The European Commission has issued
a Statement of Objections to Google alleging abuse of dominance in the mobile
phone operating market. The Commission
has accused Google of using restrictive licensing and giving preference to its
own pre-installed applications that use the Android operating system.
The objections follow a year after
the Commission launched an investigation which found that Google obliges
manufacturers who wish to pre-install Google’s Play Store application store for
Android to also pre-install Google Search as the default search engine for the
devices and Google Chrome as their browser.
The Commission also found that Google granted significant financial
incentives to large smartphone manufacturers on the condition that they
pre-install Google Search. The
Commission believes that as a result of these practices rivals have been unable
to compete on the merits.
Google has countered the Commission’s
case by claiming that the Android operating system has helped to promote
innovation based on open source software.
Google maintains that its practices do not exclude rivals from the
market.
Only yesterday an investigation by
the Canadian Competition Bureau raising similar theories of harm was closed
because the authority did not find sufficient evidence to establish that Google
had used exclusionary terms in its contracts with advertisers.
Meanwhile Google faces a host of
other antitrust investigations. It is
continuing to challenge the Statement of Objections sent by the Commission in
April 2015 relating to abuse of dominance through the self-preference of Google’s
own shopping sites. Just this week News
Corporation has lodged a complaint with the Commission alleging that Google
discourages users from accessing its news content from the original source.
European Commission press
release. Antitrust: Commission sends
Statement of Objections to Google on Android operating system and applications,
Brussels, 20 April 2016
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