Comment by spacebanana7 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spacebanana7 | Hacker News Reader

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Sanctions are different from antitrust.

With sanctions the US can declare that third parties must choose between doing business with the US and Cuba / ZTE. Because of it's large economy the US would be confident that most of those parties would choose to choose the US over the company / small country.

Antitrust enforcement is many ways more difficult than sanctions enforcement because third parties must be compelled in 'how' rather than 'whether' they do business with a company.

Even the US would've struggled to break up ZTE / Huawei etc into smaller companies across every jurisdiction for antitrust. Doing so in China would've obviously been impossible but even enforcing this in the Gulf States & South Korea would've stretched the limits of US power.

When it comes down to it - it's the same thing with the EU - they can decree that Google be broken apart or stop doing business in the union. Or pay a massive fine based on global profit or exit the union.

The goal of antitrust is to make markets more competitive.

If Google left the EU entirely there’d be even fewer competitors in the digital ads space. Depending on the segment Google’s market share would likely go to Bing, Facebook or TikTok.

The EU wants to increase the market competition, but frustratingly antitrust enforcement may not be effective and might even go in the opposite direction.

If Google left the ads market in the EU there'd be a massive gap to be filled by multiple companies, competition would have a field day filling it.

I don't follow your argument.

>If Google left the EU entirely there’d be even fewer competitors in the digital ads space.

This may be true in the very short term, but leaving a big hole in the market like that creates an opportunity for new players that would have otherwise avoided the space because it was controlled by a monopoly.

holy shit are you 12 or just slow?

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