EU weighs new record fine against Google: report

The European Union is reportedly considering lobbing another record antitrust fine at Google over its Android mobile operating system.

The European Commission, the executive arm of the EU, has set up a panel of experts to get a second opinion of the case, reports Reuters. The initial case team had reportedly concluded that Google could face the largest penalty handed to a single firm on antitrust matters by the commission.

{mosads}Last month, the commission slapped Google with a record antitrust penalty. The commission ordered Google to fork over $2.7 billion for abusing its dominant position in search markets to push its shopping service. The new decision, which could happen by the end of the year, is expected to be even bigger. 

A commission spokesperson and Google did not offer comment to Reuters.  

In April 2016, the commission charged Google with using its Android product to shut out competitors by pre-installing its own apps on the mobile OS.  

Google has fought back against the commission’s accusations, arguing that Google is not only not dominant in its position, but that the nature of its OS makes it especially vulnerable to competition. 

“Any phone maker can download Android and modify it in any way they choose,” Google senior vice president and general counsel Kent Walker wrote in November. “But that flexibility makes Android vulnerable to fragmentation, a problem that plagued previous operating systems like Unix and Symbian.”

Walker also hammered EU officials for not including Apple as a rival to the Android OS when considering the mobile OS market.

“To ignore competition with Apple is to miss the defining feature of today’s competitive smartphone landscape,” Walker continued.

The commission is also investigating a third case on Google’s Adsense web advertising platform, though a ruling against Google isn’t expected to result in as hefty of a fine as the Android case, according to Richard Windsor, an independent financial analyst who analyzes competition among large U.S. and Asian internet and mobile firms. 

“If Google was forced to unbundle Google Play from its other Digital Life services, handset makers and operators would be free to set whatever they like by default potentially triggering a decline in the usage of Google’s services,” he told Reuters, in reference to Google’s app store.