Report: EU asks Russia’s Yandex to detail Google’s work with Android

MOSCOW, Dec 1 (PRIME) -- The E.U. competition authority has formally requested evidence from the Russian Web giant Yandex regarding a potential new antitrust case against Google, this time over the bundling of Google services with Android, online technology edition Gigaom reported Monday.

This investigation, separate from the long-running case over Google’s search practices, is largely about the all-or-nothing bundling and prime placement of the U.S. firm’s Google Mobile Services (GMS) proprietary apps and APIs within Android.

The GMS apps include the Play Store, Google Maps, Gmail, Drive, YouTube, Hangouts and Chrome, while Google’s increasing emphasis on GMS APIs also makes many third-party Android apps more dependent on proprietary Google services. This makes it harder to create non-Google forks of the supposedly open-source Android.

The investigators are also examining the possibility that Google may have used its market power to force manufacturers to cancel or delay the launch of mobile devices that use competing operating systems or ship with competing core apps.

According to sources, the European Commission is interested in receiving Yandex’s version of events because the Russian firm owns mobile services, which it offers to Android device manufacturers as an alternative to the GMS services. Yandex is the most popular search engine in Russia and also has a large presence in other Russian-speaking markets.

According to sources, even large Google-partnered manufacturers operating in Russian-speaking markets were first forced to shun Yandex search as the default in favor of Google’s search, then had to avoid preinstalling Yandex on the device’s homescreen, and were finally banned from preinstalling Yandex’s services at all. This chimes with recent reports of Google expanding its requirements regarding manufacturers’ pre-installation and promotion of GMS services.

When Yandex revealed its GMS-rivalling “Yandex.Kit” suite earlier this year, it announced Russian manufacturer Explay as a customer. However, in November reports suggested Explay had done a U-turn and was refusing to preinstall any Yandex services, as it had received a GMS license with Google’s non-compete requirements.

Yandex spokesman Vladimir Isaev confirmed by email that the company had received a formal request for information from the European Commission in the summer, asking it to “disclose information and materials concerning our relations with mobile device manufacturers about pre-installing our services on their devices.”

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