EU Fines Google $1.02B for Favoring Its Own Services
wsj.com
wsj.com
Mostly tested on Firefox on Mac in the EU.
We need to stop being so helpless. A proper user agent should be able to do what you want it to.
They could have simply added a selector when a user first clicks on the maps preview in the search result, and then remembered it on device or across that user's account.
But of course, then the user could choose a competitor's product and Google would have to honor it. That would be horrible, so instead they just made the user experience worse for everyone and elegantly made people blame the EU.
And eh, it works for the cookie banner so why change the strategy ? The comment you're answering to prove it still works. As long as people can't be bothered to think and inform themselves for a second about it, they won't stop. Same with the purposefully annoying and unclear and user hostile 'gdpr popup' about third party consent.
I'm not saying I agree with it. I'm saying from Google POV that's the correct move given their intent, the issue then become people like parent.
You might still answer too little to late, but given that we're at the starting point to a massive sovereignty push here thanks to the current US admin being proved as a possibility rather than a novelty, I think this matters a lot.
2. The law is a very simple "if you want to do it, you have to make sure they know", intended to force information without creating excessive administrative / legal / tech burden, please inform me about what other way you would present it that would reach the goal without being subject to malicious compliance ?
Then come the lists of what exceptions are approved. Your medical info is used for divorces (anything involving court cases, anything involving criminal law), the police has access to it, your mayor has access to it, tax departments have access to it (think you can not pay tax and pay for your kid's cancer treatment instead? In Europe, think again). Insurance (if you get treatment for getting hurt in traffic your car insurance goes up). Unemployment (if you get treated for anything drug-related ...). Hospitals and doctors can use your medical information without your permission (for billing, for other treatments, for deciding if you should be interned, ...). And so on and so forth.
Oh and there are even silent exceptions. You see, YOU can't sue anyone under the GPDR. You can only ask a specific "supervisory authority" (you can't even choose which one)
They are under control of the executive, and so it is in most cases the currently elected party that decides if your GPDR complaint does anything, NOT the courts. Not the police. Not the public prosecutor. None of that. And it's even closed on the back end: you don't agree with these "supervisory authority"'s actions? Doesn't matter if you're complainant or defendant. You can't sue them either. You can't get a judge on your case, only appointed politicians.
There are even organizations that the GPDR supposedly applies to that have their own supervisory authority. Interpol violated your rights? No worries, file your complaint here in this building. You know, the building with "Interpol" on it in big letters.
So really, we do not even know the full list of exceptions.
More generally, the GPDR was supposed to prevent further encroachment of all sorts of organizations on privacy, with a big focus on medical data. It has achieved the opposite of that. FOR NOW (and not in every country) the only way to get a private medical file is to only use private medical care. For now that is still possible.
It's like the DMA (Digital Markets Act). Prevents organizations from using control of the OS to implement policy. There's a few exceptions though. Google gets an exception. Apple gets an exception. Through specific deals made with these organizations and the EU commissioner of
Nobody seems to have thought to scream into the commissions face: "THEN WHAT'S THE POINT?".
Well, who made those deals? Thierry Breton. He currently serves as a remunerated member of Bank of America’s Global Advisory Council (who have huge investments in Alphabet and Apple).
Yeah, I get why you want to focus on the intent only and not on what practically happened. Theory and practice are very, very different and the EU is incredibly pro-business and uses their power to literally grant billionaires exceptions to laws. That's how Goldman Sachs got it's first communist president (Barosso, who saved Goldman Sachs as president of the EU commission). That's reality, but of course the intent is thoroughly disguised, and you don't want to talk about the difference.
The goal was not even remotely achieved, and this was 100% on purpose.
At some point we have to accept the pattern. People with ideological objections against any limits at all will try to frame any regulation as stupid, regardless of what is in it.
They also buy up the competition before it gets a chance as is the way now.
I know that sounds like it comes from "it will never work", but that's how active directory, office file format, etc ... got opened, and in a case more similar to here that's how windows n and decoupling of media and internet component from windows internals happened.
The issue is, yes, it takes time.
Another issue, purely PR, is that yes the EU gets attacked repeatedly by people trying to match "respect the law of the market or leave" with "the EU tax US companies because they can't compete".
The important proviso is that the penalties need to (on some non-geological timescale) get high enough that the offender is no longer capable of operating. That could mean the fines reach $500 billion, or it could mean the company is barred from operating in the EU, or it could mean people get arrested and assets are seized. But unless the penalties become crippling, it won't matter. It needs to reach a point where the downsides of noncompliance are actually greater than the benefits.
But unlike the story some on HN and in the US like to think, US tech companies don't ever get there except rare exception, they know the game.
All of these hissy fits Google and Apple are throwing are just making me wanting to use them less and less and I'm doing my best to explain how tech companies are doing malicious compliance to others.
So Google is forced to take competitor to account or will be pushed out of the market ?
No? Better to complain and do nothing positive? Welcome to EU Parliment.
For the past 50-ish years the West convinced itself that government should not build, and as a result we're suffering from a slow collapse of basic infrastructures. Meanwhile, in China and the Gulf, government kept building and the world's center of gravity steadily keeps moving eastwards.
And they're not doing that. They are only making it harder for existing services to exist, in order to change the situation, and in order to make money for themselves. But they're not helping in the sense of building anything.
To expand upon the silly comment a bit, not sure about this particular initiative, but to me it very much feels like something that should be configurable at browser level, instead of half-assed dark-pattern-filled JS dialogs: https://killthecookiebanner.eu/
Oh, and please ignore that this surveillance apparatus is now being used to expell people, all of which already has resulted in many missing people, and even some deaths. Any historical parallels are entirely coincidental.
I do wonder if people using Chrome on iOS face the same issue, or if Google respects your browser of choice a bit more if it’s their browser.
To save "it's easy" and Google chooses to nuke their own products for... I don't know what, stick it the European regulators, strikes me as incorrect. It's because it's incredibly hard to navigate this arbitrary punative regulatory framework.
No one would use the other maps because other maps are worse. As much as euro regulators hem and haw about lack of competition, it's precisely these types of dictats that make Europe not have any viable competitors in tech.
Do you realize how many commercial driving apps are based around OSM data?
I am unsure what you you mean with this? If you are talking about choosing a different browser on mobile I will point you to the DMA Browser Choice Screen page for Android[1], it has been a thing for a while as far as I can remember.
My assessment is that EU is doing too little too late, the fine should have been something like 20B and used towards creating a non-profit, open and extendable map service ideally with the people who already do great mapping tech that don't show up in Google search results at the top.
EU is too vanilla, too unopinionated towards the tech, they go over the problem after the damage is done, take the money for themselves and force a non-solution that doesn't fix the problem and often makes it worse because they leave the implementation to the convicts who make sure to make it maliciously compliant.
The EU loves to play it the european way, and while on the surface it seems "oh that means regulations" in reality it's a "figure it out yourselves and please behave like adult, we don't want to deal with that" and we ask for some sort of regulatory association or whatever that we can refer to to talk to them all.
It's worked in a ton of industries including ones where we have no moat but somehow tech companies are always incapable to behave. At least the US ones, eg for the phone thing it ended up being Samsung who told the EU "hey I've been playing ball for years and Apple isn't , make them or I stop too".
They almost forced micro USB for devices, which would have been far worse: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2009/06/10-companies-agree-t...
Unless you have evidence that they'd have prevented the industry from suggesting/agreeing on a better standard in that timeline, MicroUSB would have made the most sense at the time.
The evidence is the law that they passed for USB-C: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...
Mandating a plug means that it is effectively never going to change.
1: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...
If this were an actual issue, you'd easily be able to point out all the previous times similar laws have kept us stuck on outdated standards. For some reason that's never the line of argumentation, it's always just "it will never change". Some political systems are actually able to pass & update laws.
What's up with Google Maps? It's great for me.
On desktop the web app is jittery, occasional freezing of UI, buttons stop working(most often the street view figure just doesn't show the available street view or would refuse being dropped at a location). Textures wouldn't load, sometimes will downgrade the UI to non-webgl version.
Also, businesses are often frustrated when it comes to changing their address, no proper support exists to fix mistakes or do updates.
I would loved if EU forced Google to open its maps business data for a year for download so competing services can achieve parity in this regard. After all, Google has this data because its a monopoly - people simply uploaded their photos and reviews to Google Maps because most people use it because Google forced it down the throat of everybody.
Ah, also Google is pretty evil when it comes to maps. They jacked up the API prices to ridiculous levels once the become the absolute dominant service and they also tried to make iPhone undesirable by not making their Google Maps app in some countries when Apple screwed up with Apple maps and Apple maps was practically useless outside the US.
Eg this has nothing to do and thus can't be hand-wavy blamed on for things like "On mobile its navigation is terrible, takes you into strange routes that might be technically faster but are hard to drive at or sometimes non-existent. Sometimes tries to be smart, makes everything worse. i.e. suggest a route that it says its 5 min faster and shows no traffic and you find out that there's no traffic because of a road closure further ahead. The UI when driving is not as good as the competition. I only use it because it has superior business listings with decent reviews and photos."
Yeah that's why EU isn't producing capable tech competitors. If other map services want my business they need to work on that. Instead, someone who built a search infrastructure is supposed to do a free promotion for competitors.
Actually its how the EU avoids monopolization.
> If other map services want my business they need to work on that.
Yeah.. Because a startup is going to meaningfully compete against a company who uses forced internal integrations? DropBox is a good example I heard about recently, iCloud, OneDrive, lesser products maybe, was able to basically make Drop box irrelevant because of in-house integration with systems.
Siemens, Sulzer, ABB, Rolls Royce and so on.
Or perhaps you meant advertising companies like Google and Meta when you said "tech"?
This is a corporation with tens of thousands of software developers. If they wanted to do better, they could. As always: If the UI is bad for you, that probably means that particular implementation is good for the corporation.
They didn't. That's specifically to piss you off on EU.
There is no standard clickable "link" for physical locations. There is no URL-equivalent you can send to someone, they click it, it open up their map viewer of choice. You can send Lat Lon coordinates and then have the recipient copy and paste them. It generally works though there isn't a standard format and no service will make it clickable like an email address, so the whole process remains clunky.
When you "Share" a location in Google Maps or OSMand, you get back a URL link to their service and not an service agnostic "link" to the geographic location.
I have it working on my Android phone. It's clickable links that open my map app of choice (or rather a selection dialog).
It's just that the big players do not want to use it.
You should thank Google for their shitty product due to malicious compliance. A daily reminder that they don't care about their users.
What's your experience?
They will just write it off against the tax they pay back in the US anyway (which is why the US doesnt like it).
What do they expect if they come to our countries and break the law there? Of course they're gonna get fined?!
Example here: Facebook changing their ToS to claim usage itself constitutes freely given, informed consent under GDPR. No it doesn't, you knew that was against the spirit, you did it anyways, you got fined.
This is fundamentally how the EU legal system works, you're expected to do what the law wants from you, not find some clever way to avoid what the law is for while ticking the right checkboxes.
I had a whole in-depth conversation on this not too long ago, check it out if you want more context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48707697
The way people treat them breaking our laws as their god given right and then frame our fine as anything but their own fault is starting to really annoy me.
Respect our sovereignty, follow our laws. Or don't, but then don't be surprised that breaking the law is punished.
Maybe things are different in the US, maybe corporate capture has progressed to a point where laws are optional for megacorps. But we still have rule of law and we'd like to keep it that way.
For the Commission, our democratically elected national governments each send a representative, so those are as elected as any minister in government is.
For Parliament, the EU demos elects directly.
Not sure where the issue is? It all seems more democratic to me than, say, the Electoral College.
In practice, the average European has more agency in shaping EU law than the average American does in shaping US law; the US’s electoral system means that, realistically, on a federal level, most peoples’ votes simply do not matter (two party FPTP system, with most seats being safe). The EU parliament is at least multiparty proportional representation, and most member states’ governments are also elected via some sort of PR.
> for which you can’t vote for its leader
Most democracies don’t have a directly elected head of state; it’s _largely_ a thing in the Americas and Africa. In terms of big countries with a true presidential system, you’re really talking the US, Russia, Brazil, Nigeria and Indonesia. I’m, ah, not sure that we should be rushing to emulate those paragons of democracy :)
These are factual inaccuracies.
South Korea is a functioning democracy. They tend to jail their ex-presidents quite often, but then only those that do deserve it, which is more than we can say about a few western democracies which are very lenient about the criminality of politicians. Ah yes and the president is limited to serving one term.
What they're trying to do is colonize Europe with their lawlessness, they're trying to deny us our sovereign right of determining our own rules.
There's no right to come to our jurisdiction and then decide to ignore our rules. Either come and play by the rules or stay out.
"Since 2019, when the Donald Trump administration began blocking appointments to the body, the Appellate Body has been unable to enforce WTO rules and punish violators of WTO rules.[3][4][2] Subsequently, disregard for trade rules has increased, leading to more trade protectionist measures.[4][5] The Joe Biden administration maintained the freeze on new appointments."
Mixing in branded items in a market with special treatment is very obviously anticompetitive. We see amazon doing that to high margin items egregiously. We see Costco doing it less egregiously.
We should fight against anticompetitive practices pretty seriously.
US: our beloved tech companies (also funded our POTUS elections) tried to navigate the complex regulation landscape in the EU to innovate and accidentally stepped into very complex rules. But EU is fining them for being good boys.
Shame on you EU, for not supporting criminals as much as US does
It should be clear to everyone that Google is too big and is engaging in anti-competitive behaviour. The EU giving them a token fine every once in a while is just part of the cost of doing business for Google. Google could just choose to not favour their own services and to give users a choice. But they don't. Hence the fine.