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Comment by Arnt | Hacker News Reader

Quite a few comments, none so far about the matter that's leading to the fine: Paying manufacturers to preinstall stuff.

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What does the EU want here, exactly? For Google to close Android and make all the phones itself, thus eliminating the problem of OEMs being paid by eliminating OEMs entirely?

This is yet another bizarre ruling by the EU - they're saying that a far more proprietary, less competition friendly approach (Apple) is OK, but you can literally give an entire OS away as open source and it's illegal? I don't think tech firms can win here. Nothing they do will ever appease the EU.

It's not about open vs closed. Google has a dominant market position and Apple does not. Abuse of a dominant market position is illegal.

What makes it a dominant market position?

The fact that Google controls 85% of the phones and 95% of search?

The problem isn't paying OEMs. The problem is what they're paying OEMs to do: shut out Google's competitors from the OEMs' products.

Anti-competitive actions are anti-competitive even if you're paying somebody to help you, even if you make a FOSS operating system, and even if Apple engage in their own anti-competitive activities.

I'm all for antitrust regulators being more active to spur competition, but this is an odd one. Microsoft certainly pays OEMs to configure Bing, Google & Yahoo have paid Mozilla to use their search engine. Yahoo pays for crapware to install their toolbar, often paying malware authors, and yet it's Android that gets them in a frenzy.

Google clearly has platform power here, but targeting the payments is such an odd one to me. I can't believe phone manufacturers will be happy about this either since competing search engines probably won't pay them as much in light of this.

> Microsoft certainly pays OEMs to configure Bing

Microsoft has little market share.

Google pays more to Apple to have their search as default than Yahoo pays Mozilla and Oracle.

Btw, can you point towards Yahoo paying for crapware to be installed?

Sorry, no references off the top of my head, just seen it first hand when investigating pay per install networks in desktop crapware. Saw Ask & Yahoo toolbars getting installed by them, pretty sure that indicated a kickback, but I didn't care to dig.

It's a very odd one. It'd leave Microsoft and possibly Yahoo the only companies willing and able to pay phone companies to install their search, and Microsoft's historically been a lot more obnoxious about it, paying them to prevent users from switching to alternative search engines.

Why is that being considered anti-competitive here ?

It seems like they are participating in a competitive marketplace by offering to pay and being awarded the coveted spot as an equal participant rather than using their position as the upstream to force their way in.

Certainly they have a valuable product and deep pockets making them better able to compete here, but it doesn't seem to exclude anyone from competing on the same field.

The suggestion is that it does. Google are paying (and strong-arming) manufacturers to shut out Google's search competitors from their handsets.

Unfortunately, Google's contracts with OEMs are secret, and the newest ones the public has seen are five years old. But Google has previously used terms that outright barred a manufacturer from having any Android devices without Google Play, if they dare partner with another company for even one model. And in order to get Google Play, the terms they must agree to also require preinstalling a large list of apps, and setting them as default.

I suggest you look up the Android MADA agreement (the ones on the Internet are from 2011), and then consider that by all rumor, they've gotten worse since then.

Maybe the biggest problem is the fact that these agreements are secret, and not subject to public review. I doubt Android's support would be so widespread if the public knew about these contracts from the start.

> payments or discounts to mobile phone manufacturers in return for pre-installing Google's Play Store with Google Search

My read is that Google leverages its dominance in the Android app store market to protect its search business by some sort of deal that makes manufacturers install both. If I understand correctly, the problem is that, say, Bing may match the price Google is paying a manufacturer for search, but Google may then make the manufacturer pay for the Play Store somehow.

Though the article is too vague to be sure.

You can't have the Play Store if you don't abide by a set of rules. Having Google Search as default is part of those rules. If you have Bing as default, you don't get the Play Store or the rest of Google Android.

I wonder if google pays adobe for their (default) bundle offering(1). And if that would be comparable to this.

(1) = Go to the download page for adobe flash or adobe reader for example and they have preselected the optional download of google chrome.

So which one is cheaper, paying for preinstall or paying the fine post install?

Did they actually pay them or simply give them the OS for free in exchange?

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