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Comment by wdabney | Hacker News Reader

To what degree does the EC actually get a say in this? These are both American companies, so presumably the commission cannot block the acquisition.

Wouldn't this be more like saying "if you do this, we will make things painful for you"? Am I completely missing something here?

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Presumably Google and/or Fitbit operating within the European Union depends on compliance with European law. So choosing to disregard the EU's decision on the matter could blow apart a large part of an international business.

My guess is Google/Fitbit could only proceed without the EU's approval if Fitbit stopped operating in Europe and deleted all Europeans' data.

So all the European consumers who bought a Fitbit can be screwed?

Arguably: All European customers who bought a Fitbit are likely screwed anyways, Google has a poor history with supporting acquired product lines. While I am irritated about my data being acquired, personally, I'd also recommend against anyone buying a Fitbit while this acquisition is in flux, as Google might choose to terminate service to devices shortly post-acquisition anyways. And privacy loss is a harm as well.

In short, this acquisition is already harming everyone, and the EU is trying to prevent the most consumer harm.

*Google has a poor history with supporting acqui-hired product lines.

I think most of the terminated services were fairly predictable (i.e. North)

We have no idea what Google's endgame for Fitbit is. Keep Fitbit OS or shove Android Wear on the brand? Focus on the Fitbit app or push everyone to Google Health.

Without knowing this, there's no safe bet in buying a Fitbit right now.

Anything the size of Google is actually a collection of multiple (probably hundreds) of separate legal entities in each country it has significant operations (e.g. a sales office) - all of these will be ultimately owned by whatever the top level listed company (presumably Alphabet). So Google almost certainly has companies in most of the countries of the EU.

It's pretty common for international companies to need approvals by multiple governments for mergers. For example, when German Bayer bought Monsanto, a US company, the Chinese government had to approve it.

"American Companies" is a pretty arbitrary measure these days - both domestic and abroad corporations are gone after by threatening (and carrying out depending on the judgement) to restrict domestic business and seize domestic assets. The US doesn't really have legal standing to seize assets of Google in their London offices (though the UK may be happy to run an assist) and the EC can't seize property in Mountain View - but Google is international and has assets in most countries that can be seized - for them the bigger threat is probably a restriction of business if google search were to be banned in the eurozone[1] then there would likely be a reverse network effect that led to a loss of traffic globally - it wouldn't be unlikely for a lot of browsers to pull google from being a default search engine.

So, the EC has teeth they can use to enforce here - but more importantly google also wants to minimize how much they piss people off. Hence a PR stance of "Hey, we're sorry you feel that way - is there anything we can do to make this go away faster?"

1. I'm not saying this is likely or makes any sense for this particular probe.

If it affects EU users then they have the right to not allow such merger to happen in the first place

Both Google and Fitbit have major EU subsidiaries in order to serve the European market. They could spin off the EU subsidiaries and merge only the US headquarters, although that would probably be impractical.

Google Ads policy: "“Google Entity” means Google LLC (formerly known as Google Inc.), Google Ireland Limited or any other Affiliate of Google LLC"

Fitbit Privacy Policy: "Fitbit International Limited, an Irish company, is your data controller and provides the Services if you live in the EEA, UK or Switzerland"

Intriguingly, it appears TikTok is doing just this to deal with the US government. Selling their US business but having a presence there, managed by a different company, has apparently been seen as a worthwhile option. But yeah, there's a lot of potential issues, especially if said divestments/spinoffs are really only such on paper. Too much coordination and the government still may be upset about it.

> if you do this, we will make things painful for you

To be fair, that's generally how law enforcement and regulation enforcement usually works.

>To what degree does the EC actually get a say in this? These are both American companies, so presumably the commission cannot block the acquisition.

If Google doesn't want to do business in the EU then EU has no say in it.

Google has lots and lots of money and an EU presence. Hence it goes with the territory. Each little domain needs to have its say and compensation.

to the point that it may end up having some countries treating fines and such as tariffs of a sort.

Their products are readily available in Europe.

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