Yandex Goes Up Against Google For Anti-competitive Practices

The bad blood between Yandex- Russia’s largest search engine provider- and Google seems to have spilled over to the courtrooms. Yandex, recently filed a complaint against the search engine giant Google for its anti-competitive practices. As per the complaint specifications, Yandex has a big issue with Google’s bundling of its search engine and apps into Android. Android, considering its an open platform as claimed by Google, should have been accessible to smartphone vendors for loading their services. However, that’s not the case. Despite being an open platform, manufacturers are required to install the entire suite of Google services and set Google as the default browser for search engines for users who want to have Google Play Store on their devices.

Yandex, no doubt, has a point to prove, but Google has its defenses up. According to Google, the company, no doubt, offers Google play with larger suite of services, but adds that Android Open Source Project (AOSP) is entirely Google-free version of Android. Manufacturers can easily sell devices on AOSP and even pre-install a third party app store such as an Yandex store.

Yandex and Google offer same kind of services, but the former had failed to persuade local companies to choose them over Google. But that’s Yandex’s problem and not Google’s.

Sometime back even Microsoft faced similar European antitrust investigations, which could have been avoided if a free version of Windows with no Microsoft apps were made available. This is what Google does now with AOSP.

Not just Yandex, Google is facing increasing heat from European markets as well for the same Android tie-in reasons. Besides this, the European Commission is pushing forward a legislation against Google and other search providers, for them to unbundle their search engines from their other services. The pressure to unbundle especially comes from US-based companies such as Microsoft, Oracle and Expedia, who are teaming against against Google under FairSearch coalition to protect their own interests.