ANTITRUST CASE AGAINST GOOGLE: A FAIR COMPETITION?

The concept of a fair market competition entails the presence of multiple buyers and sellers in a market, who decide the prices of a product through the invisible forces of demand and supply in an open economy. This principle has been upheld by the World Trade Organization as well. This practice is against the monopolization of products and services that would prove unfair to businesses who would otherwise lose opportunities to grow. That being said, the recent highlight of an antitrust case has been Google- the biggest search engine on the web. This issue was taken up by different administrations across the globe, including the US and the UK, in the past; and currently, even the Competition Commission of India has started probing into the matter.

The matter revolves around claims that Google is promoting unfair market competitions- “allegedly abusing its dominant position in the Android smart-television market by creating barriers for companies which wanted to use or modify its android operating systems for their smart televisions, according to a report from Reuters”. The alleged claim mentioned earlier in this report pertains to India, in specific; however, the matter is a result of a series of affairs that splurged in the international market in the past. These allegations have their foundational base in theories that have been curated as plausible harm that Google’s dominant position might cause to other businesses and customers. One of the important positions that Google has tried dominating is the ad market. Google does everything for itself. It has its tools for advertising, its intermediaries for handling biddings, sending bids to networks, and selecting the winning bid. These tools are then used for those advertisers who advertise their products on Google’s site! The issue that has been taken into consideration is that firstly, it manages the content of the publishers, and lastly, it buys most of these pages, where other ad companies would have otherwise advertised their product/service at a cheaper price. Instead of allowing free competition in the market, Google is customizing these spaces on other websites as well as its own.

Google, in its move to mobiles, developed Android and included a lot of defaults and bundling in the Android contract so that their “browser and search engine were on the front of the Android phone in a prominent place, and anything else would have to be installed by the user in a less prominent location”. It also has a contract in a place called the anti-forking contract, which prevents any other android seller from developing their android software. For instance, let’s assume Samsung wants to create Samsung Android using the royalty-free, open-source Android base code. If it does so with its operating system, its stores, its own set of apps, and so on; and, if it had sold a Samsung Android phone, these devices would be out of compliance with the Google Android contract. This means they have to stop selling Google phones altogether. It is a very risk that Samsung would be taking, because if the android base system doesn’t work, then it will end up having no other source of revenue as well.

This contract by Google blocks activities by all the potential competitors who understand how an operating system works thereby preventing competition in the operating system, which in turn is a barrier to search and the browser. Thus, this move by Google is of great detriment to other businesses and customers as well, who value their privacy and have a right to free choice.

Submitted by-

Sneha Rath

Student Reporter, INBA