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Comment by avazhi | Hacker News Reader

Just to be clear, Google makes $55m in profits every 2.5 business hours.

Exactly. When you frame it like that, the fine goes from “headline punishment” to “cost of doing business.”

If Google has 5 billion users, that's about 5 cents per user per day.

Sure, but how much of that is from this deal? The goal isn’t to stop Google from doing business, it’s to make this behaviour unprofitable with a little wrist slap too. And also a shot across the bow that if they continue to do it it’ll be enforced much more strongly.

That is a bit silly. The goal is to make anti-competitive and all negative conduct net-negative, not just unprofitable when caught. Otherwise, it is like a millions of dollars to none gambling, profits no one caught you, a slap on the wrist if you got caught. Not useful.

The sane calculaltion is to make the fine amount equals to (loss to society or profit to corporation) / (chance of getting caught). In some cases, I guess it can be argued that chance of getting caught is so small that the fine should bankrupt someone, but still we should not do it arbitrarily just because the target is a big corporation.

Surely the punishment should be more than just break even.

Add a multiplier so that doing the activity is discouraged, not just neutral in terms of expected value.

here is hoping that the penalty means a whole lot less than the precedance...

They have now set a "bar" for acceptable behaviour... the 55million is just a "you've been put on notice"

Good deal, search and YouTube are both pretty good

That really misses the point. That is, fines do nothing if they are a rounding error on revenue.

If they were that good, why would Google have to waste money pre-installing them as defaults?

Because most people can't even change the search engine even if they wanted to. Whatever Google is the best search engine or not, pre-installing is a different problem.

To keep somebody else from doing that. Now they don't have to because nobody can.

Using bottom line of their most recent quarterly income statement[1], and given Google operates 24/7, then that's more like every 4.3 business hours. /s

[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204425...

Did you account for the $55 being AUD, and the income statement being in USD?

Shockingly that looks to be really close. Just going with the gp's number's

  55m AUD -> 35.87 USD
  (35.87/55)4.3 = 2.8

tldr: avazhi was right

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