The country has now told the tech giant that it must split apart the bundling of its services, particularly search.
It now appears that Google has run out of options in Russia, now that the government there has made a final decision with regards to the tech giant’s bundling of mobile apps and services, particularly when it comes to the use of the search engine on Android devices.
Google has now been given a deadline of November 18 by which it must unbundle services in Russia.
Failure to unbundle its mobile apps could cause Google to have to face fines that are worth millions of dollars. The tech giant’s intention had been to appeal the issue, but the Russian government hasn’t shown any interest in working with the company to come up with a compromise. Moreover, it also hasn’t indicated that it is willing to provide the Android maker with all that much room to consider alternatives.
There is one group that could easily gain from the Google unbundling of mobile apps: Yandex.
Yandex has been nicknamed Russia’s Google. In fact, it was that company that actually filed the complaint against Google, claiming that the American company’s app bundling practice between services such as Search and Maps in its mobile operating system is causing notable harm to its business. In September, the Russian Federal Anti-Monopoly Service decided that Yandex had a point and ruled that Google must unbundle its mobile applications and services for smartphone and tablet users.
This ultimatum is aimed primarily at this one component of the tech giant’s practices. As dramatic as the Russian issue may seem, it is far from the only country in which similar efforts have been made against Google.
In fact, even American rivals and interest groups in the United States have made attempts to make the FTC conduct an investigation into the mobile apps bundling practices at Google. Some have even gone to the extent of stating that the Play Services from the company have become a central method of pushing both a monopoly and a powerful control over Android, despite the fact that the operating system has been designed to be open sourced.
