Giving a Joel to the operations of the search engine joined Google in India

 Giving a Joel to the operations of the search engine joined Google in India. India's competition regulator has now ordered Google to change its approach to its Android platform. It fined the US tech joint a sub of 100 and 662 million dollars for what has been described as anti-competitive practices. Google has been accused of taking undue advantage of its dominant position in the markets, such as online search and App Store for Android. To protect the position of its apps such as Chrome and YouTube in mobile web browsers and also in online video hosting, google was ordered not to restrict smartphone users from uninstalling its preinstalled apps like Google Maps and Gmail. The Competition Commission of India has also restricted Google from certain revenue-sharing agreements with smartphone makers, further noting that such practices actually help Google to secure exclusivity for its search services to the total exclusion of its competitors. The competition watchdog is separately looking at Google's business conduct in the smart television market and also its in-app payment systems as well. Now, the Android-related probe, which started in 2019, was sparked by a complaint from two junior Indian antitrust research associates and law school students.

Now, the Indian case is very similar to the one that Google is facing in Europe, where regulators have imposed $5 billion in terms of penalties on the company for forcing manufacturers to preinstall its apps on Android devices. The CCI has also asked Google to allow users to pick their search engine of choice for all relevant services while setting up a phone for the very first time. Google's Android operating system is powered by nearly about 97% of India's 600 million smartphones, according to Counterpoint Research. All right, and also to give us more insights in terms of how all of this is likely to affect the man in which Google functions and will Google actually change its way, we're being joined by Martin Bryant, who is a tech expert and also the editor of the press and now tech and newsletter. Ms. Bryant, thank you very much indeed for joining us here and beyond. This is quite clearly a case where the dominance and virtually the monopoly that Google enjoys in terms of the search engines that it has, and also the Android operating system that is installed in mobile phones, where it has been found by the Competition Commission of India that it has been exploiting its market monopoly to further its own apps.

It's a very difficult situation because you need the scale of something like Android to compete with Apple, certainly on a global level. And if other operating systems start coming into the market, then that kind of makes things maybe a little less easy for consumers in terms of things like switching devices, etc. For so there are arguments in favor, in fact, of monopolies like this. But very clearly there are very clear signs that Google here is very much in the same position that Microsoft was with Windows in the 1990s. And certainly with Internet Explorer as its browser. Being bundled with Windows as well in the past. Where Microsoft was forced by the European Union. For example. To add a browser ballot to Windows where people could choose a browser rather than having to be forced to have Internet Explorer as the default. It's a familiar situation here and it's something that seems to happen regularly in a cyclical fashion with technology as a leader emerges in the field.

And also the fact that it's not just Google that does something like this. Apple, for instance, when it pushes its device and also it's operating systems, it pushes in a bunch of apps. And if you were to try to use apps, let's say, of Google on an Apple phone, they don't work as well and as fast as Apple's own in-home-built custom apps. So is there anything that the government can actually put forth in terms of legislation to provide a level playing field, at least for the apps that are used in mobile phones and other devices where the UI may belong to Google or Apple, but the apps can belong to absolutely anyone and they work perfectly fine.