Sound plausible enough and is almost exactly what the EC found Microsoft guilty of with IE; so why shouldn’t Google be subjected to the same laws? One reason for this could be that the EC decision against Microsoft was also wrong. I hate to say this, but if a company writes an operating system they should be free to do what they want an include what they like in terms of software and applications. From there they should allow anyone that licenses it to add, or remove applications (in much the same way that is done on all devices today). This is how things work plain and simple. If you buy iOS you are going to get Apple’s apps in prominent positions, if you buy a Windows Phone or a Blackberry you will see that same thing. For Microsoft or anyone to complain about this is a joke and amounts to little more than someone trying to use the legal system to compete.

Now on the other hand if you do pull a Microsoft or Apple and prevent people from using the browser, email app or anything else as the default then you do have an issue. You are forcing your subsystem to maintain default status which means that no matter what the customer wants they cannot have it. Microsoft did this with both Windows Phone and Windows RT. You cannot change the default browser from IE 10 in Windows RT; you are stuck with it. Sure you can download another browser, but if you click on a link in an email it will open IE10 and no the browser you want to use. To make thing even worse Microsoft requires you to register your website to use Flash in the RT version of IE10. If you are not on the whitelist you do not get any of your flash animation displayed. The same type of behavior is present in iOS (although no one’s flash works there).

We wonder if the EC is actually able to see this distinction. We also wonder if the will be able to put together the fact that Microsoft demands a fee from any company that uses Google’s Free OS which means that Microsoft is the only one getting paid when someone uses Android. Nokia is also rather suspect as they are no longer licensing their Symbian OS and have shifted to use Windows Phone almost exclusively. Oracle (another member of Fairsearch) recently had their hats handed to them when they tried to sue Google over alleged copyright/patent infringement. So you have three companies that would love to take a large chunk out of Google’s market share getting together in an organization that is little more than a front for pushing their agenda and going after a company that is doing exactly what they want to do (and are doing… Windows still ships with IE after all).

What we would love to see is the EC require Microsoft, Nokia and others to show that they are not doing exactly the same thing and worse in order for their complaint to stick. We doubt that will happen though as things just do not work that way anymore. It is pretty sad when companies that are cheating can hid behind organizations they found to go after their competitors for doing the same things they are. What is funny is that even if Google does lose it will not help either Microsoft or Nokia as their products are just not compelling enough to grab the market’s attention and that is even IF they can iron out all of the bugs that are there.

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