Giving a shock to the operations of the search engine giant Google in India. India’s competition regulator has now ordered Google to change its approach to its Android platform and is fining the US tech giant, a sum of $162 million for what has been described as anti-competitive practices.
Google has been accused of taking undue advantage of its dominant position in the markets, such as online search and AppStore for Android to protect the position of its apps, such as Chrome and YouTube, in mobile web browsers, and also online video hosting.
Google was ordered not to restrict smartphone users from uninstalling its pre-installed apps like Google Maps and Gmail. The Competition Commission of India has also restricted Google from certain revenue-sharing agreements with smartphone makers, further noting that such practices helped Google to secure exclusivity for its search services to the total exclusion of its competitors.
The competition watchdog is separately looking at Google’s business conduct in the smart television market. And its in-app payment systems as well. But the Android-related project started in 2019, was sparked by a complaint from two Junior Indian antitrust Research Associates, and law school students.
That the Indian case is very similar to the one that Google is facing in Europe, where regulators have imposed $5 billion in terms of penalties on the company for forcing manufacturers to pre-install its apps on Android devices.
The CCI has also asked Google to allow users to pick their search engine of choice for all relevant services while setting up a phone for the very first time. Google’s Android operating system powers nearly about 97% of India’s 600 million smartphones, according to the counterpoint research.
Now, this is quite clearly a case where the dominance and virtually the monopoly that Google enjoys in terms of the search engines that it has, and also the Android operating system that is installed in mobile phones, where has been found by the Competition Commission of India that it has been exploiting its market monopoly to further its apps.
It’s a very difficult situation, because you need the scale of something like Android, to compete with Apple, certainly on a global level. And if other operating systems start coming into the market, then that kind of makes things maybe a little less easy for consumers in terms of things like switching devices, etc.
There are arguments in terms in favor, in fact, of monopolies like this, but very clearly, there are very clear signs that Google here is very much in the same position that Microsoft was with windows in the 1990s.
And certainly with Internet Explorer, as its browser, being bundled with Windows, as well as certain times in the past where Microsoft was forced by the European Union, for example, to add a browser ballot to windows where people could choose a browser rather than having to be forced to have Internet Explorer as the default.
So yes, it’s a familiar situation here. And it’s something that seems to happen regularly, in a cyclical fashion, with technology as a leader emerges in the field.
And also the fact that it’s not as Google does something like this. Apple, for instance, when pushes its devices, and also its operating systems. It pushes in a bunch of apps. And we will to try use apps, let’s say Google on an Apple phone, they don’t work as well and are as fast as Apple’s home-built custom apps.
So is there anything that the governments can put forth in terms of legislation to provide a level playing field, at least for the apps that are used in mobile phones and other sorts of devices where the UI may belong to Google or Apple, but the apps can belong to absolutely anyone and they work perfectly fine?
Yes, certainly. I’d say there are some Slim advantages for kind of your Apple own The apps work slightly more in a more slick fashion, as you say, with iPhone devices, for example.
There are potentially things that could be done. Russia, for example, forces Apple to offer Russian apps to be downloaded alongside Apple’s apps as a default when you first set up a new device there.
That’s one route. Some other countries could choose to go down. But I think there is a counter-argument to this, which is that an integrated hardware and software platform, this is probably what Apple, for example, would argue provides a better user experience if you’re using the inbuilt email app and messaging app for example.
