Google loses EU appeal and is fined a record $4B
axios.com
axios.com
"By decision of 18 July 2018, the Commission fined Google for having abused its dominant position by imposing anticompetitive contractual restrictions on manufacturers of mobile devices and on mobile network operators, in some cases since 1 January 2011. Three types of restriction were identified:
1. those contained in ‘distribution agreements’, requiring manufacturers of mobile devices to pre-install the general search (Google Search) and (Chrome) browser apps in order to be able to obtain a licence from Google to use its app store (Play Store);
2. those contained in ‘anti-fragmentation agreements’, under which the operating licences necessary for the pre-installation of the Google Search and Play Store apps could be obtained by mobile device manufacturers only if they undertook not to sell devices running versions of the Android operating system not approved by Google;
3. those contained in ‘revenue share agreements’, under which the grant of a share of Google’s advertising revenue to the manufacturers of mobile devices and the mobile network operators concerned was subject to their undertaking not to pre-install a competing general search service on a predefined portfolio of devices."
Even, rumors says that a future doz update may brick _your_ hardware...
#1 is right up the alley that busted Microsoft, though.
That could include deprecated versions and any forks.
To be clear, I have not read the original agreements to confirm this is the case, it's just my interpretation of #2.
I think that would have been acceptable - my reading of #2 is that if you sold phones with a fork of Android, even if that phone did not have Google branding, Google would not allow you to sell *any* phones with Google branding. That does seem very similar to the Microsoft example.
Then the rule was overly broad, since it also prevented them from selling Android phones without Google branding. I think Amazon was involved in that lawsuit after it had issues finding a manufacturer that wasn't bound by that rule.
Requiring that someone cannot use Google branding on any device they manufacture or sell, if they also manufacture or sell devices without Google branding that use ancient versions of Android, is entirely illegal in the EU.
Judging only by gp's message, it also targets any would-be competitor's fork of Android.
From what I understand, AOSP is not dead, but it's definitely far behind the latest versions of Android. The default apps are not updated, the UI toolkit is behind, most of the new services used by everything in Android are the proprietary bits.
It's basically Darwin at this point, yeah, open source, but in no way shape or form if you build Darwin, do you get Mac OS.
(I see the full 11 hour deposition is also on YouTube, but I think I'll save that for another day.)
So far, being 10 minutes in, I see a little bit of what you mean, but I haven't gotten to anything "unhinged" yet. He just seems like a bit of a smug nerd who's clearly enjoying going toe-to-toe with one of the country's top lawyers.
Do you remember anything that jumped out for you from the deposition? I'd love to see more of what you're getting at.
But despite that, let's not gloss over about what MS did. If they had been successful there wouldn't have been one web, there would have been two: One for MS (ActiveX and proprietary MS extensions) and one for MacOS/Linux/Netscape/Mozilla/Opera etc. This would have been part of their "Embrace/Extend/Extinguish" strategy they were known for at the time.
i woudl have agreed with you in the past but when I was curous and went back through all the cases I was surprised to see that I think (from a technical perspective) MSFT was completely right to do what they want, and the main issue was that they simply didn't understand how to win a case in court.
Microsoft insisted that the OS needed the internet explorer executable, not only the rendering engine components. You couldn't even run windows update without it opening IE - in order to load a native ActiveX component that then performed the work. They where desperate to make everything depend on IE without a plan of how to make good use of it, which shouldn't be surprising, back then any complex use of IE would have blue screened the entire system.
> vindicating Microsoft's technical decision.
Imagine a ChromeOS based on IE5 and tell me why I shouldn't break down in hysterical laughter just thinking about it.
I said it vindicating their decision- not that IE was a good foundation to build a presentation layer on.
> then insisting the OS
Arguing that a change that had no technical merit made IE necessary, when you are under scrunity for abusing your market position to push IE, seems kinda counterproductive.
> I said it vindicating their decision- not that IE was a good foundation to build a presentation layer on.
Then how does chrome OS vindicate them? You obviously agree that IE was not fit for that purpose.
If an EU company did similar it might not be hit so hard (which would be hypocritical). But that doesn't make this action (a fine for obviously anticompetitive action) in bad faith, so much as it would make the other (lack of fine) so.
Have you any evidence, numerical or otherwise, to substantiate your assertion?
And guess what, most of those big tech abusers are American.
But if it helps with anything, it doesn't look too kindly upon Chinese companies, either.
It can't really do much about European big tech companies since there aren't that many left... and they're in enterprise markets where things work completely differently (enterprises can sue you themselves very efficiently if they're disadvantaged, thank you very much).
And this is EU, which mostly does have them as top priority.
Windows phones tried the Apple approach if I remember correctly when their phones were on the market and it wasn't enough to keep them competitive. They had a litany of other issues to boot, but taking the "walled garden" approach raised the ire of many developers.
this does not look at all even close to a monopoly from Apple.
As far as I see their power in Europe comes from the fact that competition is following them in some decisions.
Would this not simply kill the kind of integration that Apple has between its different services? Or any of the smart assistants?
The point is, the alternative scenario involves more actors making different choices.
Firefox OS and webOS are still around under different names, which are Capyloon [1] and LuneOS respectively [2].
I wonder which of these projects is most active at this time.
If you look at Google's hardware's capabilities, Android would have flopped immediately.
As bad as the org level issues were with Windows Phone, it would have still beaten Android-on-Google-hardware-only.
I wonder without AOSP or some other major FOSS mobile operating system to shake things up, if smartphones would be more like the PDA industry in the 1990s, with proprietary OS's from OEMs competing with each other. Maybe Palm sticks around and webOS gets a long lease on life. Maybe Samsung, Intel, the Linux Foundation, and co. try to get mass adoption of Tizen, with hilarious results. Though perhaps if Nokia sticks around, MeeGo as based on the Harmattan design in the N9 gets wider use, delaying the need for a successor like Tizen. In any case, with only Apple and Microsoft as their mobile competitors and without Android devices cutting at their margins, BlackBerry still has a fighting chance.
The other possible alternative is Palm WebOS, but I think they were too Apple-like for their own good. The key differentiators that helped Android succeed as an iPhone alternative (wide device variety, more "open" platform) apply much more easily to Windows Phone.
Not to mention BlackBerry and webOS still being contenders.
Apple has lots of partners, but Foxconn and Pegatron make phones for many companies.
I think today's ruling reflects this, as much of it has to do with how Google handles the licensing of their proprietary Android bits.
I think in this alternate universe, Windows Phone may have actually succeeded.
Imagine Google had gone the Apple route of vertically integrating handset production, distribution and sale in the same way Apple did. If they had, there would be no antitrust issue, just like there isn't with Apple.
That seems weird.
How is having third-party manufacturers (well, really it's just Samsung now) create more antitrust issues than the Apple model? That just doesn't seem right.
Much like when Jobs called up all the book publishers and told them straight up "we gotta agree on one price among us, and remember we are doing this to harm Amazon who we both hate". Now this was a slam dunk prosecution!
Differing relationships come with differing obligations. It appears fairly straightforward that its illegal in Europe to impose such obligations on other market players. If they couldn't abide by that they could have declined to do business in the continent. It's not really weird that different places have different rules.
Kinda like how Uber was forced to accept they were an employer because they dictated work hours to drivers. Google is being forced to accept they have the potential to be a monopoly, and have abused that.
Android made a two-player competition better, but it did so at the expenses of other competing OSs which could not gains foothold.
It's practically the story of BeOS vs Windows.
So they haven't paid this fine for over four years now and there is no penalty for it? Just because they have deep enough pockets to afford expensive lawyers? I am sure not having to pay those four billion in fines for over four years more than pays the cost of these lawyers even if they eventually have to pay this fine, right?
I mean I am glad to see a big fine like this but surely the fines must go up every day it is left unpaid.
Are you sure EU has "pretty good track record" with these fines of Google, FB, et al.? If anything, I'd say the EU puts a mild theatre every now and then, and gives the US giants a free pass otherwise.
Europe needs to make sure these tech giants get to keep just enough money that they don't pull out of europe entirely, but not much more.
Big fines are a start, but a better approach is taxation, since that takes away the regulatory risk for the companies.
Companies should obey the laws first and foremost. I'm not sure there's a lot of regulatory risk either; Google certainly has enough lawyers to know that what they did was illegal.
One such law for example forbids fake reviews.
Google creates profiles for small businesses, invites everyone to anonymously say whatever they want about business and rate it.
Then they list advertisement from competitors next to it.
Their solution for the public shaming contest is that you should send more <s>customers</s> people to google to review your business and of course purchase adds.
The law says that if you want to do reviews of any kind you must be able to prove the review is from someone who purchased a product or service. The fines are in % of global revenue. Google could have some legal talking point if they allowed business to disable it.
We didn't know wont fly.
>Are you sure EU has "pretty good track record" with these fines of Google, FB, et al.?
I'm also a European. But unfortunately resident in UK. So all those benefits and more are now lost to me. Still. At least we showed Johnny Foreigner who's boss, eh?
Probably because I work in tech in the US, but that has not been my view.
What was the fine that the EU put on VW for intentionally cheating on emissions standards? And how does that compare with the many fines Google has gotten?
Not that it's relevant to Google...
EU regulator powers operate with an honestly fairly limited scope based on the laws passed by parliament and the commission. There's no EPA like organisation with broad powers to persue companies for most forms of misbehaviour like there is in the US - that's left to the member states, with countries like Germany and Italy individually prosecuting Volkswagen executives for fraud.
The difference with GDPR and anti-trust violations is that the EU has been deliberately granted the power to exact severe fines on companies for each individual offence. If post-scandal Volkswagen had been caught falsifying emissions again and again (similiar to Google's repeated GDPR violations) they might have been hit with more and more fines of the severity that Google has.
Like VW had an unfair advantage over other (non-EU) car companies because they didn't meet the standards.
The reality is that they didn't want to hurt VW that much because it is an important EU company. Same reason the US fined the crap out of them -- but would have been lenient on Ford in the same circumstances.
This is normal stuff. I was just responding to the idea that the EU was "too soft" on US tech companies.
Not everything in this world revolves around you.
We have a ton of VC capital. Can we use this to price dump our way into the market or to do slightly illegal or very illegal things covered in great UI/UX/XD so that some consumers are our own side, and by the time they ban us, we're too big too fail and fines we get are lower than our profits?
Examples: Uber, Airbnb, LinkedIn, ...
That means every device manufacturer will claim, even if the law requires that devices must all have the same plug, that a competitors device drew too much current, or charged their battery too fast/too slow/at too a low a temperature, and thats why performance sucks.
In reality, these technical problems could be solved - but device manufacturers will make the small hurdle into a big one when explaining why they can't all standardize.
Many of the packs that I've seen the inside of has balancing circuitry included.
Also worth considering these packs are charged separate from the tool. So this means the tool cannot control the charge rate etc.
Lastly, based on my luddite eyes, the difference between makita, milwaukee, bosch, dewalt and ryobi batteries seem to me to only be a different keying in the plastic mating parts. This suspicion is amplified when you consider that some of these brands are made by the same company.
(probably less-than-average usage patterns as we are lazy house owners; stored inside, not abused)
>Lastly, based on my luddite eyes, the difference between makita, milwaukee, bosch, dewalt and ryobi batteries seem to me to only be a different keying in the plastic mating parts
I'd like to see the EU designate a common battery interface for all newly manufactured tools & batteries. That way we could buy the best tool for the job each time, instead of being locked into using whatever the Blue, Yellow, Red or Green team are fielding in that area.
The manufacturers would doubtless also produce their own adaptors to allow their existing tools & batteries to work with this new 'One Interface to Rule Them All'
All of the large format packs have pins for each cell, so charging with a standard balance charger is pretty easy. You can find plenty of schematics for homemade controllers online. Where they differ however, are the other pins. Some use a communication protocol like SMBUS. Some have dedicated pins for specific things like overcurrent or temperature. It varies highly from manufacturer to manufacturer.
AFAIK, all tool brands are moving to communication protocols for the packs.
[EDIT] Someone mentioned adapters. I don't believe there are adapters that support newer communicating packs (e.g. the OEM chargers won't work with the adapter). Older packs are all analog, so conversion is just a simple matter of rerouting the pins.
Also, I've mentioned this on hn before, there is already the Cordless Alliance, which does exactly this.
Sadly, there's only a couple of useful-in-a-mainstream-sense brands in there: Mafell and Metabo. The rest are very niche.
Good on Metabo for doing it, and good on Mafell for signing up to use them. The smaller brands it's a no-brainer I guess.
Personally I'd be happy for that situation because of the big upside, but I can see why a company would not want it.
Plus, the most logical thing to do is not make a new standard, but pick an existing one. But who gets to be the golden brand whose battery system remains unchanged?
I would love it to happen but I can't see it happening for a while.
The first one to make all relevant patents & designs available royalty-free.
Perhaps part of a battery standardisation push could include making these available at a reasonable price.
Edit: One of the companies has a slightly less obnoxious website which also lists brands[1]
Metabo (the one I know for their powertools, though Fischer is famous for their dowels and Edding for their markers) is known for drills as well as gardening power tools. I think this is more a non-consumer area (though Metabo certainly dabbles in consumer devices)
The only name I recognize there is Bosch, I've never had any of their tools but my perception is that they are a mid-tier brand. It would be great to see players like DeWalt, Milwaukee, and Makita do something like this.
Although it's not the most important thing in the world, forcing standardization through law is the opposite of giving consumers choices.
Standardisation of the former means we don't have to have half a dozen sockets on the wall because every domestic appliance manufacturer uses a different design plug... or have each of those sockets provide a different voltage because every appliance manufacturer opted for a different voltage.
Standardisation of the latter leads to waiting 15 years for your Trabant.
Case in point: The enforced standardising of mobile phone chargers has given consumers more choice of chargers to use with their phone. Thas proven quite useful in practice, e.g. when they leave the one that came with their device at home because they didn't expect to need it, or when the manufacturer's own brand is more expensive than an alternative, or if they have an old phone.
I remember before USB-C standardised phone power, when visiting someone the chance that they had a power supply you could use was very low, because each one used a different connector. Even different models from the same brand. If you went travelling at short notice, you might have to buy a second charger just to keep you going for a few days. That's no longer required. Over the years you would end up with a box full of incompatible chargers, all e-waste. I think I have about 10.
This particular consumer benefit didn't happen voluntarily among manufacturers (unlike, say, SIM cards), so forcing it has increased consumer choice in some useful respects.
I prefer Apple's lightning connector (even though I don't have an iPhone), and other connectors better than USB-C would surely emerge if allowed to, so I do see benefits in not enforcing a standard like that too strictly. But the situation before USB-C mobile power was less consumer choice not more, for consumers of almost every phone.
You gain choice of charger to use with your phone, which most people do want, especially when outside their home.
You will still have phones that come with “standard USB C” cables where some support different power delivery, data speeds (or not support data transfer at all), very few will support video over USB C (which is standardized), etc.
So still when the Android user with the cheap power only USB C cord moves over to the hypothetical iPhone 15 with USB C, they will still have to throw away their USB C cable that potentially doesn’t support high speed data or video over USB C. Both supported by todays iPads with USB C.
If the same mandate had gone through when it was first proposed, we would have been stuck with micro USB.
Except that it's still a perfectly fine cable for charging, which is what most people do with their cables?
If iPhone users were satisfied with the least common denominator, they would be buying cheap Android phones.
The lowest common denominator is the same reason that Bluetooth outside of the Apple ecosystem is such a shit show.
Android has supported its own proprietary video over micro USB for ages before USB C became more ubiquitous. What are the chances that Android manufactures won’t cheap out and not ship with cables that can support video over USB?
and I am probably overestimating by order of magnitude.
Most people shoot photos and show them to their friends online. Some of them even share it through sites like Instagram and Facebook or WhatsApp and similar.
And that is where it ends for most normal people.
As long as the cable can charge the phone, it will do for the most buyers.
I know the "standard setup" shown in media, and advertisements, etc shows a ring light with a cellphone using the front facing camera as the recording device, that's just not technologically feasible.
And for the record, i move 4k and/or 108MP images from my phones via wifi or cellular, using synology diskstation autosync or syncthing, respectively. I've used syncthing to upload unedited 4k30p drone footage with no issues, and when i get home, it will sync to hard disks in addition.
Will that “standard” USB C cable that comes with my Beats Flex headphones charge my iPhone 12 Pro Max? My Anker battery?
You're letting perfect be the enemy of good here.
Also I think the ideal endgame is that your Beats Flex headphones don't come with cables at all because of standardization. Look at Apple (and most phone manufacturers) no longer packaging chargers.
And even the cheapest power only USB cables with the cheapest USB power supply provides "standard" 5V power. If your device doesn't accept that, isn't that a problem with your Macbook and not the cable?
The USB standard is fine until the unsuspecting consumer who left the USB C cord to his MacBook Pro 16 goes to a random drug store to pick up a standard “USB C” cable and wonders why their laptop is still going dead after a few hours of heavy use not knowing the cord is incapable of delivering 100W of power.
Or the hypothetical iPhone 16 user goes to the same store because he wants to watch video on his TV and buys a “standard” USB C cable and finds out that the cable doesn’t support video over USB C - which is part of the standard.
Not to mention the unsuspecting tourist who wants to back up the pictures and video from his phone to his computer so he won’t incur roaming charges and finds out the USB C cable he purchased is power only.
Basic cables support 60.
It's unfortunate when cables don't say their Gbps, but that's a different issue.
Most likely yes, unless it's a non-compliant cable in the first place, and possibly at a reduced speed (60W max).
>Will that “standard” USB C cable that comes with my Beats Flex headphones charge my iPhone 12 Pro Max? My Anker battery?
Ignoring that iPhones don't have USB C, yes to both at the fastest charge rate available.
Only times where you have to worry about a cable with USB-C when charging is if charging power exceeds 60W or the cable is optical. Above 60W you need marked cables, some go up to 100W, and some (will, not seen in the wild yet) go up to 240W. There are plans to deprecate the 100W tier as well.
You'll notice weirdness with anything that speaks a different language, i think USB defaults to power delivery, which is 5V @ 2.5A - or whatever. If your charger speaks the same protocol as your device, it will get as much power as it can through whatever cable you use.
this doesn't speak to other comments about "high speed USB C" - i have plenty of power delivery cables that do decent wattage but cannot transfer data, it doesn't even beep the computer when you plug something in to it.
Ryobi should not be praised for failure to innovate. They did not do this out of a desire to preserve compatibility, but rather out of cheapness.
Ryobi products are low end but they have innovated plenty while maintaining compatibility. Given that TTI has access to the pro market via other brands, and Ryobi geared for homeowners, I don't see this as anything but a win for the average Ryobi customer.
I have cordless tools across a number of battery platforms and while it's convenient when they can be shared, it's ultimately not a big deal to have a few if another company makes a better tool. Tradespeople won't lock themselves in if the right tool is on a different platform.
Right, but home users will. I have 5 Ryobi One+ batteries, so there's no way I'll buy a battery-operated tool from a different brand, even if the tool itself is better/cheaper than the equivalent Ryobi product.
>Right, but home users will.
The charger cost about £70 and the 3 batteries I have were a similar price, each. So, for me, changing brands for a particular tool would mean an outlay of 'Price of Tool' + 'Price of Charger' + Price of n Batteries' which just isn't worth it, unless the rival company's tool was 2 or 3 times as good as the Makita offering.
I've sometimes thought that maybe Metabo, DeWalt or Milwaukee's version of a certain tool I wanted was slightly better than Makita's one. But, as I say, not twice or three times as good, to justify that kind of outlay.
So, like quite a few people commenting here, I'm kind of stuck with supporting the blue team now --even when they occasionally get outplayed by their opponents.
There's a reason Milwaukee, Makita, DeWalt, AEG, and Bosch, are wildly popular.
They're almost entirely indistinguishable. We also have some Hilti branded cordless tools, also fine.
My personal preference for home use is something like Ryobi One+ or Ozito PXC (less than half the price of the One+) because I'm actually at work all day using power and cordless tools supplied by work, I don't plan on taking my home tools to three or four hundred commercial construction sites or building 1000 houses with them.
Tool brand preference is, in my opinion, largely a sport-like
We should all be glad that didn't happen with micro-USB or some of the worse connectors years ago, because we would still be stuck with them. USB-C was innovated by the market, not by EU bureaucrats.
Curious/out of the loop: any (unbiased?) examples?
To be sure the company won't be in trouble financially, their global revenue can cover the fine, but that doesn't stop the EU from potentially being a net loss for the company going forward. Abandoning the EU would be a drastic step, though. It's going to be interesting to see how they adapt to this. Another fine on this scale and I think they will pull out.
Google definitely wants to stay in this market, but I don't think the EU has as much leverage as they think.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-news-re-opens-spai...
Disclaimer: I work for Google in an unrelated product. Opinions are my own.
It's often very open to interpretation what constitutes a market, what constitutes bundling, what constitutes dominance, what constitutes monopoly, what even constitutes a product. There's neither such a thing as clear-cut definitions, nor even common sense (since different people's common sense can be diametrically opposed).
It's things as basic as: is a Sony Walkman with headphones one product or two? What's the difference between Sony requiring you to buy headphones together with the tape player, or Android requiring Google to be the default search? Is "portable cassette player with headphones" a single market, or are "portable cassette players" and "headphones" separate markets?
There's no such thing as "just follow EU regulations". Google and other observers can genuinely believe it's following them, while a specific EU court and yet other observers can genuinely believe it's breaking them.
Sony and headphones together with tape player ... there's a synergy there, when they can sell them together, it's a small one though. (Selling two pieces of hardware together generates more turnover with one transaction.)
With Android requiring Google to be the default search ... in comparison to the headphones there's a huge synergy here, I'd say. Collecting data (via non search software on the Android phone) and adding to it more data from search, makes all data more valuable in a very non-linear way. With the tape player I'd say it's more linear.
So for me, the search data is a quite obvious non-neutrality issue.
When I read the example though, I immediately thought it didn't quite ring true. So I tried to explain to myself why and came up with what I wrote.
Even though there are obviously many examples one could give, where it'd indeed be difficult to see a difference, I didn't want to let this specific example go unchallenged. Why? Because it is so close to the actual topic (Google).
Because of the tying of third-parties, I don't think that this is an equivalent comparison. This is more like going into the record store (since we're going back to the 80s with our Walkman) and finding that you think the Walkman comes with garbage headphones. So you pick up a Panasonic player and the headphones you want. Then you pick up a couple of tapes that you wanted to listen to, get to the counter, and the store owner explains that those albums are on the BMG label, so he can't sell them to you. In fact, he can't sell any Sony Music group cassettes unless you own those shitty Sony headphones, because if he does, Sony Music won't let him sell any more Sony Music albums in his store.
> We are disappointed that the Court did not annul the decision in full. Android has created more choice for everyone, not less, and supports thousands of successful businesses in Europe and around the world.
s/Android/Windows/ and s/Europe/USA/ and it could be Microsoft at the end of the antitrust case in the 90s.
Same way IE did back when Microsoft provided it for "free".
Of course that definition is very peculiar. I was doubtful that it would stick but apparently it did.
This is fascinating that a regulator can define market as “users of YOUR_PRODUCT excluding all competitors you thought AND across the world EXCEPT the very place where everything is made”.
Now that it has stuck, it would change the dynamics of business. It started with tech but its going to trickle down :)
Apparently, "three strikes and you're out" only applies to individuals, who with a repeat offense of this magnitude would have their lives destroyed by the justice system, and get locked away for a decade or more.
Do you mean "too difficult" or "too bigger punishment"? Either way, I disagree. If they reap the reward of huge salaries, they ought to take some of the risks.
... but I suppose you're right about more mundane, non-government-sanctioned crimes.
The cost of going after those companies is ridiculous already, once they are proven guilty, it would be simpler if we could punish the company as a person, than to find a real person to punish. After all, companies are very happy to be persons for other legal purposes.
Make it illegal not to have a "custody trace" of how a decision came to be. Even if the CEO came up with it in the shower, for the thing to be implemented, it has to come across a lot of individuals. Make them having to keep all of that data around, and required to disclose how something came to be in case it's revealed as unlawful.
No, what should instead be done is prevent the existence of these megacorporations which have disproportionate influence on humanity in the first place. Prevent them to form and chop up the existing ones aggressively into smaller ones.
Guilt by association is not acceptable in a first world country. You don't go to jail if your brother commits a crime, you shouldn't go to jail if your company commits a crime. You only go to jail if you commit a crime.
Staw man. The only way that is comparable is if you oversaw your brothers career and received part of his income... if he then committed a crime (from which you benefited), then yes, you could be held part accountable.
Execs are not merely "associated", they are responsible and receive excessive compensation directly derived from the actions of the organisation they oversee. If a corporate crime is committed on their watch they could be held accountable, if not through direct involvement, through negligence - allowing it to take place by not exerting enough oversight or management... to say otherwise would be similar to allowing people to drive cars negligently killing people without consequence, the analogy is not exact, since the car (the organisation) is not purely mechanical and has some degree of autonomy which is where these matters are not cut and dry, and those would be the finer points of a case exploring whether an individual subverted reasonable oversight or not - in the inexact analogy you could say, whether one of the wheels decided to ignore instructions, or whether the driver (exec) wasn't event bothering to steer.
Companies would then have to get their things in order quickly, and win back the trust. A very effective deterrent.
Imagine Google being out of the EU market for 3 months. How many youtubers would try and publish their videos on other plateforms? That would open competitions. People would boo google everytime they suck because they would fear for themself.
It would create pain right now, but a sane pressure that would force companies to stop playing with fire because they know they can't get a bad burn.
The world could tolerate YouTube being gone for a while.
What about Android though? Is the entire world supposed to replace their phone while Play Services are down, and Android isn't getting security updates?
What about GCP? How many businesses are also going to be shut down when GCP suddenly stops working? They might migrate, but that's not something you can do overnight.
What about Gmail? Email communications would be shattered for a while, since so many people will need a new email provider and will have to distribute that out. God forbid anyone forgot their password and can't reset it because Gmail doesn't work.
What about G Suite? Do all these other businesses just suddenly lose access to their documents? That would royally screw a lot of businesses.
You can't "just" shut down Google without a whole host of second-order effects.
so too big to fail. Like with banks, they should be allowed to do anything with impunity and we should use taxpayer money to bail them out when they fuck up?
E.g. we could simply seize all profits for 3 months, so Google sees no profit but the world can keep spinning. We could fine them a % of their cash holdings, if we wanted to. We could force them to split off lines of business so we don't have to worry about a catastrophic failure if we do need to kill the whole business.
I just don't think suddenly shutting them down is the right move. There are ways to punish them with far less collateral damage.
What do you think inflation is ? Their externalities being taxed on the population. Since we have to pay no matter what, at least they should feel it too.
This is probably still a multi-billion dollar cost when spread across the economy. There are going to be tens of thousands of workers who now have to work on migrating off Gmail/GCP/GSuite rather than doing anything actually productive. A migration like that is usually a multi-year effort, involving huge man-hour expenditures.
We could just set a fine equal to their profit for X months and accomplish roughly the same thing without upending half the businesses in the world.
> What do you think inflation is ? Their externalities being taxed on the population. Since we have to pay no matter what, at least they should feel it too.
Inflation is a decrease in the value of currency, and the causes are not well-understood. Pinning it on Google is pretty spurious. We had low inflation through years of Google doing shady things. I can't ascribe a cause to inflation, but I can pretty confidently say that Google doing shady things isn't the major cause.
That would immediately force them to comply.
Edit: Although looking at that and this fine, if you own $1000 of google shares, you would owe $3…
That would be a complete detriment to one of the greatest innovations in financing: Seperation of capital and responsibility. When you buy a stock you know you can not loose more than the stocks value, so you dare to invest.
Also, would bond holders also be burdened with this? what about derivatives?
You invest in bad actors and want to make money with it? Well you should pay the consequences for that.
Unless you fine the company enough for it to go into bankruptcy in which case the shareholders are protected by limited liability and the creditors take the hit instead. But the bankruptcy angle is completely irrelevant to this case, none of the fines considered are close yo bankrupting Google.
If a country violates international sanctions, should I be sent to The Hauge because I have bonds tied to the bridges and roads being built by that government?
To put it another way: If a restaurant is shut down for health code violations found in the kitchen, should the valet be lectured about proper food preparation?
Realistically speaking, I don't see many politicians supporting this kind of change. I'm not even thinking of the issues around corruption, but merely the knowledge that hurting that company would in turn, also impact their own economy in the process.
Imagine if no business of a nation were searchable in Google for a 4 year period. It would be devastating.
Similarly, there are a lot of physical consequences to consider as well. If you lock out a company like Apple or Coke from operating in a country, suddenly there are a lot of related issues.
If Apple could not operate in a specific nation for a set amount of time, suddenly any stores they have would presumably be closed. This would impact customers ability to get their devices repaired. I would also have to assume that all employees at each of those locations would be fired, leaving a sudden glut of unemployment, impacting people who had nothing to do with the situation.
If Coke were to be banned for some set amount of time, it would make a lot of weird cases around things like Vending Machines and Grocery stores. The company might not be marketing or selling their products to distributors, but those distributors might still be selling that product. Once their stock ran out, if they were to attempt to purchase more from the company in a nearby country, who would be at fault? Coke, or the distributor?
I imagine it would create a ton of issues with other things, like agreements to pay X amount of money over time. Stock trading would be another big one, not just in individual stocks, but in mutual funds and ETFs that might be heavily invested in that company. In one sense, it might make investors and day traders more weary and discerning from who they decide to trade with, but trying to figure out which company is breaking which laws, and how likely they are to get caught doing it, is practically impossible to determine, without inside knowledge on the matter.
What would that even mean? If you aren't allowed to participate in the Maps business for, let's say, 2 years, does that mean you cannot offer the app for download? Then everybody stays on the old version, and cannot install security updates.
Or that you cannot offer it as a new install? Then people changing their phones are screwed.
Or that you cannot offer new maps? Then people rely on the old ones, running into permanently closed roads.
Or that your servers must immediately stop serving map tiles? Customer's won't be very happy about that either.
That you cannot make any revenue from the service? Kinda hard to do when your service is maps, but the revenue source is ads.
And so on, ad infinitum.
Consumers tend to switch apps pretty quickly, but what about b2b software? Switching over to a database from another vendor can easily be a 3 to 5 years project, so it's likely that many customers would simply sit out such a jail time.
I would love this, but there are so many irritating practical problems with it that I'd prefer we expand the cases where we can "pierce the corporate veil"; we should absolutely shield people from personal liability from good-faith failures when we work for a company, but when we see fraud, wage theft, and so on, we should be a great deal more willing to chase personal liability for decision-makers.
Something that's driven a big change in safety culture in New Zealand was allowing certain types of health and safety prosecutions to proceed against individuals, so that (for example) a site manager who decides that start-of-day hazard briefings on a building site are a waste of 15 minutes can be fined or even imprisoned if someone ends up hurt as a result.
There's even judges who love baseball so much they quote it in opinions lol.
I don't know enough about New Zealand politics to know if those parties have a chance of actually doing so.
[1] I say sadly, less because I like the current government, and more because they seem desperate to import Bannon-esque culture war nonsense like attacking women's rights.
And not even to all criminal charges. Three strike laws usually apply only to felonies.
In a company with as many independent lines of business as Google has it's possible to have multiple instances of anti-trust enforcement that don't look like "we already fined you but you're continuing with the prohibited behavior", and the Android, Ads, and Shopping cases do all look really different. Plus they're covering overlapping time periods, which limits how much the regulator can say "you should have listened to us before".
(Disclosure: I used to work at Google)
> Under RICO, a person who has committed "at least two acts of racketeering activity" drawn from a list of 35 crimes (27 federal crimes and eight state crimes) within a 10-year period can be charged with racketeering if such acts are related in one of four specified ways to an "enterprise." Those found guilty of racketeering can be fined up to $25,000 and sentenced to 20 years in prison per racketeering count. In addition, the racketeer must forfeit all ill-gotten gains and interest in any business gained through a pattern of "racketeering activity."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeer_Influenced_and_Corru...
The Wikipedia article also lists a few famous cases.
Did it? I can choose between an iOS phone and an Android phone.
I may be able to choose from different manufacturers on the Android side, but on the software side there are just two options.
Mobile OS: iOS Android (third options from Korea/China?)
Hardware: iPhone Pixel Galaxy etc.
(Press at the time: https://www.theregister.com/2013/08/16/windows_phone_youtube... )
ReVanced is a WIP set of tools to patch Youtube and other apps - https://github.com/revanced
Vanced and Iceraven (Firefox with more addons enabled) are two of the main things keeping me on Android.
More broadly, that was also the time Microsoft was going after Android OEMs - never Google directly - threatening them with a secret list of patents that Android allegedly infringed[1]. The settlement almost always resulted in the OEM agreeing to manufacture Windows phones (HTC and Samsung, off the top of my head). As an outsider, it appeared to be part of a mobile marketshare shadow war.
1. I'm guessing to prevent invalidation or work-arounds.
I was around when Project Astoria almost saw the light of day and I assume Google came back to shoot it down in a similar way (which would be really nice karma given MS patent story)
Now that I work in Software I get it. Most companies are just really bad at making it.
Previously, we would switch from Nokia to Sony we would lose our ringtones, our games, our apps, our photos, etc. When each phone operator had their own operating system, it was honestly terrible.
And honestly, shoehorning privacy into a conversation about choices in phones is a poor show. Feel ashamed.
Also, I care about hardware... when it matters. Sell me a keyboard slider, the DROID 4 was the last compelling reason to care about hardware and we've all been bored senseless since.
My cell carrier has a non-precise idea of where it is, but may not be able to tie it conclusively to my identity.
Also, they will almost certainly be able to tie it to your identity even on a burner phone by who you contact. If you have a contract then obivously they will tie it. If you have a pay as you go and make payments via non cash methods then that will be tied. Cash payments and the location you made them from will help conclusively tie it to your identity with a half decent amount of work.
You are able to disable gps hardware on some Android phones. But as previously noted, no matter who your phone manufacturer is, it is a tracking device.
What do you mean by "just two options"?
The AOSP ecosystem has a healthy range of ROMs to choose from on many devices. The process of installing alternative firmware may not be for everyone, but the choice is there, which is pretty much nonexistent for iOS devices.
>The AOSP ecosystem has a healthy range of ROMs to choose from on many devices.
Same for Android flavors for that matter.
Compared to what?
Apple?
>But that's not Google's fault. They can't make Samsung have brilliant ideas about how to rearchitect the OS core.
Here's one example: text editing on mobile. I'm sure I'm not the only person who finds this excruciating. Especially things like selecting text / copy & pasting etc. And, it's 2022 and we still have no 'undo' function. But, every single variant of Android [and iOS] uses the same horribly flawed text editing functionality. Do any of the eleventy-billion 'alternative' versions of Android address any of this? Of course not. It's so much easier to throw a new skin on top of the same old crap than to actually innovate and make real changes.
One of anticompetitive restrictions identified was:
> ‘anti-fragmentation agreements’, under which the operating licences necessary for the pre-installation of the Google Search and Play Store apps could be obtained by mobile device manufacturers only if they undertook not to sell devices running versions of the Android operating system not approved by Google;
So no, Samsung can't just fork AOSP.
Either way, you're still going to have 2 operating systems: Android and iOS.
The diversity of *nix based OSes are a testament to what could happen in the absence of monopolistic powers.
If it weren’t for Google’s stranglehold, Android probably would already be #2 to a fork made by Samsung.
You mean how they all died and Linux became king?
The market cannot support diversity of operating systems -- users will flock to where the applications are and developers flock to where the users are. Only a small number of choices are ever sustainable.
If Android disappeared tomorrow and 10 operating systems were designed to replace it eventually there would be only 1 or 2 surviving.
If Samsung forked Android it will still need to run Android apps and therefore be Android. That's pretty much exactly what they do now.
There’s no technological reason that you can’t run popular Android apps on other OSes. Other OSes already support running Android apps. The primary reason this isn’t more common is anticompetitive.
Someone built an app for Nokia Symbian phones and released it with O2 UK? Well, go to hell if you had Sony Ericsson Symbian phone because that phones Symbian was incompatible on API level with the Nokia, despite having the same OS. You could even have the same Nokia, but good luck if yours had the T-Mobile DE bloatware and their own store with their own profit sharing deals.
Google enforces compatibility between Android phones with CDD/CTS/VTS which ensures that the phones support a consistent set of working APIs that application devs can rely on.
Before CTS/CDD/VTS tests grew enough, we Android devs had hellova time making sure our apps worked across Samsungs, LGs, Nokias and whatnot.
EU attacking Google for ensuring the Android ecosystem is actually compatible is just ensuring that Apple will dominate with it's lack of choice in the mobile market. The fact that EU officials excluded Apple from consideration of how mobile markets work is telling just how disconnected from reality they are. Apple swept away all the old competitors BECAUSE it didn't have the fragmented mess of lacking cross-device, cross-region and cross-carrier compatibility.
And just to be clear - I'm not against EU issuing out fines to big tech (god knows I've defended that a lot of times), but in this case it's actively toxic for us Europeans.
Android allows hundreds of companies to have a business and make millions or billions, many of which are in EU and wouldn't exist if Android had gone the Apple way.
I'm very happy every time they manage to give a slap on the wrist of these monopolies
[1082B for 2014-2020, 4B/1082B*6y~2.2%]
A loss of 4B is a decrease of revenue by 1.5% for google.
[googles revenue was 256B in 2021 4/256~1.5%]
Did you mean the budget of the EU itself? It's about what you said (180B€ in 2022). Of course, that doesn't account for individual member States' budgets. The EU's budget is dwarfed by the aggregate of all members' budgets, and it is lower than most of the big EU countries' budgets.
EDIT: I guess I offended some French people, hence the downvotes :)
Now that the UK is out of the Union, it would be nice for sanity to prevail and most of those translators be made redundant. Except for drafting official multi-language legal documents, the bulk of the proceedings can go on in English, and EMPs that require translation services should request them from their own countries.
It will never happen, but one can surely dream.
But only legislative text needs to have translated versions officially recognized as equivalent. The rest can be produced and published in English, and member countries can translate them as required, if necessary. It's a huge expense that exists only to placate French linguistic nationalism.
For companies this would completely fine. For a government this is not.
Apart from that, there is right now a huge source of text that is publicly available and already translated into the same X languages, with a huge quality to boost. People have teached ML translators with that text source. Ofc this is just a side effect but these translations have made other translations and communication in the EU a bit more simple just by being such a big reference.
> In [2014], the European Court of Auditors (ECA) carried out a further analysis of the potential savings if all meetings were held in Brussels, following a request from the Parliament. Their estimate of the cost of the monthly move is 113.800.000 euro.
(From an EJTA fact checking website, which labeled a separate 200MM euro number as "mostly false" https://eufactcheck.eu/factcheck/mostly-false-travelling-cir...)
Yes.
But I have to recognise, they could - at least - hand out "free" train tickets to most of the Parliament staff. Not just between Brussels and Strasbourg, but everywhere in the EU.
So another way to look at this is 21% of profits in Europe for a year.
In fact, I’d argue these rules the EU enforces are counter productive. Manufacturers should fork android and band together and create their own App Store. Google will either cede their position or we’ll have a viable, growing third ecosystem.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/25/22996248/apple-sideloadin...
So yes, a manufacturer could ship a phone with a de-Googled LineageOS. But they cannot today ship a phone with Play Store, but without Chrome, etc.
Play Services is required by a majority of android apps and developping and maintening a compatible system layer is just out of reach of most(all?) device makers.
Ultimately Google will always have control over android if what you’re saying is true unless an alternative ecosystem is created
This changes nothing about if google's behavior was illegally tying two products together.
You are bringing up a non-sequitor that does not change the law.
> unless an alternative ecosystem is created
That can’t happen while Google is free to do anything to crush potential competitors (they’re also found bullying makers out of bundling stuff like third party stores on their phones, and the chinese makers seem to be the only ones getting away with it), so the only way out is basically to lawsuit the hell out of the situation.
Wikipedia has more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitrust_cases_against_Google...
> In October 2018 Google revamped how it would distribute its Google Play Store with Android in the future: Charging a licensing fee for the store, without requiring installation of Google apps, but making it free to pre-install the Google apps if they want.
> Furthermore, Google's hardware partners will be allowed to market devices in the EU that run rival versions of Android or other operating systems.
> In March 2019 Google announced that it will give European users of Android phones an option of which browser and search engine they want on their phone at the time of purchase to further comply with the EU's decision.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/18/17580694/google-android-e...
Basically dirty stuff we all knew Google was doing, but kept getting away with until then
Speeding tickets are costlier than this in many jurisdictions.
Quite lucrative.
Holy shit.
Is it some sign of being on HN too much?
Sure, 1.45% is small, because % is shitty at representing the real value at this point
at the end of the day it's fucking $4 000 000 000
It's year salary of 2200 well paid engineers
That's industry-changing level of possibilities
I wanted to have 150k per person, thus "well-paid".
This way it is even more ridiculous since
4 000 000 000 / 150 000 = 26 666 engineers!
but, 1.8 mil is definitely well paid!
Repeated violations from them should be in the significant multi-billions, much higher than this generous discount of a fine that the EU is asking for. This proves that they will do it again and won't change until the fines get higher than $10B.
Banks going bankrupt is their own fault entirely. It's a "you had one job" kind of thing.
If you want to find someone who is bad at managing your money and somehow breaks the law at the same time, a bank is apparently your best bet.
And it's $4B after 4 years since the beginning of the investigation, a tiny increase to an already massive EU budget.
You run another app and it gets killed in the background, not receiving messages, because it's not on the list of your phone manufacturer partners.
This is the situation with degoogled Android today - a huge compatibility mess.
The exclusive app stores are both iOS and Android's greatest strengths and failings at the same time. Apple is arguably the far worse offender there too. If there was an alternative app store on iOS everyone would jump ship immediately.
Imagine having crossplatform Steam/GoG Mobile stores for mobile games, etc.
Just like the case with Chinese phones now - I have bunch of people in my family angry because they bought Huawei and they now can't use their banking apps because it's an incompatible build of Android that requires publishing in a Huawei AppStore to work.
That's worse. That's strictly worse for everyone, even the OEMs will lose their market to Apple by driving their ecosystem into the ground... again. Samsungs, Nokias, ASUS, etc. did this tragedy of the commons failure repeatedly and reliably.
sigh
I guess it's impossible to go 5 min without somebody wrecking the ecosystem. I don't understand how they can even manage to be incompatible, it's fucking Java, or more commonly these days just a wrapped PWA.
My favorite bug in career is when we found out that OneUI (2? Don't remember the version exactly.) redefined @android:color/white resource. It was blue.
So anything that was set to white in your app was blue on that one model. That's the quality you can expect from the companies EU is trying to protect here. -_-
citation needed.
if there was an alternative app store, 90% of apple users wouldn't even be aware of it, the other 8% would hear about it and never use it, and maybe, _maybe_ 2% would install it.
Then Apple would have to set their pricings competitively, instead of monopolistically.
I've never installed the AOSP or the oneplus specific "android" versions so i have no frame of reference, but it takes about 25 seconds to get cydia to come up on the ipad i use it on, with no other weirdness needed on the ipad itself.
So, it's a game of ever escalating fines. At some point, they'll hit diesel gate levels, which caused a bit of an existential crisis for VW a few years ago. That signal actually mostly came from the US BTW. The EU is demonstrating that that kind of thin can work both ways and that they might go there squeeze some US companies when they misbehave.
As for Google and Apple, Amazon, MS, Facebook, etc., they've been going through rounds of increasingly larger fines from different countries in the EU and them doing the absolute minimum to maybe toe the line but never entirely. It's not enough; they need to get more pro-active on this or they'll have to deal with bigger fines and lawyer fees. Very simple. Testing what is good enough in a court room like they have been doing is a costly strategy. Judges not amused/impressed so-far apparently.
(~4B is the 32bit integer limit...)
This is one of the aspects of government-based fines I dislike. The money should go to the people, the victims, not government. They go after a company that may have damaged consumers and then proceed to grab the fine instead of giving it to the people who were the actual victims of the transgression.
i'm pretty sure the panopticon that is google can determine who had an android phone, ever.
It’s like when you pay a parking fine, the money doesn’t go to the specific people inconvenienced or endangered by your wrong parking, it goes into the municipal budget.
Can they use that to finance grants or RFPs for other projects ?
Also, there's degrees of exit. Google can exit the market and have zero presence in the EU whilst still sub-licensing tech to affiliates who pay for the privilege and resell their stuff, whilst dealing with all the local regulatory overheads. Plenty of firms use that sort of model.
its psychology, the board or ceo would react preemptively based on the idea that shareholders would react on their behalf
shareholders (if they have voting power at all) would react for the same result at higher fine amounts than that
1. Other search engines regularly appearing in news / on screens would remind the non-EU users about alternatives.
2. Lost traffic is lost information. Google still relies on knowing your behaviour to improve targeting.
3. Giving a whole region to other search engines would build up their financial standing and they could threaten Google in other regions in the future.
The fine would have to be in range of 100 billion for them to exit
And this is setting aside the costs of compliance to avoid more fines. Even if the costs are less than another fine, they're not nothing. You're looking at an entire year's profits from the EU essentially being wiped out by this fine, plus reduced profits going forward due to increased compliance costs and probably losing sales. And this is your best case scenario.
It would not take a 100 billion dollar fine to make Google leave the EU, it would only take another fine like this one.
It is commendable that EU does not allow miscreants to tie up fines in an endless legal maze.
Probably any fine should accompany (but not depend on results from) criminal charges for a company officer.
I think that is unlikely, and I think it is likely we will see Google change the illegal licensing.
I am more than happy to see a Google exec get charged for a crime if you can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they committed that crime.
We charge people with a crime to see if their part in it can be proved. Second-guessing the court produces often bad results.
According to another comment, they even already changed their practices in response, a few years ago
- common carrier status for “platforms”
- PII laws, broadly
It's a shame that this fine is too generous to Google and it won't scare them. It should be much larger than that and should be in the multi-billions of dollars.
The GDPR applies to smalltech, too, and smalltech gets fined. For example, an individual got fined €600 about two months ago for pointing a video camera at a shared access road (https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ETid-1397)
You can find many more examples of small fines at https://www.enforcementtracker.com/.
Maybe the lines of business which require promiscuous data sharing in order to be profitable will stop operating in the EU, and give rise to other business models. Whether these newer ones will be better or worse is not yet known, though the gamble in the EU is that it won't be worse.
I'd say they might need to revise that. I think Google just saw a 4 billion euro reduction in profit.
It's about anticompetitive behaviour, i.e. antitrust. Antitrust is not particularly about tech companies, and it has been around a long time, since before modern computers.
It's about misusing a position of market dominance to prevent a healthy competitive market from operating. Very large companies which are market-dominant face this problem, but they also have the resources to understand and handle the responsibility. They can either do so, or face fines and injunctions to make them do so. In severe cases they can be forced to break up dominant business units, such as happened with the breakup of AT&T in the USA some years ago.
This is the same sort of thing as might have blocked nVidia from buying ARM, for example (until nVidia pulled out voluntarily). You can see how that has nothing to do with GDPR; it wasn't even in the EU.