won't let you use third party browsers on iOS, or third party app stores, or music players, or whatever, then they're just untrustworthy idiots that have no clue how the world works.

chipperyman573• 10 years ago

This is literally a repeat of Microsoft Windows shipping a browser and a media player , where any browser and media player could be used instead.

The main issue was that you couldn't uninstall or disable IE, and due to microsoft's dominance in the market the EU felt it should be possible to do so.

DiabloD32• 10 years ago

Except you can never uninstall or disable MSIE period because the actual browser canvas element is depended on by both Microsoft and non-Microsoft apps and is a core service of the OS. Modern Windows Update, modern Help, Outlook/Outlook Express, anything that uses ActiveX, and third party browsers that just wrap Trident wouldn't work.

That's like telling Apple they have to unbundle Safari, then breaking all the apps that depend on the Webkit framework.... which is a shitload of apps.

The only thing N/KN editions of Windows do is force you to download the Windows Media Player if you choose to use it, and simply unhides the MSIE icon in your Start menu if you choose to enable it. And as for Windows Media Player, N/KN doesn't disable things like DirectShow and Media Foundation, which Windows Media Player is just a fancy front end for.

It was a waste of both EU and US money for our respective DoJs to have sued. Microsoft didn't stop you from using other browsers, and allowed any app to be assigned to htm/html file associations and http/https/ftp URI scheme associations, even back in Win98 when they introduced that weird "Active Desktop" shit (a Trident canvas element as a background image on your desktop, it was weird but interesting), Microsoft never stopped you from downloading Netscape Navigator and using it as your default browser.

Windows was the first OS to have a browser by default, and the second OS to have a media player by default (Quicktime came before the original Media Player in Windows 3.x, which used DShow's predecessor, Video for Windows). In fact, Apple sued Microsoft over allegations of stolen source code from Quicktime, and Microsoft settled over it.

Notice the EU hasn't sued Apple for having a bundled media player first (since 1991, or 25 years ago), nor having a bundled browser (since 2003, or about 13 years ago, or about half way between MSIE 6 and 7). Also please note that the EU antitrust case was in 2004.

Why is the EU so protectionist towards Apple? It isn't their company, they have no more interest over Apple than they would Microsoft or Google, all three are American and all three have about the same amount of involvement in the EU for local services.

secfirstmd• 10 years ago

The EU could do us all a favour and get Microsoft actually respect the privacy of it's customers by properly allowing them to fully turn off the "phone home" stuff it has going on.

x0x0• 10 years ago

The charges are claimed to be related to defaults. As such the problem isn't that the apps can't be replaced (by the tiny fraction of users who understand and are capable of doing so), it's that the vast majority of users stick with the pre-installed defaults and google controls those.

eggnet• 10 years ago

As far as I can tell there is nothing in google's terms of service that relate to defaults. How do I know this? Because Samsung replaces every app I can think of with theirs.

- launcher - web browser - mail - calendar - keyboard - SMS/MMS texting app

Not to mention the entire "skin" of the operating system including added and removed functionality.

Samsung even has their own app store on the phone.

All of the above apps are very much the default for their type (when such a concept exists) and in some cases, like email and calendaring, you can't set another program as the default (at least not through normal consumer friendly means).

What "default" are you actually referring to?

cloudjacker• 10 years ago

I'm waiting for the antitrust violation launched by developers.

With arbitrary reasons their apps get removed, sometimes surprisingly brazen feature copying by the store owner, and lack of humans or any transparency in the appeal process.

tdkl• 10 years ago

The latest in EU tech money grabs - those failed banks aren't going to pay for themselves.

Google Faces E.U. Antitrust Charges Over Android Apps

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