EU fines Google €890M for competition breaches over search and apps
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Google Search decision: https://ec.europa.eu/competition/digital_markets_act/cases/2...
Android decision: https://ec.europa.eu/competition/digital_markets_act/cases/2...
Look like feature request lists.
If this were granted, the expectation is that we would act surprised when it is fast-followed by requirements to use EU-controlled systems that can monitor this content.
Key sectors could take the hit, including automotive manufacturing, industrial equipment, chemicals, electronics, fashion, textiles, and luxury food and wine.
Given that these nations are already managing high debt loads while funding generous social welfare programs and expanding their defense budgets, trade sanctions could cause serious damage...
So yeah...EU is performing a delicate balancing act here.
The US needs military bases, it needs general market access, it wants to sell military equipment and so on and so on. The US is already being reckless with the relationship and diversification is underway, but how deep the split will be is in large part determined by how the US wants to behave going forward.
It's like a divorce, there aren't really any winners here (in terms of wealth, assets, ...). So it's a tightrope both need to walk, balancing each other's interests.
They know it's going to hurt and they can't just order their own country -- or in the case of the EU; countries -- to fully decouple and so they're using the pain to encourage the creation and growth of alternatives.
Nobody says it isn't painful or that it isn't going to suck but it's viewed as inevitable rather than something to be avoided.
This would make some sense under normal circumstances. However the Trump administration isn't "retaliating" except in the same sense you saw ICE "retaliating" by murdering unarmed protesters.
Violent bullies respect strength to the extent they respect anything at all.
The real danger of US retaliation for EU are: export tariffs on US LNG, loosing arms exports for Ukraine. This the real EU delicate balancing act.
After that it has practically completely dried up. Ukraine and the EU are already producing themselves.
This is a big long term loss to the US.
Also if US makes their LNG unaffordable the EU will simply switch to countries like India.
Who exactly is the US going to still sell to?
So it’s a nice circumvention for the EU if they were to require one.
Reading about it, both points seem valid to me.
It’s all sort of intertwined now.
The goal of the regulation is to get the operators to comply, which they usually do after fines (EDIT: and litigations and whining, of course), because the costs of infractions are increased if they don't comply.
I've never received a dollar from the EU as a victim. If the fines are moderate and big co keeps paying that's steady revenue for the EU institutions.
It is almost entirely unsurprising that the EU tech industry is such a disaster area when people say things like this as if they are a good thing.
As is the “letting their companies do whatever they want everywhere (as they currently do) is the better "strategy"” when this wasn’t said or even implied anywhere.
It is amazing how HN has descended into arguing against people making points by saying they are someone else and saying something completely different.
The point of the EU subsidies is, surely, not to enrich a few people with the right connections but to stimulate a productive ecosystem that supports well paid skilled employment, right? Right?
Honestly, I don’t know what are you talking about. Tech industry in Europe is far from being dead. Not least because for many American companies Europe as market is dead.
I worked for a unicorn once and it came with the maxxed-out Mac book and the most meaningless job ever in the industry that should not exist.
I also wrote endless FP7 and ESA proposals for a living, and that was an utter waste of everyone's brainpower and public money.
I am now working in public sector IT, and while the job can seem dull to the outsiders, I at least serve the citizens.
After a fire erupted in my block, I could proudly say to my neighbors after the fact that there were bits of my code here and there that connected the first alert with the firefighters station.
How long have you been working inside the behemoth? Can you tell us more about the inner workings, where the money goes, how much, etc?
These companies do, in fact, change behaviour in response to such actions; they may hire lawyers to find and exploit as many loopholes as they can, but they do ultimately comply. Even X ultimately complied in response to Brazil, and the EU is a much more important market for Google than Brazil ever was for X.
(Why would you expect to get dollars from an EU settlement?)
This isn't a class action.
There's this standard assumption that HN users are well educated.
Budgets don't work like that. It's not like the US federal government collects taxes and then deposits bags of gold coins on people's doorsteps.
Taxes, fines, etc are all collected and then they mostly go to a general, undifferentiated budget which is then divided by the various ministries (departments, whatever).
So yes, if you're a EU citizen you did get the money back. As roads, hospitals, research funding, etc.
The goal should be to incentivise them to comply with the law as a whole, not to keep deliberately breaking different sections of the law to make profit above the level of fines
That's why people want the level of the fines to go up, to disincentivise the more broad lawbreaking
You don't get a higher fine every time you go very the speed limit or park in the wrong place.
You don't get a higher fine if you don't have a bus ticket.
This is not a felony. Perhaps it should be, but it's not.
The correct solution to this is to have fines scaled to the value of a company and an exponential doubling of fines for every re-offence that falls under the same category of crime with a cooling off period after a few years.
The first fine should sting and the second should be damaging to a company and the third should be crippling.
The EU has been fining Google for years to no avail.
Me after a quick research:
2017: €2.42 billion fine for favoring its own comparison shopping service.
Results: huge changes to Google's shopping service.
2018: €4 billion fine over Android-related practices.
Results: Google Play separately from Google Search and Chrome, and manufacturers gained more flexibility over preinstalled apps.
What we need to see is that exponential function. Everyone here should have at least the intuition from Moore's Law and COVID that exponential growth is either your best friend or your worst enemy depending on if it's working for you.
The next fine should've been 8B, and the one after that 16... The regression back down to 1B is counter productive to the goal of inducing compliance and reducing the offender's ability to continue to offend by taking away their resources to do so.
The big corporations don't really fix their evil behaviour. That's why fines keep on re-emerging.
> because the costs of infractions are increased if they don't comply.
See above. If the fines were to work, it would not become a repeating issue.
I think mandatory jailtimes are the only solution. When the CEOs are suddenly for 10 years in a small room, slowly they will begin to stop their mafia-strategy.
Corporations reliably break the law, the EU reliably enforces it.
I'm actually happy that this is the path the EU went, as there's a financial incentive to keep laws which benefit consumers.
Hey now, give the lobbyists some time. You know they don't do anything unless a pretty big dinner is involved and that takes a few weeks: https://www.politico.com/news/2026/07/24/trump-eu-tarriffs-t...
And while this sucks, it's not like Europe's motives are any better. It's just about the money.
https://www.irishexaminer.com/business/companies/arid-417489...
€4.536bn on €86.6bn, or about 5% (which is one third of the amount Ireland promised in an international treaty they would charge ...)
Don't blame Google for pushing boundaries. That's what people (and corpos) do in any competitive activity. Do blame our politicians for being incompetent and ill-meaning.
pours vodka into a mayo jar
(Not those exact numbers, but the same point).
So no, Google shouldn't get a pass for pushing boundaries. Thinking like this only protects the capital class and the politicians responsible for this mess.
My point is, we can't expect them to behave. And if they promise to, that promise isn't worth much.
EU competition law is not framed around valuing Europeans more than others, it is framed around protecting competition and market functioning inside the EU.
No need to moralize it and pretend anyone is using this "value" European humans more than other humans.
The reasoning is very simple just "carry a big stick", multinational companies need to fear the fines to want compliance.
Why not 20% (30%), given that's the share of world GDP (PPP) due to the EU?
Why revenue rather than profit?
The answer is: big round number that's roughly justifiable as a big stick for, and I want to emphasise this, a punishment to make sure they don't break the rules.
[0]: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/meta-says-it-s-staring-...
...but this is a private(ish) business, it doesn't have a printer in the back yard, a billion is a lot no matter how you look at it, especially if they're now facing a tough choice between cannibalizing their results with AI summaries or having AI competitors eating their lunch.
These 890M are a first warning. Now Google has some time to react, but if they don't implement what is required of them, another, higher, fine will be issued.
20% of global revenue is not just cost of doing business, to any business.
EU does much more to protect its market compared to US.
EU was never a developing country like China. Most countries in EU benefited from centuries of exploitation of Asia, Africa and the Americas. They don't need protectionism.
It is immoral and ugly.
This is basically the equivalent of the weekly nuclear annihilation threat from the Moscow direction ;)
Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%27s_final_warning
Does it though? Companies have to corrupt him in various ways to get his favors. Pichai won't get that for free.
Mandatory jailtime - otherwise they just shrug it off.
1 - restore interop with noscript/basic HTML browsers, stop favoring your 'whatwg cartel' web engine.
2 - gmail: restore interop with self-hosted SMTP servers without DNS (filtering on the IPv[46] literal from email address, this is stronger than SPF).
And there is probably more to add.
Here, Big Tech must interop with Small Tech. A common malicious behavior from Big Tech is to inflate by tons the required complexity and size of their 'tech' in order to make it out of reach by small competitors. This is one of the roles of market regulation. It seems they are now using 'security' (something which is only best-effort, it actually does not exist) to scare people to go to alternatives (how deep the rabbit hole goes here... mmmmh...)
In my EU country, we have a very good internet, thanks to _HARDCORE_ regulation which allowed small alternatives to be bootstrapped and to exist and grow. It is a bit different for gogol which is trying to create a 'very walled garden' like the "rotten fruit" company with this 101 malicious behavior on the long run: strong interop with 'Small Tech' at the beginning, slowly (~decade+) but surely this interop is broken to favor the 'Big Tech' from their cartel.
It is really complex: devil hides in the 'technical' details, it is case by case over some kind of continous spectrum. Here, it boiles down to the complexity/size of protocols, file formats with their stability in time: if you regulate here, "Small Tech" becomes a real-life alternative.
And don't be a fool at believing they are not talking to each other and play fair...
3 - stop writing comments only in english, stop favoring your 'anglosphere' linguistic bubble
There is Wikipedia article about this topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyber_Resilience_Act
No big deal for corporations though. Buddy’s workplace hired new compliance department for this topic with 30 persons. That’s competition european way.
I think losing the companies that don't have security as a main priority isn't too bad. I assume that the EU will create import restrictions if there is a meaningful shift to avoid EU rules.
Sounds like a perfect job for AI tbh ;)
I don't believe that is true. Cars do break but they have to meet safety standards. That doesn't make them perfect but it's much better than not having them. You can't make perfect safety standards in an ever changing world but you can define minimum standards.
I understand that documentation is a pain in the butt, but it's necessary to have some oversight. It's part of the enforcement. Everyone has to do it so we know the documentation should exist. That means we can fine companies that don't do it. If you mad the documentation and lied on it and it comes out you will probably fined even more. It's a deterrent and a way to enforce the rules.
"I would rather only buy from megacorporations than small players"
See also, the GDPR killing startups that attempt to invade our privacy and exploit personal data without permission.
and some other part seem to have "I have suffered so you must suffer too" mentality
and in generally there seem to be an increasing lack of basic human empathy ... which is very worrisome