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Comment by typon | Hacker News Reader

What amount would these EU fines have to be to make companies like Google and Facebook decide to exit the EU?

This is never going to happen. It's just too big of a market.

It's also really not the outcome wanted by regulators. Everyone losing access to their email and information, YouTube, etc would create absolute chaos. Antitrust's job is to rein in profit, not destroy markets.

Never is a big word. Every time the EU levies fines like this it's effectively the market getting smaller.

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.

That would be such a dream!

I just want to point out in Russia those companies have little to no presence specially after the war. It's telling that we always hear it's a sign of oppression and authoritarianism if governments kicked out those services out of their country, but here we are people advocating for it in the EU.

probably 15-20% of annual revenue

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

Speculation - google would want to operate in the EU even at a loss:

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.

I personally doubt it, mostly because Baidu is a similiar boat and hasn't been a spreading competitor of note in that space. Not apples to apples obviously due to several reasons admittedly, but that is most country to country comparisons.

Very unlikely - the EU has proven it cannot build a Google competitor worth a damn. Instead what would happen is that Google would have no corporate presence here but the website would still be accessible, and people would just continue using it as normal but with fewer local customizations and the only ads they'd see would be from American firms, or from European firms that buy ads via American subsidiaries / brokers.

Not annual, but projected maybe over decade... once you lose the market you lost it also next years. Lets not forget its 500 million of above-average rich folks that use google services extensively.

The fine would have to be in range of 100 billion for them to exit

Their annual revenue from the EU is only 17 billion dollars, as of 2021. The current fine is about a quarter of that. This is revenue, not profit. So this fine very likely impacted the bottom line for what Google is pulling out of the EU. And it was not even as big as they could've made it. It's very likely the EU refrained from the maximum fine amount because it would've pushed Google's EU operations firmly into the red.

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.

That's the quarterly revenue, not the annual.

Only one way to find out!

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