Shock: Russian court says Russian court is right in slapping down Google monopoly An arbitration court in Russia has upheld an earlier decision that could see Google banned from bundling its stuff on Android gear. The Moscow Arbitration Court said in a brief statement that it would uphold the 2015 ruling from the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) that Google abused its monopoly powers in Russia by forcing …
...the Russians have a point. Almost exactly the same point as the past MS anti-trust investigators found with the bundling of IE and similar on Windows to leverage the near-monopoly that MS had with OEM deals for Windows at a "competitive price" on the hardware.
Of course the US investigation folded before anything useful was done (you know, like breaking MS in to separate OS & apps companies to compete openly, a la MySQL now...) and the EU took ages to pick that up and it was all to little and too late.
Will Russia have enough clout to force Android licensing and app compatibility to be free of Google's slurping? OK Yandex slurping maybe not be much better, but choice is kind of a good thing.
I agree with the Russians, my phone came with a huge number of Google (cr)apps that are tied into the OS and difficult to remove. I decided I need a new app and now Google play is demanding I register a debit or credit card 'in case' I need to buy an app although I can work round it, it is annoying that it is there in the first place.
I would not consider any kind of purchasing or banking from and Android phone.
"I decided I need a new app and now Google play is demanding I register a debit or credit card 'in case' I need to buy an app..."
Can you tell some more about that? Personally, I regularly download 'free' apps and I've never been asked for a card on the play store.
Can you tell some more about that? Personally, I regularly download 'free' apps and I've never been asked for a card on the play store.
I also keep getting a popup that I need to add a card.
There is a "skip" button; it works, but you will get asked again...
Vic.
Russia might have enough clout to force that in Russia, but any judgement/settlement in Russia wouldn't bind Google to different behavior elsewhere. And even if Russia thought they could force that, what incentive would they have to do so? I doubt Yandex is under any illusions they are going to make headway in the Euro or US search market.
If we leave just the meat of the case it is identical to proceedings being brought in the Eu competition commission which are still dragging on. This one: http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-15-4782_en.htm
There are if memory serves me right similar proceedings opened competition authorities in nearly every jurisdiction on the planet.
The only thing to differ from the Eu (and other) proceedings here is that the case has gotten past the competition watchdog, the competition watchdog has quite rightfully decided against Google, Google has tried to protest in court and the court, once again, quite rightfully, has given it a slap in public.
When the Eu case will finally reach a decision it will not be any different (unless Google defangs the Eu competition commission through the transatlantic trade partnership first).
In case anyone else wants to know if Google/Android does actually have a monopoly of the mobile OS market in Russia. From what I can gather, Android is at about 75% in Russia (Kantar, 2015) and Russian antitrust law goes goes with dominant position (monopoly) at 50% or more of the market (Wikipedia).
Yandex has its own app store & nothing to stop people taking the option of allowing non google app store installs, so just chuck on yandex apk and away you go.
In the same way that you would need to do "sideload" for the Amazon android app store
I assume Google will be using same security argument as apple, that they perform some level of "vetting" of apps in the app store to reduce user risk & other app stores pose more risk.
As for email, I do not speak Russian, but a quick browse on google play showed yandex email, yandex browser and various other yandex stuff, so not exactly hard to find replacements for the google default apps.
I cannot speak for others but I do not use many of the default android apps, first thing I do on a new android phone is alternative mail & browser client setup, but it has some similarities with the MS IE default bundling case (though there are extra "security" arguments at play here) if you assume lots of people do not have the curiosity to investigate alternatives.
" if you assume lots of people do not have the curiosity to investigate alternatives."
A reasonable assumption to make!
I seem to remember that the stats for app downloads were very poor, in that your typical user only downloaded a few apps (typically a game or two), most simply stuck with what was preinstalled. Which is really where Yandex and others come from, the need is to break Google's lock-in of the device OEM's which is very similar to MS's lock-in of the PC manufacturers.
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