Japanese regulators on Tuesday accused U.S. tech giant Google of violating anti-monopoly laws, echoing similar moves in the U.S. and Europe.
Google Japan said in a statement that it found the action “regrettable.” It said it has invested in Japan significantly to promote innovation as a technology leader.
The Japan Fair Trade Commission’s “cease and desist order” says Google must stop the pre-installation of the Google search engine in Android smartphones, which it said in effect shuts out competition.
It’s unclear if Google, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., based in Mountain View in the Silicon Valley, will take legal action to fight the order.
In the U.S., a judge ruled last year that Google’s ubiquitous search engine illegally exploited its dominance to squash competition. Google has denied the allegations, arguing that it’s immensely popular because people like what it offers. The appeals process is likely to take years.
Japanese regulators began their investigation into Google in 2023. They said they consulted with overseas authorities dealing with similar cases.
European regulators have also slammed what they see as Google’s monopolistic dominance.
Tuesday’s move marks the first time the Japan Fair Trade Commission has taken such an action against a major global technology company.
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13 Comments
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sakurasuki
Japanese phone makers are free to make phone if they can. What happen to Japan phone industry now? Don't blame that to google.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Japanese-companies-to-stop-making-Galapagos-phones
TaiwanIsNotChina
Once again, we're just not going to talk about Apple's walled garden?
JeffLee
Popular and necessary pre-installed apps don't bother me. You need them to get set up after unboxing a new phone. If you don't like them, then just uninstall them.
WoodyLee
Let's face Google Search is the Ultimate, what else is out there ??
Edge is loaded with adds and pop up adds it almost covers the entire screen.
Google is it, people will install it no matter what.
Garthgoyle
If Apple devices come with Safari pre-installed, how is Google violating the anti-monopoly laws by having their devices come with their own search engine?
And if having their search engine pre-installed on their phones is a a breach of said laws, how is it ok for phones being bloated with other apps and the users being unable to delete them from their devices?
theFu
There are 2 monopolies in cell phones. This is good and bad.
The good is they are effectively standardized platforms to run apps. Sorta like having the same power plugs are in every country.
The bad is that they have tremendous control over each of their platforms and have abused that power. For example, why is having bluetooth enabled dependent on GPS being enabled too? Because around 2012, Google decided it would be great to have tracking data always on and people were starting to use bluetooth for earphone connections. Prior to that point, each could be enabled/disabled separately. Sure, the GUI makes it appear this is still possible, but the library code requires GPS enabled when BT is enabled.
On most OSes (not phones), using 99% of apps doesn't require a proprietary library be installed that brings with it all the data capture and "phone home" to google code. There are alternative non-Google app stores, but those require app devs to pull out the Google-tracking expectations. Amazon's Android app store is dying, if you haven't heard. Too hard to keep apps feeding into the non-google tracking mandates.
There are thousands of other little details just like those two. There needs to be laws that separate the platform from the apps, so people can choose if they want to have google/facebook/tweeter/apple tracking them or not. Being able to check 1 box that disabled all google tracking, without the need for any Google account, would be ideal.
SomeWeeb
And yet they will just get away with it anyway.
HopeSpringsEternal
Google's the "Monopoly" KING, their search engine not even allowed in many countries as a result.
Amazing how little Alphabet/Google creates or provides, just a massive data net. but Generative AI killing their search biz, nobody needs their $clickbait anymore!
Wasabi
Mono in monopolies means one by definition there can not be two monopolies!
SaikoPhysco
Got no problem with this... as long as other conflicting Apps are banned too. Personally, I always install Google Maps... I find it to be the best navigation map out there.
Bart Fargo
I don't mind having the pre installed apps. What I do mind is that there are apps which I can't remove completely (only turn off).
BigNaraDeer
If I understand the main problem is that many websites block crawlers tht aren't affiliated with existing famous bots such as Google or Bing. Therefore you cannot start a new search engine without enlisting the help of Google or Bings. That is where the monopoly lies.
theFu
I've been running many websites for decades. Through analytics, I can see who visits or claims to visit each page. Lots of data and pretty graphs are available. There are hundreds of graphs created so we know a little about our visitors as a group. We love seeing locations outside data centers where people and companies rent computers. This means it is much more likely a human, not some crawler. I block a number of crawlers. Nearly all of them are not for search engines, but to steal content for their own use. Most are lazy and don't even pretend to use a current browser version. Yes, websites know which browser claims to be visiting them. Often the OS will be included along with the source IP, request timestamp and, obviously, the webpages viewed/requested. Individually, this isn't very interesting, but when processed, general things like which countries/subnets people are visiting from tells much. So far this month, fewer than 1000 unique visitors have come from Japan. But more visitors come from Russia than Canada. That's interesting for a US-based website.
Googlebot is, by far, the most active visitor, coming from hundreds of different IP addresses and subnets. Yandex is 2nd. Unexpected is cloud49.ocloud.de. Clearly someone is running a crawler on the computers hosted there. They've been nice about it, so I won't hinder the requests. If you play nice, so will we.
Many crawlers are abusive and visit 10x every hour, crawling thousands of web locations looking for any updates. They aren't efficient. Through industry standard methods, I've asked crawlers only to visit 2x a day, at most. so they don't end up being 90% of the bandwidth required and don't impact other, human, users.
Some crawlers ignore the request to visit limits, so they eventually get blocked completely. Baidu is one of those crawlers that I've blocked across all our sites. We didn't have any choice. They were eating lots of bandwidth and never, ever, sending any referrals - i.e. nobody using Baidu actually clicked a link to visit our websites.
Most of the other crawlers are either SEO tools or AI engines trying to steal our carefully created, paid, data. Many of the A.I. engines that crawl lie about who and what they are so they can steal our costly-to-make content. For them, we've setup a dynamic honey-pot just for AI to find and get stuck inside for many hours. In that part of our websites, we slow down the speed of data returned and feed garbage data to taint their AI knowledge. Our hope is that they will see this and decide NOT to visit our sites because it costs them AI processing for junk data.