Google fined €4.3 billion for tying Chrome and Search to Android

This will probably get in the way of Google’s plan to reduce OEM’s control of how they customise their flavours of Android.

I’m surprised by the size of the fine, given that you can use do have the option of using different browsers on Android. Looking at iOS, for example, Siri’s search engine can’t be changed from Bing, and all browsers use Safari’s WebKit back-end.

Interested to see if Microsoft will get a similar fine for trying to prevent people from changing the default browser in Windows to anything other than Edge.

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The bigger they are the harsher the fine.

They had some interesting statements in the ruling. It’s mostly about them using their dominance to force policies on companies, they don’t care about the dominance as long as it’s not used to the detriment of the consumer. Which… is fine I guess.

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Didn’t this all ready happen. With 7 I believe and continues to rumble on to this day, you were supposed to get a propmt on first starting the machine asking if you wanted to install Edge, Chrome or Firefox. It never happened, still does not happen but they have been fined for it and it gets brought up that it still does not prompt and the while things kicks off again.

Yeah it’s similar to the fine Microsoft got for internet explorer on windows 7.
It was much smaller though at €561M

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how much yall wanna bet this fine is smaller than the revenue that was generated over time by these restrictions

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That’s not true, it happened, I saw it a few times. Also Edge and IE are installed by default still because they’re integrated into the system, it just shows you other options.
It may have been region dependant, I don’t know.

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Could be. I know they got in trouble over it not coming up even after the fine. I have never seen it, in Ireland so covered by the EU ruling.

Zed Shaw spoke about something similar a few months ago. He said corporation digging their hand in open source is bad in the long run, because they overrun developers forking and making a similar product and stint innovation.

But LOL at the quote from that article.

“THE EU HAS A LONG HISTORY OF ISSUING SIGNIFICANT FINES”

And what are they doing with this money? Anybody know? Shirley a bloated, overreaching government entity is managing money properly. Shirley.

who is this Shirley and why does she have so much control over western geopolitics?

also: Corporate involvement only matters in licensing schemes that restrict the software’s use. had the linux kernel and other elements of the base system been licensed more liberally, google would never have felt the need to twist it into it’s own mobile OS and environment to achieve the same thing.

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are you assuming its gender?

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@tkoham you are fined 1 and a half credit for Violation of the Verbal Morality Statute.

surely you can’t mean that

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Ol bait and switch. People claim Microsoft is playing 4X, Google is extinguishing Linux from their platform after they’ve invaded schools, corporations, and homes.

Shirley.

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If you wanna play ball in the EEA you have to comply with the anti trust rules.
According to the law I see no big issues with this fine.

Better to read it straight from the commison than going through biased media:

http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-18-4581_en.htm

For the “but what about Apple” Americans i propose reading the article linked above.