The European Commission blamed the company for pre-installing several apps over the smartphones to favor its services and to get an edge over his competition. The company has been accused of unfairly promoting its services as compared to others by pushing smartphone’s manufacturers to pre-install Google applications like Google Maps, Google Music, Google Photos and more.
Google has been charged a huge $5 billion as the antitrust fine by European Commission for commencing “illegal activities” like pre-installing search and web browsing application to Android mobile devices.
According to the statement made by the commission on Wednesday, the charge has been for “breaking EU antitrust rules in the mobile market”. According to EU “The company has been imposing illegal restrictions on mobile network operators and android manufacturers to forcefully strengthening its dominant position in the market and internet search since 2011”.
As we all know, the Android operating system is most popular among smartphones users with 77.32% of worldwide users while OS is standing with 19.4% worldwide users.
European Officers on a report on Wednesday stated that Google is doing unfair trade activities by forcing smartphone manufacturers to pre-load their applications like Chrome and Google search app as a condition for licensing their Google play store. The officials also mentioned that Google remunerated license only to those manufacturers who pre-installed google apps and the license was not permitted for other Android OS versions.
The commission warned Google and its parent company to end these unfair trade practices within the course of 90 days or face penalty charges up to 5 percent of the average daily worldwide revenue.
This is the second time when Google is accused by the multibillion-dollar fine by the European Commission. Earlier this year, Google has been fined a record 2.7 billion dollar for violation of online shopping activities and preferring its shopping services over their competitors.
Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai presented an official statement on Wednesday mentioning “competition decision is against Android” in response to the fine charged by the EU. He also tweeted that the company is planning to appeal the decision as it ignores the fact that Android has major competition with OS phones.
Pichai also said that the pre-installed apps can be disabled or deleted by the users if they are not satisfied. He said “Android provides hundreds of smartphone manufacturers to manufacture and sell Android devices, with millions of app developers to sustain their business. Also, today billions of users can now afford smartphones. According to the statement, “The commission’s Android decision ignores the fact that people have full control over their apps and how Google apps making their life and workload easier”.
Google is offering its applications for free to the smartphone manufacturers, and with this Google suite of applications benefit manufacturers, operators, developers and consumers in numerous ways and bearing these acquisitions may harm the balance of the android market and ecosystem.
At the final note, Sundar Pichai said, Google is worried about the decision of EC as it will upset the balance that we have maintained with Android systems and favor a proprietary system in the market.