Hacker News Reader

Comment by heracles | Hacker News Reader

In most (all?) other fields of law you are expected to abide by the rules as they are stated, or risk being punished by the legislative powers. That's not a vendetta, that's law as it is most commonly practiced.

I don't see why EU should "work with google" to make them follow regulations (EDIT: beyond the threat of punishment).

View on HN

The problem is that antitrust laws like these are very selectively enforced. Selection and prosecution of these cases is hence inherently political as these are non-standardized arguments or verdicts.

Not nearly as selective as the cases that end up on Hacker News, i.e only cases involving large US corporations.

The commission and national (European) regulators are investigating ~150 cases every year, most of which none of us will ever have heard of.

http://ec.europa.eu/competition/ecn/statistics.html#2

The ones I know about have all been the result of a complaint made by competitors. I would be surprised if the regulator could selectively reject such complaints without good reason.

Why selectively? It's basically the same principle as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp_v_Commission

Who else do you think they should pursue instead?

That is a fair point, but isn't it built into this particular field?

We can prosecute equally for jaywalking, but anti-competitive behavior gets worse the bigger the offender is and/or the worse offense they commit. So in that way it makes sense to prosecute "top-down", that is go after the biggest ones first.

That's at least what I prefer as an EU member state citizen and consumer.

Not only does it get worse the bigger the offender is; in law, generally there are specific actions that you're not allowed to take iff you're dominant in the market.

> The problem is that antitrust laws like these are very selectively enforced. Selection and prosecution of these cases is hence inherently political as these are non-standardized arguments or verdicts.

Following that logic, the same applies to law in general. Should we therefore abolish law?

This is, of course, the only logical conclusion

That only means that Google did (or should have done) a risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis on getting fined by the EU on this topic.

I'm guessing that they did, and probably came to the conclusion that they'll make more money than the fine that gets imposed. I wonder if they were right?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com