EU confirms antitrust probe into Android apps, News Corp. attacks Google news scraping

The European Commission and global media giant News Corp. on Monday confirmed separate actions against Google, with both factions suggesting that Google may be violating European regulations.

In a speech in Amsterdam the Commission's competition head, Margrethe Vestager, said that the organization was looking into Google's deals with Android phone makers and carriers — specifically, whether requiring that certain Google apps be preloaded is hampering the market for upcoming apps, according to Bloomberg. Reuters noted that the Commission has already been investigating Android for about a year as a result of two earlier complaints, including concerns that Google was preventing device makers from creating and marketing competing versions of Android.

Meanwhile, Commission spokesman Ricardo Cardoso on Monday confirmed a complaint from News Corp. that it will begin to assess. While neither News Corp. nor the Commission have provided any formal details, a Bloomberg source suggested that the issue is the combination of Google's search engine and Google News, which by scraping information allegedly deters people from visiting news websites and generating ad revenue.

News Corp. owns a number of major news sites around the world, including the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post in the U.S., Britain's The Times, and Australia's news.com.au. Even though publications like the Journal nominally hide their full content behind a paywall, Google's rules stipulate that articles must be available to scrape, and indeed it's possible to bypass the Journal's paywall by manually searching for an article's headline.

73 Comments

saltyzip 193 comments · 10 Years

About 8 years ago

“Our concern is that, by requiring phone makers and operators to pre-load a set of Google apps, rather than letting them decide for themselves which apps to load, Google might have cut off one of the main ways that new apps can reach customers,”

So what does Apple do that's different?

lkrupp 10521 comments · 19 Years

Apple preloads its own apps too and they cannot be deleted. What's the difference here? The same thing could apply to desktop PCs and Tablets that have preinstalled software through marketing agreements. That being said I think it's incredibly stupid of the EU to essentially require devices to be shipped bare of all apps. That's about as consumer unfriendly as it gets.

ceek74 324 comments · 12 Years

Maybe Apple and Android can start shipping phones with a frivolous lawsuit generator app.

auxio 2762 comments · 19 Years

saltyzip said:

“Our concern is that, by requiring phone makers and operators to pre-load a set of Google apps, rather than letting them decide for themselves which apps to load, Google might have cut off one of the main ways that new apps can reach customers,”

So what does Apple do that's different?

Apple doesn't impose their policy on other phone manufacturers. I'm fairly certain this is the reason for concern over how Google's policies are stifling competition. It's good to spend a bit of time thinking about things rather than knee-jerk reacting.

lkrupp said:

That being said I think it's incredibly stupid of the EU to essentially require devices to be shipped bare of all apps. That's about as consumer unfriendly as it gets.

They wouldn't be stripped bare -- they'd simply have other companies providing some of the core apps rather than being forced to use Google's.