Google has dominant position in EU and US mobile OS markets, but doesn't hold monopoly power
Is Android a monopoly? — A report from Bloomberg this morning suggests that US antitrust regulators are looking into whether Google has engaged in anticompetitive practices with its Android operating system.
Context & Ripple Effects
Android's regulatory exposure had been building all year before this story: in April the EU laid out three specific gripes with Android around bundled apps and default placement, and a New York Times analysis framed Google as a search monopolist in Europe while noting how differently its US position read. Then Bloomberg reported that the FTC had opened an inquiry into Google's Android business, putting US and European regulators on parallel tracks.
The significance of this piece is the framing: analysts concede Google holds a dominant position in mobile operating systems on both continents yet argue that dominance alone doesn't equal monopoly power. That distinction — market share versus exclusionary conduct — is exactly what the FTC probe was designed to test, and it set up everything that followed.
First-order effects
- Google now faces simultaneous scrutiny from the FTC and the European Commission over the same OS, forcing it to defend Android's licensing and app-bundling practices to two regulators at once rather than treating them as separate markets.
- OEMs shipping Android with preloaded Google apps sit directly inside the investigation's blast radius: any finding against bundle-and-default agreements would constrain how they configure devices.
Second-order effects
- Once the US inquiry legitimized the line of attack, Brussels escalated — by April 2016 the Commission issued a formal Statement of Objections to Google over Android, converting the earlier gripes into an actionable case.
- Google's rivals gain leverage without shipping a competing product: complaints filed through antitrust channels become a cheaper path to loosening Android's defaults than building an alternative mobile OS.
Third-order effects
- The pattern travels: five years on, India's antitrust authority reached the same conclusion that Google abused Android's dominant position there — evidence that 'dominant but not a monopoly' is a distinction regulators worldwide decline to grant once distribution contracts are examined.
- If the sequence holds, open-source mobile platforms get regulated not on pricing but on gatekeeping — preinstalls, defaults, and app-distribution terms become the standard antitrust target for anyone controlling the world's most-used OS.
The trend: Mobile operating system control is becoming a global antitrust battleground where sheer installed-base dominance, not classic monopoly pricing, triggers regulator action.