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How is that not clearly breaching d? They're a part of the same suite of apps that provide the "Android experience" (Google experience, whatever -- the thing t

How is that not clearly breaching d? They're a part of the same suite of apps that provide the "Android experience" (Google experience, whatever -- the thing that most consumers think of when they consider Android). They manifestly have a profound connection with each other. And let's be clear here lest there be any confusion -- zero customers want a vendor to do anything different, and the only reason some vendors wanted to is because they could double dip: Pitch the Android experience and get the market inroads, while getting some Bing or whatever payola to "force" that on a consumer. The same is true of the other claim- Then they said "You can't use Google Play if you try to help develop any android forks." Google's argument, whether honest or not, is that if you need a consistent representation of the Android experience that you're selling to consumers. If the GS8 has the full Android experience, but then the GS8P has the Android Fun Store and Bing Search, this can seriously dilute the market opinion of Android and cause consumer confusion. This is absolutely not at all clear cut. It is incredibly nuanced. And if we just go around clubbing everything coarsely, why does my BMW have a BMW entertainment system? Why couldn't I choose Alpine at the dealer? An entertainment system is not an engine, right? I don't want to go down the road of absurd analogies, but if you're seriously presenting the notion that this is clear cut, you are not really thinking about it much. As an aside, Google has had the same policies regard their suite of apps since day 1 of Android. Since the very beginning. When iOS absolutely dwarfed it. When Blackberry reigned supreme. When I was hefting around my sad little HTC Dream and listening to the John Gruber's tell us how doomed it was.

typon 8y ago
Are there car dealers trying to offer a la carte car + entertainment system packages but are being shut down by BMW?
- endorphone 8y ago
  Of course there aren't because BMW absolutely squashed the possibility of that at the outset. But Google, apparently, deserves a $5B fine because they made a mistake of powering AOSP phones, the Amazon products, countless variations in China, set top boxes, etc. It is incredible seeing Google being seriously attacked on here for have an open source path as well. I feel like this is some sort of alternative universe.
  - typon 8y ago
    If Google had gone the open source route out of the goodness of their hearts, you'd have an argument. Google went the open source route to bootstrap on top of a well known operating system (Linux), as well as to accelerate adoption and catch up to Apple as fast as they could. Then once they got market dominance, they abused their position to stifle competition.
    - dlp211 8y ago
      There is nothing that you said that requires Android to be open source.
      - typon 8y ago
        I think Android's popularity and extremely quick adoption owes itself to the fact that it's open source.
        scarface74 8y ago
        It owes to being free not open source. OEMs really only had three choices. Create their own OS (horrible choice), use Windows Mobile or use Android. The deciding factor was free. Phone manufacturers no more cared about open source than Windows anufacturers.
      - arminiusreturns 8y ago
        Are you just ignoring the part where they use linux which has a gplv2 license?
    - miracle2k 8y ago
      Are you suggesting that to interpret the law correctly here, a court has to judge Google's motivation of releasing the Android code as Open Source? Further, if Apple were to decide, tomorrow, to release iOS as open source, would they also be in violation of the law (possibly depending on their motivation?)
- scarface74 8y ago
  Car manufacturers have been doing custom after market upgrades for cars for years - including the audio system.
Dayshine 8y ago
>And if we just go around clubbing everything coarsely, why does my BMW have a BMW entertainment system Because BMW don't have market dominance in either the car industry or the entertainment system industry. If they used dominance in one to affect the other, they would be in breach of that legislation. >This is absolutely not at all clear cut. It is incredibly nuanced So how do you explain Google's non-compliance when explicitly and clearly informed that they were in breach over two years ago?
- Ajedi32 8y ago
  So it's only against the law once the company becomes big enough? If, for example, BMW _did_ become an extremely successful car manufacturer to the point where they were capturing >80% of the market, would they suddenly no longer be allowed to bundle their own entertainment system with their cars?
  - eastendguy 8y ago
    Exactly. That is the whole point of anti-monopoly laws.
  - stopshadowbans 8y ago
    Yes? When you’re in a dominant position in a market you’re subjected to a different set of rules. This is to help keep even a captured market competitive.
  - orf 8y ago
    No, they would be able to bundle their own entertainment system with their cars, but they would not be able to force anyone else who wants to use their engines in their cars to bundle the entertainment system as well, as a contractual precondition to be able to use those engines. Of course the size of the company and the market dominance comes into play here. It's not a monopoly if people can go elsewhere to get their engines, it is if there is only one realistic choice of supplier (Android).
  - the_watcher 8y ago
    I don't love this ruling (and I probably disagree with it, but I haven't read the whole decision or the laws in question yet, and as an American, am not 100% clear on EU precedent so I'm somewhat withholding judgment), but yes, in most cases, anti-monopoly laws only apply when a company becomes large enough. In the US, it's actually explicit - monopolies can actually only exist if they are using their status to impact pricing/consumer choice, which necessitates size.
mtgx 8y ago
> They're a part of the same suite of apps that provide the "Android experience" Offering the open source Gallery app is the "Android experience". Offering Google Photos is not the Android experience, but the "Google experience". It's different. > zero customers want a vendor to do anything different Citation needed. I mean I don't want the vendors to add bloatware to a smartphone, just like I don't want Google to add bloatware (like the search bar or the News app). But that doesn't mean I wouldn't like actually innovative features. And even if I as a "stock Android" fan, that doesn't mean everyone is.
blub 8y ago
"They're a part of the same suite of apps that provide the "Android experience". They manifestly have a profound connection with each other." Google has worked very hard to integrate their app suite at such a deep level with Android to the point that they can steer what can be done with the OS just by using that one lever. Anyone paying attention in the past decade will remember plenty of complaints about the GApps infesting Android. But yes, if just looks at the situation as it is today, they could be excused for thinking that everything is normal.
- zaroth 8y ago
  Can you think of any technical advantages why Google would do this? Any functionality that becomes possible when the full suite of apps and APIs and services are all present together at once on the phone?
  - disgruntledphd2 8y ago
    I honestly think that it was a reaction to update issues. The more of the OS which is updateable by Google, the easier it is to patch these. Additionally, i remember people saying at the time that it made it much easier to incrementally add features to Android between major releases. I don't really mind about the Google Play Services thing (as it probably benefited people overall), but the contracts with OEM's were always wack, and I'm pretty happy that the EU has (eventually) fined them for this literally textbook anti-EU competition law behaviour.
throwrightaway 8y ago
Those arguments on the part of Google sound like they're trying to use their fuzzy branding terms to blurry what's actually happening.
chmod775 8y ago
> They're a part of the same suite of apps that provide the "Android experience". They manifestly have a profound connection with each other. Fire OS and my personal phone which is running a Google-free version of LineageOS would like to have a word. > And if we just go around clubbing everything coarsely, why does my BMW have a BMW entertainment system? BMW doesn't have a dominant market position it could abuse. Neither does Apple or any other company that Google is commonly compared to in these discussions. Somehow these false-equivalences seem to be most common among people trying to push the "unfair fine" narrative. On top of that you claim that because there are other companies/products that are in breach of the law - at least according to your misreading of it - this somehow makes the word of the law less clear cut in this case. Which just doesn't make any sense. Let me throw your own words back at you: "you are not really thinking about it [your arguments] much."
- gergles 8y ago
  > Fire OS and my personal phone which is running a Google-free version of LineageOS would like to have a word. Hilariously, you just made the parent's point for them - you yourself said you aren't running Android but Fire OS or LineageOS. Android, the product, comes with Chrome, Google Search, and the Google Play Store. If you want Android, you have to take all of Android. If you want to run something else, go for it, but then it isn't Android.
  - chmod775 8y ago
    This is just factually wrong. Android is a separate software project that is developed separately from Google Play Services. The Android OS works perfectly without those installed. There's no "Chrome, Google Search, and the Google Play Store" in the Android repository. Especially since Android is open source, and most of the latter APKs are not. I suggest to actually have a look at the a android project before making claims like these. This page is a good place to start: https://source.android.com/setup/ https://source.android.com/setup/
    - cmsj 8y ago
      Android the project is open source and lacks those apps, but Android the consumer branded product without those apps is not very appealing to customers.
wongarsu 8y ago
>They're a part of the same suite of apps that provide the "Android experience" The thing they were fined for was >[Google] has required manufacturers to pre-install the Google Search app and browser app (Chrome), as a condition for licensing Google's app store (the Play Store); How is the Play Store related to the Google Seach app or to Chrome? One is an app store, one is a seach bar and one is a browser. They have nothing in common and don't interact in any meaningful way (except perhaps the interaction between the Google Seach app and Chrome, but that relation isn't part of the ruling). This is clearly Google using the dominance of the Play store to push other, completely unrelated apps. >zero customers want a vendor to do anything different The first thing I do with a new phone is to try to get rid of that google search bar on the home screen (I open a browser to seach the web ...), I don't use mobile chrome, and I prefer rooted CyanogenMod / LineageOS over stock Android. So I am clearly impacted by all three offenses Google was fined for. I suspect I am not the only one.
- zaroth 8y ago
  > How is the Play Store related to the Google Seach app or to Chrome? “Related to” does not mean that they are the literally same thing. They are clearly related as a suite of applications which form the core experience of what is called “Android”. The law doesn’t say that if it is technically possible to unbundle a set of options from a product offering to be sold al la carte that companies must do that. These are all essential components of one product — a mobile OS. Mixing and matching, for the vast majority of users, is neither practical or expected, and absolutely negatively impacts the brand.
  - wongarsu 8y ago
    > Mixing and matching, for the vast majority of users, is neither practical or expected, and absolutely negatively impacts the brand. Microsoft should be delighted then that they can force Internet Explorer on everyone again. > They are clearly related as a suite of applications which form the core experience of what is called “Android”. That argument doesn't hold for Chrome. The core experience of Android is the AOSP browser (aka Android Browser). Later Google started to use their monopoly to force the inclusion of Chrome alongside Android Browser, followed by the removal of Android Browser in Android 4.4. And even now, the only reason Chrome is part of the "core android experience" is because Google pushes hard to make it that way. There are plenty of other good mobile browsers. >These are all essential components of one product — a mobile OS But Google doesn't licence the OS. They donated the OS to Open Source, and use their licencing agreement for the App store to control unrelated parts of the OS experience
maym86 8y ago
BMW is not a monopoly. That's the key to this. Please keep that in mind.
- Spivak 8y ago
  Monopoly is not a state of being it's something you have over a specific market segment. What does Google have a monopoly on?
  - cmsj 8y ago
    In the EU, Android has about 75-80% market share if you look at the whole market, or nearly 100% if you look at the lower end of the market where iOS isn't available.
scarface74 8y ago
They're a part of the same suite of apps that provide the "Android experience" (Google experience, whatever -- the thing that most consumers think of when they consider Android). They manifestly have a profound connection with each other. Google also claimed that this ruling would hurt open source projects in favor of “proprietary platforms”, but everything that provides the “Android experience” - Google Play Services and the binary drivers - are closed sourced.
sjwright 8y ago
> And if we just go around clubbing everything coarsely, why does my BMW have a BMW entertainment system? BMW is not forcing BMW to install a BMW entertainment system. BMW can install whatever entertainment system BMW likes. Google is forcing other phone makers to install certain Google apps. The issue is not with what Google does for their own products, but what they force other phone makers to do. That is the key point—this ruling wouldn't (or shouldn't) apply to Google's own Pixel products. Now if Bosch was forcing BMW to install Bosch windscreen wipers as a requirement on any car with Bosch collision avoidance systems, there you might have a valid analogy.
pawelk 8y ago
> why does my BMW have a BMW entertainment system? Because BMW has not entered an abusive relationship with a dominant player in the car entertainment system market who would only license the popular system to BMW on the condition that 1) BMW won't develop their own version, and 2) will bundle other software packages also developed by the dominant player.
pwinnski 8y ago
> why does my BMW have a BMW entertainment system? BMW is the manufacturer, not a licensor, so it's a slightly different scenario, but let's say that dealers are somewhat equivalent to manufacturers. You raise a good question or two: 1. Does BMW forbid dealers from replacing the factory entertainment system with an Alpine system? Or do they just assume nobody will, since it's already bundled in the car? 2. What is BMW's share of the automobile market? (i.e. how close to a monopoly are they?)

typon 8y ago

Are there car dealers trying to offer a la carte car + entertainment system packages but are being shut down by BMW?

endorphone 8y ago
Of course there aren't because BMW absolutely squashed the possibility of that at the outset. But Google, apparently, deserves a $5B fine because they made a mistake of powering AOSP phones, the Amazon products, countless variations in China, set top boxes, etc. It is incredible seeing Google being seriously attacked on here for have an open source path as well. I feel like this is some sort of alternative universe.
- typon 8y ago
  If Google had gone the open source route out of the goodness of their hearts, you'd have an argument. Google went the open source route to bootstrap on top of a well known operating system (Linux), as well as to accelerate adoption and catch up to Apple as fast as they could. Then once they got market dominance, they abused their position to stifle competition.
  - dlp211 8y ago
    There is nothing that you said that requires Android to be open source.
    - typon 8y ago
      I think Android's popularity and extremely quick adoption owes itself to the fact that it's open source.
      - scarface74 8y ago
        It owes to being free not open source. OEMs really only had three choices. Create their own OS (horrible choice), use Windows Mobile or use Android. The deciding factor was free. Phone manufacturers no more cared about open source than Windows anufacturers.
    - arminiusreturns 8y ago
      Are you just ignoring the part where they use linux which has a gplv2 license?
  - miracle2k 8y ago
    Are you suggesting that to interpret the law correctly here, a court has to judge Google's motivation of releasing the Android code as Open Source? Further, if Apple were to decide, tomorrow, to release iOS as open source, would they also be in violation of the law (possibly depending on their motivation?)
scarface74 8y ago
Car manufacturers have been doing custom after market upgrades for cars for years - including the audio system.

Dayshine 8y ago

>And if we just go around clubbing everything coarsely, why does my BMW have a BMW entertainment system Because BMW don't have market dominance in either the car industry or the entertainment system industry. If they used dominance in one to affect the other, they would be in breach of that legislation. >This is absolutely not at all clear cut. It is incredibly nuanced So how do you explain Google's non-compliance when explicitly and clearly informed that they were in breach over two years ago?

Ajedi32 8y ago
So it's only against the law once the company becomes big enough? If, for example, BMW _did_ become an extremely successful car manufacturer to the point where they were capturing >80% of the market, would they suddenly no longer be allowed to bundle their own entertainment system with their cars?
- eastendguy 8y ago
  Exactly. That is the whole point of anti-monopoly laws.
- stopshadowbans 8y ago
  Yes? When you’re in a dominant position in a market you’re subjected to a different set of rules. This is to help keep even a captured market competitive.
- orf 8y ago
  No, they would be able to bundle their own entertainment system with their cars, but they would not be able to force anyone else who wants to use their engines in their cars to bundle the entertainment system as well, as a contractual precondition to be able to use those engines. Of course the size of the company and the market dominance comes into play here. It's not a monopoly if people can go elsewhere to get their engines, it is if there is only one realistic choice of supplier (Android).
- the_watcher 8y ago
  I don't love this ruling (and I probably disagree with it, but I haven't read the whole decision or the laws in question yet, and as an American, am not 100% clear on EU precedent so I'm somewhat withholding judgment), but yes, in most cases, anti-monopoly laws only apply when a company becomes large enough. In the US, it's actually explicit - monopolies can actually only exist if they are using their status to impact pricing/consumer choice, which necessitates size.

mtgx 8y ago

> They're a part of the same suite of apps that provide the "Android experience" Offering the open source Gallery app is the "Android experience". Offering Google Photos is not the Android experience, but the "Google experience". It's different. > zero customers want a vendor to do anything different Citation needed. I mean I don't want the vendors to add bloatware to a smartphone, just like I don't want Google to add bloatware (like the search bar or the News app). But that doesn't mean I wouldn't like actually innovative features. And even if I as a "stock Android" fan, that doesn't mean everyone is.

blub 8y ago

"They're a part of the same suite of apps that provide the "Android experience". They manifestly have a profound connection with each other." Google has worked very hard to integrate their app suite at such a deep level with Android to the point that they can steer what can be done with the OS just by using that one lever. Anyone paying attention in the past decade will remember plenty of complaints about the GApps infesting Android. But yes, if just looks at the situation as it is today, they could be excused for thinking that everything is normal.

zaroth 8y ago
Can you think of any technical advantages why Google would do this? Any functionality that becomes possible when the full suite of apps and APIs and services are all present together at once on the phone?
- disgruntledphd2 8y ago
  I honestly think that it was a reaction to update issues. The more of the OS which is updateable by Google, the easier it is to patch these. Additionally, i remember people saying at the time that it made it much easier to incrementally add features to Android between major releases. I don't really mind about the Google Play Services thing (as it probably benefited people overall), but the contracts with OEM's were always wack, and I'm pretty happy that the EU has (eventually) fined them for this literally textbook anti-EU competition law behaviour.

throwrightaway 8y ago

Those arguments on the part of Google sound like they're trying to use their fuzzy branding terms to blurry what's actually happening.

chmod775 8y ago

> They're a part of the same suite of apps that provide the "Android experience". They manifestly have a profound connection with each other. Fire OS and my personal phone which is running a Google-free version of LineageOS would like to have a word. > And if we just go around clubbing everything coarsely, why does my BMW have a BMW entertainment system? BMW doesn't have a dominant market position it could abuse. Neither does Apple or any other company that Google is commonly compared to in these discussions. Somehow these false-equivalences seem to be most common among people trying to push the "unfair fine" narrative. On top of that you claim that because there are other companies/products that are in breach of the law - at least according to your misreading of it - this somehow makes the word of the law less clear cut in this case. Which just doesn't make any sense. Let me throw your own words back at you: "you are not really thinking about it [your arguments] much."

gergles 8y ago
> Fire OS and my personal phone which is running a Google-free version of LineageOS would like to have a word. Hilariously, you just made the parent's point for them - you yourself said you aren't running Android but Fire OS or LineageOS. Android, the product, comes with Chrome, Google Search, and the Google Play Store. If you want Android, you have to take all of Android. If you want to run something else, go for it, but then it isn't Android.
- chmod775 8y ago
  This is just factually wrong. Android is a separate software project that is developed separately from Google Play Services. The Android OS works perfectly without those installed. There's no "Chrome, Google Search, and the Google Play Store" in the Android repository. Especially since Android is open source, and most of the latter APKs are not. I suggest to actually have a look at the a android project before making claims like these. This page is a good place to start: https://source.android.com/setup/ https://source.android.com/setup/
  - cmsj 8y ago
    Android the project is open source and lacks those apps, but Android the consumer branded product without those apps is not very appealing to customers.

wongarsu 8y ago

>They're a part of the same suite of apps that provide the "Android experience" The thing they were fined for was >[Google] has required manufacturers to pre-install the Google Search app and browser app (Chrome), as a condition for licensing Google's app store (the Play Store); How is the Play Store related to the Google Seach app or to Chrome? One is an app store, one is a seach bar and one is a browser. They have nothing in common and don't interact in any meaningful way (except perhaps the interaction between the Google Seach app and Chrome, but that relation isn't part of the ruling). This is clearly Google using the dominance of the Play store to push other, completely unrelated apps. >zero customers want a vendor to do anything different The first thing I do with a new phone is to try to get rid of that google search bar on the home screen (I open a browser to seach the web ...), I don't use mobile chrome, and I prefer rooted CyanogenMod / LineageOS over stock Android. So I am clearly impacted by all three offenses Google was fined for. I suspect I am not the only one.

zaroth 8y ago
> How is the Play Store related to the Google Seach app or to Chrome? “Related to” does not mean that they are the literally same thing. They are clearly related as a suite of applications which form the core experience of what is called “Android”. The law doesn’t say that if it is technically possible to unbundle a set of options from a product offering to be sold al la carte that companies must do that. These are all essential components of one product — a mobile OS. Mixing and matching, for the vast majority of users, is neither practical or expected, and absolutely negatively impacts the brand.
- wongarsu 8y ago
  > Mixing and matching, for the vast majority of users, is neither practical or expected, and absolutely negatively impacts the brand. Microsoft should be delighted then that they can force Internet Explorer on everyone again. > They are clearly related as a suite of applications which form the core experience of what is called “Android”. That argument doesn't hold for Chrome. The core experience of Android is the AOSP browser (aka Android Browser). Later Google started to use their monopoly to force the inclusion of Chrome alongside Android Browser, followed by the removal of Android Browser in Android 4.4. And even now, the only reason Chrome is part of the "core android experience" is because Google pushes hard to make it that way. There are plenty of other good mobile browsers. >These are all essential components of one product — a mobile OS But Google doesn't licence the OS. They donated the OS to Open Source, and use their licencing agreement for the App store to control unrelated parts of the OS experience

maym86 8y ago

BMW is not a monopoly. That's the key to this. Please keep that in mind.

Spivak 8y ago
Monopoly is not a state of being it's something you have over a specific market segment. What does Google have a monopoly on?
- cmsj 8y ago
  In the EU, Android has about 75-80% market share if you look at the whole market, or nearly 100% if you look at the lower end of the market where iOS isn't available.

scarface74 8y ago

They're a part of the same suite of apps that provide the "Android experience" (Google experience, whatever -- the thing that most consumers think of when they consider Android). They manifestly have a profound connection with each other. Google also claimed that this ruling would hurt open source projects in favor of “proprietary platforms”, but everything that provides the “Android experience” - Google Play Services and the binary drivers - are closed sourced.

sjwright 8y ago

> And if we just go around clubbing everything coarsely, why does my BMW have a BMW entertainment system? BMW is not forcing BMW to install a BMW entertainment system. BMW can install whatever entertainment system BMW likes. Google is forcing other phone makers to install certain Google apps. The issue is not with what Google does for their own products, but what they force other phone makers to do. That is the key point—this ruling wouldn't (or shouldn't) apply to Google's own Pixel products. Now if Bosch was forcing BMW to install Bosch windscreen wipers as a requirement on any car with Bosch collision avoidance systems, there you might have a valid analogy.

pawelk 8y ago

> why does my BMW have a BMW entertainment system? Because BMW has not entered an abusive relationship with a dominant player in the car entertainment system market who would only license the popular system to BMW on the condition that 1) BMW won't develop their own version, and 2) will bundle other software packages also developed by the dominant player.

pwinnski 8y ago

> why does my BMW have a BMW entertainment system? BMW is the manufacturer, not a licensor, so it's a slightly different scenario, but let's say that dealers are somewhat equivalent to manufacturers. You raise a good question or two: 1. Does BMW forbid dealers from replacing the factory entertainment system with an Alpine system? Or do they just assume nobody will, since it's already bundled in the car? 2. What is BMW's share of the automobile market? (i.e. how close to a monopoly are they?)