Re:EU wants Google to stop anti-competitive Android practice...
by euyyn on Saturday October 01, 2016 @04:00PM
(#12619641)
Microsoft's case was about Microsoft threatening OEMs to not sell Windows to them if they dared preinstall Netscape. The purpose was to keep a high barrier to entry for competing OS's, as they controlled the Win32 API but not the Java applets API.
Re:EU wants Google to stop anti-competitive Android practice...
by johncolanduoni on Saturday October 01, 2016 @02:14PM
(#12619130)
I don't think the Bing Search option would be sufficient to ward off anti-trust claims, unless you made Bing search the default or did something crazy like make phones flip a coin and then decide which search to default to.
Re:EU wants Google to stop anti-competitive Android practice...
by brianwawok on Saturday October 01, 2016 @02:27PM
(#12619199)
Microsoft never made Google the default search on Windows. Just offered the option.
Re:EU wants Google to stop anti-competitive Android practice...
by pgeorgi on Saturday October 01, 2016 @03:49PM
(#12619594)
In current Windows 10 Bing is the only provider for Cortana, which is enabled by default, both for the conversational interface as well as all shell search features.
Re:EU wants Google to stop anti-competitive Android practice...
by AsyncAwait on Saturday October 01, 2016 @03:30PM
(#12619493)
Additionally, forcing a company to effectively hide, (many users never change the defaults), its own product by making the competing one the default, goes way beyond what a government body should be able to compel a company to do, in my opinion.
I suspect the problem is that there's no "I'll pay you, but not include the software" option for Android, but couldn't it be applied to any FLOSS as in "there's no option to pay you, but not contribute back" in the case of the GPL or even "there's not an option to not buy a Mac with MacOS", or something like that?
EDIT: If the problem is using Android's dominant position to bundle Google Search, then I get the similarities to the MS lawsuit, the difference being that people actually want to use it, which is why I think Google should be confident about including a "Bing Search" or "Google Search" option, as 99.99% of people would go with Google, since in Google's case, Search is actually a product people want to use when compared to the alternatives, whereas Explorer wasn't in the MS case.
But couldn't this then also be extended to Chrome and Search on the desktop? i.e. Google used its dominant position in search to push Chrome, (try visiting google.com with Safari or Firefox, notice the top-right Chrome banner?) and once they got to a dominant position with Chrome, they used it to further the dominance of Search, by it being default in Chrome etc.