Russia targets Google over Android bundling
Google’s problems with anti-monopoly legislation are not confined to the European Union. As well as litigation it faces from Brussels, the Russian authorities have now turned their sights on the company. This seems somewhat paradoxical, given that Google doesn’t actually dominate the market there, with Yandex enjoying a 60 percent share.
This situation, which aside from Russia is only found in China (where Baidu has an 80 percent share), in South Korea (where Naver controls 50 percent of the market), in Japan (where Google has just overtaken Yahoo! Japan), and in Kazakhstan (which is dominated by Mail.ru), has not prevented it from attracting the attention of the anti-monopoly authorities, given that the lawsuit isn’t about search engines per se, but the company’s use of the Android operating system.
The Russians have been angered by Google’s practice of obliging the makers of devices that want to incorporate Android to include its suite of tools, a practice known as bundling, and that has been compared to Microsoft’s activities with Windows, landing the company in court. Unsurprisingly, the Redmond-based company has been flagging up Google’s activities for some time now.
In 2001, Microsoft was found guilty of anti-competition activities for including in its Windows operating system, which then enjoyed complete hegemony, a free navigator, Internet Explorer, that effectively excluded any other navigator from competing: users had a free program already in their operating system, preinstalled in their computers, and had little incentive to look for an alternative, and much less to pay for one. This practice, which at the time provoked the demise of Netscape, parallels the lawsuit being brought against Google: this is a different operating system, Android, and a different platform, smartphones, but the behavior is not so different.
Seen from the perspective of countries where Google dominates the market, it is difficult to see what the Russian authorities are trying to achieve here. But in Russia itself, where there are plenty of companies competing to offer alternatives to Google’s products, such as maps, mail, etc. it makes sense that competitors like Yandex would complain about the forced inclusion of products that compete with theirs in Android terminals and that are a significant disincentive to the public to use their products.
Android’s global market share in the second quarter of 2015 is 82.8 percent, according to the IDC. In Russia, Statista says that in July 2015, that figure was 64.5 percent, compared to 24.4 percent for iOS. It’s little wonder that Android has attracted the attention of the regulators, and rightly so.
In response, Google itself seems to be taking steps to correct the situation, although for the moment, this has been limited to offering users features to eliminate its applications, but still not allowing manufacturers to opt out. In fact Google seems to have pressured manufacturers like Acer, threatening to exclude it from Android if it made terminals using the Yun OS operating system, created by Alibaba as an Android fork with the aim of adapting it for the Chinese market.
Eventually, Alibaba decided to offer its operating system to smaller Chinese manufacturers and to Meizu, a popular company in the internal market there, and that it has invested in, in the same way that other forks such as CyanogenMod are offered by brands such as OnePlus, which are not dependent on Google.
The Russian authorities will announce their decision within the next week. If this involves some kind of sanction, Russia will be the first market in which Google’s Android activities are deemed to be abusive, ahead even of the EU, which said in April it would look at the case. It is very likely that the Russian decision could influence Brussels, creating problems for Google with a product that it considers strategically important in the coming years.
(En español, aquí)
