The biggest punishment in history: The European Union brutally punished Google with 4.3 billion euros for scam.

The biggest punishment in history: The European Union brutally punished Google with 4.3 billion euros for scam.

The European Union today will punish the US company Google with around 4.3 billion euros for using its Android operating system to block competition

It is the biggest punishment in the history that the European Union imposed on a company. The reasoning behind the decision states that Google Android, which is about three quarters of all mobile phones, used to gain an advantage over the competition. Google asked the mobile device maker to preinstall their search engine if they wanted to have access to their various services, which, according to the European Commission, made it difficult for consumers to make choices and restrict competition.

The Commission found that Google requested the manufacturer to preinstall the Google Search app and the Google browser (Chrome) as a condition for obtaining a Google Play Store license, that it paid certain amounts to some major manufacturers and mobile network service providers provided that preinstalled their Google Search app only on their devices and prevented all manufacturers who wanted to pre-install Google apps to sell smart mobile devices with alternative Android-enabled variants (so-called "Android forks").

"This subject is about three types of restrictions imposed by Google on Android devices and mobile network service providers to ensure that traffic on Android devices is directed to Google's search engine. In that way, Google took advantage of Android as a means to strengthen the dominance of its search engine.

This is a practice that Google has denied to its competitors the ability to compete on the basis of quality and innovation. In this way, European consumers are denied the benefits of effective competition in an important mobile segment. Such treatment is illegal based on EU anti-trust rules, "said competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager. Efforts by the company have reduced European consumers' benefits from the competition in an important mobile sphere, which is contrary to EU rules, Vestager said.

By the way, the European Commission gave Google three months to terminate this practice, as it would otherwise have to pay an additional fine of five of the average daily turnover of its parent company Alphabet worldwide. Google has repeatedly pointed out that Android does not compete with the competition, that every company has the choice of whether to use it and that its operating system has significantly contributed to the development of the digital economy, since it is available to mobile manufacturers as well as developers. Google was punished last year, at $ 2.4 billion, due to abuse of the ruling position in the search engine market by giving the unlawful advantage to its own price comparison service.