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Comment by AlexanderTheGr8 | Hacker News Reader

This seems to be a very big fine ($4.12B), much bigger than any "cost of business" I can think of. What are the chances that google will actually have to pay it?

They could re-appeal [0] or play some other judicial trick. Or maybe they say "enough is enough" and don't pay it.

They have been appealing the €2.42 billion fine from July 2017 even now[1]. So I don't think that they have any intention to pay this much larger fine any time soon.

Google's stock is already doing bad this year and this will likely make it worse (although the early trading today hasn't shown any indication of a change.)

[0] "The company can still appeal the ruling in the EU’s highest court." - https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/14/eu-court-backs-antitrust-rul...

[1] https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/202...

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> Or maybe they say "enough is enough" and don't pay it.

That just leads to the appropriate government(s) seizing assets until the fines are covered. Even the biggest bigcorps aren't actually sovereign.

Alphabet's EMEA revenue last year was $79.1B.

EMEA also includes the Middle East and Africa and some non-EU but still European countries, however the bulk of that revenue is realistically from the EU.

>This seems to be a very big fine ($4.12B),

It's not; Google's profit in 2021 was 76B, so that's about three weeks worth of profits. Anything below this wouldn't be even noticed by Google - to be effective those fees must hurt.

I'm no Google, but three weeks of my total income would be a very big fine for me.

Not income, profit. Three weeks of income minus bills, food, other costs.

>Or maybe they say "enough is enough" and don't pay it.

Never thought of it this way. Does Google need European revenue more or do Europeans rely on Google more?

It’s not only European revenue. If they leave the EU, the EU becomes a place where future competitors to their other revenue can grow.

Imagine Samsung (maybe not the best example, given their track record in software) stepping in with a fork of the open source parts of Android, to be sold in the EU.

That will be inferior to the full Android, but wouldn’t be killed by it because EU customers wouldn’t be able to choose it.

Over time, it could get closer to Android and, at some time, Samsung could start selling it successfully in Asia or the USA.

When does a company actually become subject to EU jurisdiction? If they had closed all their offices, relocated all their employees, closed all their bank accounts in Europe before this case would a US court even be allowed to enforce this judgement?

Or they could play by the rules and still operate in the EU.

I tink they should also be fined 1% of the original fine per day, for failing to pay the fine and delaying as much as possible to on order to diminish the fines due to inflation.

Would you be motivated to “play by the rules” if someone went to your store and told you they’d burn it down unless you paid them $10000 a month? This is a shakedown any way you look at it.

You are misrepresenting facts. This isn't some mafia doing racketeering, it's the EU enforcing antitrust regulation in court.

The ruling could probably not be applied. However, as someone above said, that choice would realistically cost them tens of billions each year, as well as fostering new competitors.

An angle to this is that even if you're gonna pay the fine in the end, there's a huge incentive to delay that, due to inflation. As long as your legal fees are lower than fine currency's inflation, you're better off delaying. E.g. we're close to 10% annual inflation in the euro area, and euro is also set to fall in relation to the dollar.

> This seems to be a very big fine

it does?

https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-faces-254-bln-dama...

> They could re-appeal [0] or play some other judicial trick.

Civil law doesn't work like that. The legal code is clear and precise. When the allowed appeals are exhausted, there is no re-appealing, 'interpreting', twisting. Which is one reason why the proceedings of the Eu against Google et al are very effective.

Dream on. Intel fought its $1B fine for directly screwing AMD for 13 years. Money on lawyers and bribes best spend, penalty cancelled.

https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/27/intel_eu_antitrust_fi...

Then why is Google still appealing the fine from 5 years ago?

Because the appeals are not exhausted yet. I think they still have to option of a final appeal to the ECJ.

The State Department and White House will likely intervene when the EU wants to start using fines as a revenue stream.

Google has been historically targeted by individuals in high ranking roles at the EU who have gone on record calling it their personal mission to harm US tech firms. There is a limit.

Every time there is a discussion of EU regulating an American firm for anything, a comment like this appears. I am really puzzled, what is the cause for this blatant nationalism - as an American you will never see any of this money, it's probably headed for a tax heaven.

The hypocracy is blatant too, USA regulates every business on it's soil without hesitation, often with asine laws like the Jones act.

When France introduced 3% tax on tech giants, US government lost their shit. They can set 100% tax if they please, if you don't like it, don't trade in France.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48947922

I think US State Department is quite aware that EU is one of the few institutions that is roughly their peer in economy and trade wat capability. They don't want to kick a hornets nest.

Well, it’s not “anything” now, is it?

The specific findings of the commission and the court here go against any reasonable logic.

The EU seems to love kicking US tech firms while staying silent on anything China does. Ask German businesses who moved manufacturing to China and had their Intellectual property stolen from right in front of their eyes, only to have the EU play pussycat then.

Your comment could certainly use a bit more thought.

> Every time there is a discussion of EU regulating an American firm for anything, a comment like this appears.

The united fruit mentality never really ended.

With what reciprocity? EU-based firms being immune to FTC enforcement in their US operations?

Both the US and EU have a fairly strong interest in the principle that transnational companies can be regulated by national regulators, _particularly_ antitrust regulators. Undermining this would tend to lead to a situation where these companies couldn't be effectively regulated by _anyone_.

There's a difference between harming US (international) tech firms for the sake of harming the US, and harming antitrust-law-violating, privacy-violating, human-rights-violating tech firms that happen to originate in the US.

That might look like a personal vendetta against Google, but it's not personal at all. It's much like the way the head of the US FTC has a bone to pick with Amazon, not because she has anything personal with Amazon, but because she's charged with protecting consumers and believes Amazon to be harming them.

Just because they're able to get away with it here due to the corruption in American campaign finance doesn't mean they can get away with it everywhere.

> There is a limit.

And that limit is antitrust violations.

The US won't be concerned about the rights or wrongs of the issue. If Google is willing to pay 25% of avoided fines to politicians, politicians will certainly be overjoyed to make Google's rights to abuse their position in the European market a personal passion.

The main job of American diplomacy is securing profits all over the world for America's most generous lobbyists.

Politicians are way, way cheaper than those 25%.

I look forward to your support of US fines on the German automobile industry and Airbus as well.

Any half wit judge should be able to bless those judgements if we’re using the standard in the court ruling we’re commenting on.

It’s a almost as though you think the issue here is about some actual abuse as opposed to the logical loops the judgement is diving through to push through those findings.

And yet none of Google's competitors are in the EU, despite their stronger antitrust laws. You can actually make a case that this fine was made in good faith, but historically, their fines have been completely arbitrary. They fined Google $2.8 billion for simply adding Google Shopping to search.

That's fine, the US has been doing exactly this for at least the last 10 years against EU corporations.

Time to walk the talk.

And they have in the past with a mix of stick and carrot. The US tries to protect its companies despite knowing they're in the wrong, the EU does the same. What changed is that even the US regulators and politicians grew weary of big-tech's abuses and the fact they have so much power they're getting to be too big to control.

Volkswagen paid much more for Dieselgate in the US

So . . deliberately concealing poisonous gas emissions on a scale so massive, it affected every living thing in the United States is a little different to a highly subjective interpretation of a dominant market position and an even more suspect ruling on abuse of said monopoly.

Well, the fine was higher

You think we're arguing about the dollar amount or about the lack of legal grounds ?

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