The problem that Google stated was the YouTube app for WP (written by Microsoft) did not display any ads. Microsoft countered that Google wouldn't make a YouTube app themselves. But of course no business is compelled to create apps for their platform.
Under antitrust law, once you have a large enough market share in one area, you may not use that as a weapon against competitors in other areas.
In the EU, a 40% market share is large enough to place your conduct under these restrictions, so actions that would be perfectly legal in the US can be quite illegal there.
Also, the chance of the EU competition commission buying the advertising argument is approximately zero.
>Microsoft agreed to Google’s terms and in version 3.2 of the YouTube app, released earlier this week, they had enabled Google’s advertisements, disabled video downloads and eliminated the ability for users to view reserved videos
I didn't really buy the excuse either, and the demand that it be written with certain technologies seems quite ridiculous. But are you saying that they could force Google to reveal some of their internal API details for Microsoft to make a YouTube app, even if the mobile website had the service's full functionality?
I'm saying the EU can force Google to stop behaving in an illegal manner.
Your idea of a potential remedy for this behavior may not be the one they land on.
However, it is certainly a remedy which they have employed in the past, something Microsoft is very much aware of:
>The 2004 [Microsoft antitrust] ruling ordered the company to open up source code for server communications protocols to rivals, in order to allow them to build server programs that work as smoothly with Windows as Microsoft's own software.
If Microsoft could do that to Google, can we do that to other companies? Can we write custom Netflix clients for unsupported platforms too? Or for another services? That a deep rabbit hole to follow.
I don't see what's so dangerous about that precedent. Google would basically be forced to either make an app, or enable someone else making such an app (e.g. by providing a public API).
And it would only apply to companies that are so big, they act as a monopoly in some market segment. I don't see why forcing those to use open standards and documented APIs, so that everyone else can interop with them, is a bad thing.
I mean, imagine this being applied to Facebook. I suspect that if you could do everything that you can on their website through an API, that alone would be sufficient to defeat the barrier to entry to the social network market that is practically insurmountable today, and thereby create more healthy competition. Isn't that a good thing?
> You must have a large enough market share for it to apply, and you must be using that market share as a weapon against competitors in another market.
I think Netflix is big enough for it, and yet they prohibit every custom client (thanks to DRM).
