When Europe’s antitrust regulator announced its preliminary findings in its case against Google last month, it said it found evidence that “Google’s conduct” stopped manufacturers selling smart phones using a variant of Android. One episode the EU might be talking about: Acer’s 2012 abandonment of that kind of phone, under pressure from Google.
The electronics maker had built a smartphone in partnership with Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce firm, using what Google considered to be a “fork” of Google’s Android software. But then-Android honcho Andy Rubin successfully pressured Acer to kill the phone or else be prohibited from using Google’s official version of the operating system for other devices, Alibaba said at the time. (Google didn’t deny it.) That was a scary scenario for Acer, which sold devices powered by Google’s Android and Chrome operating systems, so it bowed to Google.
