The Question: Why is the EU going after Android?

The European Commission has not been shirking from battles with multinational behemoths of late. This week it picked another fight, this time charging Google over its Android operating system.

The commissioner in charge of competition policy, Margrethe Vestager, who has already opened investigations into Google’s business practices in its advertising division, said: “Based on our investigation thus far, we believe that Google’s behaviour denies consumers a wider choice of mobile apps and services and stands in the way of innovation by other players, in breach of EU antitrust rules.”

The details strongly echo the sort of antitrust charges that used to be levelled at Microsoft when it dominated the personal-computer industry with Windows. The irony is that Google developed Android to act as a moat around its search business at the dawn of the mobile era, primarily to defend itself against Microsoft, which at the time looked primed to convert its PC operating-system superiority into a similar position in mobile.

By developing Android, and making it free, Google stymied Microsoft’s efforts to make and license a dominant mobile OS. But it was a case of being careful what you wish for, as Google now dominates the mobile market, controlling, as the commission points out, more than 90 per cent of the licensable smart-mobile operating systems in the EU with Android. (Apple occupies the lucrative top end of the market with the iPhone, which runs the unlicensable iOS.)

Google must feel damned either way: it makes a free operating system for any manufacturer to use, making an incalculably valuable contribution to the rise of mobile computing, and still gets mired in antitrust investigations.

The details are complex, in that it’s not merely Google’s dominance that is at the core of the charges but also the way it deals with handset manufacturers to ensure that its services – search, browser, email and, above all, app store – get priority.

The nature of these cases means there’ll be no resolution for years, by which time the mobile landscape might have changed anyway.