Awareness in IT

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KEY POINTS

Reasons

·         Pre-installation – Manufacturers were asked to preload the Google Search app and Chrome browser and it was set as a precondition for licensing Google’s Play Store.

·         Pre-installation of the apps can create a status quo bias among the users.

·         Incentives – Google offered financial incentives to large device manufacturers and network operators to exclusively pre-install Google Search across their entire portfolio of Android devices.

·         This significantly reduced their incentives to pre-install rival search apps.

·         Tweaked versions – Google had not allowed the “forked” versions of Android to pre-install Google’s proprietary apps.

·         Google’s measure had thus prevented many manufacturers from developing and selling devices based on these tweaked versions.

·         E.g. Amazon’s Android fork called ‘Fire OS’.

·         This had made EU to slap a record € 4.34-billion ($5.04 billion) antitrust fine on Google.

Implications for India

·         Like the European Union, India, too, has a diverse, multi-ethnic, multilingual market connected by a single currency.

·         Moreover, the Indian Smartphone environment is dominated by the Android-based OS, just like the EU.

·         India being the second largest market for smart phone users in the world after china, the action taken by EU is of greater significance.

·         The EU verdict expresses the possibility of Google apps becoming the default and consumers being denied “the benefits of effective competitive” and rivals cannot “innovate and compete on merits”.

·         India is more vulnerable to such kind of things.

·         For example, the Competition Commission of India had earlier fined Google Rs. 136 crore for its unfair business practices in the Indian online search market.

·         India's Competition Commission would do well to follow this case and consider carefully the principles upon which the EU's actions are based.

·         The Competition Commission could consider emulating the EU to induce Google to open up the indigenous Android environment.

·         This would stimulate local app developers and it might provide an especially big boost to app developers in vernacular languages.