Switzerland’s Competition Commission opened a preliminary investigation into Google on Tuesday, after the search engine selection prompt that Android owners elsewhere in Europe still meet when they switch on a new handset quietly stopped appearing on Swiss phones.
The feature, known as the Choice Screen, asks users which search engine they want as their default during the initial set-up of a new device. COMCO says Google recently removed it in Switzerland while leaving it running in the European Economic Area.
The practical consequence is that Swiss buyers now get Google Search as their default without being asked.
“This new practice by Google could affect the ability of search engine providers and, more broadly, other digital service providers to compete,” the authority said in a statement.
It added that the change “creates an unequal treatment between Swiss users and those in the European Economic Area”.
Google confirmed it was aware of the case. “We look forward to cooperating fully with the authority to address their questions,” a spokesperson said.
The company has not published a rationale for withdrawing the screen in Switzerland.
The instrument being used here is worth being precise about. A preliminary investigation, the Vorabklärung, is the lightest tool the Swiss competition secretariat has.
It carries no charge, no deadline, and no presumption of wrongdoing. Its only job is to establish whether there are indications of an unlawful restriction of competition under the Cartel Act.
If there are, a full investigation can follow, and that is the stage at which remedies and fines become possible.
What makes the case interesting is the reasoning behind it. Default settings, COMCO argues, play a decisive role in digital markets, and the choice screen exists precisely to soften the foreclosure effect that defaults produce.
Remove it, and rival engines lose visibility at the single moment a user is most likely to reconsider. That, in the regulator’s framing, raises the barrier to entry.
In its statement the commission put it less gently. Removing the feature, it said, “could limit the visibility of search engines competing with Google during device set-up, thereby raising barriers to market entry”.
The choice screen, on that reading, was never a courtesy extended to users. It was a corrective applied to a market.
The size of the prize is not in dispute. Google holds roughly 82% of Swiss search, according to web analytics firm Statcounter, a share that leaves the choice screen looking less like a meaningful marketplace and more like a formality.
Rivals do move when the conditions shift, though. DuckDuckGo installs jumped 18% after Google reshaped its results page around AI summaries, which suggests the appetite for an alternative is there when users are given a reason to look for one.
The choice screen is a European artefact, and that is the heart of the matter. It exists because Brussels made it exist, first through the Android abuse case whose €4.1bn fine Google exhausted its appeals against, and more recently through the obligations gatekeepers carry under the Digital Markets Act.
Switzerland sits outside both regimes. It is not in the EEA, the DMA does not reach it, and its regulator is left proving abuse of dominance the hard way.
The gap is not small. In the EU, the Commission is preparing to force Google to open Android to rival AI assistants, and has already set out what search data Google must share with competing engines.
Switzerland has none of that machinery. What it has is a cartel law, a dominant firm, and a feature that was there in June and is not there now.
COMCO also noted that whatever it finds could bear on how default settings are assessed on other mobile devices, a sentence that lands somewhere in the vicinity of Cupertino. No timetable for the preliminary investigation has been set.
Google is not accused of anything yet, and a preliminary investigation can close with nothing. It has, though, been asked a question it has so far declined to answer. Why Switzerland, and why now.
