FEDERAL JUDGE ORDERS GOOGLE TO OPEN ITS ANDROID APP STORE TO COMPETITION

A federal judge this week ordered Google to tear down the digital walls shielding its Android app store from competition as punishment for maintaining an illegal monopoly that helped expand the company’s internet empire.

- 

The injunction issued by U.S. District Judge James Donato will require Google to make several changes that the Mountain View, California, company had been resisting. Those include a provision that will require its Play Store for Android apps to distribute rival third-party app stores so consumers can download them to their phones, if they so desire.

The judge’s order will also make the millions of Android apps in the Play Store library accessible to rivals, allowing them to offer up a competitive selection.

Donato is giving Google until November to make the revisions dictated in his order. The company had insisted it would take 12 to 16 months to design the safeguards needed to reduce the chances of potentially malicious software making its way into rival Android app stores and infecting millions of Samsung phones and other mobile devices running on its free Android software.

The court-mandated overhaul is meant to prevent Google from walling off competition in the Android app market as part of an effort to protect a commission system that has been a boon for one of the world’s most prosperous companies and helped elevate the market value of its corporate parent Alphabet Inc. to $2 trillion.

Google said in a blog post that it will ask the court to pause the pending changes, and will appeal the court’s decision.