For Google this is just like parking tickets to UPS. A cost of doing business in town.
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.
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-...
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.
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 ...)
...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.
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.