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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 Verizon proceeded to then successfully sue the FCC to have those repealed anyway, leading to better rules in 2015 that were also dismantled a few years, later, albeit thanks to lobbying, not the courtroom.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by stretch611 on Saturday August 21 2021, @08:30AM
Despite how evil it is now, I will actually defend Google on this one...
If anyone remembers the smart phone market from literally a dozen years ago... Initially AT&T and Verizon did have their own app stores for android phones.
I actually remember a friend of mine complaining that the map software of one of those stores cost too much and they could not download google maps which I had on my android (for free) at the time. (I was on t-mobile then which was the first major carrier to adopt android in the US due to its 4th place as a competitor.)
In fact I also remember one of the small competitors at the time (MetroPCS) actually had a walled internet with its android phones... you could only reach the websites that metroPCS allowed.
If it took some of Google's cash at the time to get rid of wireless carrier owned app stores, than I say, "Thank you Google!"
In fact, I would even go a step farther and thank Apple. At the time, it forced AT&T to offer unlimited internet with no caps. (while later it added caps and performance degradation on speed, it actually got the ball rolling and competition added cheap internet as well.)
I even suspect that the smartphone revolution caused the collapse of texting charges as well. (You were damned to a pauper's life back then if you had a teenage daughter that could text.) With the proliferation of IM apps on smartphones, it likely broke the texting cash cow.
So, yes, I commend the initial anti-competitive behavior of the Google/Apple smartphone duopoly; It wrest a bunch of control away from the wireless carrier cartel. It made things better for the consumers.
That being said, I do think that it is time to wrest some of that power away from Google/Apple now, but I do appreciate the past.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P