Google Has Been Paying Wireless Carriers Billions To Not Develop Competing App Stores
from the not-so-innovative-I-guess dept
To be clear, wireless carrier app stores have always kind of sucked. Verizon's efforts to create its own app store were shut down in 2012, after underwhelming consumers for years. At the time, the narrative was that Verizon just didn't find it worth the trouble in the face of Google domination and innovation. And while that's still largely true (wireless carriers are utterly unfamiliar with competition and therefore historically suck at innovation and adaptation), it turns out there was another reason.
Namely, that Google was paying Verizon and other major wireless companies a big chunk of money to not compete with the Android marketplace. And they were paying smartphone manufacturers to ship devices without competing app stores installed. Both nuggets were buried in a freshly unredacted copy of Epic's antitrust complaint (pdf) against Google, first spotted by Jeremy Owens:
Man, I love when the redactions come off and there are fascinating numbers underneath.
This unredacted graf shows that telcos get up to 25% of Google's app sales to keep them from developing rival app stores on the smartphones they sell and service. pic.twitter.com/Vx6p1YBU6S
— Jeremy C. Owens (@jowens510) August 19, 2021
This agreement to start paying wireless carriers 20-25% of app sales was occurring right around the time that Google brass was visibly starting to wimp out on consumer-centric issues like net neutrality. That involved working closely with Verizon to push the FCC toward flimsy, loophole-filled, "compromise" 2010 net neutrality rules that excluded wireless entirely. Verizon proceeded to then successfully sue the FCC to have those repealed anyway, leading to better rules in 2015 that were also dismantled a few years, later, albeit thanks to lobbying, not the courtroom.
Google's shift from hugely innovative disruptor to entrenched, elbow-swinging turf protector has been a fairly ugly and historically unsurprising transition. You can clearly see the line in the sand somewhere around 2010 to throw away many of the guiding principles that made them successful and popular. There was another executive leadership pivot sometime around 2016 that brought with it increased timidity at the company (see: the company's abrupt decision to largely give up on expanding Google Fiber and many other exciting moonshot projects). Then, more recently there's the whole AI ethics scandals, which speaks for itself.
To be clear Google still does a lot of interesting and popular stuff, but it's pretty damn clear that the ethics and bravery that guided the company originally were obliterated some time back.
I have to think that revelations Google was paying wireless carriers and smartphone manufacturers to not compete with it will likely fuel several different antitrust inquiries and court cases. Maybe wireless carriers would have always failed to develop compelling app stores of their own thanks to innate incompetence, but it's harder than ever for that to happen when Google is paying you billions of dollars to not even try. And then, should those competing app stores succeed, paying handset makers not to carry them anyway, even if they happen to become popular.
As a little side note, the fact Google has been paying wireless carriers billions of dollars to do nothing kind of puts an additional dent in FCC Commissioner's ongoing, dumb claim that "big tech" gets a "free ride" on telecom networks. Getting paid to do nothing is the exact kind of thing AT&T has been pushing for since 2003 or so. It's the kind of stupid demand that started the net neutrality debate. Whether the payoffs violated the law is for antitrust lawyers to decide, but the fact Google repeatedly thought nothing about ignoring its original founding principles continues to speak pretty loudly either way.
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Filed Under: android, app stores, competition, fees, mobile app stores, mobile operators
Companies: google, verizon
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European Commission and Google Android case
See also https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_18_4581 :
https://ec.europa.eu/competition/antitrust/cases/dec_docs/40099/40099_9993_3.pdf :
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Uh oh
Hey Karl, remember that Mike is a Google shill and you could get fired for writing articles like this. Toe the line my man. ;)
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Re: Uh oh
Might wanna check who's funding their Tech and COVID section.
Google's not the only one in the room for a while now. ;)
Which also explains why there's low-quality, unTechdirt-like garbage being mixed in recently.
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Have you seen carrier exclusive app stores?
They utterly suck and given the openness of android as a platform they can do so easily.
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Have you ever used an AT&T smartphone
There's so many crap AT&T apps installed on AT&T Smartphones, by AT&T, that can't be uninstalled, that I can't image the absolute nuclear-cluster-fuck that their app store might be.
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Re: Have you ever used an AT&T smartphone
Verizon does it too...
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Re: Re: Have you ever used an AT&T smartphone
Sprint did it too, and I suspect T-Mobile did as well.
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Re: Have you ever used an AT&T smartphone
So much this. I'm OK with Google heading off the crApp stores that would have been created by the cell carriers.
Remember what the carriers wanted phones to be like? They wanted to sell you ring tones for $4 each. And the actually made phone manufacturers remove the cumulative call timer feature that let you keep track of how many of your monthly minutes you'd used. The kind of apps they'd want on my phone via their app store would be terrible, and they'd want to lock me into their app store, finding a way to keep me from getting the apps I wanted, and to charge me for ones I don't.
The cell carriers are not some benevolent force for good - not even as "competitors" to Google.
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Re: Have you ever used an AT&T smartphone
Samsung loves to have a Smasung loadup and then google gets there onthe same phone and the Phone is FULL. 16gig of crap from both sides.
But if you Stop the samsung loadup, its just Android, and thats Fairly clean install.
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Re: Re: Have you ever used an AT&T smartphone
tried to do that with my Galaxy A50 after upgrading to Android 11, i installed the Google Clock app and disabled (from an ADB shell) the built-in Samsung Clock app.
i discovered that the phone started to drain battery like crazy and the screen was not turning off at all...
Even if the display was all-black, since i enabled 'show touches' under the developer settings i could see that the display was actually working and was drawing markers for every little touch it could detect... that clued me in on the fact that the display was not turning off at all.
For a few months I didn't quite know why it was behaving like that and draining the battery, since after upgrading to Android 11 i had replaced and disabled quite a few stock Samsung apps, but then i decided to look into it and discovered that Samsung designed their piece of shit logic for the display to depend on the Samsung Clock app.
If the Samsung Clock app is disabled then it won't show the clock on the lockscreen (meh...didn't need it) BUT it will also NOT turn off the display at all since it was waiting for their Clock app. (WTF moment)
The result was that it is draining the battery to about 50% after just sitting unused on the desk for 3-4 hours.
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Re: Re: Re: Have you ever used an AT&T smartphone
its so much fun watching others play with tech and messing Everything up.
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Looks like the carriers et al are getting free rides for not doing something they suck at and most people wouldn't be interested in anyway. Did I say "free ride"? I meant to say "making big bucks" (for doing nothing).
I'm not really seeing a problem with having a simple, basic business arrangement that deprives no one of anything worthwhile.
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Do no evil!
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Sounds very similar to the IE vs Netscape stunt Microsoft pulled with OEMs. The very stunt that (along with other things) ended up with them being found guilty of Antitrust violations.
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This is like payola all over again but with different actor giving and receiving the moola.
For the younger crowd: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola
Here, Google is the music "industry" and the carriers are the radio stations (and others)...
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But I can switch to an iPhone, so Google’s behavior poses no anti-competitive issue whatsoever. Just like how Bing and DuckDuckGo cause all the issues with Google’s size and power to instantly evaporate.
/s
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We need Linux phones, ASAP!
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Re:
lots of options there, up to you
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Re:
Android phones run Linux.
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Re: Re:
Whoooooosh!
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eyhe
What I find a little incredulous is that every year, everyone has to file tax returns, and if they're a public corporation, they also have to file a 10K with the SEC. From regular scrutiny of the "big boys" in the telecom sector, I'd like to think that someone should've seen a line item on the order of "Income from Google" . Or at the very least, a line item that made no sense at all, and no one could (or would!) explain what it meant - that should've raised a few eyebrows at some time in the past several years.
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How do I subscribe to billions of money?
I can also threaten google by creating my own app store and competing against google's play store. It's called meshpage. It shows 3d models and executable scripts for 3d modelling. Now that I have app store ready, I just need to subscribe to the billions of money designed to kill my appstore.
So, where's my money?
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Re: How do I subscribe to billions of money?
See, you an be funny when you aren't trolling.
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Such applications may not be successful because they need to be effectively promoted. And for this you need to have the appropriate skills or it is better to order such services from professionals. Personally I liked this option of mobile app advertising services on https://splitmetrics.com/blog/guide-to-mobile-app-advertising/. No one likes competition, so become competitive and you will be successful.
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