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Comment by pb7 | Hacker News Reader

It shows me to me that the EC shouldn’t have meddled to begin with. Android is free but Google isn’t providing it out of the goodness of its heart. If it can’t recoup its costs from offering the Google suite of apps (including search), then Android will be monetized by other search engines paying to be included in the options. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

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I'd be okay with your objection if I could pay to have the spying/data gathering turned off, like the Kindles offer with ads/no ads. But you can't, probably because the world would go crazy if someone finally puts a price on personal data.

Sucks if their business model isn't profitable with current legislation, but they aren't the first company something like that has happened to. And they're hardly a bastion of ethics and morality, which is fine (I'm not stupid and realize how companies work), but I find it hard to feel like there's a great injustice here.

> if I could pay to have the spying/data gathering turned off, like the Kindles offer with ads/no ads

What makes you think that paying to disable ads also disables data gathering? Does Amazon say this?

No mate, it was just an example, an analogy. Although my Kindle works pretty well without internet connectivity. Much harder to do with a phone, kind of defeats the purpose.

To me, it demonstrates the fines aren't an adequate remedy: Google still turned it into a profit model. The EC needed to split up Google, and force Google to divest Android if they wanted to remain in business there. (Note that if you ask Google why they created Android, it reads something like "out of the goodness of our heart", but it's bull. It's about ensuring everyone's on a platform that defaults to Google services for everything.)

Note that the EC can yet still tell Google that it's solution isn't adequate and not compliant.

Is your suggestion here that google be barred from monetizing android? That goes well beyond anything having to do with anticompetitive practice.

No, however, tying Android to Google Search (even through a supposedly competitive market, where Google always wins a space, and Google makes money either way) is illegal.

Google can monetize Android pretty successfully through a way it already also does: Selling apps in the Play Store. And if Google was forced to divest Android, it is likely that is how the newly independent Android would fund itself.

In fact, if Google were forced to give up Android, the proposed search engine bidding process would work fairly: Google would have to compete and bid and pay to be listed just like everyone else.

Google can monetize. They can charge for Android and ask a fee per phone which you pay when you buy the phone. But Google choose to break the law and accept the fact that it will be fined because in the end it has more profit and that will cause a lot of irritation and higher penalties from the EU. And probably someone will cry about faul play as well.

One of the issues with the EC fines is that they leave it up to Google to invent a remedy. Similar to how a child who doesn't want to do a chore might do a bad job in hope that they won't be assigned again, Google can try to engineer a worse outcome as a "fix". If the EC is smart, they won't fall for it.

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