The US tech giant and Australia’s competition watchdog announced that Google has agreed to pay a 55 million Australian dollar (€30.1 million) punishment for entering into anticompetitive agreements with the country’s two biggest carriers that prohibited the installation of other search engines on certain handsets.
In a statement, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission announced that it has filed a lawsuit against Google’s Asia Pacific branch, based in Singapore, in the Australian Federal Court on Monday. The appropriateness of the AU$50 million (€27.9 million) fine will be determined by the court.
During the 15-month anticompetitive agreements that ended in March 2021, Telstra and Optus were only allowed to pre-install Google Search on Android phones that were sold to consumers. We didn’t include other search engines. In exchange, the telecoms got a cut of the money Google made from those customers’ ads.
According to the commission, Google acknowledged that the arrangements were probably going to “substantially lessen competition. According to the commission, Google has also agreed to remove certain pre-installation and default search engine limitations from its agreements with telecoms and Android phone makers through a court-enforceable undertaking.
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