Share

Google fined for breaking Russian antitrust rules with Android

438 million rubles ($6.7 million) for violating antimonopoly legislation by preinstalling applications on Android smartphones.

Advertisement

Tsar Putin’s state anti-monopoly watchdog FAS said that it had not reached an out of court settlement with Google over the Android operating system.

As well as the fine, FAS ordered Google to mend its ways and floated the possibility of an out of court settlement.

The case will now go to court for a decision.

Russian appeals court has rejected Alphabet Inc.’sGoogle’s ( GOOG ) appeal in an antimonopoly case, a spokesman for the Russian antitrust watchdog said Wednesday. We are confident that the requirements create fair conditions for effective competition in the rapidly growing market for mobile applications.

The Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) originally ruled against the USA company in 2015, after a complaint by the Russian search engine Yandex.

At the end of March, FAS informed that Google had submitted the complete set of data with regard to the company’s operations on the Russian market in 2014, including information about earnings on the part of Google Play and related products.

Google dominates its service areas in much of the world, but it has failed so far to do so in Russian Federation, where Yandex retains more than 50 percent of the market for internet search, according to industry statistics.

Advertisement

Preliminary investigations showed that 16 of the country’s major retailers have been involved in price fixing since the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus came on the market in October 2015.

Google fined for breaking Russian antitrust rules with Android