European Commission vs. Google. Android under the magnifying glass – Newsweek Poland

Brussels falls on the warpath with Google. How expensive can be such a dispute, convinced once Microsoft.

Margrethe Vestager, EU Commissioner. Competition, announced on Wednesday an antitrust investigation against Google, a manufacturer of mobile operating system Android. Plea? Google uses a dominant position in the smartphone market to restrict competition.

This is serious, because it concerns today’s hottest segment of the computer market. Smartphones are essentially pocket computers sold in bulk quantities. In the last year, according to the firm Strategy Analytics, it was 1.4 billion units, of which 80 per cent. It works on Android (Google is developing this system and make it available for free to various manufacturers). Another source of income is the applications which run on smartphones programs – earning them both their producers and intermediaries, that is, the owners of “stores” of applications, including Google Play or Apple App Store.

Shop Google or Apple is the only official way to install the application on your smartphone. But the customer must first learn that in general can install applications, and then have to find them among the more than one million others. The manufacturer of the system has the advantage over others, that default can install their applications on any smartphone. And this happens: when you turn on the phone with Android, there is already an application to read Google Mail, Google maps etc. The services of Google, you can use right away, you do not need to do anything. And every customer is specific to Google money. Interestingly, the same thing appears in the case of Apple and the iPhone, but this market share is considerably smaller (in the US is less than 40 per cent., The Western Europe – less than 24 per cent.), So there is no abuse of a dominant position.