The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority has been asked to investigate allegations that Google and Apple, which together control over 99 percent of the global market in smartphone operating systems, secretly colluded to stifle smartphone search engine competitors.
The pressure group Marketers for an Open Web (MOW) submitted a complaint to the U.K. regulator, citing evidence from a Department of Justice antitrust case against Google that started under the Trump administration.
These quoted an internal email saying senior Google and Apple staff discussed a ‘vision that we work as if we are one company’ when looking at search income.
The US lawsuit followed huge pressure from regulators, smaller search engines such as DuckDuckGo and app developers concerned about high fees and complex rules.
And MOW has now quoted from what it claims to be evidence in the US of ‘collusion at a very senior level between Apple and Google in relation to overall strategy’.
The complaint also notes the Apple-Google stranglehold over access to the smartphone apps market:
MOW said in its complaint that the California-based tech giants are both creating ‘walled gardens of apps stores’ and stifling innovation on the open web.
The Apple-Google duopoly, in particular their control over the app marketplace, is a key bottleneck in the fight against online political censorship and bias.
The growth of competitors to the mainstream social media platforms, like Parler and Gab, is severely limited due to exclusion from both app stores — usually on dubious allegations of “hate speech.”
Lack of access to the Apple App store means applications cannot be installed on iPhones, whereas lack of access to the Google Play store means applications can only be installed on Android phones through a technically complex manual installation.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.