FAS fined Google 438 million rubles
Today, the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS Russia) has imposed an administrative fine on Google. The amount of the fine is 438,067,400 rubles (the official rate of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation as of August 11, 2016 is 64.8137 rubles / $).
On September 18, 2015, FAS recognized Google as a violator of Part 1 of Article 10 of the Federal Law "On Protection of Competition" (abuse of dominant position).
“We are confident that the execution of the prescription will provide an opportunity to develop competition in the mobile software market in Russia, which will have a beneficial effect on our consumers. The law on the protection of competition must be observed by all companies whose products are shipped to the territory of the Russian Federation - and to transnational corporations as well, ”said Elena Zayeva, head of the Communications and Information Technologies Regulation Directorate of the FAS Russia.
During the proceedings of the case, the FAS Russia Commission identifiedthat Google is abusing its dominant position in the market for mobile app stores. The investigation was initiated on the complaint of "Yandex". The Russian company considered that Google is preventing the installation of Yandex applications on mobile devices running Android. In 2014, a number of developers of Android devices refused to install Yandex services on their devices, claiming that Google prohibits doing this. According to experts, Android dominates the Russian smartphone market with a share of more than 80%.
As a result of the investigation, the FAS indicated to the American corporation to eliminate the violation of the Law on Protection of Competition. In particular, Google is obliged to exclude from agreements with vendors a number of anti-competitive requirements that restrict the installation of applications and services of other developers. The company was also obliged to notify users of Android OS devices about the possibility of deactivating pre-installed Google applications, changing the search engine in the Google Chrome browser, changing the location of icons and installing another search widget.
FAS has repeatedly postponed the decision to approve a fine for Google at the request of an Internet company. On June 29, the decision was postponed for the fourth time. The head of the FAS RF, Igor Artemyev, previously stated that there is a possibility of a settlement agreement with Google. If such an agreement were concluded, the penalty for an Internet company would be reduced to 1% of the company's annual turnover in the market of pre-installed app stores in Russia.
The maximum penalty under the laws of Russia could be 15% of Google's turnover in the Russian Federation for 2014. In January, representatives of the FAS reported that the amount of the fine could be about 7% of the turnover. If the percentage is exactly the same, then Google's turnover in the domestic market for this year amounted to 6.26 billion rubles.
Google has filed an appeal for finding it guilty of violating the competition, but the appeal is constantly postponed. July 5 consideration was postponed to August 16.