EU Lawsuit: Google Fined $5 Billion Over Android Anti-Trust Violations

BAILEY T. STEEN | MONDAY, JULY 23, 2018

Last Wednesday, the European Union once again took the fight to Google’s elitists with another round of anti-trust fines. The Atlantic reports that for the crime of “denying rivals a chance to innovate” through the Android operating system (OS), used on 80 percent of smartphones worldwide, Google is expected to pay the largest fine in EU history with damages of €4.34 billion ($5.06 billion USD) for their “abuse of marketplace dominance”.

“Google has used Android as a vehicle to cement the dominance of its search engine. These practices have denied rivals the chance to innovate and compete on the merits,” the EU anti-trust chief Margrethe Vestager claimed in a statement last week. “They have denied European consumers the benefits of effective competition in the important mobile sphere.”

To translate in non-bureaucratic English: the EU commission found Google were establishing illegal deals with phone manufacturers to have Chrome apps and services pre-installed across all Android phones (a luxury not afforded to their competitors). Furthermore, Google even prevented these manufacturers from installing alternate builds of the Android OS. Despite Android being an open source OS, Google enacted anti-fragmentation agreements to keep manufacturers on Google’s offical version of Android that’s pre-approved by the company directly, compared to customised versions (such as Amazon’s Fire OS) which were not allowed on these devices.

Failure to do abide by Google’s anti-consumer choice requests would result in threats of restricting creators’ access to the Google Play store, an essential service for consumers hoping to have more apps on their phone, cementing a device’s demise. This coercion gave Google a sinister market edge: either cater to our unearned demands, where our offical products™ reside in almost every mobile phone across the globe, or die alone with only your pride.