So Brussels hit Google with a $5.04 billion fine last Wednesday. €4.34 billion if you want the number in real money. The EU's antitrust arm says Google broke the law by forcing phone makers to preinstall Chrome and the Google Search app if they wanted the Play Store on their devices, and by paying manufacturers and carriers to keep other search apps off entirely. Google's got 90 days to knock it off or the fines start racking up daily. It's the biggest antitrust fine in EU history, bigger than the $2.7 billion they slapped on Google last year over the Shopping thing, and every tech outlet has run basically the same 800 words about it since Wednesday morning.
I'm not going to do that. Partly because everyone else already has, and partly because reading the ruling made me go dig through my own phone, and honestly the ruling undersells the actual problem.
My phone is a mid-range Android thing my carrier practically gave away with a two-year contract, and it came with three app stores. Three. The Play Store, obviously, because Google requires that. Then there's the manufacturer's own store, buried in a folder labeled "Tools" that I have opened exactly once, by accident. And then there's a third one from the carrier itself, preloaded with a name I won't even bother typing here because it's not worth the search-engine juice. None of these can be deleted. You can disable two of them, which just hides the icon and leaves the code sitting on the phone doing nothing useful for anyone except whoever gets a cut of the preinstall deal.
And Facebook. I want to talk about Facebook for a second because it drives me up a wall. The Facebook app comes preinstalled as a system app on a lot of Android phones, mine included, which means you cannot uninstall it the normal way. You can go into settings and hit "disable," which stops it from running and removes the icon, but the app itself, all several hundred megabytes of it, just sits there on your storage forever like a tenant who stopped paying rent but won't leave. I have an 16GB phone. Sixteen gigabytes sounds fine until you realize the OS eats close to 6 of that before you've installed a single thing, and then Facebook's sitting there taking another chunk you can't reclaim without rooting the phone, which I am not doing to a device I got for free with a contract I'm still eleven months into.
This is the part the EU ruling is actually about, even if the headlines focus on the dollar figure. It's not really about whether Google's search box is on your home screen. It's about the fact that the whole chain, from Google down to the manufacturer down to your carrier, gets to decide what's permanently welded onto a phone before you ever touch it, and you as the person who paid for the thing have basically no say. The fine addresses one link in that chain. It does nothing about the other two.
I'll say this though, because I try not to be purely a complainer here: my actual day-to-day experience with Android hasn't been bad. The bloatware is annoying in the way a fly buzzing around a room is annoying, not in the way that actually ruins anything. I still prefer it to the last iPhone I used, mostly because I like being able to set a different default browser, which, ironically, is the exact thing the EU says Google was making artificially hard to do. So there's a weird knot in the middle of this story where the same company that gets fined for anticompetitive defaults also builds the one major mobile OS where changing your defaults is even possible in the first place. Apple's never been fined for this because Apple never lets you set Chrome as default to begin with, that just hasn't been an option people had, so there was nothing to force.
Anyway. It's the last week of July, Comic-Con just wrapped up in San Diego, and half my Twitter feed is trailers for movies I won't see until next year instead of antitrust filings, which honestly feels like the correct ratio. I'm going to go see if I can find a fourth app store hiding somewhere in a subfolder I haven't checked yet. Wouldn't put it past this thing.