I'm sorta glad the EU is taking this hard stance on antitrust, and actually following up on a lot of these violations.
Side-note: As a Dane, so weird seeing Margrethe Vestager so prolific in this, used to seeing her as one of the usual politicians.
Side-note: As a Dane, so weird seeing Margrethe Vestager so prolific in this, used to seeing her as one of the usual politicians.
"The fine represents 4.9% of Qualcomm's turnover in 2017."
"In accordance with the Commission's 2006 Guidelines on fines (see press release and MEMO) the fine has been calculated on the basis of the value of Qualcomm's direct and indirect sales of LTE baseband chipset in the European Economic Area (EEA). The duration of the infringement established in the decision is five years, six months and 23 days."
Qualcomm made 122.5 billion in the last 5 years[2]. Making them pay 1% of that for breaking the rules isn't what I would call "taking this hard stance on antitrust".
[1]: http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-18-421_en.htm [2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/737780/revenue-of-qualco...
(Source: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELE...)
If they can apply it yearly, they can fine 2.2 billion per year, which is over a third of Qualcomm's 5.3 billion per year profit.
Sure it's a simple napkin calculation, but as long as the napkin calculation comes out to "not worth it" that's fine.
Source for numbers: http://markets.businessinsider.com/stock/QCOM/financials
I wondered what the ultimate reason was for Microsoft to bow down and apply the required changes to windows, but I imagine being labeled as a recurent law breaking business might have a lot of side effects.
At a very small scale, I knew engineers that didn’t want to apply for MS jobs because of that. I wonder if individual states or other regulation agency also would change their stance regarding a company once behavior change requested by the EU are ignored on a regular basis.
1. That's their revenue not their net income, which looks to be 20~25% of revenue.
2. Indexing the fines on revenue from the domain/division where improprieties happened seems logical.
2. It seems logical but it isn't. In you're a rich kid that starts selling drugs your fine is going to be based on all the money you have, not just the money you made selling drugs. That makes all the sense in the world given that the fine is supposed to hurt you financially in order to change your behavior.
I guess by hard stance, I more meant any stance at all, instead of simply bowing to threats by multinational corporations. It's very refreshing.
Also, you're quoting revenue it's profit that's important.
PS: If the US choses not to take their own piece of Qualcomm's illegal profit's IMO that's on them.
Shouldn’t the CEO go to jail? That might make them behave themselves, and possibly go some way towards justifying their astronomical salaries.
No. While it's always tempting to bring out the torches and pitchforks and go straight for the emotional response, please try to keep in mind that specifics in law matters because it affects the rights of the regular person far more. Criminal and Civil violations of the law are not the same thing for very good reason, and that's not a matter of white collar vs blue collar or any other color of collar. We want to discourage civil violations, but in general those are things where the situation can be made whole purely through money. There are no victims of non-reversible physical harm. Qualcomm's violation is not the same thing as dumping carcinogens into a water supply or VW's pollution or worker safety violations or cutting corners on life-safety product requirements or whatever. It's not even clearly market damaging to the level of situation's like Intel's actions vis-a-vis AMD. It's a violation and one they should have caught, but at least mildly fuzzier, and the violation is already over not ongoing. A sizable fine, investigations into more, and the threat of larger ones in the future seems a genuinely reasonable response to a situation like this absent continued patterns of bad behavior.
Seriously, we have way too much criminalization of things that should be civil violations already. There are certainly many times that people in power get away with things that should be criminal and we should be trying to bring them into line with what applies to everyone, but there are also a lot of times where people in power get away with things that shouldn't be criminal for everyone. In that case the common feeling of "bringing them down to our level" is backwards, we should instead be working to bring the standards for everyone else up. Both are equalization of advantage, but that doesn't make them an equivalent end result. Prison is not something we should ever be in the habit of reflexively resorting to.
Do you think that perhaps this has to do with the much larger pool of resources put behind criminal prosecution vs civil?
I also disagree that there are no victims. Money and the lack thereof has profound effects on people's lives. People get depressed, get divorced, commit crimes and commit suicide due to the inscrutable flow of capital into and out of their lives. There are victims, somewhere. We just don't know who they are.
I don't think you are wrong, there should be individuals held accountable.
We will nothing, and we will fix nothing by slapping these companies on the wrist and then letting them go back to what they're doing.
It does not seem right to base the fine on the total revenue or profit of the company, which may include many other product lines and businesses.
EDIT: I don't understand, how can anyone be against this? Doesn't every good person wish that all people and companies would behave according to the law? Did you vote for Trump?
It’s a weird and uniquely American thing.
One of the stranger things I’ve found after moving here from Australia (which has a very strong pro-consumer government agency called the ACCC which is non-partisan).
Maybe you didn't mean it that way, but I don't think it's healthy for a democracy to talk about politicians with such a negative undertone.
If there are too many black sheep, it's not the fault of "the politicians", it's the fault of the public for not voting for the alternative or being the alternative.
You say you don't think it's healthy to talk that way, but that's backwards. People talk this way because the democracy isn't healthy.
You're not reading the right colour books.
I did, although Vestager is not as bad as the majority of the parties—I very much hate populistic politics, which politics usually are, except, luckily, for some outliers.
> If there are too many black sheep, it's not the fault of "the politicians", it's the fault of the public for not voting for the alternative or being the alternative.
Well, it is also the fault of the politician themselves for being a so called black sheep. They don't get an out just because they were elected in.
Furthermore, I put my vote where my mouth is, but democracy is not really a suited type of governance when the majority of the population are not qualified to decide on a large majority of the decisions made. People vote with their feelings, as we've seen in the US. Sadly, it's the best we've got still, or I can at least not come up with anything better.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-antitrust-case-against-face...
The main takeaway I got was that they have different views on what is a monopoly and how/when it is bad. From the article:
> The different outcomes hinge in part on different approaches. European regulators are more likely to see a shrinking pool of competitors as inherently bad for both competition and consumers. American regulators are more open to the possibility that it could be natural and benign.
Paying billions of dollars to Apple to include only their baseband chips to monopolize is hardly natural.
It happens all the time. Then again maybe this is changing.
Has the EU cracked down on many non-US companies?
Why would you have qualms?
EU Competition commission has fined a lot more European companies than American companies.
And there is the whole lot of small fine to other companies.
The OP was the one claiming, he has to back with numbers.
[0} Is only fines for cartels, look at the companies
[0] http://ec.europa.eu/competition/cartels/statistics/statistic...
Maybe you should rethink your judgement of "usual politicians".
Never forget that they always, and inevitably, try to balance competing (yet valid) interests: issues where the answer is obvious almost by definition don't get to be "political"[0].
Any time you read about a political debate and think "why are they so stupid? Just..." it's highly likely that your neighbor one door down is muttering the same, only with an opposing answer.
[0]: US is exempt from this rule, because about half of the citizen and politicians have long gone off the deep end.