this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2024
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Legally, yes. Dictating the rules for software on your own hardware is entirely legal, and extremely common.
Using your market position to dictate a cabal of other manufacturers' rules on their hardware is anticompetitive. They're using their market dominance with the play store to mandate a variety of hardware decisions and software decisions.
That's incorrect. There are multiple requirements, both hardware and software, to be able to ship with the play store. That's the monopoly they're abusing, and that's what Epic is suing for.
One example (of many) where their requirements have directly impacted the growth of a market is refresh rate. Android ereaders are excellent devices, but because of Google's arbitrary limitations, devices until recently (when the technology they impeded with their monopoly developed far enough to meet that restriction) were forced to require users to jump through multiple extremely convoluted hoops to enable the play store.
This made them almost entirely inaccessible to normal end users and almost certainly played a huge role in the availability of options. That's textbook anticompetitive.
It's not the only restriction, just the first to come to mind.
The play store is their monopoly that they abuse. There's a refresh rate requirement to distribute your device with the play store.
Otherwise, the user has to go to a Google website page from the device, sign into a Google account, and copy paste serial information of the device in order to be allowed to install the store. That's not something normal customers can do, and it massively impeded the growth of the Android reader space.
You have to manually enable the play store on all of those devices. It's why they're so niche and only made by Chinese companies.
It's not in any way a limitation of the OS. It's a business decision that is using their market position as the only source of most Android apps in order to control what manufacturers are able to make and sell.
And again, your core concept isn't just flawed. It completely lacks understanding of what antitrust is. You can make decisions that only affect your own hardware. You cannot claim to be open and use that "openness" to make yourself the standard, then use that market position to pick winners and losers between your "partners" using that product, especially when you're also one of them. That's anticompetitive. Google wants all the benefits of being "open" while completely dictating the entire market.
It has nothing to do with the OS. It's for the play store. But again, a limitation of the OS would be something that the OS can't do, not the OS just refusing to allow hardware for business reasons.
Your opinion on rational is just as flawed. People should be able to make their own products. It's specifically pretending to be open to form a standard that multiple independent companies join in on, then unilaterally controlling that standard to make decisions for the entire market that's abusive.
There are many companies that do what Apple does and run closed operating systems on their own hardware. Apple built their market share on the strength of their walled garden providing an excellent development environment. It's not what a monopoly is. Controlling the behavior of hundreds of competing products is a monopoly.
Controlling what happens on your systems is not anti-competitive. You can't just re-define words to mean something that's the exact opposite of what they are. The locked down system of Apple and consoles is their biggest value add. It's not "something I tolerate to buy an iPhone". It's why I buy an iPhone. They make so much money because their control of their own product makes it better. There is no such thing as a "monopoly" on your own hardware. It's literally impossible.
Google is a monopoly because they are controlling the behavior of competitors with their market position. That is always a monopoly. Controlling your own product never is.