Google fined €220m by French competition watchdog over online advertising market
euronews.com
euronews.com
As part of the settlement negociation, Google has agreed to improve interoptability with other SSP.
This means the fine was too cheap.
If its a fixed fine that is not adjusted in either direction for ability to pay, or which maxes out at a level which only is meaningful to the poor, sure.
If the fine is ““Your net worth minus the lesser of half your actual average annual income from legal sources for the last five years or double the federal poverty level for an individual”, it doesn’t “only apply to the poor”.
Of course, most criminal fines do only apply to the poor, but that’s not inherent to fines, but just what fines look like when the law is intended to punish the poor to start with.
Would be great is everyone did. But as the rich are so good at dodging taxes, already, I imagine it wouldn't be as effective as desired.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/finland...
Often the meat of these agreements is the agreed behavior changes, not the fine. (It's very annoying that the articles often focus on the fines, rather than the rest of the agreement.)
Setting the fines at a level that doesn't cause endless appeals gets the behavior changes sooner, and may be more net efficient.
Would it be far-fetched for fines to be part of an annual/quarterly budget?
What matters is the changes google has to make as a result. We haven't seen much of a muchness on this front so far. If the trend continues, antitrust (particularly european antitrust) will be more of a pseudo taxation system for monopolies than about trustbusting, regulation or whatnot. If so, I suggest we raise the rates.
Commercially at least, that's basically a noise-level cost of doing business. It might be that it instigates a change in market dynamics but we'll have to see.
More generally, it is another example of the growing sentiment against the big tech players - and one of the few (thus far) that have come to conclusion.
[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/267606/quarterly-revenue...
We don't need a single nation to fine FAANG or others "once and for all" on behalf of all nations. We need every nation fining them over and over again for each offense.
Of course, this was a fiction, that was attacked in court, Google settled this one for 1 billion in 2019.
The principle of the fines in France is that the first one is a warning, that serves to clarify rules that may not have seem obvious at first, but non compliance a second time can cost a lot.
So it's not like this was just a cost of doing business to maintain the status quo, but a fine applied despite the changes they have to make.
If this starts to build up (fines + changes) seems better then nothing, or just fines alone.
The press release is in French, but they usually release an English translation in the following hours. I'll update this comment when they do.
The press release (contains more details): https://www.autoritedelaconcurrence.fr/en/press-release/auto...
https://www.euronews.com/2021/06/07/google-fined-220m-by-fre...
Google probably spends more on toilet paper.
- revenue 182B
- earnings 40B
The fine is 0.5% of their earnings or 0.12% of their revenue. Basically nothing.
They should start fining in the order of B not M
There is no disincentive from what I can see...
> "Google proposed commitments aimed at improving the interoperability of the Google Ad Manager services with third-party ad server and ad serving platform solutions," the watchdog said.
Basically, this is threatening but not hurting. Yet