Europe’s idiotic war on Google

By James Pethokoukis of AEI.

"The core of the EU’s complaint this time around is that Google used restrictions on the use of Android — which runs more than 80 percent of the world’s smartphones — to unfairly favor its own search, browser, and other services. A mobile phone company that wants to offer the Google Play app store must also preload a suite of other Google applications. In addition, it must make Google search the default search application. These and other “illegal practices,” according to EU antitrust boss Margrethe Vestager, “denied rivals the chance to innovate and compete on the merits.”

To accept the EU’s case, however, one has to ignore the reality of the modern internet, where users easily and frequently download millions of apps some 100 billion times a year. Indeed, even though developers must preload Search, Chrome, and some other Google services as a condition of licensing the app store, the arrangement is not exclusive. A device maker could also preload rival app stores and other apps. As it is, the Firefox browser, for instance, has been downloaded more than 100 million times on Play. And consider this: One thing that really bugged the EU was that the Android home screen displayed a Google Play icon and a folder of 10 other Google apps vs. the myriad of preloaded apps on the Apple home screen.

Such preloading has long been a part of Google’s phone business. It’s one thing that allows Google-developed Android to remain free, which has subsequently drastically lowered the cost and availability of smartphones. This has increased the number of people who own them. Developers in Europe and elsewhere are thus able to distribute their apps to over a billion people around the world. If Google couldn’t preload its money-making apps onto Android phones, it probably wouldn’t give Android away for free.

Another reality: Google has a powerful app store competitor — Apple, which rakes in a whopping 87 percent of smartphone profits.

But maybe this isn’t just about competition. Amazon, Apple, and Facebook have also been the target of legal or regulatory actions lately, after all.

Yet you won’t find the U.S. suing Europe’s super-successful platform companies because, well, there aren’t any. Likewise, Europe has generated only a tenth of the fast-growing tech startups, or unicorns, found in the U.S. Instead of company creation, Europe seems to be specializing in regulation and investigation. The whole thing stinks of platform envy."