Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Intellectual Property Law Blogs -> Groklaw

Intellectual Property Law

: Groklaw

FSFE Writes Letter to EU Commission, Objecting to FairSearch's Claims Against Google of 'Predatory Pricing' ~pj Update

By Pamela Jones et al.

Free Software Foundation Europe has just announced it has written a letter to the European Commission, objecting to FairSearch's claim that free distribution of Android software by Google is "predatory pricing":

The so-called "FairSearch" coalition is essentially asking the European Commission to favour a restrictive business model over a liberal one. This is exactly the opposite of what competition regulators should do in order to achieve a fair and open market.

"Free Software is not about price, it's about liberty, a guarantee of competition and vendor independence. Asking to cripple Free Software in order to allow proprietary vendors to sell their locked-down systems is just absurd" says Carlo Piana, FSFE's General Counsel. "The most substantial threat to competition in the mobile space today are software patents, and we have repeatedly urged antitrust authorities to address this problem," he adds.

FSFE asks the European Commission to dismiss the "FairSearch" coalition's unfounded claims regarding predatory pricing, and not make them part of whatever steps it decides to take in response to the group's filing.

They tell the Commission that they are writing to "explain how the distribution of Free Software, whether gratis or for a fee, promotes competition, rather than damaging it." For example, it's not true that Google compels Android-based phones to exclusively use its own app store, and by releasing the code for free, Google is actually enabling others to easily compete with Google:

Google's competitive advantage is essentially ephemeral: the only way to stay ahead of the competition in Free Software is to provide better products or services, and to win users' trust. Barriers to entry for competitors are extremely low. An example is that the platform allows installing alternative marketplace (or "app stores"). The Free Software Foundations promote a "Free Your Android" campaign where they solicit adoption of an alternative marketplace called F-Droid where only Free Software applications are provided.

The letter points out that most of the innovation going on in mobiles is in Free Software:

In a powerful illustration of how the Free Software model enables competition, we note that all recent additions to the list of mobile operating systems are largely Free Software. Though Android devices currently make up around 70% of mobile phones and tablets sold, several other Free Software mobile operating systems based on the Linux kernel are setting out to to compete with Android. Examples include Firefox OS (backed by the Mozilla Foundation), Jolla (from the ashes of Maemo, a Nokia project terminated after the company's strategic alignment with Microsoft), Tizen (backed by Samsung, Intel and various telecom providers such as Vodafone and NTT Docomo), and UbuntuMobile (backed by Canonical).

You can write your own letter to the EU Commission, whether you are a company, a FOSS project, or an individual. I hope you will. I know some of you have already, because you've been nice enough to let me know, and so I know some beautiful letters have already been sent. But numbers matter. Write to:

comp-greffe-antitrust at ec.europa.eu

Full post as published by Groklaw on July 29, 2013 (boomark / email).