California court rejects two class-action suits against Google

A California court yesterday threw out two class-action lawsuits accusing Google of bad business behaviour, on grounds that the plaintiffs failed to provide sufficient evidence to support their claims, The Register reported.

The first of the two suits, filed by law firm Hagens Berman in May 2014, alleged that Google's policy of requiring Android phone makers to bundle its own suite of applications on their devices had "financially and creatively stagnated" the market for mobile internet and search.

According to the suit, consumers had been paying too much for their mobile phones. However, in December, US district judge Beth Labson Freeman of the Northern District of California described the claimed damages as "speculative" and "concerning."

Later arguments before the court failed to cut ice with Freeman, who dismissed the suit, ruling that the plaintiffs could not demonstrate a direct link between Google's alleged anti-competitive conduct in the mobile search market and the prices of phones.

"Plaintiffs have failed to allege that they have suffered 'antitrust injury' in the same market as and sufficiently close to the alleged anticompetitive conduct to allow them to pursue private antitrust remedies against Defendant," Freeman wrote.

Meanwhile, Google had been hit with yet another anti-trust investigation.

The Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) of Russia had launched a formal investigation into Google over potential violations of antitrust law, according to a Reuters report.

The investigation followed a request by Russia-based search engine Yandex, which had leveled allegations against Google of forcing device makers to pre-install certain Google apps and to set Google search as the default.

Reuters quoted a spokeswoman for FAS as saying the complaint had been studied and it was decided to open proceedings regarding the violation of anti-monopoly regulation.

Yandex, a direct Google competitor, had close to 60 per cent share of the overall search market in its home country.

However, its share of searches on Android devices was only around 44 per cent, down from 52 per cent a year ago, a Yandex spokesman told BBC News.

The Russian search engine claimed that Google locked device makers into Google's app store and in order to install Google Play, device makers needed to preinstall the entire suite of Google Mobile Services, including Google Search, Google Maps, Gmail and other Google apps, Yandex said.

Furthermore, it alleged Google blocked rival apps from being installed on Android devices, Yandex claimed and cited by way of example, its smartphone vendor partners - Prestigio, Fly and Explay claiming last year that they were no longer able to preinstall Yandex services on their Android devices due to Google's policy.