Europe’s High Court Slams Google’s Android Empire -By Fransiscus Nanga Roka

Europe’s top court makes its ruthless ruling on Big Tech power, shutting down Google’s final appeal & closing the door closed effectively throttling a €4.1 billion. Dramatically, the ruling confirms there is a finding of abuse of dominant position because Google used its monopoly in mobile operating systems to capture global search while trapping billions of Android users as captive traffic in order for its own services.

In late 2018 the European Commission imposed a record €4.34 billion fine on Google, after finding that Android had been turned into a weapon by means of a series of illicit contracts with makers of smartphones. In order to gain access to the all-important Google Play Store, manufacturers have been forced in effect to pre-install Google Search and Chrome as default apps, effectively hard-wiring one of the world’s two biggest search engines and its browser into most smartphones. Meanwhile, Google dangled lucrative revenue sharing deals behind the implicit promise that producers and mobile operators would never pre install a competitor search engine, rendering “competition” a contractual mirage rather than a market fact.

A third, more insidious tactic was revealed to the regulators: Google allegedly prevented manufacturers from selling devices that ran forked versions of Android, independent systems which could have lessened reliance on Google’s services. The combination of bundling, exclusivity and anti-fragmentation rules has amounted to a closed ecosystem which regulators allege unlawfully extended Google’s monopoly power over online search. That was not, in the Commission’s opinion, simply market success; it was a wilful misuse of market power that strangled competing browsers and search engines out of mobile.

For years, Google has defended Android as a “free” and “open” platform that encourages innovation and lowers the price of handsets, arguing its business model is pro-consumer. What EU officials witnessed was very different: a system where default configurations and contractual coercion silently guide users into one search engine, one browser, one data pipeline. The judges of the top court agreed, determining that Google had systematically distorted consumer choice through its control over how Android devices arrive on the market and what services they pre-load.

It is a multi-tribunal legal battle which has gone on for years. The General Court of the EU upheld most of the Commission’s decision in 2022, reducing the fine only by a notch to about €4.1 billion. This is the final attempt by Google to escape: an appeal to the Court of Justice of the European Union, has been comprehensively rejected by judges, who dismissed all of its arguments. The result marks the final legal path to avoid paying for Alphabet and confirms one of the largest antitrust fines in history.

I This Android case Is not a lone standing entity So far in the past 10 years, EU regulators have levied almost €11 billion ($12bn) in antitrust fines against Google across several competition cases including shopping search and online advertising, showing no sign of easing pressure on digital gatekeepers. Such decisions laid the political groundwork for the Digital Markets Act, a newly minted regulatory framework that requires platforms with entrenched market power to take steps to be and stay open. The goal of the DMA is to preemptively halt another lock in similar to that seen with Android, and ensure that dominant companies must open up their ecosystems rather than surreptitiously closing them off.

Google claims it has amended contracts with manufacturers since the Commission’s initial ruling in 2018 to comply with this and the latest judgement “disappoints. Still in Brussels, it is now an example of how law can challenge concentrated digital power, however arguably associated with open and innovative language. The blunt message from Europe’s highest court to Google and the rest of Big Tech too is this: it will no longer be acceptable for dominance built on restricting defaults or contractual coercion to be the ‘normal’ price of free technology.

Faculty of Law University 17 August 1945 Surabaya and Managing Partner Law Firm Victorious Indonesia