dontnotice

It's not a battle it's a legitimate point of view. It's also backed by evidence.

Also I balance it with the variety in my submissions.

> The intention of the fines is not to make money but to discourage illegal behavior.

Of course fines are a revenue source, the EU operates on multiyear fixed budged which they supplement with fines and tariffs.

The bulk of that wealth transfer is reliant on the coffers of US companies.

You cannot remove system apps they're part of the OS, the other preinstalled apps come curtsy of OEMs and carriers.

You can change defaults and sideload apps on android, which makes it much more permissible than the rest of maker i.e iOS.

Any company can use AOSP in their devices and laod them with anything they like, see the Chinese market, see Amazon Fire tablets.

Are you suggestion that AOSP has nothing to do with Android!?

And if we were to take the existence of AOSP into consideration then this fine seems even more ridicules and unwarranted.

"Given Google’s dominance in search and browsers and the popularity of its many web services, Pichai’s warning looks more like a bluff to court popular opinion than a genuine threat that Android will no longer be free."

I wish these bloggers would keep their biases and unsubstantiated commentary to themselves.

This fine is an assault on open source, the fact linux didn't attain mainstream appeal on the desktop was largely due to the lack of condition and harmonization across distros.

In any other context fining an open source project for antitrust violations is absurd.

You tell me. It certainly appears that the EU spares no resources at seeking and investigating US corporations and certainly they have no qualm in sticking them with record fines.

By sucking profits from American companies?

Also because the EU is deliberately targeting US companies, the US gov't doesn't have that incentive.

I was responding more to the comments in this thread.

It's always surprising how much comments and postings in these parts are vehemently in opposition to data being usefully incorporated into these apps and services, I remember a recent post about how Google's passive on device music identification worked on the Pixel 2 which turned hostel.

I understand that certain types of people are attracted to certain topics but it's still somewhat jarring when in a technology discussion board there is this amount of anti tech sentiment.

This feature is useful, it puts that data gathered to a good use, and it's upfront about it, if you don't like it just swipe the notification away.

Don't be fooled, the iPhone is gathering the same type of data it just only snitches on non system apps doing so in the background. Not to mention that it looks like they don't put that data to good use which as far as I'm concerned is the greater sin.

They are certainly entangled in this instance.

It's funny how everyone's a legal scholar these days.

They seem to suggest that Google's control over their own site's design/function is somehow an affront to their cause, not mention malicious.

They certainly see it as a big enough grievance to include in a manifesto type document which repugnantly entitled.

Yup, that was in the the blog post announcing AMP, and subsequent press comments.

I'm of the persuasion that they can rank and display the results however they please, it's their site after all, so it's a non issue either way.

It's funny how no one was up in arms when facebook (the leading source of publisher traffic) did their version of accelerated pages.

AMP serves a purpose for the end user and it does so well, it loads instantly and doesn't consume much data in the process.

As for their "demands":

1. Google already states that AMP pages are ranked higher because they're faster to load.

2. I'm not sure if it's related but they they addressed that only yesterday: https://amphtml.wordpress.com/2018/01/09/improving-urls-for-...

I'm not totally okay with blackballing brilliant people for touching someone's thigh.

Halfway down that piece:

A study this year by Stone Temple, a prominent analyst of the industry, showed Google’s search engine answered 74.3% of 5,000 questions, and on those answers it had a 97.4% accuracy rate. Both percentages are higher than services from Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corp.

Alternative WSJ:

Let's bury that tidbit under the fold while we nitpick and highlight edge cases in a constantly improving system.

We should also emphasising how integral google's search is to the health of society and civilization because we are mandated by management and ownership to produce anti-google PR and provide a steady supply of ammunition to its critics.

They are a decent ancillary source. The EU has a fixed multi year budget, fines are one way they use to supplement it.

The guy looks relatively young, if I had to guess I'd go with the cultural warrior angle, I bet this guy is fully aware of the Jim Damore saga.

This is bizarre. It's also bizarre how the reporting on it doesn't mention how out of left field this is. Why Google? why Missouri? How come a republican is doing this?

As for: The United States has lagged behind Europe in pursuing antitrust cases against tech giants

This narrative is silly. The EU goes after "tech giants" partly because they are foreign, the US doesn't have that incentive.

"Network effects" are people's relationships with their products, which they justly earned.

They ran atop the same network that everyone else had access to and achieved, the accurate analog to the railway example is the ISPs and not these companies.

Difference being that the railway was the only practical mean of delivery back then and is an actual utility. Also one couldn't sideload newspapers to circumvent restrictions.

Tagging everything as a "utility" and demanding they be regulated as such is as far removed from the conservative ethos as the altright apparently.

My more pressing (no pun intended) concern is with the press' coverage of these suits, when they don't lay bare the underlying machinations they are basically choosing sides.

The media should practice more circumspection when reporting about lawyers seeking plaintiffs or suing for class action status or at least mention how it’s a money making endeavour for that lawyer/law firm.

Many of these lawyers are vultures trying to capitalize on topical matters and they rely on this sort of coverage for free marketing, it’s as likely for this to be thrown out as it is for any other outcome, and the media should consider that before obliging with the reputational damage.

Edit: not sure why I'm being downvoted, I don't think I've made any non factual or offensive statements.

The omitted context here is that the lobbying against Google is much larger than Google's countermeasures.

I don't know, in a perfect world there would be a debate where the learned would pitch in and enlightenment would ensue, that didn't happen.

I think managerially this is the right move; the guy created chaos and had to go.

I'm not sure that's the right move in any other respect, it certainly doesn't advance the conversation.

It's not about you and who you trust the most, it's about if this makes sense or not. The EU is not infallible, they are subject to political pressures and there have been enough of that in this case that they started asking the wrong questions and reached the inevitable wrong conclusions, which are easy to welcome since they serve their protectionist instincts.

Google is not a utility, it's not the water company nor the electric company, or even your ISP, it's essentially a website one which you are free to use or not and the price of admission and switching and opportunity costs are nil, same as for all competing websites, so dictating what Google's website can display and declaring it's contents illegal and worthy of billion dollar fines makes zero sense.

The FCC isn't the right equivalent here, the FTC or the DoJ are, and they have to successfully sue in federal court for their fines to stick.

Which is legal. The Apple case was about "illegal state aid" of all things.