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Comment by aboringusername | Hacker News Reader

I honestly don't think any country in the world actually cares about monopolies or the abuses by these companies. Apple no longer has to pay a fine the EU gave them. The same will likely happen to the 2 billion+ fines they gave Google.

So far, no amount of fines, or laws, has actually changed anything as far as Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google or Microsoft are concerned. They're still in dominant positions, where AI or computer made decisions can devastate the "little guys" like being wiped off Google (or the play store removing your app), or the horror stories of businesses on Amazon.

Truth is, they're too big, and at this point, can't be stopped. Laws won't work, fines won't work. They haven't so far, and I doubt they will in the future.

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Apples fines were because EU commissioners demanded Ireland charge them higher tax rates. The courts ruled they were wrong in doing so. Not an anti trust issue at all.

Do you really want to live in a world where bureaucrats can issue fines without recourse?

> So far, no amount of fines, or laws, has actually changed anything as far as Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google or Microsoft are concerned.

That seems like hyperbole. E.g. all the three big EU-Google anti-trust cases (Shopping, AdSense, Android) resulted in Google changing their practices on the issues in question.

(Shopping, Android: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_vs._Google, AdSense: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_19_...)

> The same will likely happen to the 2 billion+ fines they gave Google.

> Truth is, they're too big, and at this point, can't be stopped. Laws won't work, fines won't work. They haven't so far, and I doubt they will in the future.

First of all, Google has paid their EU fines. Secondly, I think you misunderstand the nature of what's going on with these fines. A combination of strong trade agreements and savvy tax jurisdiction selection has left most EU countries with little capacity to tax US tech companies, so they have resorted to fines. The play is old hat at this point. Pass a piece of vague legislation that probably applies to the target company's activities, then fine them before clarifying the law to the extent that the company can actually avoid breaking it. Rinse and repeat. The EU fined Google a few billion dollars last year, and the year before, and now this year, and they will surely do it again next year and the year after that. This is just a roundabout means of taxing Google. It will of course never change anything about Google, except that each year once the law is clarified Google's lawyers will make sure that they are scrupulously no longer violating this year's new regulation, but the extent of the regulation and the value of the fines is calibrated to not be so high that it would actually drive Google to extract itself from EU jurisdiction.

Now that it's clear they've lost their tax battle with Apple I expect the EU will begin fining them as well.

I can't speak for all the companies listed, but I know we've spent a lot of SDE time ensuring we're compliant with GDPR and various privacy laws. Building new systems and changing existing systems (on the scale of dozens, probably 100+, of individual teams). It's more likely that it's hard to quickly change the direction of large ships. I've certainly seen my leadership (and engineers) take things like GDPR compliance extremely seriously, to the point that I've seen it as a cultural shift over the last couple of years.

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