Fair Trade Commission Raises Fine on Google for 'OS Gapjil' to 224.9 Billion KRW

[Image source=Yonhap News]

[Asia Economy Reporter Lee Seon-ae] The Fair Trade Commission (FTC) has increased the fine imposed on Google for coercing smartphone manufacturers to pre-install its own operating system (OS), Android, by 17.5 billion KRW.

According to the FTC on the 15th, the commission decided to impose a fine of 224.93 billion KRW in the plenary meeting resolution sent to Google at the end of last year.

This amount is approximately 17.5 billion KRW higher than the provisional fine of 207.4 billion KRW announced when the FTC disclosed its sanction decision against Google in September last year.

This increase is due to the FTC extending the period of Google's legal violations, which serves as the basis for calculating the fine.

At the time of the provisional announcement, the FTC based the fine calculation only on Google's related sales from January 2011, when data was secured, to April of last year. Later, the FTC considered the end date of the legal violation period as the last plenary meeting review date, September 10 of last year, and recalculated the fine accordingly.

According to data received from Google by the FTC, during the violation period, Google generated a total revenue of 7,119,696,605 USD (approximately 8.5258 trillion KRW) in South Korea through its app market, Play Store.

Of this, revenue earned solely from app intermediary commissions was identified as 6,822,403,284 USD (approximately 8.1698 trillion KRW).

Advertising income was recorded at 292,803,321 USD (approximately 350.6 billion KRW), and app developer registration fees amounted to 4.49 million USD (approximately 5.38 billion KRW).

While the FTC also addressed unfair practices in the smart mobile OS market beyond the app market, it excluded this from the fine imposition considering that Google licenses Android for free.

The FTC recognized that Google Headquarters, Google Korea, and Google Asia are all responsible for paying the fine, but due to practical difficulties in precisely identifying the entity to which the related sales belong, the three companies were ordered to jointly pay the fine.

Google has filed a lawsuit last month against the FTC, seeking cancellation of the corrective order and fine imposition, disputing the FTC’s sanctions.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.