Google Competitors File Ridiculous EU Complaint Arguing That 'Free' Android Is Anti-Competitive
from the get-over-yourselves dept
FairSearch, the increasingly silly and shrill looking "coalition" of tech companies which have nothing in common other than a visceral hatred for Google (it's led by Microsoft) has so far failed miserably in convincing regulators that Google was an antitrust problem. Now it's filed a new attack on Google in the EU, arguing that its Android mobile strategy is anti-competitive because it gives Android away for free.“Google is using its Android mobile operating system as a ‘Trojan Horse’ to deceive partners, monopolize the mobile marketplace, and control consumer data,” said Thomas Vinje, Brussels-based counsel to the FairSearch coalition. “We are asking the Commission to move quickly and decisively to protect competition and innovation in this critical market. Failure to act will only embolden Google to repeat its desktop abuses of dominance as consumers increasingly turn to a mobile platform dominated by Google’s Android operating system.”What's especially ridiculous here is that Microsoft, who is the major source behind FairSearch, dealt with this exact issue itself back during its antitrust fights, when people ridiculously accused it of the same thing for daring to give out Internet Explorer for "free." The idea that giving away some software for free is somehow anti-competitive is just laughable. That this is now being pushed by a bunch of companies who themselves use the exact same benefits of giving away free software to promote other parts of their business is just the height of cynical exploitation of the political process to try to hamstring a competitor in red tape, rather than competing in the marketplace.
[....] Google achieved its dominance in the smartphone operating system market by giving Android to device-makers for ‘free.’
Law Professor James Grimmelman, who is hardly a big Google supporter (he was among those who fought the hardest against the Google Books settlement) properly called this new filing by FairSearch "disgusting." It's a blatantly cynical attempt by Microsoft, Nokia, Expedia, TripAdvisor and Oracle to use a totally bogus legal complaint to just waste a competitor's time. All of those companies rely on free software in some form or another. No one in their right mind argues that offering free software is somehow anti-competitive. It seems that FairSearch has now reached hysterical desperation as it attempts to justify itself.
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Filed Under: android, antitrust, competition, eu, free, mobile
Companies: expedia, fairsearch, google, microsoft, nokia, tripadvisor
Reader Comments
The First Word
“What about harming the consumer?
I thought monopolies were measured by their harm to the consumer; where has it been shown that Google has harmed the consumer? Getting something free sure hasn't hurt me. Besides that, Google pushes, unsuccessfully, for a base Android to be installed on mobile phones and tablets. This allows the consumer to run whatever software they want from email client, maps, navigation, etc. It just so happens that much of what Google offers is best in class for apps as well. But again, those are free. Well, if you count giving up large quantities of data about yourself "free". But every app gathers that data.Subscribe: RSS
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Of course, the problem is others have ALREADY TRIED THAT and the results have been less than spectacular.
Maybe it's just that Google's offerings are a more compelling?
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The world made sense when this separation existed, but as Microsoft is pushing in to the content space with Bing, and as Google pushes in to the OS space with Chrome OS and Android, I can see how this would create a natural conflict.
There seems to be this natural inclination for businesses to always need to grow, when perhaps the smart thing to do is stop trying to grow in to other business's markets and start looking for ways to go in to "maintenance mode" and simply serve your core market.
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Of course it's anti-competitive!
Well, I mean, radio is surely the reason music is dying off, I mean, giving away all their music for free and getting people to like the songs and buy the albums and... Um...
Well, there's always software that's getting pirated! Surely no one can compete with free software! Why, I'm sure that Bill Gates, one of the earliest people who spoke out against this is just furious that he could never stop it from his giant mansion and... Um...
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You know, I'm beginning to think that you can compete with free somehow.
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Re: Of course it's anti-competitive!
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Re: Re: Of course it's anti-competitive!
You should be more worried about the new dioxygen scare! You're constantly surrounded with the stuff, and it's been linked to every fire that's ever killed someone. It's responsible for the weakening of what should be very solid metal and if reacted with hydrogen creates dihydrogen monoxide!
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Well, you would have to include hydrocarbon gas, argon, and trace gases if you want to be accurate.
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Microsoft should sue Linus, he's gave the world an operational system for (GASP!) free. FireFox is distributed for (THE HORROR!) free.
Next they'll say that free is to business what the Boston strangler was to women home alone. Hmmmm.
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same argument against MS?
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What about harming the consumer?
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No, they aren't.
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Google encourages manufacturers to put Android on their phones by giving them a share of ad revenu if they sell Android phones.
It's not a problem of Android being open source and therefore free. And it's not the same as giving IE away for free. This is closer to what Microsoft does when they give a licensing discount to PC makers for including Windows on their devices.
I'm an avid Android user, who has owned quite a few Android devices but I still see why some would think it's anti-competitive.
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Citation, please.
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http://abovethecrowd.com/2009/10/29/google-redefines-disruption-the-less-than-free-busines s-model/
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Perhaps, but not really. They can't make this argument because doing this sort of thing is common practice. They would be hoist by their own petard.
Also, that it's common practice means that Google doesn't get an advantage from it that the others don't get. So it's not actually anti-competitive in the first place.
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Let's clear something up
That is very much an oversimplification of what actually happened. Sure, they gave away IE for free, but they also:
- claimed it was an integral part of the OS (it wasn't)
- made IE uninstallable (for anyone but a very determined power user)
- required PC manufactures to not install any other browser
Those are the things that really got them in hot water, and justifiably so as it was clearly anti-competitive (anyone remember Netscape?)
In fact, the above reasons are what made ditch Windows entirely and switch to Linux.
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Re: Let's clear something up
Also, Microsoft was requiring PC manufacturers to pay for a Windows license for all machines they shipped, whether Windows was installed on them or not.
The "IE is free" component of Microsoft's antitrust issue was one of the most insignificant parts of the whole deal, and nobody really took it all that seriously. Microsoft lost because of their actual abuses.
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Re: Re: Let's clear something up
(I got nailed by that when I bought a PC back in 1998. I had to take the OS, even though I had already bought a retail copy of Windows, and I was going to put Linux on my old PC.)
But that practice has long since been discontinued... even though it's still difficult for the average consumer to actually buy a pre-built PC without Windows on it.
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Even now, if you buy a computer with Windows preinstalled and aren't going to use Windows, Microsoft will refund the license fee for that machine to you. It's not actually worth doing -- there's a lot of hoops to jump through and waiting to be done, and the amount of money you get is lower than you might think as the license fee is nowhere near the retail price for Windows -- but you can do it.
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Actually, I kind of see the point. Microsoft, Blackberry, Apple, and Google have all spent millions of dollars to develop their mobile operating systems. Aside from Google, all of the other platform developers have opted to profit from this by making the consumer pay for the software - either as part of the device (in the case of iOS and Blackberry) or through license fees, like MS does with Windows Phone.
The thing is, so-called "loss leaders" are a common tactic: bringing in customers with good deals, then hooking them in with contracts or more expensive products can be abusive. A lot of retail stores, for example, have been accused of moving in to a town, setting low initial prices on products, then raising their price once competition has dried up.
I think you could make a case that giving something away for free can be used to hook people in to something that they would not otherwise have purchased. Internet Explorer is perhaps a perfect example of this; IE started out as payware, but it quickly became free. Netscape, the first browser I had experience with, also started as payware - but IE killed Netscape's market share, even though Netscape was a much better product at the time.
That's the real issue here: free software isn't always or even usually as good as the paid-for alternatives, yet people use free stuff because it's good enough.
In the case of IE, this definitely harmed the industry by creating a conflicting set of "standards" for CSS and web design. You have to basically write web sites twice, now: once for IE and once for everything else.
However, in the mobile phone industry, I think we're facing a situation where the free product is actually better than its competition in many ways: I didn't choose Android based on price; I chose it because it's more like a real computer than the other mobile OS's I've used.
The fact is that for the consumer, all of these OS's are free. The OS comes with the device, and that's all there is to it. We've already also discovered that Android actually costs manufacturers money in terms of patent licenses: rumor has it that Microsoft makes more from its patents in Android device than from Windows Phone devices.
So while I do agree that this really isn't anti-competitive in this instance, I also cannot agree with the assertion that free software can't be anti-competitive. I think that free software, when it's used as a way to lock people in to products or services that are more costly in the long run, can and definitely have been harmful to the industry.
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Something I've read elsewhere springs to mind: if the product you're using was given to you for free, you're not the customer, you're the product.
That's largely been my distaste with Android in general, and ad-driven software in particular. Unfortunately, ad-driven software on smartphones is starting to become the norm, and Android has become such a "default" in the industry it's hard to go with the competitors (other than Apple's "walled garden", where the fact that you're a product is just as apparent).
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Don't kid yourself.
Dunno if that's the worst thing really because you have the alternative of insidious micro-payments.
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The beauty of Android in my view is that along with being easy it's very easily customizable (ie: custom builds, mods) so you can always get rid of the bad parts if you want. By easy I mean that if you read about it you can learn how to do it ;))
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That's largely been my distaste with Android in general, and ad-driven software in particular.
Free doesn't necessarily mean ad-supported. There are any number of open source products that aren't ad supported and you could really say there is no customer. Just users.
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Except that most of the free software I use isn't ad-driven. Certainly, Open Office, Paint.Net, and Inkscape aren't adware.
And then there's all the free developer tools out there. Eclipse, SharpDevelop, the list goes on.
My thinking is that the real reason Android is free is because its developers wanted to use Linux as a base. That pretty much forced them to continue under the GPL.
And quite frankly, I'm glad they did. There's been a lot of stuff that free Android has made possible that would have been a lot more difficult, if not impossible without it: stuff that has nothing to do with Google or even mobile phones.
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I was more referencing Google's own apps: GMail, Google Docs, Youtube, etc. They're free (well, unless you have a paid business account). This isn't done out of the goodness of Google's heart.
My thinking is that the real reason Android is free is because its developers wanted to use Linux as a base. That pretty much forced them to continue under the GPL.
Not necessarily. As a counter-example, think of webOS, which, while it was still active, was my preferred mobile OS: used Linux, not free, and much of it wasn't open source. Fairly open? Sure: look at how active, even today, the modding community is with webOS, and Open webOS is helping continue it. Running Linux, though, didn't force Palm or HP to give away webOS for free, though.
And quite frankly, I'm glad they did. There's been a lot of stuff that free Android has made possible that would have been a lot more difficult, if not impossible without it: stuff that has nothing to do with Google or even mobile phones.
I'll agree with that.
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I fail to see any issue with this.
In the case of IE, this definitely harmed the industry by creating a conflicting set of "standards" for CSS and web design.
Which has nothing to do with IE being free and all with Microsof~1 being the dicks they are. Netscape Navigator was free for end-users to.
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It's an issue when a loss leader is used to crowd out competitors with better products, and then that "special deal" is taken away when the competition disappears.
To be fair, I don't think that's actually happening here: Android is a quality product that can stand on its own. I have seen this happen in the past, though: one company manages to get in to the OEM market, and their competition dries up for lack of sales.
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I know Windows 8 still has a different Euro build that has less MS products included at install. It seems that over there giving out too much free shit really is "anti-competitive". Which I guess just shows that their legal system is as against the public as ours.
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It's still here in the US, though. It's the browser I use to install Chrome.
Actually, I do tend to agree with Microsoft's logic on one point: providing a browser with the OS allows software developers to more easily provide a text visualization layer that doesn't need a lot of coding. If I'm going to distribute text and graphics as part of a program, I know that there's an easy way to show it to the user.
This used to be done by the Help system. Help files used to be something very much like HTML, as a matter of fact... but in recent years, more and more programs are simply linking to web pages or HTML documents for user documentation, and an HTML doc is much easier to build than a help file.
But you still need some sort of baseline presentation layer for that... which means the OS really does need some sort of HTML viewer, or what we call a web browser.
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One piece of software dominating the market isn't a problem if no company hads a monopoly on that software
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(See "IBM Loses Latest Round In Symbolic Control Case".)
And while we're on the subject, does this not look eerily familiar?
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Nokia is the last one that should complain.
Nokia now is only a shadow of it past, they didn't need a OS with a strong ecosystem, they had it, actually with their past workforce well managed they had the possibility to offer a ton off free high quality apps to make the best experience for their user. Is basically what Google do now some time fails but their apps tend to be one of the 10 best in their category.
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The modified kernel will always be free and you will always be able to patch out any data collection from it.
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I mean to say google cannot force kernal vendors or end useres of unlocked phones to have any kernel spying intact
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It seems unlikely the actual kernel has that stuff in it, doesn't it? Wouldn't that be built on top of the kernel, in "userspace" if you want to geek out? BTW, does Android use GNU stuff or their own?
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What's AntiTrust?
Yep. That sounds just like what we're seeing.
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Apples and Oranges
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Re: Apples and Oranges
How do you mean?
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Re: Re: Apples and Oranges
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but the complain is not about Android perse
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Microsoft still doesn't get it
The issue with IE was not that it was "free". In fact, it was originally available as a free download or disk for Windows 95 to compete with Netscape. That wasn't what got Microsoft into antitrust problems, it was when they started "bundling" IE with every purchased copy of Windows 98 that made IE no longer "free" and anti-competitive. That and Microsoft bullying OEMs to not preinstall any other browser if they wanted their OEM license discount.
Linux, Android, and the GPL don't cross this line. They are available for "free", but never bundled. You always have a choice. Phone manufacturers could offer iOS on their phones as an alternative to Android, but Apple forbids iOS from being installed on any hardware but theirs.
But of course, Microsoft seems to think that because it did wrong and got spanked for it that anyone else who competes with them must be guilty too. A liar assumes that everyone else is a liar, a thief assumes that everyone else is a thief.
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