Currently, Google is fighting a tough battle in court against the European Union against the lawsuit of $5.1 billion which was fined back in 2018 by European Union regulators. This fine was due to toe Google’s dominance over the OS market with Android. Google is now arguing that the regulators are ignoring Apple for doing the same, its biggest competitor.
This massive fine was slapped on Google after the ruling which made clear that the company uses its Search and Chrome apps to be installed on all the Android phones to gain access to the Play Store.
The regulators also slammed the web search engine giant for paying the manufacturers to pre-install its apps on their phones to further increase the grip of its dominance in search and also have been found guilty of discouraging other manufacturers from selling smart devices with forked Android versions.
According to Reuters, Google lawyer Meredith Pickford argues that regulators are not taking Apple’s iOS into account.
The Commission shut its eyes to the real competitive dynamic in this industry, that between Apple and Android.
By defining markets too narrowly and downplaying the potent constraint imposed by the highly powerful Apple, the Commission has mistakenly found Google to be dominant in mobile operating systems and app stores when it was a vigorous market disrupter.
However, the commission acknowledges that the market share of Apple is too small to matter. Commission lawyer Nicholas Khan says that bringing Apple into the equation “doesn’t change things very much. Google and Apple pursue different models.” and the fact that Apple only advocates its OS in the devices manufactured by the company itself means that there doesn’t exist the fact of involvement by other manufacturers.
