Earlier this week Russia’s anti-monopoly arm FAS (Federal Antimonopoly Service) fined Google $6.8 million USD for abusing its position in the smartphone market. Despite the paltry fine, which is sock money to Google, Google appealed the anti-monopoly ruling. Reuters is reporting this morning that a Russian court has already rejected Google’s appeal so the fine will stand which is a win for Russian competitor Yandex.
Yandex is a Russian multinational technology company specializing in Internet-related services and products. Yandex operates the largest search engine in Russia with about 60% market share in that country. It also develops a number of Internet-based services and products. Yandex ranked as the 4th largest search engine worldwide, based on information from Comscore.com, with more than 150 million searches per day as of April 2012, and more than 50.5 million visitors (all company’s services) daily as of February 2013. source: Wikipedia
Google has been facing deeper scrutiny in countries like Russia and the European Union for its business practices surrounding Android and pre-installed Google apps. Google has even been accused of using its position in the Obama administration to lobby against the cases it has faced overseas. The United States had similar anti-monopoly/antitrust investigations going into Google’s business practices but those investigations were stopped.
While Google’s batting average is great in the United States, it seems to be losing ground and cases overseas. How this will affect the company’s business and reputation remains to be seen. We suspect Google will pay this very small Russian fine and move on leaving the news cycle to decay over the matter.
What do you think of the Russian court rejecting Google’s appeal? Let us know your thoughts and comments below or on Twitter, Facebook and Google+.
[button link=”http://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-google-idUSKCN10S138″ icon=”fa-external-link” side=”left” target=”blank” color=”285b5e” textcolor=”ffffff”]Source: Reuters[/button]Last Updated on January 23, 2017.
