At eyeo, we work daily to transform the internet into a trusted, sustainable and accessible place. Staying true to our purpose, we took the opportunity to provide comments to the UK antitrust regulator’s on-going investigations, advocating for a fairer mobile browser space.
Background
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the competition regulator in the United Kingdom, is mostly known to the ad tech world as the agency overseeing Google’s privacy sandbox proposals. However, the CMA is also assessing the state of competition in other areas online, such as the recently relaunched market investigation into mobile browsers. Concretely, the CMA is assessing whether Apple and/or Google are using their market power as a source of competitive harm and if they protect their market position in anti-competitive ways.
Given the de-facto Apple and Google’s duopoly in mobile ecosystems, and its impact on consumers, we welcome the CMA’s initiative to investigate potential interventions to unlock competition and foster user choices. In our submission to the CMA, we advocate making the mobile browser space fairer and better for everyone and bringing the benefits of the open web to mobile ecosystems.
#1 | Removing barriers of entry
The CMA’s evidence emphasizes Apple and Google’s control over this space, which stifles competition and innovation. Despite benefits, restrictions on businesses and users lead to higher costs and limited choices. Notably, the dominance of Google’s Blink and Apple’s WebKit engines, as highlighted by the CMA, creates barriers for competing mobile browsers. Our experience with Adblock Browser, based on Blink for Android, confirms this: the dominance of a few browser engines limits competition by setting restrictive web and app capabilities.
We believe the remedies the CMA proposes, such as minimum standards for third-party browser engines on iOS and Android or enabling access to functionality for other browser vendors, could significantly improve competition in the mobile browser marketplace.
#2 | Increasing user choice
This is a bit of a textbook argument from business schools and competition law classes, but it couldn’t fit better to the mobile browser ecosystem: Creating more options for users leads to innovation, since companies compete to differentiate themselves from another by offering different services and improving their product offerings. The streaming media market is often mentioned as an example since various companies (Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+/Hulu, HBO Max, and more) compete for subscribers - since users can freely choose their streaming service, those companies are incentivized to continuously improve their services (e.g., by investing in content, improving user experience, and developing best-in-class technologies).
In stark contrast, the mobile browser ecosystem offers barely any choices for users. Product designs, user interfaces and choice architecture on mobile devices often lead to fewer choices (think, for instance, about pre-installed and default browsers and how impractical and technical it is to switch default browsers). Here the CMA can lead the way and improve competitiveness, by introducing choice screens and requiring that the user journey on alternative browsers is technically supported in the same way as a pre-installed browser.
#3 | Empowering users
One of the success stories of the open web is desktop browser extensions empowering users by giving them the agencies and tools to improve and customize their online experience. In a highly competitive market (alone on Chrome desktop, users can improve their web experience by choosing from over 180.000 extensions), add-ons compete to increase user accessibility to the web, boost productivity, safeguard privacy, protect biodiversity, or filter ads. Through extensions, users took (back) control and agency over their online experience.
Unfortunately, extensions are only a success story on desktop browsers. On mobile, the empowerment of users is either restricted or entirely prevented: Apple allows some support for browser extensions on mobile Safari, but (as the CMA study rightfully concludes), the related complexity and required technical expertise strongly limit the adoption. Google Chrome on mobile does not support extensions in any way, effectively hindering any adoption of extensions for mobile users.
Given the huge success of desktop extensions for users and businesses, we advocate including the lack of user empowerment in the scope of the CMA investigation. Since 2011, when eyeo was launched, we made a stand to empower users with control and agency over their online experience to enhance competition and innovation.
Staying true to this mission, we welcome the CMA’s initiative and its ambitions. We are also optimistic to see that other stakeholders are outspoken proponents of this cause as well: London-based start-up Gener8 urges the CMA to “lift anticompetitive restrictions to open up the mobile browser market (of which extensions are a critical feature) to full and open competition, to support innovation and choice”. Along the same lines, the Coalition for Online Data Empowerment calls upon the CMA to “unlock distribution of browser extensions for all browsers on iOS and Android devices”.
You can join us and other stakeholders in advocating for a fairer mobile browser market: check out the CMA’s overview page, where the authority publishes regular updates on the investigation and relevant insights, such as market studies or working papers.
Also, feel free to get in touch with us if you want to discuss how we can make the internet a more trusted, sustainable and accessible place.
