CGTN Europe interviewed Professor Ioannis Kokkoris, a professor of Law and Economics at Queen Mary University of London.
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00:00Google is up against a deadline to set out its plans to restore competition in the search engine market.
00:06A court in the United States ruled in August that the company violated antitrust laws by maintaining an illegal monopoly.
00:14Google's Chrome is the most popular web browser in the world, with an estimated 67% of the market.
00:23Well, let's talk now to Ionis Koukouris, an antitrust expert and professor of law and economics at Queen Mary University in London.
00:31Professor, welcome, good to see you.
00:33What are the potential fixes here that Google might propose to try and address the court's rulings?
00:42The most obvious one is to significantly change, maybe go as far as eliminate the exclusivity arrangements
00:52in these agreements that the court, the judge has found to be problematic.
00:56And these exclusivity arrangements relate to both browsers and Android software.
01:02So it should go as far as offer to eliminate these exclusivity arrangements from these agreements.
01:09I doubt it will go any further than that, to be honest.
01:12I mean, there's no defense here, is there? I mean, 67% of the world market is indefensible, isn't it?
01:19It is, it is. And this kind of exclusivity arrangements, they've been anti-competitive in case law for years.
01:26It's not something new. It's not something that Google shouldn't expect.
01:30And it's not something that the judge had any difficulty in actually deciding,
01:34because there's a clear case law for the last 20 years on this kind of arrangements,
01:41creating problems to markets and consumers.
01:43Saying it, changing it is one thing. Of course, actually doing it and bringing in other names
01:49who become big players is quite another, isn't it?
01:53Definitely, definitely. I think where these type of markets are now,
01:59we have one, two big hostile names in some of these markets.
02:04It's very difficult where they now are to kind of dethrone them
02:09and get a new name coming in in the near future to replace a search power like Google.
02:16How does this case, I wonder, compare to those other high-profile antitrust cases?
02:22I'm thinking perhaps Microsoft back in the mists of time in the 1990s.
02:28It's a kind of a tragic irony, because in the 90s, Microsoft's problem was the same nature that Google has now.
02:36So Microsoft was selling Windows back then, and they had Explorer already pre-installed.
02:43So it's a kind of a similar type of arrangement here, that you buy a software,
02:48you buy Android software, and you have Google Search already pre-installed.
02:52So in effect, it's the same type of conduct that was anti-competitive 30-odd years ago,
02:58and it's still anti-competitive now. So it hasn't really changed much.
03:03Professor, good to see you. Thank you for that.
03:05The Professor of Law and Economics at Queen Mary University in London, Ionis Koukouris.