Google share price: US judge dismisses case over Android app restrictions

Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) has won a dismissal of a US lawsuit alleging that it harmed smartphone customers by using the dominant position of its Android mobile operating system to promote its search engine and apps. Consumers claimed that the company required smartphone makers such as Samsung Electronics Co to favour Google mobile apps on Android-based phones and restrict rival products such as Microsoft Corp’s search engine Bing. According to the plaintiffs, this illegally pushed handset prices higher because rivals could not compete for the “prime screen real estate” enjoyed by Google’s apps.

On Friday US District Judge Beth Labson Freeman in San Jose, California, decided that the plaintiffs failed to demonstrate that higher prices stemmed from Google having illegally forced restrictive contracts on the handset makers.
“Their alleged injuries – supracompetitive prices and threatened loss of innovation and consumer choice – are not the necessary means by which defendant is allegedly accomplishing its anticompetitive ends,” Freeman wrote, as quoted by Reuters. The judge gave the plaintiffs three weeks to amend their claims.

Freeman’s decision came on the same day that Russia’s competition watchdog opened an investigation into Google over its mobile platform. The investigation followed a complaint from the country’s largest online search engine provider Yandex that the US company was restricting competing apps on Android.
In today’s trading, Google shares were down 1.2 percent at $535.72, as of 15:16 UTC. The company’s stock has risen 1.1 percent since the start of the year, and its market capitalisation currently stands at $363.7 billion.
According to CNNMoney, the 40 analysts offering 12-month price forecasts for Google have a median target of $625.00, with a high estimate of $700.00 and a low estimate of $530.00. The current consensus among 46 polled investment analysts is to purchase equity in the company.
As of 16:08 GMT, Monday, 23 February, Google share price is $535.67.

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