Google to be fined in Russia after allegedly monopolizing competition

Google was recently seen abusing its market dominance in Russia by the country's Federal Anti-monopoly Service (FAS) and is now bound to face charges. "Google company has been found responsible for the violation of Part 1 of Article 10 of the law ‘On protection of competition,'" said Vladimir Kudryavtsev, head of the market watchdog's information technologies department, in an interview with RIA Novosti, a state-operated media company.

The organization has indicated that Google had violated the country's law by pre-installing certain mobile applications, omitting third party apps along the way. One of these apps is Yandex, the firm who started the case. The company accused the search giant of prohibiting three device manufacturers, Fly, Prestige, and Explay from pre-installing Yandex products. Furthermore, Google allegedly forced phone makers to install Google Search as the default search service, as well as give the company's products a prominent placement on handsets.

Yandex is currently the leading search engine in the country, but is currently seeing declines with the increasing adoption of Android phones, which are usually baked with products of its competition.

Google's exact penalty for its committed felony is not known yet, but the company is seen to have a sanction equal to 15 percent of its revenue in the Russian market. Moreover, the FAS will issue a full ruling in the next couple of days containing recommendations to prevent Google from monopolizing their market position.

“In particular, FAS could prescribe [Google] to adjust its agreements with manufacturers of mobile devices, eliminating those clauses that restrict pre-installation of applications and services by other developers,” said Alexey Dotsenko, deputy head of FAS.

As of the moment, Google Russia has not yet commented on the issue. However, a spokeswoman in the country has said that they have not yet received a copy of the ruling.

Back in 2014, Google also got in the same dilemma in India, where the company was caught using its dominant market position to alter search keywords pointing to their website, and recently got fined for it.

Source: RT