Google hit with €1.5B fine from EU over advertising
bbc.com
bbc.com
A third-party site who wants to show ads in their own search results could partner with Google to include AdSense ads in their own results. The Google contract originally required exclusivity, and then was changed to require Google ads to be more prominent.
In the context of the market for third-party sites running search ads, the $1.5 billion fine seems extremely high.
On the one hand, it’s not immediately obvious to take a conglomorate’s total worldwide revenue into account to value a fine for a specific market, versus considering only the revenue for that market.
However in this case Google is squeezing out companies like Yahoo and Bing from increasing their own ad inventory in the few ways that are available to them, aside from increasing their own organic search traffic. So this is where the anti-competitive behavior comes in, and perhaps why the fine is so massive.
I can’t imagine keyword search on third-party sites is responsible for a significant share of overall AdSense revenue, I wonder if it’s even a single digit percentage of their overall ad inventory?
If you steal 1.000,00€ from a bank, they don't fine you 1€. No. They send you to jail for years.
You'd rob a bank and then drop by the police station to drop off their cut just to avoid the hassle of "getting investigated" later.
So obviously the punishment has to be worse than the value of doing it. But not 1:1 either, if you know you'll only catch 50% of robbers, then the fine would have to be something like ${amountStolen}*3 so that the equation makes the Expected return of robbery sharply negative. I.e. if you expect to get caught 50% of the time, and only had to return the money you stole when caught... then robbery would be very profitable. If you had to pay twice what you stole, then the Expected return is actually a wash, and wouldn't necessarily deter potential robbers. However if you have to pay a fine of 3x what you stole and you think you'll get caught 50% of the time then it's a money-losing venture.
This is all ignoring jail time, of course, because no one can send Google to jail... so from the corporations point of view it just comes down to money.
Keeping the taxes as "fines" ensures they can give EU companies favorable treatment. It's the definition of corrupt: "a willingness to act dishonestly in return for money"
$1.5B is far below the amount of revenue Google got from advertising since 2006. I'm not sure what you mean by this.
As an aside, I've got some bad news about how Socrates' method worked out for him.
> I mean we could
The post I was replying to talked about “closing” a corporation for a rule violation. Closing a company is akin to “killing” it, not “punishing” it. I think the analogy stands.
EDIT: And now I'm getting down-voted too. Would you nay-sayers care to chime in with more than an e-frown?
Other countries in the EU do this as well, even in personal matters. For instance, a speeding ticket is based off a percentage of your annual income. Why? Because if you make $200k a year, a $50 fine isn't a big deal, at all, but if you barely scrape by, $50 could break your budget for the month.
That makes no sense. If you're stealing $50 then a $150 fine is a deterrent even if you're a billionaire, because the expected value if you're caught is -$100, which has nothing at all to do with how much money you have.
And if that caused the billionaire to not care, that's great. If I got $150 every time someone stole $50 from me and that didn't deter them, I'd start researching how to get them to steal more money from me because it's so profitable to me. If they're willing to pay that much more than something costs, at that point you're just selling it to them and deterrence is not desired because the transaction is apparently net positive to both parties.
Moreover, it seems that you're suggesting that someone with $0 income and $0 assets then should have a <=$50 fine because it's all they can afford? That's the thing that really wouldn't serve as a deterrent, in a problematic, net negative consequences sort of way.
Google does not just steal money which we get back with a fine and thats it.
It drives competitors out of the market and that causes damage to the economy and is against the interests of the population where they do business.
They should make the Managers personally liable.
If you think about it 1.5 Billions is laughable for a company like Google, its only money which they have plenty from. Nothing will change.
> It drives competitors out of the market and that causes damage to the economy and is against the interests of the population where they do business.
That's the same thing. The harm can be measured in money and a proportional fine imposed. That is no argument for the fine to be proportional to total revenue rather than having any relationship to the harm itself.
> They should make the Managers personally liable.
At which point the "manager" is compensated by the company or its liability insurance for whatever retribution the government takes on them as an individual, and it's still the company paying regardless.
> If you think about it 1.5 Billions is laughable for a company like Google, its only money which they have plenty from. Nothing will change.
I don't know about that. In the US the tech companies used to mostly ignore Washington, until it stopped ignoring them. Now they're some of the biggest spenders on lobbying.
That would take a different form in Europe because the laws are different, but if you're not expecting this to lead to some variant of "money buys influence" you're likely in for a surprise. So it will likely change that at least.
Which is another reason proportionality is important. If preventing a $1M fine is worth spending $1M on lobbying then preventing a series of multi-billion dollar fines is worth...
Just because they have a lot of money doesn't mean they are okay with losing a bunch. As long as the fine amount, adjusting for the probability of the fine, is higher than benefit Google attains by breaking the law it will act as a deterrence.
This is not true if you see $50 and $150 dollars as basically the same amount when compared to your overall wealth. Would you care about a 2 cent fine for overrunning you time on a 1 cent parking space?
At which point you can be happy that the rich person is voluntarily paying the 3 cent fine instead of the 1 cent parking fee.
If you made it a $1000 fine vs. a 1 cent parking fee then they would pay the parking fee, but how is that actually better? You convinced them to spend more of their time keeping track of how long they had before having to put money in the meter and as a result you ended up with less money. Net loss to everyone.
Meanwhile now you're creating a bunch of perverse incentives for rich people to register their cars in someone else's name or waste thousands of man hours on both sides to contest an ordinary parking fine, and creating a bunch of perverse incentives for governments to pass vague, misleading, counterintuitive or impossible to comply with laws so they can jump out of the bushes and impose massive fines on anyone who walks by with money in their pocket.
No, because the issue here is not like a fee, it's about breaking the law and how you should be punished for it in order for it to deter you. A more apt comparison would be "you can be happy that the a rich person is voluntarily paying 500$ to park on top of a crosswalk. In this case you want to deter the person from doing something that harms others, not just to make them pay for it, which in this case means either a fine indexed to income or jail time, so it hurts you even if you are a billionaire.
Cite?
Related links:
https://rady.ucsd.edu/faculty/directory/gneezy/pub/docs/fine...
NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/books/chapters/freakonomi...
NPR: https://www.npr.org/2008/03/31/89233955/dan-ariely-takes-on-...
Or if the fine would be lower for some other company with less money, then why are you willing to let that other company pay less to do it than it costs you to let them do it?
Taxes are something else entirely. Income taxes aren't intended to put a price on working so that people won't do it unless it's worth the cost, they're intended to raise government revenue.
Suppose there are fines for both texting while driving and blocking traffic. Now someone is driving in a place where they can't stop without blocking traffic, when they think of a piece of information that they need someone else to know as an urgent matter of life and death.
If they don't send the information right away their kid is going to die. No fine is going to deter them from that. To account for the probability of getting caught, the deterrence-level penalty would have to be something like death for you and your whole family.
I assume nobody is going suggest that the penalty for blocking traffic should be that the government will snuff out your bloodline. Because that's disproportionate, because the fine is supposed to be a price -- and in that case it's one worth paying, because the alternative is worse, so that's what we should want to happen. It's not a problem that we failed to deter someone from blocking traffic for a minute in order to save their child. "Fixing" things so that we actually deter them from that (and then their child dies) is not an improvement.
And the same is true for less drastic events that are still worth more than the cost of blocking traffic for a minute. Which is why a fine is a price, proportional to the harm.
You're missing the forest for the trees.
Then he should have set the late fee to as much as the amount he wanted to go home earlier. Which would still be the same amount for every parent regardless of how much money they had, because which parent is late has nothing to do with how much he values not being able to go home on time.
How about instead of a fine you give the kids to CPS. You go home on time, the late parents never come back, or if they do they're never late again, and you win.
I guess the point is that monetary punishments don't seem to work when companies can consider it as 'cost of doing business.' If we start taking away the company's hypothetical metaphorical children when they're late to pick them up then they have a reason to listen.
Except that you do ultimately get the $1000, because you have a valid contract specifying that, and the premise is that some people are willing to pay it. Which is great -- you get paid $1000/hour to stay an extra hour. Well worth it. (And if not, specify the amount that makes it worth it.)
> How about instead of a fine you give the kids to CPS. You go home on time, the late parents never come back, or if they do they're never late again, and you win.
At which point you still receive no money but have to spend time arguing with them anyway when they show up at your house with an army of lawyers (or a machete) because you left their kids with CPS. And then you lose all your business because no one will trust their kids to someone who would leave them with CPS.
> I guess the point is that monetary punishments don't seem to work when companies can consider it as 'cost of doing business.' If we start taking away the company's hypothetical metaphorical children when they're late to pick them up then they have a reason to listen.
But we don't need them to listen as long as they're paying. Just take their money. It's worth more than their compliance, by definition, because the amount is explicitly chosen that way.
This is basically the same argument as for progressive taxation.
The issue is that stopping the behavior is committing to a bad abstraction.
Cars can kill people even below the speed limit. If you drive faster, the probability goes up. That is an externality, because you put others in danger in addition to yourself, regardless of which speed it is. In principle what you ought to do is price the externality. You create some amount of risk by driving a mile at 50MPH, so you're charged a proportional amount for that. The risk created by driving at 70MPH is more, so the charge should be higher, proportional to the higher risk.
But that would require monitoring the speed that every car drives every mile and billing for it. Until recently that wasn't even plausible and even now it would be a huge privacy invasion. So instead we settle on choosing some speed, ignoring the cost of anyone driving slower than that even if its true cost is non-zero, and whacking anyone who drives faster with a disproportionate fine to compensate for most instances going undetected.
Committing to deterring all speeding at any cost is completely ignoring why we're doing this to begin with. We don't need to eliminate all risk -- that would imply eliminating all cars and other vehicles and in practice isn't possible even then.
What we need is to throttle the risk so that it remains at a manageable level. Which is exactly what pricing it does. That's true whether you're doing meticulous risk accounting or using blunt stochastic methods like speeding fines.
And when you price something, rich people buy more of it because they have more money. If the price you've assigned to the risk is actually proportional to the cost being imposed by taking it, you really don't need to stop them. Just let them pay for the risk in money. Then use the money to pay for safety improvements or compensate victims or whatever you like -- if the amount they're paying is properly proportional to the risk then you come out better off this way than by actually deterring them.
> This is basically the same argument as for progressive taxation.
The argument for progressive taxation is that we're not trying to discourage behavior and the rich are better able to pay, so charging them more will have less detrimental effect because it will have a lower impact on their consumption. It's more about taxing the poor less than taxing the rich more.
So don't try to stop rich people from driving drunk and killing people, for instance? Just let them do it and then pay off the victims and the victims' families?
Is that really what you're suggesting?
Somehow I suspect you'd reconsider if someone you cared about was killed in a DUI accident. No amount of money can bring them back.
"You can't bring them back" isn't any less true for someone who kills someone driving 65MPH in a 55MPH zone -- or 55MPH in a 55MPH zone. The only difference is the probability, which is a difference in quantity rather than kind.
> No amount of money can bring them back.
Neither can it bring back the person hit by a bus because the government didn't have that money to spend fixing a bad intersection. Should we really let two families lose loved ones to that intersection when they could be saved with the money that not deterring a risk taker generates, even if that risk ultimately kills one person? What about the family who lost someone but the compensation allowed the survivors to live somewhere safer or afford better medical treatment and that saved someone else?
What you really want to be arguing is that we should never be trading money for lives. Everyone viscerally feels kind of that way. But that doesn't work. There is always a marginal safety improvement that would save additional lives in exchange for additional money. Any time you choose a smaller number of lives over a larger amount of money, what you're really doing is choosing a smaller number of lives over a larger number of lives.
They sent notices recently about a transfer of data custodianship to GSuite customers.
https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-google-margrethe-vest...
These fines are big, but as a percentage of the tech industry revenue, they're still under 0.1 percent
Single digit percent of Google's overall ad inventory would be $1bn-$10bn per annum, at current scale. Google's ad business is big. Over 10 years...
One of the first "tricks" you learn on adowrds is to turn off (it's hard to find) "search partners," or at least split it off and quarter your bids. It's on by default and'll take up a surprising amount of your budget, using default settings.
I wouldn't be surprised if it ads up to a meaningful share of the "search ads" market.
I don't understand how that is illegal.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/27/google-fined-e2-42bn-for-e...
"Evidence shows that even the most highly ranked rival service appears on average only on page four of Google’s search results, and others appear even further down. Google’s own comparison shopping service is not subject to Google’s generic search algorithms, including such demotions."
Google is Walmart, offering all kinds of products. Carrying Kellog’s cereals (and many others).
Recently it started producing its own brand, Cerealify. Once it started producing its own brand, it’s the only brand you can now buy at Walmart. It’s also the only brand featured in marketing materials (catalogs, flyers, posters). Kelloggs, and other brands, can only be found in a warehouse 5 miles away.
How’s that for competition?
I understand the desire of playing Devil's Advocate here, but it's difficult to stomach. Google has been such a force for positive change globally that it's hard to see the EU as the good guys in this case.
Google is like yellow page, not Walmart.
Walmart is a store, and sells things. Best Buy is also a store, and sells many of the same things Walmart sells. They are competitors in the market for selling electronics. Competition between them is good, and so they aren't required to advertise each others' stores.
Google is a search engine. Bing and Yahoo Search are also search engines. They crawl and search the same websites. Competition between them is good, and so they aren't required to advertise each other's search engines.
Google Mail is not a search engine. Google News is not a search engine. YouTube is not a search engine. Google Play is not a search engine. These are all different products from Google Search. Thus, Google giving preferential treatment to these products in its market-dominant search engine would be a textbook example of an antitrust violation: using a dominant market position in one market to interfere in the another market. (It depends on the jurisdiction's specific antitrust laws, but it may not matter where the competitors' products show up in the search results if Google is giving preferential treatment to its own competing products in searches for those products or the search terms that would list those products.)
It's not hard to see these line of fines against Google for what they are: Money-grabbing attacks. With no knowledge on the matter, as an external observer, I wish this doesn't lead Google to de-prioritize its offerings in Europe.
I'm not sure what reasoning you're using, but it appears you aren't grasping the complexity of the argument.
For starters, Google search placement is a fundamental part of the search product, and is a wholly different product from Google Ads (which don't show up alongside search results). Search results and display ads aren't just different products--they're different markets (for example, print ads and tv ads are also advertising but are wholly separate forms of advertising from each other and from display ads and from search placement). So paying for placement in search results isn't an antitrust issue.
On the other hand, if buying search placement was contingent on also buying Google Ads, that would be a textbook example of antitrust abuse because Google's dominance in the search engine market is being used to leverage and interfere with the display ads market.
It's interesting to see how many people are shocked abuse of dominant market position remedies. I think enforcement has been so lax that many people casually assume anti-competitive behavior is the de-facto norm.
If you want to make a general argument about Search placement that is conditioned on plainly wrong assumptions (Google _never_ prioritizes organic search results based on buying Google Ads) then, sure, go right ahead.
If you're a libertarian, you would think that's fine, but in a libertarian world one company would have 97% of the market, and if you wanted to use their electricity, you would be forced to buy your food from them.
You couldn't just use Google Search and accept ads in those search results a cost of use. This sounds rather like abuse of a dominant position in one area to squash competitors in another.
Can I get a link or a quote to support that? If that is the case then yes, it crosses a line but I didn't see any in the linked article to support that view.
Edit: I reread the article and I think you are wrong. It specifically says on search pages. From the article
>In 2006, Google started to include "exclusivity clauses" in contracts which stopped publishers from placing ads from Google rivals such as Microsoft and Yahoo on search pages, the Commission said.
>From 2009, Google started replacing the exclusivity clauses with "premium placement" clauses, which meant publishers had to keep the most profitable space on their search results pages for Google's adverts and they had to request a minimum number of Google adverts.
Antitrust law, despite the name, isn't limited to abuses of monopoly power. It includes the use of dominant market positions in one market to reduce competition in another.
Product A: dominant search product
Product B: non-dominant advertising product.
If you want to use product A, you need to also use product B. That alone is sufficient to create an antitrust violation. It's almost literally the textbook example of an antitrust violation.
But Google didn't stop there--they required exclusivity for product B for several years, and even after that ended they still required premium placement. Either way, they just compounded the severity of the antitrust violation.
Product B is display ads, which are displayed on other (almost always non-Google) websites. No searching involved...
I don't see how they're even remotely the same product. They're similar in the sense that their forms of advertising, but they're very different forms of advertising. Search placement is intentional advertising (in the sense of targeting prospective customer's "intent" to use/buy) while display ads are awareness advertising. The proof is in the very different rates: search engine placement terms can cost several dollars per search. That same amount could buy hundreds or even millions of display impressions.
Do we want to subsidize it? Or just let it die as the free market works?
So, do we want to subsidize it? No, because it's a private product offered for profit.
Should we let it die? Sure. Google's not the best search engine anymore, just the biggest. If it has to face some competition, they'll start improving the product again, which benefits everyone. And if it doesn't improve the product, it deserves to die.
Its current embodiment is only 10 years old so they are at the stage where they are required to make a point. If its too vague, which would fit your observation, challenge it and see what the venues for appeal or courts are in that supernational government.
Sounds uncompetitive to me.
> Starting in 2006, Google included exclusivity clauses in its contracts. This meant that publishers were prohibited from placing any search adverts from competitors on their search results pages. The decision concerns publishers whose agreements with Google required such exclusivity for all their websites.
Even if the search result and some ads were provided by Google, requiring exclusivity for search adverts was too much.
Which completely ignores why ad networks have those restrictions.
At one point it was common for crummy web pages to sign up for every ad network. All of them. Because every one you signed up for was more money. Then the whole side of the page would be ads from different networks.
The obvious problem is that the advertiser is paying the website for eyeballs, but nobody is ever going to look at all of those ads. It's hard enough to get anyone to look at your ad box when it's the only one on the page. So you're paying for eyeballs and then not getting them. It was like buying a TV ad spot and discovering that the TV network had put it in the middle of an uninterrupted two hour block of just other ads. No surprise that the ad networks then required sites to stop doing that.
Instead, they consciously choose themselves to be a monopoly.
Exclusivity contracts give way too much power to Google at the expense of everyone else, if we could simply leave it to Google to decide which websites they want to place advertisements on.
It's like having a retail electronics store placing bad products from company B next to good products from company A. We don't really let A bully the store into exclusivity either, if A doesn't want to be associated with the store they can simply end their contract.
Rather, they are specifically locking everyone on their platform.
I do not completely understand your "de facto" vs "de jure" distinction. Unless of course you don't see any other ways of dealing with your clients but a binary yes/no.
Even trying to price just based on how many other ad networks there are is problematic. For each additional ad network the value of each ad goes down. Even adding a second one may cut the value more than in half compared to exclusivity, because if the user sees the other network's ads first and they don't appear relevant they may not even look at yours, and a user who sees a larger number of ads may not look closely at any of them.
If the price offered for any non-exclusive placement is more of a reduction over the price offered for exclusivity than the amount gained from the other ad network(s), how is that any different in practice than requiring exclusivity?
Is it?
It seems pretty simple to audit your 10,000 largest ad-spend domains and check to see if they're actually just ad fraud. You'd need maybe 300 person-hours to do so, at an overhead-in cost of, let's high-ball it, 100$/hr, which puts you at a cost of $30,000.
If you mean the process is impossible to automate, then don't try to automate it. You can catch 99% of fraud with very low-effort manual review in most industries. That Google doesn't do it doesn't speak to the inability to get it done. It speaks to their unwillingness.
In short: exclusivity is there to choke out other ad networks.
>If the price offered for any non-exclusive placement is more of a reduction over the price offered for exclusivity than the amount gained from the other ad network(s), how is that any different in practice than requiring exclusivity?
The comparison you're making in the last paragraph is a common mistake in examining competition scenarios. The comparison isn't between pricing between the market leader and the incumbents following the anti-competitive behavior. It's the comparison between the prices we would have had no anti-competitive behavior existed in the first place.
You're figuring 10k domains in 300 hours, or 1.8min per domain. It's way more expensive than this, and it's an adversarial system. If you have rules about how spammy a site can be and still show your ads many sites are going to try and get as close to the boundary as possible without going over. This means it takes substantial effort to figure out which side of it they're on.
Then, the spammier sites run many different domains with multiple accounts, which means they're not that likely to show up as top domains. Spammy sites also can "cloak" so they show up one way to a reviewer at the ad network and another way to a real site visitor.
Manual inspection is definitely a valuable tool, and is something that ad networks use, but that a process like you described would catch 99% of fraud is massively optimistic.
(Disclosure: I work at Google on ad stuff, but not this sort of ad stuff. Speaking for myself and not the company.)
Sure, but I've overstated the hourly costs by an order of magnitude. You can get body shops to do this work very inexpensively.
Making a call as to whether or not they're over the line isn't difficult; you flag the clear bullshit calls and leave the borderline ones after making the contractual terms more conservative than your in practice review would accept.
>Then, the spammier sites run many different domains with multiple accounts, which means they're not that likely to show up as top domains
Sure, but we both know your distribution of revenue isn't difficult to parse, nor is auditing methodology difficult.
We have active fraudsters at the top of the iOS and Play stores. The issue isn't that you don't know how best to cast the net to grab everyone. It's that you don't cast it at all to grab anyone.
>but that a process like you described would catch 99% of fraud is massively optimistic.
Not really. Most fraudsters are terrible. Sure a few will slip through the cracks, but that's the case in every industry. That's not an excuse to do nothing. It's especially not an excuse when the dichotomy being pushed here is that the difficulty underlies a need for illegal anti-competitive behavior.
What apps are you thinking of? My guess is that they're apps that are being really careful to stay just inside the bounds of the store policies.
> That's not an excuse to do nothing.
I'm confused why you think ad networks are doing nothing?
> the dichotomy being pushed here is that the difficulty underlies a need for illegal anti-competitive behavior.
I wasn't trying to defend that. I just saw your "it's pretty simple to..." and as someone close to the issue wanted to explain ways it's not that simple.
Oh, I thought you were the original poster I was replying to. Sorry about that. Regardless, it's not actually all that complicated at all. Catching all fraud is almost impossible. Catching 90-99% is dead simple. If you don't like my quick and dirty breakdown, make another - the problem's size needs to be 4 orders of magnitude larger before the cost implications become a concern.
That said, there's a very consistent pattern at play here: Organizations and groups that refuse to take action on the basis that they can't catch everything are consistently those that intentionally look the other way in respect of fraud, and digital advertising has a bad rep in this area for a reason: most networks ignore as much fraud as they can get away with.
In any event, locking out other networks doesn't change the fact that the excuse provided for exclusivity is about how many containers are around, not how many networks can bid on that inventory. The rationale for the illegal activity doesn't address the problem at all.
It's not just a matter of fraud. The website could be CNN, but if they're filling their pages with a thousand different ads, none of the individual ads is going to be worth paying for, even if the page also contains legitimate content.
And the thing that's impossible to measure is content volume. If you have one morsel on the page that drives traffic to it, you can easily add arbitrarily more to the bottom that is arguably "content" in order to make the ratio of ads to "content" be whatever you like. At that point you're trying to measure content quality, which is inherently subjective.
> The comparison you're making in the last paragraph is a common mistake in examining competition scenarios. The comparison isn't between pricing between the market leader and the incumbents following the anti-competitive behavior. It's the comparison between the prices we would have had no anti-competitive behavior existed in the first place.
That's not what I'm saying.
Suppose we do a test. If a page has one ad on it, 0.5% of page visitors buy the product. If it has two ads on it, 0.2% of page visitors buy each advertiser's product, because the extra clutter causes people to pay less attention to both of them.
So then your ad network prices that way. If the site puts your ad on their page with no others, you pay them 5 credits. If they put your ad on their page with someone else's, you pay 2 credits. If they want to use three ad networks then you pay 1 credit and it goes down from there. Just paying proportional to the value of the ad to the advertiser.
Now nobody is going to put two ad networks on the page, because they'd get 2 credits from each ad network (total of 4) instead of getting 5 credits from one. Even if it was 4 vs. 2, you might as well save yourself the transaction costs of using the second network.
The reason exclusivity is worth more isn't that there is less competition so you can charge more, it's that if you clutter up the page with more ads, their value falls off faster than their volume makes up for it.
Moreover, suppose that isn't the case. Showing more ads would produce more value, at least until some threshold number of ads is shown. Then the first ad network would just offer to display more ads on your page and pay you appropriately more for them.
You still end up with only one ad network -- whichever one will pay you the most per unit. The only way two ad networks end up on the same page is by reaching the point that the highest paying ad network knows showing more ads won't produce more advertiser value, and then scamming them by showing more anyway.
>Google has abused this market dominance by preventing rivals from competing in the online search advertising intermediation market.
>Based on a broad range of evidence, the Commission found that Google's conduct harmed competition and consumers, and stifled innovation. Google's rivals were unable to grow and offer alternative online search advertising intermediation services to those of Google. As a result, owners of websites had limited options for monetizing space on these websites and were forced to rely almost solely on Google.
This just doesn't make sense to me. So Google offers the website search functionality. It then says "If you want to run ads, you have to use our ads" a few years later Google says "If you want to run ads, you have to give us the best N spots, and all other ads have to be approved by us." Because of this the EU concludes "rivals were unable to grow and offer alternative online search advertising intermediation services."
I am really trying to read the logic some other way but the logic appears to be as follows
1) Google let people set up search pages on individual websites.
2) Google set the terms for ads on those search pages so that Google had exclusive/best ad spots on those search pages.
3) 2 limited competitors ability to develop an alternative to 1.
4) Because Google had a dominate market position, 3 is illegal and should be fined.
This honestly feels pants-on-the-head crazy to me because I do not see how this logic doesn't apply to Google.com. Should Google be forced to let Bing run adds on "google.com/search?q=shoes"? No! Yet if it is "ShoeReviews.com/search?q=shoes" suddenly Google is required to let Bing run adds on it.
Edit: Formatting
The exclusivity deal might have been fine were it not for Google's dominant position.
If you use market dominance in one market, to stifle competition in another market, that's anti-trust!
The one market is Search, the other is Advertising.
This makes me wonder, how much does Google make from showing ads to one person?
What price do we sell our personal data for?
YouTube seems to be getting really bad in that regard, even worse than TV.
While you can get ads that are 15 minutes long they can always be skipped within 5 seconds. That's not even comparable to television.
So these 15-minute "ads" pretty much lead to the situation that halfway through my shower I won't be listening to music anymore, but rather some tutorial on how to best light a photoshoot or a "documentary" how Hezbollah is destroying Europe.
Don't get me wrong here: They can have their ads, but throwing 15-minute ads between videos that average out at around 3-8 minutes just feels like a very bold choice.
And it's not like watching that 15-minute ad means you won't be bothered by them for a while, you can watch it and after the next 3 minute song, there will be yet another ad.
Having the actual music video with the music is also a very nice extra, some of these can make a song like 10 times as good.
If the YouTube premium wouldn't be so expensive (asking 16€ per month over here) I'd already signed up just for getting ad-free music.
There are ads on Youtube that cannot be skipped, and they can be much longer than 5-6 seconds.
Pi-hole, uBlock Origin (even kills the adblock detectors), Privacy Badger, Decentraleyes, Tracking Token Stripper, Webmail Ad Blocker, etc.
Ads. What ads? You have a VPN set up on your home network, you can pass your mobile phone through it so as not to get ads even while away.
I guess I really gotta look into building myself a Pi-hole.
Therefore: 8,000,000,000 / (500,000,000 * 0.9 * 0.6) = $29.63 per person revenue per quarter. Could be as much as +- $10 given how arbitrary (research based, but still guesswork) my inputs were...
Somewhere around $100 per person per year seems insane but I guess how much do you spend per year on stuff?
P.S. please feel free to correct my figures!
Guess how many times an average person clicks on an ad knowingly/unknowingly.
_What are_ consumers?
Google can make >$100 a click for ads on mortgages or insurance keywords, but subscription models are locked in to revenue that doesn't scale with the category of use - unless they become some sort of affiliate service.
If the seller has $1000 per click, that's really going to distort the market...
Presumably the value of advertising is highly correlated to the amount of money you spend (on things you have some choice over).
Disposable income is a strongly skewed distribution (across countries, within most countries).
An average won't help you much if you want too know how much Google makes off you!
Isn't this the same case with Safari on iOS devices?
Update: I posted this before the motivation was published.
It's not a free for all, get free money from tech companies with no legal background.
Antitrust laws aren't specific to EU by the way.
Apple isn't getting fined for it's app store which is essentially the same structure as Google's OEM hardware setup
They're working on that, give it some time. The complaint from Spotify gets the ball rolling. The EU will do the rest. Two or three years from now they'll have a $4 billion fine for Apple.
"Spotify announced this morning that it’s filed an antitrust complaint against Apple with the European Union, alleging that the iPhone maker is harming consumer choice and stifling innovation via the rules it enforces on the App Store."
https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/13/18263453/spotify-apple-ap...
Basically the way the EU sees it, Google has a monopoly in a market: mobile operating systems. That is, if you're an OEM and you want to sell a device with an operating system, Google is currently the only place you can really turn. Apple exists but since it doesn't sell its operating system, it's not a participant in this market.
So the EU saw Google saying to OEMs "you can have Android but you have to install our stuff on it or pay extra" and decided that Google was using its monopoly position in one market (mobile OS) to give itself an advantage in other markets (app stores, browsers, search). They see this as anti-competitive.
Reducing the choice to just Google phones running Android will spark other providers to develop their own OS and increase competition in the market, which would indeed lead a great deal of people to say "Good job, EU" if the EU was the catalyst for such a scenario.
Google could shut it down and only publish their own phones, but they don't have the chops to become a premier customer goods maker. The field would be free for Apple until Samsung catches up. In the end Google lose negotiation power in getting their search engine, browser and services on Apple's and Samsung phones.
Basically they would be the main loser in the move.
Edit: like Netflix, Hulu, and Snapchat
If an OEM sold a phone with a stock AOSP build, I think they'd be fine with calling it "Android" without permission. Google might attempt to enforce their mark anyway, but they wouldn't have much of a case.
If the phone ran a fork like LineageOS, the OEM would need to be more careful about their use of the mark, but I imagine they'd still be okay with language like "Android-based".
"Fines imposed on companies found in breach of EU antitrust rules are paid into the general EU budget. This money is not earmarked for particular expenses, but Member States' contributions to the EU budget for the following year are reduced accordingly. The fines therefore help to finance the EU and reduce the burden for taxpayers."
edit: of course, how big the disincentive is is up for debate. :P
In case this is in accusation of corrupt practices aimed to increase the EU budget, note:
- Fines account for <5% of the EU's budget
- The EU budget is relatively small compared to national governments' budgets. EU: 150 billion, Germany + France + UK = 5 Trillion (5,000 billion). That's leaving out 24 smaller economies. National governments have a lot of input in the decision-making process and couldn't care less about a billion here or there. Especially if it risks impacting perceived rule of law.
- In any large bureaucracy, individual decision makers have incentive structure that often diverge fundamentally from those of the organisation as a whole. A prosecutor will have no financial or career advantage tied to the EU's finances. In this specific example, the commissioner responsible (Vestager) is somewhat likely to leave the commission after the May elections anyway, because of another pro-competition decision that was decidedly more important and not appreciated by France and Germany, namely prohibiting the Siemens and Alstom merger.
If you sum up all the fines collected by continent, you will see that (a) EU companies pay fines roughly equivalent to their share of economic activity in the EU, (b) Asian companies pay comparatively more, and (c) US companies are actually fined far less than their share of the economy would suggest. The most likely explanation is that rather high standards of enforcement and corporate governance in the US require less EU intervention.
Or maybe the american political influence is stronger?
Note that such agency actions are firewalled from even their EU/US/national political leadership. Even if Trump managed to convince Merkel to intervene, she wouldn't really be able to. To illustrate with a reverse example: Imagine Macron trying to get to get to a judge in a California District Court. There are multiple layers in between where they would tend to consider the call a prank and hang up.
More likely that US companies are so comparatively wealthy that even apparently large fines aren't as large as fraction of revenue. Anchoring fallacy.
SAP is Europe's most profitable tech company by far. About $4.5 billion in net income ($7b in operating income).
The US has at least 16 tech companies at that level of profit or higher.
Just Microsoft + Google + Amazon + Facebook + Apple = $185 billion in annual operating income.
In terms of sales, those five combined companies are the size of Turkey or Saudia Arabia in GDP (they'd be around the 19th or 18th largest economy in the world).
Nah, EU commissioners are very unlikely to stay in their post when the Commission changes anyway, regardless of performance. That's because they are an expression of national governments' priorities at the time of commission composition (every government gets 1 commissioner, and usually tries to place it in an area it is particularly interested in - which obviously changes when a government changes "colour").
This has become even more true ever since EuroParliament obtained a meaningful vote on approving or rejecting the Commission. Because the Commission President is now a political figure expressed by the party with the most votes in EuroElections, it is almost inevitably bound to change every 5 years, when Parliament changes; when the President changes, the whole Commission usually changes as well. I fully expect this to happen this year.
In the past, Commissions would change on a different schedule, without any real vote, and it was mostly seen as an administrative body anyway. This meant a President would not change until it effectively resigned or lost the trust of all national governments, which in turn allowed other commissioners to stay on if they were already working together well, with EUParliament just rubber-stamping. This changed after the corruption scandal of 1999.
This is maybe not as comforting as you think it sounds. 1.5B is 1% of the budget that you describe below, which is non-trivial -- that's make or break money. I'm guessing it exceeds the total annual contribution of several member states (I tried to find the actual budget, but talk about incomprehensible documents [1] -- what's an "own resource"? What's with the obsession with sugar?). To that end it seems like fines like this are a critical part of the EU's budget.
> If you sum up all the fines collected by continent
I'm wondering if you have a reference for that -- I can't really find anything definitive and it would be interesting as a data point.
[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...
47% subsidies for farmers, 30% regional support subsidies (e.g. they might co-found an R&D project in an outermost region in a country):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_the_European_Union#P...
So mostly subsidies. If there's a deficit, they can cut the regional subsidies which I believe are mostly individual projects with relatively short timespans.
The farming subsidy is more like social security, I think you'd have riots in France if you cut that significantly. Which is sad.
reduce burden for taxpayers... yeah. how? i don't see my taxes dropping because ppl get fined >.> even if the amount of fines would raise consistently by 1000% still i would pay the same taxes, guarantee you that.
What were your tax contributions to the EU last year compared with the year before?
Last year they gave Google €4.34bn fine and in year 2017 they gave Google €2.42bn fine.
At what point does Big Corp run out of things to abuse?
If the fines just become a cost of doing business the finance and legal teams can probably get creative and invent new ways of mashing up old abuses over time.
I think the underlying theme here, then, is that the fines are necessary but not sufficient.
Finally, Google is also liable to face civil actions for damages that can be brought before the courts of the Member States by any person or business affected by its anti-competitive behaviour. The new EU Antitrust Damages Directive makes it easier for victims of anti-competitive practices to obtain damages.
It's very simplistic to look at their yearly revenue and say they can just absorb it. If the money they made off of an activity like this was less than the fine, absorbing it won't make sense.
Imagine if Google went to jail and had to work for 13 cents an hour making license plates.
Personally i also think getting fined constantly is not a reliable business model. :)
As for larger ever US fine - perhaps for Google. US can also be rough.
https://www.fnlondon.com/articles/european-banks-face-dispro...
Both seem to perfectly consistent with New York being the world's premier financial center and Europe being somewhat renown for stronger consumer protection.
(which leaves Volkswagen as a terribly embarrassing example of regulatory capture in Germany)
Some German states own parts of VW and clearly would prefer to believe it to be honest mistake VW has learned from. No one should be surprised that the Deutsche Bank are criminals either. I dont think those cases are anything more then corruption preventing proper prosecution. Big corporations simply get away with a lot of stuff if its politically inconvenient. I mean the HSBC laundered billions for drug cartels. Heckler and Koch breached weapon embargos. Non of that is in any way a grey area but plain and simply criminal conspiracy.
One only has to take a peek at the HSBC cartel scandals to know that's patently bullshit.
HSBC is a British bank. Yet, skimming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSBC#Controversies it appears almost all investigations and fines were the result of SEC and other US investigations.
Now I wonder if the EU will take on search engine front ends like startpage.com or duckduckgo who use Google results. Will they be allowed to run their own ad network alongside the Google results? If so that would make them a lot more viable.
The other kind, which is not discussed here, is where you have a web front end like startpage.com or duckduckgo.com which is making an API call to a search index in response to your query. In the US, the two english language indexes with decent precision and recall are provided by Google and Bing[1]. One of Google's big partners there is Infospace which uses Google results in many of their properties. That said, when you use Google results in your search "engine" web page, you are bound by a different contract than the AdSense contract. And, like the AdSense contract, it is (or at least was) pretty restrictive on what sort of advertising you could do around Google's results.
[1] Bing either directly or through Yahoo!'s BOSS API if that is still a thing.
Edit: The linked article is now updated, at the time it was basically just a paragraph stating the fine.
> In July 2018, the Commission fined Google €4.34 billion for illegal practices regarding Android mobile devices to strengthen the dominance of Google's search engine.
> Google's provision of online search advertising intermediation services to the most commercially important publishers took place via agreements that were individually negotiated. The Commission has reviewed hundreds of such agreements in the course of its investigation and found that:
> Starting in 2006, Google included exclusivity clauses in its contracts. This meant that publishers were prohibited from placing any search adverts from competitors on their search results pages. The decision concerns publishers whose agreements with Google required such exclusivity for all their websites.
> As of March 2009, Google gradually began replacing the exclusivity clauses with so-called “Premium Placement” clauses. These required publishers to reserve the most profitable space on their search results pages for Google's adverts and request a minimum number of Google adverts. As a result, Google's competitorswere prevented from placing their search adverts in the most visible and clicked on parts of the websites' search results pages.
> As of March 2009, Google also included clauses requiring publishers to seek written approval from Google before making changes to the way in which any rival adverts were displayed. This meant that Google could control how attractive, and therefore clicked on, competing search adverts could be.
> Therefore, Google first imposed an exclusive supply obligation, which prevented competitors from placing any search adverts on the commercially most significant websites. Then, Google introduced what it called its “relaxed exclusivity” strategy aimed at reserving for its own search adverts the most valuable positions and at controlling competing adverts' performance.
> Google's practices covered over half the market by turnover throughout most of the period. Google's rivals were not able to compete on the merits, either because there was an outright prohibition for them to appear on publisher websites or because Google reserved for itself by far the most valuable commercial space on those websites, while at the same time controlling how rival search adverts could appear.
From: http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-19-1770_en.htm
That doc says Google's deals with publishers relating to AdSense for Search (which e.g. shows ads in newspaper sites' on-site search results) harmed competition by restricting what their partners could do with other potential providers. And that this was abuse of Google's dominant position in the relevant market.
""""In 2006, Google started to include "exclusivity clauses" in contracts which stopped publishers from placing ads from Google rivals such as Microsoft and Yahoo on search pages, the Commission said."""
https://www.politico.eu/article/eus-milk-scramble-for-africa...
I don't think it's related to the EU as institution
"Brexit shows what we have in the EU. She clears up issues among neighbors, grating them into rules and sometimes unsatisfactory compromises. But she grates them small, in a civilized and peaceful way. That's her big achievement." (rough translation by me, sorry)
https://twitter.com/tagesschau/status/1105932622000209921 (in German)
I am not sure how true it was but I heard a theory that Europe lost much of its intellectual prominence due to so many young men dying in the trenches in WW1 - now Europe does good intellectual work now but it is more "neat thing out of Europe" as opposed to "the hotspot". I am not well equipped to evaluate the merits but the idea is interesting at very least.
It only became fully realized with the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, which was shortly after the fall of the USSR in 1991.
But I wouldn't go as far as claiming it's solely responsible for it because rarely anything is as simple as that.
Do you get a vote over antitrust regulations enacted by your own government?
You usually vote a party which might (or not) have a high-level guidelines over a few select policies, but otherwise trust them to make the best decision based on how their political view matches with yours.
You elect EU parliament member the same way, and you are free to vote otherwise if you do not like their work (and yes, the actual effect of your individual vote is statistically irrelevant, just as the vote for your own government).
Besides, the point is moot, because parliament members tend to group themselves based on shared political views, rather than by country.
That countries with more population should have more representation and more weight in the decisions, to me makes sense.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/20/google-eu-fine-investors-not...
They control way too much.
Right after the case was settled, Microsoft sold their shares again.
It’s said that this investment likely helped Apple survive through that period.
Given Apple’s market position right now, it’s not a stretch to assume this to be a direct result of the antitrust case against Microsoft.
The social, political, and economic damage Google is causing as one of the leading forces pushing the world into surveillance capitalism vastly outweighs the "good" derived from a few technical trivialities.
[1] http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/shoshana-zuboff-q-and...
Former intelligence agents have gotten into business intelligence as well engaged in legal surveillance work to predict trends just doing things like counting cars in factory lots from public spaces to analyse worker demand and thus production and sales - surveillance and capitalism are bridged by being in the same reality and a legal system where everything not forbidden is permitted.
I never said they created it; Google, FB, etc, are the "leading forces pushing the world" into a new type of economy. It almost certainly wo9uld exist without Google involvement, but the are involved and the damage from their business model is real.
> literally nothing to do with industrial outsourcing.
I don't see how this is in any way related to surveillance capitalism.
> counting cars in factory lots from public spaces to analyse worker demand and thus production
You're talking about specific examples of surveillance, which are only tangentially related to surveillance capitalism. As the article linked above explains, surveillance capitalism is an economic system with a new form of market. Capitalism has had many forms: mercantilism, factory and mass-production capitalism, financialization, etc. Each of these created unique types of market that incentivized different types of business practices.
An example of the problem from the previous [1] that illustrates the kind of economic change that Google/etc are causing:
>> Three or four months ago, the CEO of Ford says there’s a global auto slump, it’s really hard to sell cars, but we’re getting downgraded in the markets. He says, we want price-to-earnings ratios like Google and Facebook. How do we do that? We’re going to become a data company. We got 100 million people driving around in Ford vehicles. And what we’re gonna do is, we’re gonna now figure out how to get all the data out of this driving experience.
The problem isn't minutia like counting cars in a factory lot or a business trying to advertise to their customers; this is about creating an economic system that gives the most profit to whoever creates the most invasive surveillance so they can sell your pattern-of-life.
(cries in Firefox)
The end result would be that project leaders would be CEO-s belonging to Alphabet, but everything would be still running on the same architecture, platform, services.
I don't know much about the internal structure of Google, but my naïve intuition is that it could be broken up into several profitable companies relatively easily a whole a bunch of different ways, given how many different products there are.
It seems like the first thing would be to split off Youtube, which is apparently already independent enough that it has its own CEO. Actually, I'd be comfortable arguing that Youtube is big enough by itself that breaking it up somehow would benefit consumers, but at least in that case it does seem hard to imagine how it would be done.
Then, I would guess the next step would be to split Google Search from everything else. As far as I can tell, it's mostly stand-alone, and most integration with other products seemes more harmful to consumers than beneficial.
After that, it gets harder, but I feel like you could do something like this:
1. Adsense 2. Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs 3. Android, Pixel / whatever other hardware Google makes. 4. Everything else
E.g. If Android becomes it's own company, it's still the only player in the mobile operating system space. If search was it's own company, it's still the dominant search engine.
Admittedly, I wasn't around at the time, but what use was breaking up Ma-bell into the sub companies, from a choice perspective? I certainly understand that from a telephony devices perspective, consumer choice drastically increased, since third parties could now make telephones, but you still ended up with local monopolies for all of the fractured components.
Also, how is search's integration into other products harmful in all circumstances? It's extremely convenient that typing the name of a restaurant into Google search gives me reviews, the menu, directions, etc.
As I understand, the desired goal is to stop the dominant player in one domain (search) from getting an unfair competitive advantage in another (advertising backends). It might also be true that allowing one company to have complete dominance in a particular domain stifles competition within that domain, but that's a seperate problem.
> Admittedly, I wasn't around at the time, but what use was breaking up Ma-bell into the sub companies, from a choice perspective? I certainly understand that from a telephony devices perspective, consumer choice drastically increased, since third parties could now make telephones, but you still ended up with local monopolies for all of the fractured components.
I know nothing at all about this particular topic, but I have two immediate thoughts:
1. It would be easier to break a monopoly held by a company that made just one component, because once you finished your replacement for that component, you'd be able to ship a product, whereas if one company had a monopoly on every component, you'd need to make replacements for every component.
2. I don't find "It might stay just as bad as it is now" to be a very strong criticism if the alternative is doing nothing.
> Also, how is search's integration into other products harmful in all circumstances? It's extremely convenient that typing the name of a restaurant into Google search gives me reviews, the menu, directions, etc.
Sure, but Duckduckgo does those things as well and doesn't own any products that do those things. Whereas there are some google products that seem really tightly coupled, like Drive and Docs that I can't really imagine working as well if they came from different companies. As for harming consumers, I was mostly thinking about search data → advertising.
Actually I would really prefer if they were banned from conducting business in Europe. For a decade. No fines are needed.
- "What can we earn?"
- "Billions."
- "What's it going to cost?"
- "Less than what we're going to make."
- "Let's do it!"
Do you have a source for that assumption?
The problem is it's been blown completely out of proportion to a point where by son's child minder sent out letters asking for our permission to contact us if our child is unwell (Of course she should - that isn't unsolicited contact. She was already covered!).
Yeah, but blame that on the lawyers who wanted to cash in on this new regulation. I think only _very few_ people/business owners actually took the time to read the GDPR and think about whether all of that even applies to them.
Most just became a victim of the fearmongering around all of that.
My observations was most of the negativity came from a combination of the press writing slanted articles criticising the EU (which is fairly typical for anything relating to the EU, it seems) and blogs from people who assumed the worst case and subsequently wrote a hysteria-driven knee-jerk opinion piece as a result. Those blogs, I've found, are the worst examples because they're more likely to spread like a virus where people say "if they're worried then I should be to!" Where as these days people can dismiss the press a little easier if it doesn't confirm their cognitive bias.
That's just my opinion from what I've observed though. I'm not trying to claim anything as fact here.
Our lawyers where rather calm, too, saying that not everything is eaten as hot as its being cooked.
"Selfmade media" on the other hand went really wild and fantasized some absurd threats for everybody with a website, you're right on that.
The back up clearing involved would also be a pain in the ass and boost expenses of compliance (can't just use write only storage which nicely solves other problems) but it isn't insurmountable.
It has certainly affected the bottom line of companies like Facebook and Google, but they can afford to take the hit, not all startups can.
I'm not really disagree that companies "should" do it. But I'd argue one of the many reasons we have a shortage of big tech in the EU is excessive regulation restricting our ability to scale.
I actually like GDPR and would love it if it was made law worldwide, but right now that's not the case and with being EU only it comes at the cost of EU tech. And if the EU wishes to remain economically competitive with the US in the coming decades we're going to need tech and GDPR is yet another hurdle preventing us from achieve this.
Again, I'm not really arguing what should be, but from a purely pragmatic perspective I'd argue tech regulation isn't good for the already struggling economy of the EU.
GDPR can really be reduced to "privacy by design" and "privacy by default". If your business struggles with those two principles it's a business you'll probably not need.
It hurts and sets up barriers when you want to collect data which is not needed for fulfilling the purposes of "doing your business".
Nobody keeps you from saving contact information and communicating it in that way. But collecting all kinds of data to build profiles and get on my nerves, because I wanted to test your software is getting more and more complicated. And that's good for (end) users privacy.
You spent two weeks solving technical debt, which you had ignored because no one was forcing you to actually play nice with people's data and it was convenient to you to do.
As for startups: depending on what kind of personal data you are collecting, being GDPR complicit shouldn't take more than a day.
If it takes longer you are building a business around personal data, and I think you should know your stuff (not just GDPR, but also what kind of data you are collecting and why).
And you should probably pause and ask whether your proposed business will provide a net benefit to the world, or if it's just an attempt to make money regardless of the consequences to society.
Not to say there aren't any worthwhile businesses to be created around personal data, but experience suggests that some skepticism is in order.
either you're overly optimistic, or you have some 100x rock star doing the impl. because it took over 1 year to implement all of the GDPR required features for me, and we don't even store that much private data!
> we don't even store that much private data!
What do you store? Because I can't imagine what would take that long.
What have you spend 1 year doing if I may ask? Did you previously store passwords in plain text and you had to update that?
How long it takes obviously depends on your data - but also on how important privacy and security is for you already. In my case, privacy was already important, so there wasn't much to do.
Unless you were in charge of GDPR compliance for an enterprise-size company, I don't know how you could possibly take a year about it, even if you had previously not cared a jot about your user's data?
That has always frustrated me - we have cryptographic signatures. An order should involve only an invoice signed by the end user, the merchant checking it vs your public key and then submission to the credit card processor.
Even if done with "black box calculator functions" to the end user it should be layman usable.
As someone starting a startup there's compliance I need to do, and it's work for sure, but I still (again, for now) live in the EU as a citizen, and I still have personal data that I don't want to lose control of so on balance I'll take it.
article 13 is bad for sure. They don't get everything right by a long shot, but on balance I think the changes have been positive.
GDPR is a mess not from the goal but the implementation.
Currently no one knows how to implement GDPR correctly - e.g. how to exchange business cards, how to store information from sales leads etc.
Compare this with PCI compliance (which is about CC data protection) and it's very clear if you're compliant and if you are not and what to do.
For now this has no effect because data protection agencies - at least in Germany - are overloaded, but will lead to a lot of fines for companies that want to do everything the right way.
Article 13 is the same mess. Good in intention of making YT pay for the content they use and which is copyright protected, but _impossible_ to implement in it's current form.
The only time I've seen it be a problem for people is when they are playing fast and loose with people's data.
I mean, exchanging business cards is (I would suggest) in invitation to start a conversation. I'm not personally worried about that. It's definitely not an invitation to store my data in a leads database indefinitely though.
Does not being able to indefintely store people's data in your database without getting permission first make your life harder? Good, that's the point.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
From: _Codemonkeyism@ycombinator.com
To: Bob@from.accounting
Subject: Great chat!
Hey Bob, thanks for handing me your business card the other day, can I add you to our sales database? We will contact you whenver we think we have some suitable widgets.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
From: Bob@from.accounting
To: _Codemonkeyism@ycombinator.com
Subject: Re: Great chat!
Take a hike _Codemonkeyism! / Sure, go ahead!
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
> Compare this with PCI compliance
I've done PCI compliance, it's largely bullshit IMO. It does certify compliance with something, but it's not a particularly useful way of working out wether a company is storing peoples data securely.
> but will lead to a lot of fines for companies that want to do everything the right way.
Well, we will have to see, but I doubt it. Sure, there will be companies that want to protect people's data, but can't for whatever reason (developer time etc.), but the solution there is "don't do it". If you can't secure people's data, don't store it. "It's a bit beyond our capabilities" isn't an excuse.
> Article 13 is the same mess. Good in intention of making YT pay for the content they use and which is copyright protected, but _impossible_ to implement in it's current form.
Yep, totally agree.
For sites not in the EU, see Article 27.
If you are not in the EU, and you processes personal data of people in the EU, and the processing is related to offering goods or services to those people (regardless of whether payment is required), Article 27 requires you to have a representative in the Union.
Note: do not mix this representative up with the Data Protection Officer, which may be required by Article 37. DPOs are generally only required for pretty big data processors, and if you are required to have a DPO there is no geographic limitation on where they can be.
Article 27 doesn't apply if the processing is only occasional and doesn't involve certain especially sensitive categories, but it is not at all clear what counts as more than occasional.
Note: common system logs, such as Apache logs, include personal data (IP addresses). Logging such data is probably not a violation of GDPR, but that doesn't make it no longer count as personal data. It still counts and so you still have to follow the rules for sites that processes personal data.
It also won't apply if goods or services aren't being offered to people in the Union, but that too is unclear. You site merely being accessible from in the EU is not sufficient, but it is not clear what beyond that counts.
There is no need to be playing fast and loose with data to be totally unsure if Article 27 applies to you or not.
As someone with an interest in this space, I can say that the PCI DSS is not as clear as you say - there is plenty that is ambiguous and open to interpretation, and often a pass/fail for each requirement hinges on your QSA's interpretation.
It seems EU is digging laws to earn money from American companies.
It's very weird when EU punishes someone by digging up their past and without looking into oneself of the horrible atrocities one have done.
While in this case, it seems to make sense to say we aren't responsible for what's done in past.
What does this mean? Who is "one" here?
But if one looks at the European countries history, they have mostly looted from various other countries.
It's seems completely fine for them to look up all the bad practices done by google.(where no human life is lost)
One should also look at what their countries have done in past and pay the affected countries for their wrong doing.
But in these case they seem to say we aren't responsible for what our ancestors have done.
What I mean is, It's fine if google have done something wrong in the past.
Layout the rules now, if they cross it, then fine them.
Now, I think this is exploiting power, just because they can.
The problem isn't technical debt. It would be a company making billions on something that's "hard to change", and than brush it off as technical debt ;)
Right, but what does this have to do with anything? The only thing in common is that both have “Europe” in the name (and I’m not even sure that was part of Trotsky’s vision). If a union of states scares you, the USA must be your waking nightmare. If you’ve indeed read 1984 you’ll notice that there are literally no parallels between that scenario and the history of the EEC and EU.