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posted by janrinok on Friday August 20 2021, @06:11PM   Printer-friendly
from the not-so-innovative-I-guess dept.

Google Has Been Paying Wireless Carriers Billions To Not Develop Competing App Stores:

To be clear, wireless carrier app stores have always kind of sucked. Verizon's efforts to create its own app store were shut down in 2012, after underwhelming consumers for years. At the time, the narrative was that Verizon just didn't find it worth the trouble in the face of Google domination and innovation. And while that's still largely true (wireless carriers are utterly unfamiliar with competition and therefore historically suck at innovation and adaptation), it turns out there was another reason.

Namely, that Google was paying Verizon and other major wireless companies a big chunk of money to not compete with the Android marketplace. And they were paying smartphone manufacturers to ship devices without competing app stores installed. Both nuggets were buried in a freshly unredacted copy of Epic's antitrust complaint (pdf) against Google, first spotted by Jeremy Owens:

Man, I love when the redactions come off and there are fascinating numbers underneath.

This unredacted graf shows that telcos get up to 25% of Google's app sales to keep them from developing rival app stores on the smartphones they sell and service. pic.twitter.com/Vx6p1YBU6S

This agreement to start paying wireless carriers 20-25% of app sales was occurring right around the time that Google brass was visibly starting to wimp out on consumer-centric issues like net neutrality. That involved working closely with Verizon to push the FCC toward flimsy, loophole-filled, "compromise" 2010 net neutrality rules that excluded wireless entirely. Verizon proceeded to then successfully sue the FCC to have those repealed anyway, leading to better rules in 2015 that were also dismantled a few years, later, albeit thanks to lobbying, not the courtroom.


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  • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Friday August 20 2021, @07:48PM (1 child)

    by darkfeline (1030) on Friday August 20 2021, @07:48PM (#1168999) Homepage

    No it isn't. Anti competitive laws are about preventing competitors who want to compete from doing so fairly. A competitor who wants to compete can just not take Google's money. I'm not restricting someone's personal freedom by offering them money to not take advantage of their personal freedom.

    Here, take this $5 and go buy yourself some candy.

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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 20 2021, @10:10PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 20 2021, @10:10PM (#1169058)

    Didn't apple try making that argument when they were doing non-poaching agreements?