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Editorial Viewpoint
Love or hate Google, the massive
EU fine is a joke
While the €4.34 billion fine that an EU court imposed
on Google this July (which they are in the process of
appealing) may be legally sound, it is based on a lack
of technical understanding. The judgment is likely to
decrease competition in the smartphone space, the
very opposite of what the court is trying to achieve.
This case has echoes of United States v. Microsoft
Corp from back in 1998-2001 (ah, nostalgia!). The argument then was that Microsoft’s integration of Internet Explorer (IE) into
Windows had an anti-competitive effect on companies that offered other web
browsers. Microsoft lost that case (wrongly, in my opinion, despite the rage
I feel when I see IE) but ended up with a slap on the wrist.
In the more recent Google case, the argument is as follows: Google allows
smartphone makers to use their Android phone operating system for free as
long as they follow certain rules. One of them is that Google Search and the
Chrome browser must be included on the phone or else the Google Play Services (used by many Google apps) is not made available.
They also made payments to some manufacturers and networks to make
the Google search engine the default on their phones. And they threatened to
withhold some Google apps from manufacturers who sold devices running
“forked” versions of Android – ie, not the versions distributed by Google.
According to the EU court, part of the reason that this is so bad is that the
Google Play Services is a “must-have” and the threat to withhold is a serious
one. But I wonder if these people have ever travelled to China.
All Google services are blocked in mainland China. As a result, Android
phones sold in China don’t include any apps which rely on them, or the
Google search features. And yet Android phones are incredibly popular in
China, with over half a billion sold last year.
And having these Google apps on your phone hardly locks you into using them. It’s dead easy to install a different browser or select a different default search engine. You can disable the Play Store on day one and simply
download and install app packages manually from web pages, if you want.
There’s absolutely nothing stopping you.
Part of the complaint was that 95% of Android users use Google search,
which the EU court thinks indicates that they are somehow locked in. Maybe
most users prefer to use Google search because it’s the best option available
– did they consider that? When I was in China and couldn’t access Google
search, I tried several alternatives and found them very poor by comparison.
I’m of two minds about Google as a company. Many of their products are
amazing but their corporate culture appears to be quite toxic and they seem
to allow politics to invade their decision making in troubling ways. But I
still don’t see how this fine can be justified. The logic of the court simply
doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. It makes the whole thing look like a shakedown.
It is quite reasonable that they expect vendors to bundle some of their
apps on phones if they are going to have free use of their operating system.
The alternative would be to charge manufacturers to use Android, which I
expect would increase the cost of phones. That’s hardly helping consumers
and it is likely to have an impact outside of the EU too.
While I can certainly see how some of the restrictions that Google have
placed on the use of Android could be seen as mildly anti-competitive, they
also have the beneficial effect of providing standardisation across multiple
generations of smartphones, avoiding a fragmented nightmare of different,
incompatible versions of the operating system and software.
So on balance, I think Google should be rewarded for providing Apple
some competition and giving consumers more options, not punished.
Nicholas Vinen
Derby Street, Silverwater, NSW 2148.
2
Silicon Chip
Australia’s electronics magazine
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