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Google has a near monopoly on smartphones--In my country Android has like 95% market share. You can only abuse your dominant position if you have a dominant po
by cpmouter 8y ago
Google has a near monopoly on smartphones--In my country Android has like 95% market share.
You can only abuse your dominant position if you have a dominant position, and Apple does not have one.
- hammock 8y agoIt's different in the EU, but in the US, being a monopoly is not illegal. What's restricted is 1) monopolistic actions like predatory pricing 2) mergers that might create a monopoly
- cpmouter 8y agoBeing a monopoly is not illegal in the EU either.
- daveFNbuck 8y agoHow do you take a monopolistic action if you have a small market share?
- ekianjo 8y agoGoogle does not sell (much) smartphones. If you have several manufacturers selling Android smartphones where is the monopoly coming from?
- cpmouter 8y agoHow many computers did Microsoft sell in the 00s?
- ekianjo 8y agoMicrosoft forced OEMs to install Windows at the time. That's a slightly different situation. As far as I know Google is not force-feeding Android to anyone.
- detaro 8y agoIn what way did Microsoft force OEMs that Google doesn't?
- ekianjo 8y agoCould you fork Windows at the time? No. You can fork Android anytime now. That's the difference.
- cpmouter 8y agoYou can fork AOSP, which I'm sure can't run any of the top 10 apps of the Play Store unless you install Google Services, which are closed source and require a licence from Google (which in turn requires you to bundle Chrome, make Google Search the default, etc). AOSP by itself is pretty useless because it can't run any of the apps the public is interested in.
- beenBoutIT 8y ago*Can't run many of the apps. Lots of apps will run with limited functality. Chrome generally runs on AOSP, but it won't update and isn't nearly as capable as it would be with Google Services installed.
- detaro 8y agoYou can't freely fork the Android that's dominating the market: Android with Google services in it, key components of it are proprietary. You can't even sell some devices with it and others with an AOSP fork.
- tomcam 8y agoNo. They gave a better deal to OEMs who used Windows exclusively
- ksk 8y agoHow did they force them? With a gun or something? Google will threaten to cancel your Play Services license if you ship services (that have nothing to do with android) competing with them. Classic case of harming competition by product tying IMHO.
- detaro 8y agoMarketshare of their OS and associated services, not their phones.
- Brakenshire 8y agoThe effective monopoly is in access to the Play Store, which requires Play Services, which is strongly controlled by Google.
- beenBoutIT 8y agoGoogle Play Services enable Google to guarantee a consistent UX across a wide range of OEM devices. Anyone with a Nexus device can build and flash an AOSP eng/debug image and manually install just the Play Store to understand why Play Services are a requirement.
- ricw 8y agoGoogle does control what equates to an effective monopoly of all smartphone software in the EU. You don't need to sell to have a monopoly that you can abuse.
- ekianjo 8y agoAndroid is mostly open-source and nothing prevents manufacturers from forking it for their own purpose. Google play Services is not an obligation when you see things this way.
- pmiller2 8y agoManufacturers want the Google Play Store for the same reason Willie Sutton is said to have robbed banks: because that’s where the money (and the apps) are.
- MBCook 8y agoMicrosoft didn’t sell PCs in the 90s either. People want Android with Google Play store. Google won’t let you do that without restrictions the EU says are anticompetitive.
- jonknee 8y agoThey also didn't give away the source code... Anyone can ship a phone without the Google Play store, but almost no one wants to buy one. Check out the Amazon Fire Phone as an example, backed by one of the biggest companies in the world and you can fit the number of Fire Phone users in a small room and still have lots of room left over.
- gsnedders 8y agoNo, not anyone can ship a phone without the Google Play Store: if you ship one device with it, all your devices must ship with it. That isn't that far away from Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. v. Intel Corp. over Intel's exclusivity contracts.
- MBCook 8y agoReally? Didn’t know they did that. MS had effectively the same rule too, didn’t they? Wasn’t that (one of) the reasons we didn’t see Linux as even a BTO option for the longest time?
- gsnedders 8y ago> MS had effectively the same rule too, didn’t they? Wasn’t that (one of) the reasons we didn’t see Linux as even a BTO option for the longest time? Until 1994: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/microsofts-1994-consent-decree-boon-or-bust/ https://www.techrepublic.com/article/microsofts-1994-consent... Note that the MS one was different: OEMs paid license costs based on computers shipped (with/without Windows), whereas Google requires complete exclusivity if you ship one device with Google Play Store.
- votepaunchy 8y agoMicrosoft did not sell computers but was found to have abused their Windows OS monopoly.
- hadrien01 8y agoTo be successful, any Android phone needs the Google Play Store. And to get the rights to ship the Play Store, you (as a manufacturer) need to preinstall dozens of Google system apps and services. That way, Google has the total control (therefore monopoly) over the experience of nearly every single Android phone.
- ekianjo 8y ago> To be successful Then it's a choice on the part of manufacturers, not an obligation. Look at Amazon: they decide to do without.
- jdmichal 8y agoTo be successful, you need to breathe. I will now remove all oxygen from the room. It's your choice, not an obligation, to then negotiate with me to provide oxygen. Unfortunately for you, there are no other oxygen providers to negotiate with. But you could, after all, grab some water and generate your own oxygen... I think it's noteworthy that the only counterexample you can find is a tech behemoth with an even larger market cap than Google. If this was a person with an analogous scenario to be "successful", aka put food on the table, this would clearly be negotiating under duress.
- ocdtrekkie 8y agoYes, the Fire Phone was a stunning success, and clearly evidence you can compete with Google's proprietary Android offering with your own fork. /s I would argue Kindles are largely successful because they don't compete with proprietary Android in any appreciable metric: Google-flavored Android barely even attempts to compete in the tablet market, and Kindles are e-readers first, and tablets second.
- detaro 8y agoFollowing that logic, it would be impossible to dominate an OS market since an OEM always would be free to write their own.
- craftyguy 8y agoThey push their OS, which requires fees from and compliances with manufacturers. The same analogy can be drawn from Microsoft and the desktop OS market in the 90s/00s. They had a monopoly Ewen though they didn't sell computers directly. They still strong-armed manufacturers, like Google is doing today.
- ekianjo 8y ago> like Google is doing today. any source for that?
- craftyguy 8y agoHere are some examples: https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/03/27/google-confirms-blocking-google-apps-uncertified-android-devices-heres-deal/ https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/03/27/google-confirms-blo... https://www.androidpolice.com/2017/10/04/google-announces-made-google-program-certify-accessories/ https://www.androidpolice.com/2017/10/04/google-announces-ma... Also, you know, the article here and any evidence the EU produces against Google...
- Zenst 8y agoAnother analogy would be EU membership and trade deals, they curtail others members from doing any trade deal as well as charge a fee. Though the sign of a true monopoly would be issues in trying to cancel the deal. Which is way easier with Android compared to many examples.
- virgilp 8y agoThey seem to have 66% market share on mobile apps, and I'd say they are abusing their power as much as they can: https://beta.techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/screen-shot-2017-04-27-at-9-49-19-am.png?w=680 https://beta.techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/scree... And if we're looking at e.g. "tablets", I wouldn't be surprised if they had something like 90% of the market, in some countries. It's funny how Apple is simultaneously depicted "non-dominant player" and "the only mobile platform where you can make money", sometimes by the same people.
- cpmouter 8y ago66% is not even close to a monopoly, and even if it was, "consumer spend" is not a metric that defines a monopoly.
- Oletros 8y agoIn the EU, more than 30% makes you a dominant player
- drdaeman 8y agoIt's almost certainly a duopoly, though.
- bad_user 8y agoIt’s not global percentage of a certain market that defines a monopoly. Apple has 100% market share in the iOS market. Due to that fact they’ve got exclusive control over a significant percentage of the population - consider that customers cannot install another OS on the hardware they’ve bought and they cannot move their iOS apps on another Android phone either. To make an analogy consider that you’d complain about your local electricity provider having a monopoly and I’d tell you that you can always move to another city or country, there, problem solved, it was your fault for staying there.
- mook 8y ago> Apple has 100% market share in the iOS market. And Linux has 100% market share in the desktop Linux market. But it probably doesn't count as a monopoly. I do believe the significant market share of Apple smartphones is an issue, but as far as I know they haven't managed to make it a monopoly yet.
- mtgx 8y agoI think both deserve to be investigated over anti-trust. What I'd like Google to be investigated for in this Android case, and I don't think it was, is how the company bans virtually all forms of ad-blocking from the Play Store. Adblockers are not illegal (quite the contrary), but they are a business conflict for Google. Given that Android is found to be a monopoly, Google should be much more restricted in how it decides to cut apps off from the Play Store, especially if those apps are a "problem" for its main business (just like VOIP apps once were for carriers, etc).