UK investigation says Apple and Google are ‘holding back’ mobile browsers
1 min read
Summary
The UK’s competition watchdog, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), has published the final report of its investigation into the country’s mobile browser market.
It found that Apple and Google were impeding competition, to different degrees.
The CMA said that Apple made it difficult for third-party providers to compete by restricting the capabilities of third-party browsers to the features of its proprietary web engine, and also by pre-installing Safari as the default browser on iOS devices.
Google was also found to be anti-competitive through its dominance on the Android platform through the pre-installation of Chrome as the default browser.
Furthermore, the CMA found that Apple and Google were further incentivised not to compete as a result of Google paying Apple a significant proportion of its search revenue in return for being the default search engine on Apple devices.