 Hello and welcome to NewsCreek. The competition commission of India has ordered a probe against search engine giant Google. This was after it found that Google misused its market dominance to basically discriminate against rivals. To talk more about this, we have with us Prabir Prakash sir. Hello Prabir. So there are not too many details about this case. This is based on a Reuters report which has seen the document. But there is already a case from the European commission from last year where Google was fined five billion dollars on very similar charge. And the competition commission sources have indicated that the case was quite similar. So could you just take us through what exactly that case was and what its implications are in India? See without getting the details of the case, the question that always comes up with respect to monopolies or what is in the US called antitrust is that if you have a market position in which you are a monopoly of something, can we use this to try and bundle things where you are not a monopoly and thereby also make that into your monopoly. Now this if we look back on say Microsoft which used to be the dominant player in the PC market. At that time it used to do with the internet explorer what's being charged against Google now that Chrome is being bundled in a similar fashion with Android. We'll come back to this issue. So what it means is you have to buy windows at that time PC platforms really Mac or Windows and the IBM PC compatible market was a much bigger one. So everybody who bought IBM PC compatible bought Microsoft Windows to run their machines and then a whole bunch of things came along with it. At the time there are other also shall we say essentially web browsers and internet explorer was a web browser. Other web browsers which are more dominant at the time had to give way to internet explorer mainly because of the Windows dominance. So that became the preeminent in that sense web browser. Android case is very similar that exactly the charge against internet explorer is the charges come out against Google. Microsoft had to debundle in that sense internet explorer that you could use other web browsers Firefox later group Chrome but at that time Firefox was a very popular web browser. So what Google has done is something very similar the Android system which is really based on Linux. So it was in fact a Linux kernel which was used. So this is open source product. So Google could not privatize the Android version could make my money out of that. But what Google did is it created dependencies on the Android version it was selling and said if you use preloaded Android then you have to also load Chrome as the web browser. You have also to put Google search as the basic search engine. So it was using it Android monopoly that it had and let's face it. The Android today is the dominant shall we say the smartphone operating system and which is the way the next play is of the internet. So this monopoly that Google has over the Android ecosystem is what gives it also the monopoly over the browser and other things. Now this is not the only play that Google has in fact the much bigger play is that it comes also with Google Play Store. So all the Android phones that you see in the world have Google Play Store and the Google Play Store forces or makes it very easy for the app developers to integrate with the Android ecosystem of Google but via the Apple Play Store sorry the Google Play Store and the Google Play Store is on the cloud that's a Google cloud services. Therefore the second dependence apart from the Android operating system itself and that dependency can be changed as what the European Commission is doing or what the competition commission in the MF was Google to do but the dependency on the Apple the dependency on the Google Play Store will still remain and that is the key problem that all Android ecosystems have and this essentially is also the problem by the way Huawei has at the moment and they are taken out of the Google Play Store that what happens to all the Google apps all the other apps that run seamlessly with the Android system and what will happen to that is the basic threat that Huawei phones will have outside China and that's something that is also the issue over here. So far the antitrust regulators both in Europe and India their solution has of course been to levy quite substantial fines and Google is also responded by giving users an option to download other browsers of course and also make the other browsers default browsers in their individual phones but like you said it does not really solve the problem of the Play Store which is actually where the more substantial issue is. You see this is the shall we say how monopoly is operated. This is not something that we are aware of. This is how all monopolies have behaved in the past if I have a monopoly in one sector how can I use it to have monopoly in other sectors. In this case it was really the operating system monopoly which paved the way by Microsoft earlier with the Windows operating system with Linux giving it competition and also the fact that Apple has also become a major player again in the PC market that is a weakening monopoly but still let's face it Windows or Microsoft one of the major revenue still of Microsoft is to sale of software. I think 60% of their revenue comes from Windows, Word and other services other software that they provide leaving that out for the time being if we come back to what Apple sorry Apple has done shall we say not Google but what Apple has done they have built their own ecosystem completely. Now anybody who wants to challenge Google today will have to consider how to build their own ecosystem completely new ecosystem otherwise Google's monopoly is going to remain not only in search engine not only on things like Google map not only on Gmail all of these things but the fact that Android is the de facto operating system today in India for instance 98% of phones apparently use Android. So the question that remains is do we have an alternative to the Android ecosystem not just the Android phone. You see the Android based operating system can be very easily changed with an alternative Linux kernel. Android itself actually was bought by Google at one point of time it was based on a Linux kernel and it cannot be made close source because it was always based on a open free and open source software. So that kernel is open that can be forked by anybody but the real problem is today the app based provisions because without the apps the phone is in some sense very very of limited use because smartphones use a lot of apps and at some of the apps are standard there you have the problem. So yes you can get shall we say the Google's Chrome you can use Firefox instead you can get other things out of the dependency that is there on the phone or which the phone manufacturers have had supposed to submit to Google if they want the Android as a pre shall we say pre's already downloaded stuff already when you order the phone it comes along with the phone. So if you do all of that even then that Android based dependency is really on the cloud. Now one must understand what happens about Google. Google is quite willing to pay the future five billion dollars in fines for having got Android into the preeminent position of the European market and say the Indian company the Indian arm or Google itself is an American company is fined by the Competition Commission say X number of dollars. Now having captured 98% of the Indian market Google might be quite willing to pay the fine as a capital investment shall we say in the monopoly it has created. So this fines they're quite happy to pay the fines in lieu of the monopoly they have got for five, eight, six years whatever the duration might be and that's a long game that Google is playing and many jurisdiction there will be no fines. So even the fines in some sense are expenditure which Google is willing to undertake in order to achieve the monopoly and would you see the possibility of say some a company like Huawei being able to actually generate its own ecosystem as an alternative because that is one of the options they are considering to build a Huawei Play Store which has its own series of apps. You know the challenge for the world is that if we don't want to succumb to companies like Google and so on internationally what are the options they will have and this is true for Chinese obviously, Russia little less so but definitely at any point of time any of the companies can be sanctioned. So these are those who already have strategic competition in the United States and you can be easily taken out of the US shall we say domains in by use of sanctions. So suddenly all the US products becomes out of bounds for it. So what do they do? So I think they have no alternative but to do what we India India called self reliance for a long time or shall we say technological sovereignty again which means you need to have options by which whether it is hardware or software you should be able to be completely self reliant. You may not be so but you have to aim to be so. So in case that you have an existential crisis like the Huawei has then you can say okay what is the gap now I need to cover in order to become independent and I think that is the challenge that to for instance Huawei has it's they have been looking at different things they have been looking at say companies which have now almost died and whether they have an app store which they can they can take over they're looking at Russians what is the Russian apps which are there. So they are on the work hunt for a quick way to create their play store equivalent and let's let's see there is there are two precedents to this so it's not that difficult to do either but big bucks. So one is Apple which has built its Apple store by which you can get the apps from Apple they integrate seamlessly with Apple because the hardware is all the same. So in fact the integration is even easier because the target hardware is not as varied and as shall be said different from each other as the Google ecosystem has and the second is Amazon Fire Stick for instance that also seems to have built a whole bunch of applications or apps which are independent of the Google Play Store and therefore these big companies are already thinking ahead that they cannot afford to be dependent on Google and this is the route that Huawei or any other company has to travel. It's clear that Huawei is being forced to travel this route they didn't want to they would like to compete in the European market and in the third world market with products which people don't see it as dissimilar which also have the familiar Google stuff on it because Google still controls a large part of the search engine, the Google Maps, the Gmail and also the Google Docs now etc. including the search engine which is where the contention has come out. So I think all of this we have to see how it goes but we are seeing a long-term battle against Google's monopolies or the monopolies of big American companies because it's clear that we are today entering into global trade wars and what a news click we have earlier says also Technological Wars or Tech Wars. So I think that's where it is. It's going to be a rocky road. I don't think the globalized United World which was the sort of the slogans it is all the slogans which was given is actually working at the moment but behind this is a really an attempt to reassert dominance of certain countries companies or through some companies certain countries asserting the dominance over rest of the world which is where the competition commissions are now waking up to the threats. The Europe is waking up to threats of American digital companies taking over their space and in fact the only ones today who are able to challenge it is because they have a huge market internal market is the Chinese companies to a lesser extent Russia because they have good technological strength but they really do not have as big obviously as bigger market as the Chinese have the population of Russia small Russian is not a popular language internationally so it doesn't have the numbers required to really create a large market base. So we have to see how Russia and China whether they will come together strategically even on the digital tech sector as it were. Thank you. That's all we have time for today. Keep watching news click.