It almost seems as if they believe anti-trust has been effectively killed between then and now, and they're ready to poke the bear to verify that it's dead.
These cases are fought for years, and theorized over for decades. In the meantime, the companies have gained or lost market share, profits and future revenues move in whatever direction, and the court ruling and the fine have little importance.
This may have been different some time ago. Nowadays, however, rest assured that no internet company will be deterred by pesky things such as laws, morality or ethics. If market share is at stake, that is.
This goes for Microsoft as much as for Google and Facebook. Google settles important cases (data related) to not have any legislative interference, and will pay the fine for everything else. Microsoft would be foolish to do anything else.
The companies are more powerful than the legal systems in the EU. Not the EU, mind you - if the will was there. But it isn't.
Look at the fines, look at the dollars actually being paid. And then look at the prospect of gaining 30,40 maybe 50% market share in the browser market - now that all bets are off and Microsoft has gone back to just siphoning off all data without even giving normal users a choice. Yeah.
Don't be naive.
> To date, Google has been found guilty of antitrust behavior in the cases related to Google AdSense and Android, and has been fined over €8 billion (~$9 billion)
https://www.statista.com/statistics/266206/googles-annual-gl...
> In the most recently reported fiscal year, Google's revenue amounted to 181.69 billion US dollars.
So over the course of a decade so far and ~4-5 different cases, the EU has fined Google for approximately 4% of their revenue of a single fiscal year.
Truly "slapping the giant".
*Edit: Conversion to dollars*
I’ve called the GDPR fines great because they’re finally actually hitting with real numbers.
For example, if breaking the rules to earn 0.1% of revenue leads to the same penalty as breaking the rules to earn 100% of revenue, the company might as well maximize the scale of each rule broken to improve the risk-adjusted return.
More reasonably, a fine should be proportional to the amount of incremental revenue that the company obtained by engaging in the illegal conduct, and that should be multiplied by the odds of getting caught (so the fine can’t be amortized as a cost of doing business).
I think this rhetoric claiming that fines are just a slap on the wrist made sense at some point when we were talking about million-dollar settlements, but now we’re talking billions, and in some cases it’s so much money that the company certainly didn’t increase their revenue by that much by breaking the rules. I feel like people are just repeating the same old argument and they aren’t thinking critically about the numbers. Companies do, in fact, care about being fined billions of dollars! It’s a big deal! That kind of money really does drive corporate strategy! Try asking your CEO for a billion dollars to build a new product if you don’t believe me.
I hope someone will take action against all these three companies but I don't think the laws have been written to deal with this.
Would "but Apple is doing worse" really work as a valid defense in court? Wouldn't it just provoke another litigation against Apple (if the court decided smartphones should be treated in the same way as personal computers)?
Are you sure about that? On Android my default browser is Firefox. If I email myself https://detectmybrowser.com/ and then open it in the Fastmail app on Android, it says I'm using Firefox.
I agree that Apple and Google are also guilty here, but MS is repeating actions which there is not only a direct legal precedent against, but one which involved them as the defendant.
The issue wasn't what they did, it was what they did in combination with their monopoly of the desktop market.
Apple gets away with what they want to do because they're a minority player in both the desktop and smartphone markets. It will be interesting to see how this changes with Epic's attempt in court with redefine the market to a fraction of the market.
What's amazing to me is how much platformization has happened since then, especially in mobile, where even though no one company is a monopoly, Google, Microsoft, and Apple are definitely flexing their "we own the platform" muscles quite as strongly as Microsoft did in the late 90s (or stronger), to the detriment of both users and developers.