The Wikipedia article on this case is much more informative:
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_vs._Google" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_vs._Google</a><p>> In their Statement of Objections, the European Commission accused Google of the breach of EU antitrust rules in three ways:<p>> - by requiring mobile manufacturers to pre-install Google Search and Google Chrome browser and requiring them to set Google Search as default search service on their devices, as a condition to license certain Google proprietary apps;<p>> - by preventing manufacturers from selling smart mobile devices running on competing operating systems based on the Android open source code;<p>> - by giving financial incentives to manufacturers and mobile network operators on condition that they exclusively pre-install Google Search on their devices.
Apple - OS only runs on their hardware, and you can only install applications approved by them.<p>Google - Allows any hardware manufacturer to use their OS, and you can install any application you want.<p>And yet the EU is going after Google?
If smartphones were open we wouldn't have the whole problem. Why can't we have the model of IBM clones of the 80s/90s, where I actually own the device I buy. Right now, I can't even become root on my device without tricks (which one day may not even work).
Good. There's nothing more annoying on Android than the Google app presence on it perhaps ironically and having this pushed at you all the time really puts you off.
People that do not understand why Android is free and fail to recognize how Google is using its dominating position in one market to dominate other market should read this "Laws of Tech Economics: Commoditize Your Complement" [1] and here HN discussion [2].<p>[1] <a href="https://www.gwern.net/Complement#2" rel="nofollow">https://www.gwern.net/Complement#2</a><p>[2] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17047348" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17047348</a>
This doesn't make sense. Google gives away it's OS for free. It's the overwhelming major contributor to Android R&D. What's EU's expectation here? Just give it away for free without an expectation of profit?<p>This is in contrast to the old Microsoft that required payments of about $40 for their OS license, and they further restricted browser choice etc. Google is nothing like that, the Android framework and underlying OS is fully open source. There exist non Google forks of Android, Amazon being the most famous.<p>Then there's the whole worshipping of Apple - the most evil, monopolistic company on the planet. Apple's only recourse seems to be their ~17% hardware market share. Though, that's not really the lens to use. When considering the 'mobile paid apps' market, their position immediately moves into Monopoly territory, and in that segment that fuck with the developers and consumers in every way possible.
The 2016 blog post it refers to is presumably this one: <a href="https://blog.google/topics/google-europe/android-choice-competition-response-europe/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.google/topics/google-europe/android-choice-comp...</a>
It's interesting to see the HN reaction to this. The last time the EU fined Google a huge amount of money for anti-trust reasons the general sentiment here was that it was just socialist Europeans taxing American companies trying to make an honest living.<p>I guess Google is a lot less popular now compared to like two years ago.
Little silly. Google should just charge for Android and then credit if ship with their stuff. Problem solved.<p>Really think the EU risks getting a worse result with this type of thing.
Android isn't the issue near as much as Google proper.
- One answer seearch results scraped from sites to be dominant in keeping ppl on Google
- Maps showing places scraped by Google
- Google results order<p>These are the real anti-trust cases.