Google’s Android choice screen now stops at the Swiss border

Switzerland’s Competition Commission on Tuesday opened a preliminary investigation into Google, after the company removed the search engine choice screen from Android device setup in Switzerland while continuing to show it, as EU rules require, across the European Economic Area.

The screen asks anyone setting up a new Android phone to pick a default search engine from a randomized list of rivals. Swiss users no longer see it.

“Recently, Google removed this feature in Switzerland. As a result, the Google search engine is imposed as the default on Swiss users, without a ‘choice screen’ being displayed during the initial set-up,” COMCO said in a statement reported by AFP.

The commission’s secretariat will examine whether the removal amounts to an unlawful restriction of competition under Switzerland’s Cartel Act, and said its findings could extend to default settings on other mobile devices. Defaults decide digital markets, the regulator argued: dropping the screen could hide Google’s rivals at the very moment users pick a search engine, raising barriers to entry, per Euronews.

A preliminary probe is the stage that decides whether a formal case follows. Nothing has been ruled.

“We look forward to cooperating fully with the authority to address their questions,” a Google spokesperson told AFP. The statement did not say why the screen came down.

A concession with a border

The choice screen was never a product decision. It exists because the European Commission fined Google 4.34 billion euros in July 2018 for using Android to cement the dominance of its search engine. The first version, announced for the EEA and UK in August 2019 and appearing on new devices from early 2020, ran on sealed-bid auctions: rival engines bid for the few slots shown alongside Google’s, paying each time a user picked them. Ecosia boycotted it. DuckDuckGo won a slot in every European market and attacked the design anyway, telling TechCrunch in 2020 that “a pay-to-play auction with only 4 slots isn’t right because it means consumers won’t get all the choices they deserve and Google will profit at the expense of the competition.”

In June 2021, “following further feedback from the Commission,” Google scrapped the auction and made participation free, expanding the list to as many as a dozen engines. On November 1, 2021, according to Google’s own eligibility page, the screen arrived in Switzerland, a country where no ruling required it. The Digital Markets Act then hardened the obligation inside the EEA; Google’s March 2024 compliance post promised “additional choice screens” as users set up devices.

Switzerland sits outside the EU and the EEA. The DMA stops at its border, and Swiss law has no equivalent. Euronews reports that a 2023 assessment by the Swiss government’s coordination group on EU digital policy concluded the large gatekeepers would apply EU rules across that border anyway, reasoning that treating the two markets differently would not be worth the cost — the spillover scholars call the Brussels effect.

That assumption now has a counterexample.

Our read: this is the cleanest data point yet for skeptics of that effect. A remedy Google spent seven years negotiating, redesigning under pressure and then voluntarily exporting has been withdrawn from exactly one market, the one where no law compels it. Whatever COMCO eventually concludes about the Cartel Act, the geography already answers a different question: the concession travels precisely as far as enforcement does, and not one canton further.

As of this week, Google’s choice screen page still lists Switzerland among the places the screen applies. Implementation date: November 1, 2021.