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Comment by mcv | Hacker News Reader

If people's GMail and Android phones stop working, they may get angry at the French government, but outside France a lot of people would also want to move away from Google services like GMail, Android, etc, because Google would show your access to them can't be trusted. Google would lose a lot more users than just France.

Yes, it would cause chaos in France, but it would also really hurt Google.

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If you've paid attention to Facebook's most recent quarterly, you'll realize that people don't really care about the things they claim to care about. Facebook's recent privacy breaches haven't really affected their bottom line. Likewise, a couple days of Google flexing it's power over France may not really cause a widespread exodus.

if Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft formed a union of sorts it would be hard to move away from

Google has flexed its power and punished big companies for not playing nice in the past

http://edition.cnn.com/2006/BUSINESS/02/07/google/

This particular instance seems to be for gaming search results - which google punishes across the board.

it was, and it sent a strong message to other big companies that Google doesn't care who you are. This is Google's playground and if you want to stay in the search index then you play by Google's rules.

First few days. Then some solutions will appear, and for some weeks - and in some cases even months an industry of decoupling will grow so that somebody'll turn green of envy. Then slowly people will start forgetting that at a time there were some G, A, F, A, M...

maybe for some cases, but then there are the government and industry bodies that have exabytes of data stored. if Amazon wont provide access to snowmobile to you it becomes problematic

Well, if it gets really inconvenient, I'd assume the industry will be invited to help with them, but I don't see how France or Europe position is weaker. You generally don't fight with your customers, and there are good reasons for that.

For a token fine I would agree. If the scale of the fines where to increase from a level that can be written off as the cost of doing business to something more damaging, I think that could change things. Particularly as we are seeing a rise in nationalist political movements around the world.

The thing about governments is that they can manifest their power in the form of people with guns showing up in places and forcing people to comply with them.

If Amazon refuses to give back someone's data; if they are a government entity they show up to the Datacenter and put a gun to someones head. If they are a private entity, the sue Amazon, win, and then get a court order which they can have the police enforce.

Maybe, but if the French government where to send the army into an American companies datacenter, would America stand by? Particularly if tech lobbyists had been contributing heavily to political campaign donations?

France and the US has a military alliance. I think choosing side between Amazon and the french army would be easy decision in fawor of the side with the guns.

If the value of Amazon in France is their customer list, then the government always will have more "customers" enlisted.

The power of FANG is always one government decision away from being relativly zero to today. The opposit is hardly true except in really small or unstable states.

In places like EU, this may be illegal cartel behaviour.

In Australia, the Big Four banks applied to the consumer watchdog for permission to team together and negotiate as a block - form a cartel - to Apple over Apple Pay and NFC access. The banks were denied, and just last month the biggest bank added Apple Pay support (after a number of the 'smaller' ones added it).

And what would they do? Force them to do business in their country? By presumably what means?

The EU could conceivably force them to choose to do business in all or none of the countries in the EU.

That would be a big gamble for each member country to make.

- Detaining any executives of the company found within borders or in regions where extradition is possible.

- Seizing all company assets, offices, source code, etc.

- Breaking the company up and promoting in-borders employees into management positions, etc.

Its not like Corporations can pay someone else, say US or China, to protect their assets and people. US totally wont fk EUs shit up for few hundreds of billions. No sir, countries can seize and kidnap without consequences, because muh sovereignty.

> No sir, countries can seize and kidnap without consequences, because muh sovereignty.

The Jamal Khashoggi tragedy is a very recent example that this has been the sentiment for some time.

All of those things and worse. Remember these nations have vast armies, trillions of dollars of power, bombs, tanks and nuclear weapons, and can seize assets and restrict internet access easily.

France has vast armies and trillions of dollars? lol

On the one hand I think foreign countries griefing American businesses with arbitrary fines is lame. Perhaps they should start their own tech industries instead of leeching off ours. On the other hand, the notion of corporations having enough leverage to dominate sovereign countries - that's scary as hell. There has to be some kind of happy medium here.

And... now you understand how China feels about American tariffs?

If Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft all simultaneously stopped doing business in the EU, their competitors would have probably the biggest business opportunity in all of history.

Every time I hear comments of this sort, I immediately think of the French Revolution.

Dynasty of emperors so detached from reality that the nation is willing to go to a civil war just to get rid of them?

God bless FANG realise that their power over people is only there because they are providing free services that are for still useful.

The moment those companies decide to play politics we, as a society, have already invented numerous methods of getting rid of the abusers of power.

And let’s be honest: neither of those companies are making such a huge difference that we would ceise existing as a society if they perished. We would take a hit, but we would still function.

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