Google Accused of Interfering With South Korean FTC Investigation 186
New submitter DCTech writes "South Korea's Fair Trade Commission is accusing Google of methodically interfering with an anti-competition investigation into Android. 'Google deleted files and made its employees work from home in an attempt to frustrate the investigation, alleges the commission in an interview with a South Korean newspaper [machine translation]. The non-cooperation allegedly came after Google's Seoul office was raided by the commission's officials in September. The anti-competition probers were looking into whether Google's Android phones unfairly prioritize Google search and are "systematically designed" to make it difficult to switch to another option'. Now the South Korean watchdog is considering maximum fines for Google's non-compliance. Google is currently under investigation for similar anti-competition issues in Europe and the U.S."
Re:Systematically designed? (Score:2, Informative)
Even funnier is that the one and only Apple product I ever owned, an iPhone 3G was set to Google search.
If it's good enough for their main competitor, why is it not good enough for them? And as the PP points out, this is all customizable by the hardware maker.
And apparently, South Koreans have never installed Chrome, which immediately gives you a simple choice of Google, Yahoo, or Bing.
Install the latest Internet Explorer and see how hard it is to not choose Bing.
Re:History repeats (Score:4, Informative)
It WAS/IS a vital part of the OS. We aren't talking the kernel, or the drivers, but the shell, Explorer.exe used the IE components for doing close to everything. You did have sillyness like 98lite that removed IE by actually installing the old windows 95 shell from disk. However, due to the fuss about being forced to have IE, Microsoft just component-ized the hell out of it, so if you were to "uninstall" IE, you are actually only getting rid of the executable, not the essential OS components.
Re:Android is Open... (Score:5, Informative)
Google, by tying together search and access to the android store, is doing "bundling"
Motorola Backflip is an Android device, uses Bing as default search and has Android Market. Your argument is invalid.
AJAX According to WIKI (Score:0, Informative)
The term Ajax was coined on 18 February 2005 by Jesse James Garrett in an article entitled "Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications", based on techniques used on Google web pages.[1] However, a patent application covering this type of user interface was filed on 3 September 2003, thus predating the term itself by two years. This application resulted in US Patent #7,523,401 being issued to Greg Aldridge of Kokomo, IN.[9]
On 5 April 2006 the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) released the first draft specification for the XMLHttpRequest object in an attempt to create an official web standard.[8]
Re:AJAX According to WIKI (Score:4, Informative)
The concept behind the XMLHttpRequest object was originally created by the developers of Outlook Web Access (by Microsoft) for Microsoft Exchange Server 2000.[4] An interface called IXMLHTTPRequest was developed and implemented into the second version of the MSXML library using this concept.[4][5] The second version of the MSXML library was shipped with Internet Explorer 5.0 in March 1999, allowing access, via ActiveX, to the IXMLHTTPRequest interface using the XMLHTTP wrapper of the MSXML library.[6]
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest [wikipedia.org]
Re:"If this was Microsoft" (Score:4, Informative)