[propman]

I’m usually on Europe’s side against tech giants (Facebook fine, google antitrust fine, WhatsApp, mostly for unfair Ireland loophole with apple taxes) but this looks incredibly dumb to me. I’m fairly anti google but now that they have a 90% market share I want them to charge a ton for each phone and force someone to create a brand new OS that competes with android or iOS, fix all the security, convince developers to build for that, market it to millions, force a satisfied consumer base to learn a new OS and deal with a brand new UI.

This is a complete Google win. Now they can charge without looking bad.

[ocdtrekkie]

Google's not going to be making any more money under this plan, and that's my point: This Bloomberg article has suggested a completely fictional interpretation of events.

Google previously offered a single bundle of apps, one that contained apps that it made money on, and one that contained apps that cost them money. Since OEMs are required to include all of them, Google charges $0 for them.

Now, they'll have two bundles: One that phone makers will pay for, and one that phone makers will be paid to include. If they're still getting both bundles, it's a wash. Again, $0 changes hands.

But what could happen now that it's unbundled, is Bing could pay to have Bing preloaded instead by outbidding Google, and then they can still pay for the Play Store and such. In that scenario, the OEM actually saves money under this change, because there's competition to Google now, where that wasn't possible before. Bing would pay the OEM per phone more than the OEM has to pay Google for the Play Store.