Google Sued Over Claims Android Tie-Ins Hurt Competition

Google Inc. (GOOG) was sued for allegedly abusing its market power by forcing handheld device makers that use its Android operating system to also provide the search engine company's applications. Google's requirements that manufacturers such as Samsung Electronics Co. (005930) adopt less popular applications in order to use consumer favorites such as YouTube are "designed to maintain and extend its monopolies," according to a complaint filed yesterday in federal court in San Jose, California. The existence of the Android "mobile application distribution agreements," or MADAs, wasn't widely known until this year, when Harvard Business School professor Ben Edelman wrote about them on his blog and voiced concerns about anticompetitive behavior similar to the claims in the lawsuit. Worldwide, 78 percent of smartphones were run on Android in the fourth quarter of 2013, according to IDC.



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