As Google's influence over technology continues to grow, so do the calls from competitors for regulatory agencies to slam on the brakes. Such is the case in Russia where a competing search company has filed a complaint with Russia’s anti-monopoly regulator to investigate the way Google manages Android. It's not some small-scale nobody competitor, though, this is Yandex -- Russia's largest search provider. Yandex claims the way Google integrates its search services in Android is anti-competitive, but it really just sounds like Yandex wants to have its cake and eat it too.
Yandex isn't fighting over Google's scraps in Russia as many search providers are around the world. Yandex owns the majority of the search market in Russia, but its share recently fell below 60 percent. That's cause for concern from where Yandex sits, so is it time to change up the business? Compete harder? Nope, get regulators to hassle Google.
The shift in Russia's search market is due to the increasing use of mobile devices, 86 percent of which run Android. Yandex only captures 44 percent of those searches, but that's no shock. When you buy a standard Android device, Google is the default search engine. In fact, Google's rules for OEMs include specific requirements about how the software is set up (assuming they want Google's apps in the first place). Specifically, an OEM can't take money from Yandex to make its search engine the default.
Yandex thinks Google should be forced to "unbundle" search from Android to increase fairness in the market. The situation is actually similar to the one Microsoft dealt with in Europe a few years ago that ended with the infamous browser ballot screen. Android is a very different animal than Windows and Internet Explorer, though. Android itself is open source, so if Yandex doesn't like Google's bundling of services, it can simply take the open source version and create a fork without Google's oversight. It's all right there in the Android Open Source Project. That's what Amazon and many Chinese OEMs do, and it seems to work well enough for them.
Creating a fork of Android doesn't get Yandex any closer to its goal, so now we get the the real issue. Yandex pretty clearly wants phones in Russia to get all the advantages of Google services without following Google's branding rules(Opens in a new window). You can't remove Google search from Android anymore. It's deeply integrated with the rest of the components for location, messaging, email, and even the home screen. Google doesn't provide all these free services out of some altruistic sense of decency -- it's about search, so of course that's part of the package.
By asking regulators to force Google's hand, Yandex is just trying co-opt Android for its own purposes. Google's suite of services come with strings attached, yes, but they are entirely reasonable ones. It's a simple matter for users to install another search app. In fact, Android will ask if they want to set it as default after it's installed. It seems like Google is doing more than enough to ensure fairness. Yandex isn't asking for fairness, though, it's asking for special treatment.
