According to the latest report, Google is facing a new EU anti-monopoly investigation, said Google may force the smartphone manufacturers to use Google Assistant as its default voice assistant on the device. As early as June, EU antitrust regulators expressed concern about the market dominance of Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant.
Regulators claimed that many interviewees expressed concerns about exclusivity and bundling. For example, voice assistant providers prevented manufacturers from installing rival voice assistants on their smart devices. In addition, many interviewees also expressed concern about the promotion of their services by Google, Apple and Amazon, which would limit the large amount of data that competitors and these companies can access.
More than that, European regulators are also dissatisfied with the serious lack of interoperability of devices in the smart home market and are expected to submit a final report on the survey of voice-assisted and Internet-connected devices in the first half of 2022.
Due to Google’s abuse of market dominance, the European Commission has imposed a fine of 10 billion U.S. dollars. In 2018, EU regulators charged Google a fine of 5 billion U.S. dollars to punish it for forcing smartphone manufacturers to pre-install their search and map services on Android phones and tablets.
