On Tuesday, we reported on a new complaint filed by “Fairsearch,” an anti-Google group that counts Microsoft, Oracle, Nokia, and about a dozen other Google competitors as members. In recent years, European regulators have become more aggressive at policing anticompetitive behavior in the tech sector than their American counterparts. Microsoft and its allies hope that officials will conclude that Google’s mobile OS strategy violates the EU’s competition laws.
“Android phone makers who want to include must-have Google apps such as Maps, YouTube or Play are required to pre-load an entire suite of Google mobile services and to give them prominent default placement on the phone,” Fairsearch argued in a blog post announcing the complaint. Here, the group is echoing charges Microsoft itself faced more than a decade ago after it bundled Internet Explorer with Windows.