MELBOURNE, Austalia (AP) — Google has agreed to pay a 55 million Australian dollar ($36 million) fine for signing anticompetitive deals with Australia’s two largest telcos that banned the installation of competing search engines on some smartphones, the U.S. tech giant and Australia’s competition watchdog said.

The consumer watchdog found it had hurt competition by paying the country's two largest telcos to pre-install its search application on Android phones.

The Australian government announced Monday that Google must pay after having admitted to making monopolistic preinstallation deals with Android manufacturers.