Google Search decision: https://ec.europa.eu/competition/digital_markets_act/cases/2...
Android decision: https://ec.europa.eu/competition/digital_markets_act/cases/2...
The goal of the regulation is to get the operators to comply, which they usually do after fines (EDIT: and litigations and whining, of course), because the costs of infractions are increased if they don't comply.
The goal should be to incentivise them to comply with the law as a whole, not to keep deliberately breaking different sections of the law to make profit above the level of fines
That's why people want the level of the fines to go up, to disincentivise the more broad lawbreaking
The correct solution to this is to have fines scaled to the value of a company and an exponential doubling of fines for every re-offence that falls under the same category of crime with a cooling off period after a few years.
The first fine should sting and the second should be damaging to a company and the third should be crippling.
The EU has been fining Google for years to no avail.
Me after a quick research:
2017: €2.42 billion fine for favoring its own comparison shopping service.
Results: huge changes to Google's shopping service.
2018: €4 billion fine over Android-related practices.
Results: Google Play separately from Google Search and Chrome, and manufacturers gained more flexibility over preinstalled apps.
I've never received a dollar from the EU as a victim. If the fines are moderate and big co keeps paying that's steady revenue for the EU institutions.
These companies do, in fact, change behaviour in response to such actions; they may hire lawyers to find and exploit as many loopholes as they can, but they do ultimately comply. Even X ultimately complied in response to Brazil, and the EU is a much more important market for Google than Brazil ever was for X.
(Why would you expect to get dollars from an EU settlement?)
It is almost entirely unsurprising that the EU tech industry is such a disaster area when people say things like this as if they are a good thing.
As is the “letting their companies do whatever they want everywhere (as they currently do) is the better "strategy"” when this wasn’t said or even implied anywhere.
It is amazing how HN has descended into arguing against people making points by saying they are someone else and saying something completely different.
How long have you been working inside the behemoth? Can you tell us more about the inner workings, where the money goes, how much, etc?
You don't have to out do US in-regards of waste of public money. It's not a competition either party wants to win.
There's this standard assumption that HN users are well educated.
Budgets don't work like that. It's not like the US federal government collects taxes and then deposits bags of gold coins on people's doorsteps.
Taxes, fines, etc are all collected and then they mostly go to a general, undifferentiated budget which is then divided by the various ministries (departments, whatever).
So yes, if you're a EU citizen you did get the money back. As roads, hospitals, research funding, etc.
EU competition law is not framed around valuing Europeans more than others, it is framed around protecting competition and market functioning inside the EU.
No need to moralize it and pretend anyone is using this "value" European humans more than other humans.
The reasoning is very simple just "carry a big stick", multinational companies need to fear the fines to want compliance.
These 890M are a first warning. Now Google has some time to react, but if they don't implement what is required of them, another, higher, fine will be issued.
20% of global revenue is not just cost of doing business, to any business.
...but this is a private(ish) business, it doesn't have a printer in the back yard, a billion is a lot no matter how you look at it, especially if they're now facing a tough choice between cannibalizing their results with AI summaries or having AI competitors eating their lunch.
[0]: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/meta-says-it-s-staring-...
Corporations reliably break the law, the EU reliably enforces it.
I'm actually happy that this is the path the EU went, as there's a financial incentive to keep laws which benefit consumers.
https://www.irishexaminer.com/business/companies/arid-417489...
€4.536bn on €86.6bn, or about 5% (which is one third of the amount Ireland promised in an international treaty they would charge ...)
Don't blame Google for pushing boundaries. That's what people (and corpos) do in any competitive activity. Do blame our politicians for being incompetent and ill-meaning.
It’s all sort of intertwined now.
Reading about it, both points seem valid to me.
1 - restore interop with noscript/basic HTML browsers, stop favoring your 'whatwg cartel' web engine.
2 - gmail: restore interop with self-hosted SMTP servers without DNS (filtering on the IPv[46] literal from email address, this is stronger than SPF).
And there is probably more to add.
"Once you pay the Danegeld, you'll never get rid of the Dane."
There's no evidence of double tapping the school.
That requires live surveillance. Come back when you have video of that.
One of the groups took over a church where refugees were hiding and burnt them alive in the building.
Also, here in the U.S., we’ve managed to screw up so badly on data privacy and basic rights that the EU has been systematically replacing their entire tech stack with sovereign components.
A fundamental rule for capitalism to work well long term is that oligopoly and similar should not exist and must be rained in or outright split up if they exist. If that rule isn't followed capitalism turns from a tool which can support democracy to one which will sooner or later tear it apart. It's basically the economic version of the number one rule of democracy: "never concentrate too much power into two few people".
This also isn't just some theoretical thing, if you look through history having too much money/power in to few entities(1) always sooner or later lead to suffering of people, injustice and collapse.
Lastly it's worth noting that historically companies often do challenge such fines and managed to cut them down by quite a bit, that is iff they actually started being compliant by then. Sadly the end result is often still that, the economically benefit of huge companies systematic breaking the law, outweighs their penalties. I mean they often do calculate the most likely level of penalties into their cost-benefit analysis.
(1): Through it should be noted that this is about effective power, not theoretic power. It isn't rare through history to have people which theoretically are autocrats with absolute power, but practically the power is spread quite widely and in turn them having a brain fart, mental decline, megalomaniac, irrational hate against some groups of people etc. didn't lead directly to atrocities being committed.
There is Wikipedia article about this topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyber_Resilience_Act
No big deal for corporations though. Buddy’s workplace hired new compliance department for this topic with 30 persons. That’s competition european way.
I think losing the companies that don't have security as a main priority isn't too bad. I assume that the EU will create import restrictions if there is a meaningful shift to avoid EU rules.
See also, the GDPR killing startups that attempt to invade our privacy and exploit personal data without permission.