Going to pre-empt the comments that always pop up in these topics saying "Google/Meta/Apple will just leave the EU at this rate": Google still has around $20 billion yearly reasons to remain active in the EU. Talking Europe yearly net profit here, post-fine. No, they're not going to say "screw this fine, you can take your $20 billion per year, we're leaving!". The second that happens, shareholders will have Sundar's access revoked within the hour.
There is a number of countries where Google has to deal with large levels of protectionist barriers (not the EU, these fines aren't that) and they still operate there. Korea is just one example. Because there's still a lot of money to be made. China isn't a counterexample: Google stopped operating search in China because at that point there was not a lot of money to be made for them in search there.
Im not necessarily saying its extortion. Im saying his observation is why the EU could extort Google for a lot more than $3B. My wording was unclear so I tried editing my original comment but apparently it was removed.
Why forfeit $20B in revenue in exchange for NOT having to pay $3B? I think that's an astute observation by the original commenter.
There are two types of businesses: those allergic to change, and those unable to stay the same.
If you are at a corporation where you constantly have to be Doing Things which Demonstrate Impact, this sort of judgement or regulatory change is a godsend for hundreds or thousands of middle-managers and engineers.
You have a project with clear goals ("comply with court order/new regulations"), relatively low bars for success (minimal impact on the bottom line), and it's all very clear to upper management that the work you're doing is Important. Heck, you might be able to lean on it for a couple of years to justify your existence, instead of trying to convince people that changing the rating system from a five point scale to a percentage then back to a five point scale was a worthwhile use of a dozen employees worth of headcount.
There may be some industries where change is anathema or the owners' oppositional defiance disorder makes they unwilling to change things just because they're illegal, but there's also plenty of others where people will be gleefully fighting for the opportunity to comply with a court order.
I think I've summarized it well enough. I would copy/paste it for clarity but I will avoid that, as I'm not trying to give the impression of evading content moderation.
EDIT: FWIW I think your observation that the EU is threading a needle stands. It's a controversial topic that people are very passionate about.
Here's a better option that Google will more likely follow; simply build the fines into operation costs and bill that to EU customers or maybe all Google customers looking to serve ads in the EU.
I am not sure why but otherwise seemingly intelligent people seem to be incapable of internalizing that any cost, expense, or fine levied against any corporate entity will always, with 100% (not any other percentage) be rolled into prices. The minor headache of it lowering returns will also be offset and will not really make a difference to any meaningful degree. Most likely Google, just like other corporations that are exposed to this kind of risk, will have set aside a "war chest" they have been building up over prior years, which further would defray any real impact.
Then of course there is the fact that these fines are rarely ever the actual amount that will be paid in the end, and most of the time it can be distributed over time.
What people should really take away from this is that in the end it really is kind of an extortion racket by the EU, but not of Google, but rather of the advertising companies the end consumers who end up paying from he higher priced ads through product prices, and possibly the general Google customer base.
This would really only be an issue that materially impacted Google if there were some kind of real competition in the space, which there is not really. What the EU could possibly do that would have a notable impact is setting industry standards to, e.g., a universal ad format that is ad broker agnostic, e.g., your app, site, service, etc could just serve up ads from all kinds of places, a kind of free market of ads not dominated by Google.
But even with that, with Google's advancement in AI generated content, they will likely also dominate the ad generation market soon.
The oddest thing is that the EU and Europe in general has all but floundered in many ways regarding the generation of a competitive technology industry. But that's a whole different topic.
> Here's a better option that Google will more likely follow; simply build the fines into operation costs and bill that to EU customers or maybe all Google customers looking to serve ads in the EU.
That will make Google less competitive and allow more players on the market, breaking their monopoly. Not a bad outcome and probably exactly the point of these fines.
If google is already a monopoly, and EU fines them and google adds more ads to their Eu customers as the parent posted, well guess what, I think that google still is a monopoly...
I doubt that google is a monopoly because they are the most competitive at what they do & thus have the market share. I have been using duckduckgo for honestly 3-4 years ago and I think that I have ublock so I don't see their ads but they are really nothing compared to google's ads and they rarely show even without adblocker (I think).
Duckduckgo is already really really competitive, You might argue that ddg uses bing and isn't independent but brave search is independent and comes really close to google to the point that you wouldn't know the difference.
I don't know the last time I used google but I love ddg's bangs etc.
I am sure that someone else can articulate what I am saying into something more logical as to why a monopoly can still exist even while being less competitive than competition.
And also I am saying that it is as easy as two clicks to change the default browser but it maybe speaks mountains that most people still don't switch from google to duckduckgo.
I sometimes want to recommend librewolf just because it has duckduckgo, ublock and sane defaults (except your web browsing deleted everytime/starting from clean slate (I think) and webgl stuff)
This is why the fines should be high enough that a competitor who doesn't engage in abusive practices, and doesn't have fines levied against them, can out-compete the ones that do. Then competitive pressure would prevent companies from just treating fines as a cost of doing business and passing it on to their customers.
Of course, in a market with this degree of concentrated market power, those fines would have to be very very high indeed...
"any cost, expense, or fine levied against any corporate entity will always, with 100% (not any other percentage) be rolled into prices. " is not true, because raising prices isn't free of consequence.
Same reason why exporters sometimes pay some of the tariffs and importers might eat some in their margin as well.
There is no doubt it puts pressure on the prices and in many cases it may entirely be reflected in the prices but the incentive structure doesn't actually necessitate it.
Willful continued violation of the law will result in increasingly steep fines, and likely ulterior measures. It’s not something that Google can just price in.
The idea is pricing in the lost value. So whether its fines or they stand up compliance and see revenue loss from operational changes, that's what they could offset with new pricing.
Yes we should not sugarcoat this. Money made due to illegal pragtices should not be regarded much different than for example money from money laundering.
He's suggesting that the money Google does not make because of this regulation may be rolled into prices. The fact that eating the fees is not sustainable doesn't mean they have to take the margin hit for all associated costs.
Whether or not Google is "losing value" (aka money) or losing "illegal income", which aren't mutually exclusive by the way, has nothing to do with that dynamic. They could, in theory, roll that difference into prices either way.
When you can be fined up to twenty percent of your worldwide revenue (not profits, revenue), you listen. This is the EC making clear they’re willing to rule against Google and fine them. Next time it’ll be the full initial 10% of worldwide revenue
If it can buy them some few years worth of time every willful continued violation, then guess what?
They are more than happy with increasingly steep fines
Dude, 2.95 Billion $ is already steep, and I am sure that google used to get small fines when it was small in EU too, but its just that the rate at which google grows is more than the rate at which fines grow but I think that EU can't really make a really large number like suing google for 100 billion dollars. and I think that google already weighs in everything like the fines, the costs associated with exiting (stock price drops etc.) and they would actually just do whatever is more profitable to them of the following three options
A) stay in EU & pay the fines
B) leave EU
C) Follow EU requests
What is the fine amount which might change things into C) and not A) or B)
Because I think EU wants change not money, I am sure that they have plenty of money and they know that google isn't paying them out of their kindness. EU's people or even google itself isn't following EU laws and its affecting people living in EU. I wonder if someone thinks how much powerless EU might feel in that sense. They already have money, they want change.
I disagree only because I would be truly shocked if they do not figure out how to get as close to the line as is profitable without crossing over and recover those fines in the future with increased pricing.
> Here's a better option that Google will more likely follow; simply build the fines into operation costs and bill that to EU customers or maybe all Google customers looking to serve ads in the EU.
Google applying tariffs to itself in Europe might be something the EC may a) investigate and fine Google for ripping off Europeans, and/or b) approve of; they previously considered a big-tech tax to improve competition in Europe. Google would be doing them a favor, and Trump won't send them a nastygram this time around.
It was tongue in cheek, since only governments can effect actual tariffs.
However, the consumer effects of a "tax" or surcharge on a foreign service applied to a specific jurisdiction are indistinguishable from a tariff. The only difference is the money doesn't go to the government treasury - in any case, that's not the reason most governments introduce tariffs. If Google were to introduce a Europe surcharge, they'd be ironically in alignment with Brussels.
There are a lots of examples of geo-based pricing that I dont think you'd consider a tariff. Cloud services, Uber, Spotify subscription, etc.
They cost different things based off the country you are in. I guess you could try to distinguish between why they cost different prices in different countries and in some cases it's largely purchasing power parity, but others it absolutely is operational cost differences, such as cloud services. Uber is a bit more mixed - there are definitely purchasing power differences but there are also different regulatory requirements.
All that is to say you could never really tease it all out perfectly in practice.
As an European, I wish you were right, but I’m afraid you aren’t.
The EU would use public funding to build some sort of Google alternative and it would take ages, would be mediocre and most money would go to waste. Instead of incentivising entrepreneurship, which is what they probably should do.
We live very well in the EU. We don’t have to have millions in savings in order to retire. Strong worker protection. Plenty of time off. Low crime rates. Most people fantasise with becoming rich, but as in, “I had a rich aunt that I didn’t even meet in my life and I was the sole heir” or “I won the lottery”, not as in “I grinded for the best 10 years of my life working 100 hours per week before I sold my company” that seems more prevalent in the US. Ordinary people here are super happy if they can buy a small place to live (not a humongous house) even if it takes 25 years to pay it in full, then finish work at 5 and take their kids to the park and have dinner at some restaurant on Saturday.
OTOH: I think the current US administration is the best think that could happen to the EU, a big wake up call. Suddenly there’s money to invest in Defense and that kind of thing.
Also, hopefully LLMs will diminish Google’s importance, and as long as there’s competitive models not from the US (Mistral, DeepSeek) we might be fine. But Google holds all the cards (data). With stuff like the Harvard animosity they might even stop attracting all the foreign talent.
Apple? There’s Samsung for phones at least. Amazon? They’ve become a Temu/Aliexpress. Facebook… huge win if they stopped doing business in Europe. MS? This is the year of Linux in desktop?
The Cloud is one of those things where the EU could build something competitive/alternative just with public funding. All running on Linux, of course.
> The EU would use public funding to build some sort of Google alternative and it would take ages, would be mediocre and most money would go to waste. Instead of incentivising entrepreneurship, which is what they probably should do.
Something like web search is basicallly part of a modern digital infrastructure. We don't want entrepreneurship in water or energy supply, I don't think we should rely on it in web search, because it will inevitably end up chasing profits over everything else.
Markets are good at driving cost down via competition, but once you reach a monopoly steady state there's not much left to optimize. I think a search utility would work just fine. The main barrier to entry is the huge storage and processing resources that are needed to make a good index. Google contains all the information out how to scale like that too.
> I think the current US administration is the best think that could happen to the EU, a big wake up call. Suddenly there’s money to invest in Defense and that kind of thing.
Not to derail the conversation, but IMO the current US administration isn’t a wake up call. It’s a temper tantrum by people who understand that the US isn’t as relatively wealthy to the rest of the world as it was after WW2 but don’t understand why. If some of the thrash accidentally improves the West’s defensive posture or spending that’s good but there is no coherent plan of why things need to be changed.
>We live very well in the EU. We don’t have to have millions in savings in order to retire. Strong worker protection. Plenty of time off. Low crime rates.
We'll see how that pans out when the baby boomers finish retiring. Europe ate it's children to feed the retirees.
> Most people fantasise with becoming rich, but as in, “I had a rich aunt that I didn’t even meet in my life and I was the sole heir” or “I won the lottery”, not as in “I grinded for the best 10 years of my life working 100 hours per week before I sold my company” that seems more prevalent in the US.
I promise you that within the US, each of those first two fantasies is more popular than the third one.
Isn't Europe in a desperate weak position? To me it's on the edge of collapsing. France needs a bail soon. Germany in a steep decline. A war they probably gonna lose. Dozens of national governments in shattered pieces. Housing and energy crisis. Overregulation on many topics holding countries locked.
Yes the voices echo all around the globe of what's happening in the US. Surprisingly the only place it isn't heard is in some places of US.
But I still feel like some points raised by the gp might be right. And I was laughing a little thinking that someone critizing the EU already makes you consider them as an american.
Like its just funny.
Also, I feel like every country has problems but countries should honestly first and foremost try to stay away from corruption and the billionaires/rich people's influence in general and try to be impartial. I do think that EU might be good in that but still, I sometimes wonder if this all might be a facade in the sense that EU wants to work and they want to show something for it and so that's why they are fining google only almost 3 billion$. Like maybe my trust in political systems is a little too faded seeing US instititutions erode in days (speaking as non american but I really admired american politics, not anymore)
> And I was laughing a little thinking that someone critizing the EU already makes you consider them as an american.
Look at the comments in this post. The always pro-privacy, anti-ads HN suddenly moaning about this fine. Now that’s super funny and worth of a good laugh. Of course it’s an America vs EU thing, patriotism trumps (no pun intended) all else.
On a more serious note as much as you can be when you realize that discussions aren't happening in good faith and that biases like nations come...
I think that why nationalism/patriotism works is that the state has a monopoly over (legal) violence / laws in general. But the only way that might work is if we believe into them & thus nations have massive wheels of (propaganda?) or whatever it might take to convince the masses to be patriotic.
I feel like everyone all around the world is kinda the same man. We are homo sapiens. Nations shouldn't define us or the way we interact in an ideal world but I feel like a hypocrite when I myself defend my nation sometimes. I generally prefer decentralization to the point that we might take pride in our nations but we don't get influenced by it because the bigger the nation, the larger its influence/propaganda.
I feel like switzerland might be a good example in the sense that I have heard that there are people who don't even remember the (president/prime minister's?) name while working fine. I wonder if the whole world could essentially agree on international laws while being decentralized.
I just feel like that most of us are puppets and very few puppeteers in this world essentially controlling us / manipulating us into doing things that we generally wouldn't do.
A lot of the things you listed are already partially true of the EU. I wouldn't exactly call it fully decentralized, but I doubt many Europeans know by heart the name of the current EU president (I don't even know the proper title of the office) and they would fervently reject the notion of Europe as a single “nation”. Despite, I see more and more people (esp. in threads like this one) describing themselves as “European” rather than their nationalities and crediting EU laws and institutions ahead of their national governments.
I find this trend encouraging and I hope that one day we can see ourselves as humans ahead of any artificial groupings we sort ourselves into.
China is a special case. As the government has effectively total control, even having 30% market share as Google doesn't mean it's a profitable venture, or that the government hasn't said that it will let it remain one - and there's really no way that it would've given that it's relatively easily replaceable critical infrastructure. Search engines aren't as hard as Googlers like to believe, it was substituted by Baidu succesfully. Think about it - which B2C non-Chinese software (not HW) services are still big in China? Anything besides OSes?
I agree with everything you’ve said, but just would also point out that in addition to the fine, it is unclear how changing its practices is going to decrease existing (ill gotten) ad revenues going forward. Presumably these changes will hurt revenue or google would already be following them.
"Google still has around $20 billion yearly reasons to remain active in the EU."
That just means the fines are inadequate. The solution is to increase them until shareholders are noticeably hurt. Pressure from shareholders on Google's management to stop the offending practices would soon effect the necessary change.
If it helps to stop the reliance on American digital services and don't mind Google leaving Europe or the European Union. EU should start charging the fines they are allowed too for GDPR percentages of the world wide revenue.
The entire idea of "Oh they'll leave" is ridiculous, an empty threat from billionaires who are afraid of regulation.
The EU has 450M (+80M for UK & similar non-eu countries that are likely to follow the EU on such regulations) population to the US' 350M.
The moment the likes of Google, or Meta, or Microsoft, or whomever else leave the EU, they immediately create a market gap. A market gap that will then in short order be filled with a European company that, because of the population sizes, has a notable comparative advantage to the US tech company.
+ As much as HN's readership loathes to admit it, regulations like this are "Good, Actually". Google's monopolist practices are bad for both advertisers and services showing ads. Any would-be competitor that arises from Google leaving the market would, by virtue of being forced by law to not be so shitty, be the better option.
(And yes, this does also apply to pretty much all of the other big tech regulations as well.)
Like, c'mon. "Monopolies bad" is capitalism 101. Even the US' regulators thought Google was going too far.
> The EU has 450M (+80M for UK & similar non-eu countries that are likely to follow the EU on such regulations) population to the US' 350M.
Europeans are much poorer on average though, so actual revenue figures are rather the inverse of these population figures (they actually skew much more to the US than that, but anyhow).
The EU is still a massive profit center for these companies. Over 2025 Alphabet's revenue was around $170B in US and $100B in EMEA. Imagine if Google couldn't operate in half of the US, and how impactful that would be. Yet EMEA revenue is higher than that.
> The entire idea of "Oh they'll leave" is ridiculous, an empty threat from billionaires who are afraid of regulation.
My hot take is that if they want to leave, then they can fuck right off. If you think your desires, profits, or business practices extend beyond democracy, then I don't need your business. Private enterprise should support and assist democracy, not the other way around (there's obviously some leeway there, but by and large).
A lot of it is a because the US brands are more recognizable and cheaper (due to dumping) and grow faster (due to the USA's VC glut).
IIRC a company like AirBNB was started in Europe, and was slowly growing, and couldn't get investment because "who would want this?" and then AirBNB was created, and then arrived in Europe, and they still couldn't get investment because "who wants a ripoff clone of AirBNB?"
"Dumping" in the context of international trade; Predatory pricing.
The standard model for tech firms has been to run at enormous losses to push competition into bankruptcy or steal their users through subsidized service.
No European social media company could compete with e.g. Twitter, running at a loss for TWELVE years.
In more recent years, it's things like Uber. Subsidizing ride costs to crush existing taxi services & European taxi startups.
This is all, ostensibly, illegal under international law. You can't do it for cars or commodity goods. It's just not been enforced on the tech industry.
Could you please share how its illegal under international law and why I couldn't do it for cars or commodity goods.
Some resources would definitely help me out here!
Also I think that I doubt how enforceable this is in tech industry as for the most part, they are selling a service and each service is different and thus have different price points and therefore the company should have the ability to decide prices technically.. so if they want to sell at a loss, theoretically nothing stops them from selling the service at a loss.
But I feel like the same logic applies to commodity goods. If two parties want to decide that they want to buy/sell at lower prices, why does the govt. interfere b/w them? Does this not impact their rights/freedom?
The actual legal mechanics are complicated; "Illegal under international law" here specifically entails "WTO agreements allow retaliation in response to dumping".
> and why I couldn't do it for cars or commodity goods.
Specifically, it's more enforced. Governments care about their conventional industry. The way this'd look is say, China providing state subsidy to certain industries in order to artificially lower the price of those goods, making them cheaper than US-based industry could produce, with the specific intent of driving US industry out of business.
Just googling "predatory pricing" and "dumping" will get you examples.
> Also I think that I doubt how enforceable this is in tech industry as for the most part, they are selling a service and each service is different and thus have different price points and therefore the company should have the ability to decide prices technically.
The problem for tech is this difficulty in assessing "real value" and the assumption that running at a loss for extended periods is "normal" for tech companies.
For a clear-cut example, consider Uber, who paid drivers more than they charged the passenger(s). This is obviously predatory. Uber has tricks like moving insurance/maintenance to the driver's wallet, but a taxi can't be cheaper than what they pay the driver.
> why does the govt. interfere b/w them? Does this not impact their rights/freedom?
It does impact their freedom, but the reason why the government intervenes is long-term health of the market.
Things like a 'firesale' because you're going out of business, or moving to a new warehouse, etc, are fine. A single store (even a big-box one) going out of business won't crush the entire market and it's only of short duration.
The problem is that dumping/predatory pricing is a strategy to maintain a monopoly. (Or in the cases of extensive investment funding, build one)
Again, consider something like Uber (but the same applies to any "rental"/gig-economy company). They sell rides below cost paid for by their huge pile of investment money, no other taxi company can compete. All the competing taxis go out of business. Uber can now raise the prices to obscene levels and cash in.
Whenever someone tries to start a new taxi company, it'll be small and local, so Uber just lowers their ride prices in that region again until they go out of business. And because they're small they don't have as much money as Uber so they'll go bankrupt first. Uber keeps the monopoly.
Such monopolies are long-term bad for the entire economy.
On an international level, it's China and steel again. China subsidizes their industry, industry in other countries can't compete and goes bankrupt, China can now raise their prices.
Well written. The comparison with physical goods as you're making it is one I'm a big fan of, and should be made much more often.
It's laughable that tarriffs and import taxes only apply to physical goods. If the EU had even an ounce of self-respect, the second the US came out with the tarriffs, they would've come out and said:
"We think this is a fantastic idea by Mr. Trump. Aligned with his views, we are instituting accompanying digital tarriffs to fix the digital trade defecit. We're sure he'll agree that the trade balance should be corrected in both the physical as well as digital worlds".
And that's why the US is so mad at the likes of Brazil - finally, after decades of getting rinsed, countries are starting to take (wholly insufficient) measures here and rightly instituting the equivalent of digital tarriffs.
The EU presumbly knows they're currently very dependent on the US tech industry, and doesn't want to collapse the EU to the way Trump doesn't know the US is dependent on imported materials and will collapse the US.
(It's probably more about keeping up politicians' stock market investments though)
A key focus on VC glut. I think that another idea to consider here is that the VC's just spend like billions on projects and they don't care about consequences, all they want in the end is profit and maybe growth..
And so, maybe something like airbnb gets the money and expands which effectively removes the competition, making a monopoly who might get fined or what not but still in the end, it all turned perfect for VC.
VC funding (I think) drives on monopoly creation. Maybe that's why we were seeing a huge amount of VC funding in AI because they think that they want to monopolize "intelligence" this time so its the end goal as they are trying to monopolize the means towards creation...
I really want to learn how US got VC trapped. The whole economy's system issue arises from VC. Like, AI hype started from VC spending billions which then justified the absurd AI growth in things like magnificent 7 on stock market.
We really have these billionaires pulling quite deals which secretly shape the world to a much larger extent and they don't do it because of some evil reason but a plain old reason: money.
But the fact that all they care about money makes the companies inside VC justify doing evil things because morality isn't the end goal, helping isn't the end goal. Its money and more money and even more money. Guess what? Exploitation pays the most short term and these VC's prefer short term too.
VC and corruption seems to be the worst issues that I think really influence way way more of the world secretly and thus making "democracy" as one HN user pointed out on a different thread, a "copium for the masses"
The EU has been chronically unable to fill the gaps in their economy. If you look at the list of europes biggest companies, it's the same companies as it was 30 years ago...automotive and oil and gas. There are no major tech companies in Europe, which is so insane it's comical. Let that sink in...a continent full of intelligent tech workers has never been able to get a major tech company off the ground.
Regulation may be good, but understand, actually, recognize, that it is also suffocating. People bragging that they have no weeds in their fields, when they have no fresh crops either....
> There are no major tech companies in Europe, which is so insane it's comical. Let that sink in...a continent full of intelligent tech workers has never been able to get a major tech company off the ground.
This is plainly untrue if you're talking about tech beyond the mag-7 sized supergiants.
> Regulation may be good, but understand, actually, recognize, that it is also suffocating. People bragging that they have no weeds in their fields, when they have no fresh crops either....
And yet it is the tech giants in the US, oh so praised for their size, that are the "weeds" in many regards.
What good is Google when it's reliant on an advertising monopoly itself built entirely on monopolistic and fraudulent exploitation of the rest of the economy.
What good is Amazon when it's reliant on crushing all other retail and local manufacturing?
Amazon crushed all other retail in the first place and therefore, now all other retail can't provide some stuff and you buy them from amazon
That isn't good.
Man I am thinking of this as an ouroboros. Amazon got big because they crushed all other retail and they crush all other retail because they are big.
I think that the ouroboros that I am talking about should be known as the monoboros (get it? I am trying to have some fun by mixing monopoly and ouroboros, I hope you don't mind it)
Or just call this ouroboros a monpoly, man. it hurts me sometimes that you can't bring change in this world because of the way the world is right now and that bad things can happen in this world and its far far from perfect. I don't get how you guys or even anyone stays optimistic, I really wish to be a optimist logically but I can't come to that conclusion other than the fact that hey I run on emotions and bad emotions lead to bad things happening for me personally so I need to shut down bad emotions just so that they happen better for me. But that seems a little like running away from the truth. Should I feel okay running away from truth?
Nah, Amazon got big WHILE all the other retailers were huge. Amazon was nothing, and the other retailers sucked so bad (consistently) that Amazon was able to eat their lunch and crush them.
Amazon didn’t win because they were huge. They got huge by winning.
Now, they can afford to be shitty (unfortunately), which is actually helping local retail near as I can tell.
Please stfu and gtfo with your baseless accusations calling everyone racist just becausse they have a different viewpoint that's not parroting the mainstream.
It's not conspiracy when there's facts and pointing out the facts isn't racist.
>Without those „Fachkräfte“ the healthcare system would crash.
Really? How many of the illegal boat immigrants work in the German healthcare sector? Because last time I checked they were mostly EU workers who got their job before crossing the border. Actual doctors and nurses don't need to cross borders illegally to get a job. I wasn't talking about skilled, LEGAL immigrants like doctors and nurses, I was talking about the other „Fachkräfte“ that tend to make the news.
>And the biggest companies aren’t automotive, gas and oil.
Maybe he meant in the tech sector. Because I can't take the LVMH sweatshop seriously even if they're making a lot of money. And the other companies on the list, FANG are worth more than all of them combined. I think even Nvidia is worth more than all of them.
MasterCard leaked address + full credit card data about 90.000 people in Germany. Everyone that signed up for a lawyer (that was paid 15% of a possible payout) got 250-300€, including me.
If only 10.000 signed up, it's already 2.5 millions.
I'm aware of a single record case that cost the perp 350K. You really don't want to get zapped with the maximum fines based on wilful transgressions on large numbers of people.
You seem to pop up on threads on a daily basis just making up shit and pretending it’s a fact. I guess it really matches the bio you wrote here in your profile but JFC… why..
I don't think I expressed anything about their likelihood of payment - just that they won't stop doing business in the EU.
I think your scenario is a real possibility, but ironically one that would cost the US a lot more than it gains. It's really playing with fire, running the risk of even just 1% of EU businesses and consumers opting for EU services over US ones. And just that 1% represents far more than all of the yearly fines to Google/Meta/Apple combined.
And ursula will brag how she got a deal with trump, where google doesn't get fined. ...like with the tarrifs, where US got everything they wanted and EU got nothing.
No, they will not leave the EU because the EU is not reading the room right now. You think Trump will do nothing to protect FAANG? To be honest, despite being European, I'm surprised the US has let itself be pushed around for so long. I don't say I agree with it, it's just realpolitik.
If Trump makes Google not pay the fine you think that will have no negative side-effects? His actions have been incredibly positive for European tech companies, 5 years ago the only ones that even considered not going for the US options were a few companies in Germany. Demand has skyrocketed and making Google not pay this would give it a huge boost.
It is hard to understand in a country where big corp corruption for political parties is considered normal, and even gets prime time with gift ceremonies, and dinners.
Laws that the EU passed in order to fine big tech one could argue. Just saying, you think Trump (and later Vance) will stand idly by? EU is a shell of its former self economically, there's not much we can do besides cozying up to an actual dictatorship (China) who literally shot thousands of students, turned them into pulp using tanks and flushed them down the drain. I know we all hate Trump, but the US is the better ally here still.
It is hard to understand what Trump will do… it is hard to talk about this without going on some US politics tangent, which I think is not appreciated on this site. But he isn’t particularly affiliated with FAANG really. He has some startup guys in his orbit, but they aren’t FAANG.
And he’s, uh… very motivated by what others have to offer him… so FAANG clearly has some leverage there, but I don’t think it is necessarily a sure thing they’ll work something out.
Odds aren't terrible that Trump will have a fatal stroke before his term is up, the EU will outlive him, and can't and shouldn't tie its sovereign domestic policy and enforcement to cross-Atlantic chain-yanking that changes direction from week to week.
No matter what anyone does, he just moves the goal posts. Let him keep his ball.
Just a note, in case anyone thinks this is an insufficient punishment:
> The Commission has ordered Google (i) to bring these self-preferencing practices to an end; and (ii) to implement measures to cease its inherent conflicts of interest along the adtech supply chain. Google has now 60 days to inform the Commission about how it intends to do so.
It is on top of ordering them to fix the business practices. They can always issue more fines if Google doesn’t comply.
IMO some of us here want to see these companies hurt. That’s a non-goal for the EU, they are looking for compliance, not vengeance or something silly like that.
Because the rule of law, specifically the principle of proportionality, does not allow us to penalize some entities only to hurt them. That might be something entertaining to see for many of us, but civilized societies typically limit the public power from being used in such a way.
I hope I am wrong, and would be happy if that were the case, but I find these deadlines laughable. In reality Google will delay this in courts for at least 5 years. In which time they will make some extra billions, and then the fine will be cut to a quarter of the current value. And by then they will have invented a new way to abuse consumers, just different enough to be the object of a new investigation and new court case that also takes years.
I don't think this decision is wrong, I'm from the EU, and I think companies like Google have too much power anyway, but I don't like the ability of the commission to enforce things.
Here in Sweden we have a legal tradition where the government doesn't have power over the enforcement of the laws-- parliament can make any law it likes, and it can be anything, but enforcement and the courts are isolated from the politicians.
I really don't like that the commission can make up rules, or fine people etc. It's a bad system. It should be done by an impartial regular, or prosecutor or a court. This kind of system opens up the commission to political blackmail and threats from powerful states, it opens up for corruption, it opens up for uneven enforcement, and there's just no reason to have the system this way.
You could easily imagine a world where Google was a big US government darling and where they put their weight on the commission and got an outcome that isn't in accordance with law, but with the right system, one more like the Swedish system, that won't be possible.
I have my issues with how legislation is set up in the EU, but it's not like the commission can just make its own laws. The commission can only submit proposals, which then have to be approved (or changed) by the council and parliament. (In fact, the commission is the only party that can submit proposals, something that is very weird to me) As such, the commission is not part of the legislative branch, but the executive. The main job of the executive is to enforce the law, e.g. with fines.
In fact, this seems to be pretty similar to Sweden, quoting from [1]:
> Most state administrative authorities (statliga förvaltningsmyndigheter), as opposed to local authorities (kommuner), sorts under the Government, including the Armed Forces, Coast Guard, Customs Service and the police.
It appears that the swedish government can also initiate legislation, just like the commission (although the Riksdag can initiate on their own, something the European parliament cannot).
Also, fwiw: The fines can also be adjusted or cancelled by the court of Justice of the EU
The Swedish IRS (whose directors are appointed in a fashion similar to the commission) publishes regular clarifications of tax law and how they implement the tax law in their enforcement of Swedish tax law. How is that any different?
People and companies regularly go to court regarding the Commission’s decisions, what makes you think that does not happen in the EU?
For example Danske Fragtmænd, challenged the Commission's decision that capital injections by Denmark and Sweden into Postnorrd did not constitute unlawful state aid.
and this is not enough to not make the rulemaking by the commission into rulemaking.
I gave the example of their to designate terrorist organization, which as you probably know is a power that is impossible constitutionally in Sweden. The commission has actual authority which is extremely broad and wielded in individual cases.
In Sweden SÄPO (the security police) primarily government entity that designates terror organisations. The leader of SÄPO is a political appointee from Regeringen and the prime minister of Sweden.
In other words the executive branch has rulemaking powers in Sweden according to you.
How is that meaningfully different from how a EU commissioner is appointed?
We do not designate terrorist organizations. SÄPO does not have such a power. The courts interpret the following definition:
>3 § Med terroristorganisation avses i denna lag en sammanslutning av personer som begår eller på annat sätt medverkar till terroristbrott eller gör sig skyldiga till försök, förberedelse eller stämpling till terroristbrott.
Thus the government, SÄPO, the authorities etc. have no power over what is a terrorist organisation. There's designation or possibility of designation. Only the above definition defines it.
Notice that even state organizations of friendly states can in principle be terrorist organizations according to this definition. It's among the most beautiful laws we have.
I was initially opposed to the inquiry to develop this law, because I feared that we'd something deranged, something against our constitution where the government or some authority designates organizations as terrorist and where it's thus a political matter, but we got really lucky. This law is like a pearl, and it's moral delight, so beautiful that one should cry. Actual generality, actual equality before the law, actual apolitical court-based and truth-based, where others have political determinations.
Isnt the commission basically just he executive branch of the EU?
My understanding is Sweden's "SEC" (in US terms) is called Finansinspektionen.
Wouldnt this EU commission be like the Finansinspektionen issuing a fine or revoking a license if a bank didnt comply with regulations? My understanding is the Finansinspektionen can do this sort of thing but has to go to the court for larger actions.
> Isnt the commission basically just he executive branch of the EU?
The European Commission is both the executive and legal branch. They propose the legislation that the European Parliament can only approve or reject. On the other hand, the European Patliament can not propose anything at all.
That’s not quite accurate. There is an extended process in which the Parliament and the Council can give input and propose and discuss changes to the Commission’s proposal, to work out a compromise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_legislative_pro...
How feasible is it in practice? In the US, it's possible in practice to remove officials via impeachment as well as amend the constitution, but in practice they are almost impossible to achieve. In practice the legislature is almost deadlocked for most non-budget bills as well, so the executive ends up running the country, with an assist from the judiciary.
And all of them represent the EU citizens who elected both the Parliament and the Member States governments. I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make. The point I tried to make is that the Parliament has significant input to the legislation in the process, it’s not just a binary yes or no.
I see. So my undrestanding is the finansinspektionen answers to the ministry of finance, which is part of the executive branch, but the finansinspektionen is probably a bit more insulated from the executive branch than say, the SEC.
The problem with this is big tech companies are very adept at stringing court-based enforcement along, that would defer this punishment until well into the 2030s and even the 2040s for actually rectifying the issues.
Who does "enforcement" in Sweden? Is the police somehow under the courts? Same for things like consumer protection agencies, environment protection and so on? Are prosecutors somehow in the same group as the judges? That may work for you, but I see some potential for abuse there as well. I think that is how it turned out in Japan, once you are prosecuted conviction is a foregone conclusion.
The way it works is that the goverment (The politicians in executive positions) are allowed to write policy for all goverment agencies but they're not legally allowed to tell the agency how to handle any given individual case.
No, they are not. The police is under the control of the central government (and that includes the courts). Yes, it is true that swedish politicans dont want to give the impression they control the actions of the police etc but of course in the end they do. The difference is maybe in the US politicans say "I gave the order to the police to do X" while in Sweden they would say in private "you probably should do X or we might find a replacement"
What do you say when Arbetsmiljöverket (labour regulation), Skatteverket (IRS), Ekobrottsmyndigheten (monterary crimes) take enforcement actions in Sweden and hand out decisions for fines and such?
The EU Commission does not make up rules anymore than these government agencies in Sweden does.
That's fine. They aren't politically appointed and in the end their decisions are checked by the courts.
The EU commission on the other hand actually has power.
As one other example, consider the Swedish terrorism law. There's no such thing as designating something a terrorist organization-- that's constitutionally impossible, instead it's determined by the courts. Meanwhile the EU commission can actually designate a group as a terrorist organization, no court case necessary.
The director of arbetsmiljöverket does not intervene in individual cases either, and in the end the law is what matters.
>Ingen myndighet, inte heller riksdagen eller en kommuns beslutande organ, får bestämma hur en förvaltningsmyndighet i ett särskilt fall ska besluta i ett ärende som rör myndighetsutövning mot en enskild eller mot en kommun eller som rör tillämpningen av lag.
No authority [...] may decide how an administrative authority is to decide in a case involving use of authority against an individual[...]
Furthermore, the commission is not like a directors of an agency. They are politicians. I would compare them to government ministers, who are appointed in a similar way.
Oh man, I’m confused why you keep arguing like the 12th chapter of the Swedish Regeringsform does not exist. What you write is not what is reality in law or reality in effect in Sweden.
Very fair. Doing anything with online advertising, either as an advertiser or as a publisher, without it involving any of Google's platforms is nearly impossible.
Oh nice. I hope other countries follow suit. It’s quite a shame Google didn’t get Chrome divested from them in the US, would’ve been a “nature is healing” moment for the web.
"would’ve been a “nature is healing” moment for the web". I wish this was true.
The healing will be when all ads and marketing will be down to zero. This companies like Facebook and Google make their billions putting on your face what you don't want or need and someone else pays them good money for that.
You may think it's too radical but we must make marketing illegal. Then fix the web.
This is a pipe dream. Advertising always has existed and always will. It comes and goes in different forms, but people like selling things they make or services they provide. Without a way of getting those things in front of people, nothing new could come to light.
I agree that some sites make advertisements a massive eyesore, but that's a problem that can be solved in other ways.
While that’s technically true it’s not true about the current type of advertising.
The ads we see online now (and the tracking that goes with it) are what, 20 years old?
The type of marketing and advertising we live with now is a direct descendent of research and work done in the last century (thanks Bernays).
The whole point of Google was to get people answers to questions they have. Our current approach to advertising creates the problems in people’s heads only to immediately sell the solution.
> Without a way of getting those things in front of people, nothing new could come to light
This argument sounds intuitive, but are we really sure about that? People willingly seek out marketing materials to find things they want to buy. I've seen people flip through coupon books and catalogs as idle entertainment. That plus word of mouth may well be sufficient to keep knowledge of new products and such in circulation. Hell, it might even yield better-informed consumers, allowing the market to function more efficiently.
One thing I'd worry about is ads would become unviable or banned somehow would be that companies would militarize the word of mouth element. Basically like the old tupperware parties.
Without a way of getting those things in front of people, nothing new could come to light.
Most of the things I own / purchase / use… I have neither seen a commercial for nor pursuaded by it if I saw it in passing. So there are other ways. Right now few of the largest companies on the planet contribute little-to-nothing to society other than showing garbage down people’s throats. Perhaps there is some happy medium but I don’t think society can ever reach it any longer
>Without a way of getting those things in front of people, nothing new could come to light.
If my environment was not inundated with advertisement, I'd only be seeing more things that I'd be willing to pay for, not less.
>I agree that some sites make advertisements a massive eyesore, but that's a problem that can be solved in other ways.
Ads are not simply a way of getting your product in front of people. Ever wonder why ads are the fig leaf for mass surveillance? It's because they constitute some primitive, mild, poorly understood, but completely socially acceptable form of *non-consensual behavior modification*.
That this has been tolerated up to now is a historical contigency. Much like other civilizational essentials like tobacco products and leaded gas, as soon as someone prices in the externalities - whether through regulation or through disruption - the societal attitudes to them will quickly change from "unavoidable" towards "inexcusable".
So what do you do if you have a better product and a "name brand" disadvantage? Advertising commodifies information flow instead of letting it pool with the people who already have access to it. Think of all the products that got big nowadays because they could convince VCs to fund ad spend, and saw a return for it.
I think advertising has a huge, positive, 2nd order effect on the world.
Please expound. Are we going to fill in yearly surveys explaining what we like and don't like? Where does the information come from? Who determines the algorithm for placement? Will there now be no way to opt-out of ads at all, there's now a national quota on how many ads were exposed to a year or something?
There's no algorithm. Just a query language. Nothing is pushed to consumer. You want to buy something. You search. Companies can't pay anyone for any kind of publishing. Anyone is free to build tools and content that helps with the search. However companies can publish information about their products and services only through the database.
> You may think it's too radical but we must make marketing illegal. Then fix the web.
I've given some thought to this, and outright banning marketing sounds basically impossible. Not just from a "good luck getting that bill passed" sense, but in a practical one. Where do you draw the line on "marketing"? Presumably my writing a glowing review of a product I like won't be banned, and online banner ads will. I'm not trying to make a "the line is blurry therefore no regulation can happen" argument, rather I think "marketing" isn't really the right line. Specifically, what ought to be banned is the sale of attention. Anything where money or favors are changing hands in order to direct attention intentionally to your product, service, etc. So you can absolutely have a marketing page extolling the virtues of your brand. You cannot pay to have that page shoved in front of people's eyeballs.
Yes, I know that this kills the ad-based funding of the current internet. Let it burn. A mix of community-run free services and commercial paid services is infinitely preferable to the "free" trash we've grown dependent on.
To make an ethical argument: quantifying and selling human attention is gross anyway. Some things just don't belong on a market.
I had a decent idea. Not that it's easily practical, but it's more practical than other solutions.
Major problem today is information asymmetry. Google giving you free YouTube videos is front and center. Google paying for it by linking your location and this and that fingerprint from here and there is hidden in whitewashed language 3 settings menus deep. Many things are hidden in bottom right of a billboard in fine print, t&c fine prints, etc,.
What I propose is the law making sure that all information about the product that you intend to or are forced to by regulation to make public, public in the same measure. That is, if you're going to advertise "coca cola, open happiness" you also need to have in the same fontsize "39g of sugar" right next to it. Similarly google search bar needs to say what info of yours helped serve the ads you see, right next to the content paid for by those ads.
If you're going to hide less palatable stuff in your t&c, then marketing logos slogans all become illegal for you. And all information even positive ones must also be in fontsize8 t&c fine print.
Real estate ads can't put *artists impression at the bottom right of their ad in fine print, it has to be as big as the main tagline.
You get the idea. What I gave are just examples, slight variations of the idea that still focus on information symmetry as the main goal, will also work.
> would’ve been a “nature is healing” moment for the web.
A more likely scenario is that some other big techs like MSFT or Meta would acquire Chrome and replace the monopolist position. This is the sad truth that many people try to underplay; Nature won't heal by itself. The market is already structured to incentivize monopolist behaviors, thanks to the scaling nature of big techs. You need correction to the market itself, which can only be done by an extremely competent legislative body but we won't have that anytime soon. But at least the EU has done something with DMA so there are still some hopes.
I don't think we should expect much from the us justice system at the moment. All the biggest tech companies CEO were publicly donating millions on trump investiture, one can only imagine what else happens privately.
in my garden, if I see one rat it means there is at least a dozen more.
Google has done a ton for PWAs. If apple didn't have the monopoly they have on the ios ecosystem and actually granted PWAs the same accesses they get on android, you'd likely see them taking off.
They're essentially apps that don't have to go through the app store.
The issue is that Google is both the browser, the web standards, the ads, the mail, the search, the phone, the AI, the maps… not a chance to compete with any of that as long as it’s all in one. The only other barely approaching this level is Apple, and we know they have their own anticompetitive aspects.
Allowing corps to grow so much should never have been a thing.
If 10% of intel could be "sold" to the government maybe Chrome should be too? And the there could be 20 year ban written into law on selling it back to private.
Would probably rather end up under the Linux Foundation and not RH. How development would then continue is up for debate.
> Valve?
They already use CEF for their Steam client IIRC, but I don't think they are too much interested in owning an entire browser. Especially considering Valve itself is a relatively small company emplyee wise.
Mozilla already owns a browser, and gets free money from Google to do that. Yet, they have been mismanaging the whole time.
What makes you think they'll suddenly do a good job when the funding goes away, and they have to now support a large userbase which pays $0 to use the product.
Can someone elaborate on the first accusation — "DFP favours AdX over rival Ad exchanges by e.g. informing it in advance of the best bid from competitors"? I'd be really curious to understand how it does this, like what information is actually shared that isn't also shared with other ad exchanges.
> The Commission has already signalled its preliminary view that only the divestment by Google of part of its services would address the situation of inherent conflicts of interest, but it first wishes to hear and assess Google's proposal.
They also started to support censorship and government approved social media content.
See the recent thread about Nepal banning many apps and the comments are full of people saying that the EU should do the same or require that the content be even more moderated on all the platforms.
It's very sad to see.
I come here for the hacker news but it seems we are being overrun by a new kind of people who love when the EU intervenes to "regulate" the markets and fully believe that the EU is "pro" privacy (TM) and can't wait to impose new regulations all the while it's actually working to undermine encryption for everyone in Europe.
I guess the old saying is true, War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.
Wouldn't it be something if the EU focused on fostering a tech scene rather than attacking it. This is like the 4th time they have gone to the Google bank demanding a $1B+ ransom.
And before we "Just don't break the laws" take note of the fact the the EU has a dead tech scene. I don't know how they expect competition to grow when they block all the sunlight in their tech fields.
If you don't want Google dominating your populations technology, try creating conditions to grow a replacement.
This is not Europe racketing Google. Google is losing the same kind of trial everywhere in the world including the US for one simple reason: they are actually using anticompetitive practices in the ad tech market.
Honestly the most likely to benefit from this verdict are other American companies. You are welcome for us doing the enforcement your country refuses to do.
were not about monetary fines, they are first and foremost about changing practices (behavioural remedies). Microsoft didn't even pay any money, they had to change how they operated their business in the US.
Likewise with both the recent antitrust trials in the US against Google: In one government prosecutors wanted them to sell off Chrome, the other they are trying to break Google Ads monopoly by breaking it up.
This is not a system extracting billions of the dollar for the 4th time in a couple years. Especially as others have mentioned that this commission is also the one inventing the rules, so it can keep doing it indefinitely for new reasons.
At this point there's about a hundred (or more) years of research, experience, law etc. in competition policy.
Competition doesn't necessarily just win in the mid-term. Competitions works - if the conditions are right, markets are anonymous and dynamic, not two-sided, not plaqued by information symmetries and - importantly - vertical entanglements. Competitions also works out in the long term. Like, take a hundred years and squint.
However, in the meantime of all this, there are many cases where the market outcome moves strikingly far away from the optimum. What that means is that the market situation destroys value (consumer welfare, societal roi, whatever)
You can scan the OP for about three sections and see that Google is violating any reasonable and established take on how market regulation, leading to an inefficient market outcome.
This is not some special European temperament. This is just standard and - just to make this clear - 100% American economic theory as previously applied and pioneered mainly in the good US of A.
If this doesn't get applied in the US now, we may call this regulatory capture.
Personally, I feel it also really speaks to the situation that Google is lauded as representing the US tech scene. I disagree here. I think the US tech scene goes far beyond Google. Google ain't even a particular strength, probably more of a weakness by now.
By contrast, you could (and should) bring up about a million things the EU and the commision in particular does to stifle a EU tech scene.
Bog standard application of competition policy ain't it.
Do you think that the adtech industry "scene" is somehow exclusive to the USA? Antitrust enforcement doesn't appear out of thin air just to throw a spanner in the works just for the hell of it, it's because the local competition complained. You may not agree with it but they are "fostering" them as you wish.
> Wouldn't it be something if the EU focused on fostering a tech scene rather than attacking it.
It really wouldn't.
We're having the wrong conversation here.
The reality is that these fines mean nothing for the average EU consumer. There's really no difference between a consumer in the EU, the US or China. As a EU consumer you win nothing from these fines. You won't be able to sue Google or any other company if they're abusing you or your data. You're just reading these stupid headlines about these huge fines and that's the end of it. Europe has huge power and could really change the way big companies work, but instead it chooses to do nothing but apply random huge fines here and there that change nothing in the grand scheme of things. It's a shame.
I'm not talking about those 10 EUR that I get as a european citizen. I'm talking about consumer friendly legislation. No amount of money will compensate for the fact that big corporations rule EU just like they rule any other place on this planet.
>the 4th time they have gone to the Google bank demanding a $1B+ ransom
Even if I accepted this premise, from a realpolitik lens, why not? The USA has gone to the 'taffif/trade war bank' like 40 times, so maybe fight fire with fire?
> And before we "Just don't break the laws" take note of the fact the the EU has a dead tech scene. I don't know how they expect competition to grow when they block all the sunlight in their tech fields.
Google is abusing his position to prevent other companies to compete, hence decreasing the likelihood of European tech companies emerging.
Beside, I don't see how having strong monopolistic companies is beneficial to Americans citizens beside the tech bros working in Silicon Valley ? American companies are being ripped off on advertising just as bad as european companies used to be, and obviously they were following google rip off on goods price and customer had to pay more.
Even if you nuked every one of them, the EU tech scene would still be dead. It’s a cultural problem. The EU would rather be comfortable than competitive.
These numbers would be admirable if they had something to show for it, instead: illiteracy below level 1 28% [0]; life expectancy 79.5 years (as opposed to - for example Italy 83.9 [1]; rank 13 when it comes to cost of living [2]... I could go on with health etc. So, what exactly do you get out of all that additional labour?
I’ve lived there, among many other places. It’s pretty obvious in dozens of ways when you see it up close.
East Asia (currently) has a completely different mindset, with tradeoffs, which is why it has completely replaced Silicon Valley for actual Silicon. And frankly, is starting to do the same for software.
I read this whole article a couple times and don't really u understand what was wrong here.
Google is using their own ad exchange to fill ads? Isn't that... Their entire business model? Does the EU just want more intermediaries to exist? At the end of the day doesn't Google still get to decide how much an ad is worth when someone searches 'car insurance'?
To me this reads like the EU should pass a law describing exactly what they want.
>For example, Google Ads was avoiding competing ad exchanges and mainly placing bids on AdX, thus making it the most attractive ad exchange.
I just don't know why Google couldn't do this. Is this an instance of if they just never used other ad exchanges at all no one would be mad? Like Google getting called a monopoly by requiring the play store to be installed on android phones, while Apple obviously does exactly this just on their own hardware?
From what I quickly gather, these are the things Google did that are against the EU anti-trust rules:
- Companies advertising through Google were not allowed to collaborate with other advertising companies under Google's contract.
- Google runs an ad exchange (AdX) where advertisers and advertising spaces can connect, and Google didn't share platform's data with other members, giving them an unfair market advantage.
- They also manipulated the way deals were made on the platform to their advantage.
To me it sounds just wrong anyway that Google runs this platform where companies compete with each other but also Google itself, so they'll always have more control.
I think it's a good idea having these anti trust rules, because otherwise you'll eventually get a a gigantic monopoly economy, and I just think that's not a good idea.
Cost of doing business. If these fines are to have any teeth, they need to be of a magnitude proportionate to company size. Otherwise, they are more of a petty cash shakedown.
eu's real issue with google and meta is that they are not french. beautiful healthcare system and worker rights are phenomenal but it's like a different planet out there
Agreed. Megacorps where noone has actual honest skin in the game and every unethical decision can be paved over with money are bad news for most of us.
Until the rich people who green light things like this go to jail it will literally never stop. Someone, somewhere needs to be responsible for policies that break the law and they need to go to jail.
For usual corporate crimes: Usually CEO and/or a few senior individuals who you could prove was part of a conspiracy and aware it was a crime, through emails, chat logs etc.
I actually do think that's significant, if someone took 15% of your yearly earnings this year that would definitely be noticed. I'm not saying it's the right amount, I'm saying that is enough to be felt and therefore isn't the tiny fines you often tend to see
Honestly, on this particular case that's on the judge and your current culture, not Khan. Before the 80s, Google would have been forced to separate its two ads divisions, to make some space for new companies and actors.
If Lina Khan only victory is that people are now aware that having a government this friendly with monopolies isn't normal, that's probably better than most politicians since Clinton.
> Honestly, on this particular case that's on the judge and your current culture, not Khan. Before the 80s, Google would have been forced to separate its two ads divisions, to make some space for new companies and actors.
The case in which the government didn’t get what it wanted was the online search case; the trial in the remedy phase of the ad tech case starts later this month, so talking about the difference between what Google would have gotten in the 1980s for that and what they are actually getting now is premature speculation.
Oh sorry then, i guess my lack of following and my pessimism has taken over proper verification. Hopefully the US government break Google adtech in two different companies.
Do you think it's fair to put the recent case on Lisa Khan when a) the Google antitrust lawsuit was started in Trump v1.0 and b) the trial remedy was during Trump 2.0? If anything, that Google was found to have antitrust behavior bolsters her success rate. She's not in charge there anymore, so blaming her is very very suspect.
One comes from an orangutan because he wants to get it hard and please his fanbase and the other is because a specific company broke a law of a region.
The two couldn't be more different than that. And I find it hard to believe your comment is genuine given the obvious difference.
It is not that the EU can't compete, it is that the US don't enforce their own antitrust laws - and that the EU has to step in to ensure fair competition.
US Tech Giants use tax optimisation created by the single market to avoid EU taxes to the tune of billions a year. That’s on top of them getting far too much access to public markets in the EU including for plenty of things EU companies are bared from by the Buy American Act in the US.
The idea that EU is somehow a mob boss shaking down American tech companies is plain ridiculous. Just take a look at the EU-US trade balance in service and you will understand in which direction the money is actually flying.
You don’t seem to understand how the EU works, or what it even is in the first place. A hint: it’s not a singular entity when it comes to "needing" money.
I fully expect and won't blame the form of archery that will pursue this comment, but... Impulse must have its way once in a while.
With the unprecedented extrajudicial approach the US has recently taken against certain recreational boaters in the Caribbean, perhaps they will realize Google is far worse and apply similar tactics.
Lawsuits will never amount to anything. And they are taking over the world. And in my opinion, they're verifiably more hostile than any boater I've ever been made aware of, including people on jet skis.
With the very substance of reality dissolving before our eyes, and considering we may be but a twitch of a jingo fingertip away from nuking the homeless, why not?
Going to pre-empt the comments that always pop up in these topics saying "Google/Meta/Apple will just leave the EU at this rate": Google still has around $20 billion yearly reasons to remain active in the EU. Talking Europe yearly net profit here, post-fine. No, they're not going to say "screw this fine, you can take your $20 billion per year, we're leaving!". The second that happens, shareholders will have Sundar's access revoked within the hour.
There is a number of countries where Google has to deal with large levels of protectionist barriers (not the EU, these fines aren't that) and they still operate there. Korea is just one example. Because there's still a lot of money to be made. China isn't a counterexample: Google stopped operating search in China because at that point there was not a lot of money to be made for them in search there.
I love that you got one response calling it extortion, and another worrying that it might not have recovered all the money from the abusive practices.
The EU is threading the needle deftly here, I guess.
Im not necessarily saying its extortion. Im saying his observation is why the EU could extort Google for a lot more than $3B. My wording was unclear so I tried editing my original comment but apparently it was removed.
Why forfeit $20B in revenue in exchange for NOT having to pay $3B? I think that's an astute observation by the original commenter.
So here's the thing.
There are two types of businesses: those allergic to change, and those unable to stay the same.
If you are at a corporation where you constantly have to be Doing Things which Demonstrate Impact, this sort of judgement or regulatory change is a godsend for hundreds or thousands of middle-managers and engineers.
You have a project with clear goals ("comply with court order/new regulations"), relatively low bars for success (minimal impact on the bottom line), and it's all very clear to upper management that the work you're doing is Important. Heck, you might be able to lean on it for a couple of years to justify your existence, instead of trying to convince people that changing the rating system from a five point scale to a percentage then back to a five point scale was a worthwhile use of a dozen employees worth of headcount.
There may be some industries where change is anathema or the owners' oppositional defiance disorder makes they unwilling to change things just because they're illegal, but there's also plenty of others where people will be gleefully fighting for the opportunity to comply with a court order.
Sorry for the incorrect read I guess. Hopefully it will be restored and I’ll get a chance to re-read it (fwiw I wish it hadn’t been flagged).
I think I've summarized it well enough. I would copy/paste it for clarity but I will avoid that, as I'm not trying to give the impression of evading content moderation.
EDIT: FWIW I think your observation that the EU is threading a needle stands. It's a controversial topic that people are very passionate about.
Here's a better option that Google will more likely follow; simply build the fines into operation costs and bill that to EU customers or maybe all Google customers looking to serve ads in the EU.
I am not sure why but otherwise seemingly intelligent people seem to be incapable of internalizing that any cost, expense, or fine levied against any corporate entity will always, with 100% (not any other percentage) be rolled into prices. The minor headache of it lowering returns will also be offset and will not really make a difference to any meaningful degree. Most likely Google, just like other corporations that are exposed to this kind of risk, will have set aside a "war chest" they have been building up over prior years, which further would defray any real impact.
Then of course there is the fact that these fines are rarely ever the actual amount that will be paid in the end, and most of the time it can be distributed over time.
What people should really take away from this is that in the end it really is kind of an extortion racket by the EU, but not of Google, but rather of the advertising companies the end consumers who end up paying from he higher priced ads through product prices, and possibly the general Google customer base.
This would really only be an issue that materially impacted Google if there were some kind of real competition in the space, which there is not really. What the EU could possibly do that would have a notable impact is setting industry standards to, e.g., a universal ad format that is ad broker agnostic, e.g., your app, site, service, etc could just serve up ads from all kinds of places, a kind of free market of ads not dominated by Google.
But even with that, with Google's advancement in AI generated content, they will likely also dominate the ad generation market soon.
The oddest thing is that the EU and Europe in general has all but floundered in many ways regarding the generation of a competitive technology industry. But that's a whole different topic.
> Here's a better option that Google will more likely follow; simply build the fines into operation costs and bill that to EU customers or maybe all Google customers looking to serve ads in the EU.
That will make Google less competitive and allow more players on the market, breaking their monopoly. Not a bad outcome and probably exactly the point of these fines.
If google is already a monopoly, and EU fines them and google adds more ads to their Eu customers as the parent posted, well guess what, I think that google still is a monopoly...
I doubt that google is a monopoly because they are the most competitive at what they do & thus have the market share. I have been using duckduckgo for honestly 3-4 years ago and I think that I have ublock so I don't see their ads but they are really nothing compared to google's ads and they rarely show even without adblocker (I think).
Duckduckgo is already really really competitive, You might argue that ddg uses bing and isn't independent but brave search is independent and comes really close to google to the point that you wouldn't know the difference.
I don't know the last time I used google but I love ddg's bangs etc.
I am sure that someone else can articulate what I am saying into something more logical as to why a monopoly can still exist even while being less competitive than competition.
And also I am saying that it is as easy as two clicks to change the default browser but it maybe speaks mountains that most people still don't switch from google to duckduckgo.
I sometimes want to recommend librewolf just because it has duckduckgo, ublock and sane defaults (except your web browsing deleted everytime/starting from clean slate (I think) and webgl stuff)
Why are you talking about monopolies? Go check the EU ruling, and also the original designation of gatekeepers. They’re not the same thing.
At the same time, Google absolutely has a significant stranglehold on the adtech market, which is what this is about, not search engines
This is why the fines should be high enough that a competitor who doesn't engage in abusive practices, and doesn't have fines levied against them, can out-compete the ones that do. Then competitive pressure would prevent companies from just treating fines as a cost of doing business and passing it on to their customers.
Of course, in a market with this degree of concentrated market power, those fines would have to be very very high indeed...
"any cost, expense, or fine levied against any corporate entity will always, with 100% (not any other percentage) be rolled into prices. " is not true, because raising prices isn't free of consequence.
Same reason why exporters sometimes pay some of the tariffs and importers might eat some in their margin as well.
There is no doubt it puts pressure on the prices and in many cases it may entirely be reflected in the prices but the incentive structure doesn't actually necessitate it.
Willful continued violation of the law will result in increasingly steep fines, and likely ulterior measures. It’s not something that Google can just price in.
The idea is pricing in the lost value. So whether its fines or they stand up compliance and see revenue loss from operational changes, that's what they could offset with new pricing.
There is no 'lost value'. There is illegal income.
Yes we should not sugarcoat this. Money made due to illegal pragtices should not be regarded much different than for example money from money laundering.
Do you understand what I am saying?
He's suggesting that the money Google does not make because of this regulation may be rolled into prices. The fact that eating the fees is not sustainable doesn't mean they have to take the margin hit for all associated costs.
Whether or not Google is "losing value" (aka money) or losing "illegal income", which aren't mutually exclusive by the way, has nothing to do with that dynamic. They could, in theory, roll that difference into prices either way.
When you can be fined up to twenty percent of your worldwide revenue (not profits, revenue), you listen. This is the EC making clear they’re willing to rule against Google and fine them. Next time it’ll be the full initial 10% of worldwide revenue
If it can buy them some few years worth of time every willful continued violation, then guess what? They are more than happy with increasingly steep fines
Dude, 2.95 Billion $ is already steep, and I am sure that google used to get small fines when it was small in EU too, but its just that the rate at which google grows is more than the rate at which fines grow but I think that EU can't really make a really large number like suing google for 100 billion dollars. and I think that google already weighs in everything like the fines, the costs associated with exiting (stock price drops etc.) and they would actually just do whatever is more profitable to them of the following three options
A) stay in EU & pay the fines B) leave EU C) Follow EU requests
What is the fine amount which might change things into C) and not A) or B)
Because I think EU wants change not money, I am sure that they have plenty of money and they know that google isn't paying them out of their kindness. EU's people or even google itself isn't following EU laws and its affecting people living in EU. I wonder if someone thinks how much powerless EU might feel in that sense. They already have money, they want change.
I disagree only because I would be truly shocked if they do not figure out how to get as close to the line as is profitable without crossing over and recover those fines in the future with increased pricing.
yes, lets charge the EU customers 10% more for the price of viewing an ad.
The customers are buying the ad in the EU
> Here's a better option that Google will more likely follow; simply build the fines into operation costs and bill that to EU customers or maybe all Google customers looking to serve ads in the EU.
Google applying tariffs to itself in Europe might be something the EC may a) investigate and fine Google for ripping off Europeans, and/or b) approve of; they previously considered a big-tech tax to improve competition in Europe. Google would be doing them a favor, and Trump won't send them a nastygram this time around.
Why would you classify this as a tariff?
>build the fines into operation costs and bill that to EU customers or maybe all Google customers looking to serve ads in the EU.
It was tongue in cheek, since only governments can effect actual tariffs.
However, the consumer effects of a "tax" or surcharge on a foreign service applied to a specific jurisdiction are indistinguishable from a tariff. The only difference is the money doesn't go to the government treasury - in any case, that's not the reason most governments introduce tariffs. If Google were to introduce a Europe surcharge, they'd be ironically in alignment with Brussels.
There are a lots of examples of geo-based pricing that I dont think you'd consider a tariff. Cloud services, Uber, Spotify subscription, etc.
They cost different things based off the country you are in. I guess you could try to distinguish between why they cost different prices in different countries and in some cases it's largely purchasing power parity, but others it absolutely is operational cost differences, such as cloud services. Uber is a bit more mixed - there are definitely purchasing power differences but there are also different regulatory requirements.
All that is to say you could never really tease it all out perfectly in practice.
Tariff’s usual goal is to increase the price to reduce competitiveness.
My guess is that exactly this similarity coupled with a pinch of humour, was what caused op to classify it as such.
I think Google leaving EU will result in more good than harm by shaping a better landscape for innovation and competition.
As an European, I wish you were right, but I’m afraid you aren’t.
The EU would use public funding to build some sort of Google alternative and it would take ages, would be mediocre and most money would go to waste. Instead of incentivising entrepreneurship, which is what they probably should do.
We live very well in the EU. We don’t have to have millions in savings in order to retire. Strong worker protection. Plenty of time off. Low crime rates. Most people fantasise with becoming rich, but as in, “I had a rich aunt that I didn’t even meet in my life and I was the sole heir” or “I won the lottery”, not as in “I grinded for the best 10 years of my life working 100 hours per week before I sold my company” that seems more prevalent in the US. Ordinary people here are super happy if they can buy a small place to live (not a humongous house) even if it takes 25 years to pay it in full, then finish work at 5 and take their kids to the park and have dinner at some restaurant on Saturday.
OTOH: I think the current US administration is the best think that could happen to the EU, a big wake up call. Suddenly there’s money to invest in Defense and that kind of thing.
Also, hopefully LLMs will diminish Google’s importance, and as long as there’s competitive models not from the US (Mistral, DeepSeek) we might be fine. But Google holds all the cards (data). With stuff like the Harvard animosity they might even stop attracting all the foreign talent.
Apple? There’s Samsung for phones at least. Amazon? They’ve become a Temu/Aliexpress. Facebook… huge win if they stopped doing business in Europe. MS? This is the year of Linux in desktop?
The Cloud is one of those things where the EU could build something competitive/alternative just with public funding. All running on Linux, of course.
> The EU would use public funding to build some sort of Google alternative and it would take ages, would be mediocre and most money would go to waste. Instead of incentivising entrepreneurship, which is what they probably should do.
Something like web search is basicallly part of a modern digital infrastructure. We don't want entrepreneurship in water or energy supply, I don't think we should rely on it in web search, because it will inevitably end up chasing profits over everything else.
Markets are good at driving cost down via competition, but once you reach a monopoly steady state there's not much left to optimize. I think a search utility would work just fine. The main barrier to entry is the huge storage and processing resources that are needed to make a good index. Google contains all the information out how to scale like that too.
> I think the current US administration is the best think that could happen to the EU, a big wake up call. Suddenly there’s money to invest in Defense and that kind of thing.
Not to derail the conversation, but IMO the current US administration isn’t a wake up call. It’s a temper tantrum by people who understand that the US isn’t as relatively wealthy to the rest of the world as it was after WW2 but don’t understand why. If some of the thrash accidentally improves the West’s defensive posture or spending that’s good but there is no coherent plan of why things need to be changed.
>We live very well in the EU. We don’t have to have millions in savings in order to retire. Strong worker protection. Plenty of time off. Low crime rates.
We'll see how that pans out when the baby boomers finish retiring. Europe ate it's children to feed the retirees.
https://www.politico.eu/article/france-francois-bayrou-wakin...
its
> Most people fantasise with becoming rich, but as in, “I had a rich aunt that I didn’t even meet in my life and I was the sole heir” or “I won the lottery”, not as in “I grinded for the best 10 years of my life working 100 hours per week before I sold my company” that seems more prevalent in the US.
I promise you that within the US, each of those first two fantasies is more popular than the third one.
Isn't Europe in a desperate weak position? To me it's on the edge of collapsing. France needs a bail soon. Germany in a steep decline. A war they probably gonna lose. Dozens of national governments in shattered pieces. Housing and energy crisis. Overregulation on many topics holding countries locked.
Wish you could know what they (media) tell us about the US over here…
Yes the voices echo all around the globe of what's happening in the US. Surprisingly the only place it isn't heard is in some places of US.
But I still feel like some points raised by the gp might be right. And I was laughing a little thinking that someone critizing the EU already makes you consider them as an american.
Like its just funny.
Also, I feel like every country has problems but countries should honestly first and foremost try to stay away from corruption and the billionaires/rich people's influence in general and try to be impartial. I do think that EU might be good in that but still, I sometimes wonder if this all might be a facade in the sense that EU wants to work and they want to show something for it and so that's why they are fining google only almost 3 billion$. Like maybe my trust in political systems is a little too faded seeing US instititutions erode in days (speaking as non american but I really admired american politics, not anymore)
> And I was laughing a little thinking that someone critizing the EU already makes you consider them as an american.
Look at the comments in this post. The always pro-privacy, anti-ads HN suddenly moaning about this fine. Now that’s super funny and worth of a good laugh. Of course it’s an America vs EU thing, patriotism trumps (no pun intended) all else.
The pun is strong with this one!
On a more serious note as much as you can be when you realize that discussions aren't happening in good faith and that biases like nations come...
I think that why nationalism/patriotism works is that the state has a monopoly over (legal) violence / laws in general. But the only way that might work is if we believe into them & thus nations have massive wheels of (propaganda?) or whatever it might take to convince the masses to be patriotic.
I feel like everyone all around the world is kinda the same man. We are homo sapiens. Nations shouldn't define us or the way we interact in an ideal world but I feel like a hypocrite when I myself defend my nation sometimes. I generally prefer decentralization to the point that we might take pride in our nations but we don't get influenced by it because the bigger the nation, the larger its influence/propaganda.
I feel like switzerland might be a good example in the sense that I have heard that there are people who don't even remember the (president/prime minister's?) name while working fine. I wonder if the whole world could essentially agree on international laws while being decentralized.
I just feel like that most of us are puppets and very few puppeteers in this world essentially controlling us / manipulating us into doing things that we generally wouldn't do.
A lot of the things you listed are already partially true of the EU. I wouldn't exactly call it fully decentralized, but I doubt many Europeans know by heart the name of the current EU president (I don't even know the proper title of the office) and they would fervently reject the notion of Europe as a single “nation”. Despite, I see more and more people (esp. in threads like this one) describing themselves as “European” rather than their nationalities and crediting EU laws and institutions ahead of their national governments.
I find this trend encouraging and I hope that one day we can see ourselves as humans ahead of any artificial groupings we sort ourselves into.
Which war? If you mean the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Europe doesn't try very hard to win.
> Google stopped operating search in China because at that point there was not a lot of money to be made for them in search there.
Source?
Back in 2010 when Google left, their search market share was close to 30%. It's hard to think there was no money to be made. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_China
China is a special case. As the government has effectively total control, even having 30% market share as Google doesn't mean it's a profitable venture, or that the government hasn't said that it will let it remain one - and there's really no way that it would've given that it's relatively easily replaceable critical infrastructure. Search engines aren't as hard as Googlers like to believe, it was substituted by Baidu succesfully. Think about it - which B2C non-Chinese software (not HW) services are still big in China? Anything besides OSes?
So you don't have any evidence. Unless you link to something I'll assume you are just making all of this up.
I agree with everything you’ve said, but just would also point out that in addition to the fine, it is unclear how changing its practices is going to decrease existing (ill gotten) ad revenues going forward. Presumably these changes will hurt revenue or google would already be following them.
"Google still has around $20 billion yearly reasons to remain active in the EU."
That just means the fines are inadequate. The solution is to increase them until shareholders are noticeably hurt. Pressure from shareholders on Google's management to stop the offending practices would soon effect the necessary change.
If it helps to stop the reliance on American digital services and don't mind Google leaving Europe or the European Union. EU should start charging the fines they are allowed too for GDPR percentages of the world wide revenue.
The entire idea of "Oh they'll leave" is ridiculous, an empty threat from billionaires who are afraid of regulation.
The EU has 450M (+80M for UK & similar non-eu countries that are likely to follow the EU on such regulations) population to the US' 350M.
The moment the likes of Google, or Meta, or Microsoft, or whomever else leave the EU, they immediately create a market gap. A market gap that will then in short order be filled with a European company that, because of the population sizes, has a notable comparative advantage to the US tech company.
+ As much as HN's readership loathes to admit it, regulations like this are "Good, Actually". Google's monopolist practices are bad for both advertisers and services showing ads. Any would-be competitor that arises from Google leaving the market would, by virtue of being forced by law to not be so shitty, be the better option. (And yes, this does also apply to pretty much all of the other big tech regulations as well.)
Like, c'mon. "Monopolies bad" is capitalism 101. Even the US' regulators thought Google was going too far.
> The EU has 450M (+80M for UK & similar non-eu countries that are likely to follow the EU on such regulations) population to the US' 350M.
Europeans are much poorer on average though, so actual revenue figures are rather the inverse of these population figures (they actually skew much more to the US than that, but anyhow).
The EU is still a massive profit center for these companies. Over 2025 Alphabet's revenue was around $170B in US and $100B in EMEA. Imagine if Google couldn't operate in half of the US, and how impactful that would be. Yet EMEA revenue is higher than that.
Any company will rather get pennies from me, than none at all.
Many pennies together add up.
Mmmm, you should look at distribution figures.
>Europeans are much poorer on average though
Some people are so poor that all they have is money.
> The entire idea of "Oh they'll leave" is ridiculous, an empty threat from billionaires who are afraid of regulation.
My hot take is that if they want to leave, then they can fuck right off. If you think your desires, profits, or business practices extend beyond democracy, then I don't need your business. Private enterprise should support and assist democracy, not the other way around (there's obviously some leeway there, but by and large).
Nm
More importantly though, why haven't they?
A lot of it is a because the US brands are more recognizable and cheaper (due to dumping) and grow faster (due to the USA's VC glut).
IIRC a company like AirBNB was started in Europe, and was slowly growing, and couldn't get investment because "who would want this?" and then AirBNB was created, and then arrived in Europe, and they still couldn't get investment because "who wants a ripoff clone of AirBNB?"
What do you mean by "dumping?" It sounds like you're just talking about VC.
"Dumping" in the context of international trade; Predatory pricing.
The standard model for tech firms has been to run at enormous losses to push competition into bankruptcy or steal their users through subsidized service.
No European social media company could compete with e.g. Twitter, running at a loss for TWELVE years.
In more recent years, it's things like Uber. Subsidizing ride costs to crush existing taxi services & European taxi startups.
This is all, ostensibly, illegal under international law. You can't do it for cars or commodity goods. It's just not been enforced on the tech industry.
Could you please share how its illegal under international law and why I couldn't do it for cars or commodity goods.
Some resources would definitely help me out here!
Also I think that I doubt how enforceable this is in tech industry as for the most part, they are selling a service and each service is different and thus have different price points and therefore the company should have the ability to decide prices technically.. so if they want to sell at a loss, theoretically nothing stops them from selling the service at a loss.
But I feel like the same logic applies to commodity goods. If two parties want to decide that they want to buy/sell at lower prices, why does the govt. interfere b/w them? Does this not impact their rights/freedom?
To be slightly rude, there is just a wikipedia article by the name "Dumping"; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)
The actual legal mechanics are complicated; "Illegal under international law" here specifically entails "WTO agreements allow retaliation in response to dumping".
> and why I couldn't do it for cars or commodity goods.
Specifically, it's more enforced. Governments care about their conventional industry. The way this'd look is say, China providing state subsidy to certain industries in order to artificially lower the price of those goods, making them cheaper than US-based industry could produce, with the specific intent of driving US industry out of business.
Just googling "predatory pricing" and "dumping" will get you examples.
> Also I think that I doubt how enforceable this is in tech industry as for the most part, they are selling a service and each service is different and thus have different price points and therefore the company should have the ability to decide prices technically.
The problem for tech is this difficulty in assessing "real value" and the assumption that running at a loss for extended periods is "normal" for tech companies.
For a clear-cut example, consider Uber, who paid drivers more than they charged the passenger(s). This is obviously predatory. Uber has tricks like moving insurance/maintenance to the driver's wallet, but a taxi can't be cheaper than what they pay the driver.
> why does the govt. interfere b/w them? Does this not impact their rights/freedom?
It does impact their freedom, but the reason why the government intervenes is long-term health of the market.
Things like a 'firesale' because you're going out of business, or moving to a new warehouse, etc, are fine. A single store (even a big-box one) going out of business won't crush the entire market and it's only of short duration.
The problem is that dumping/predatory pricing is a strategy to maintain a monopoly. (Or in the cases of extensive investment funding, build one)
Again, consider something like Uber (but the same applies to any "rental"/gig-economy company). They sell rides below cost paid for by their huge pile of investment money, no other taxi company can compete. All the competing taxis go out of business. Uber can now raise the prices to obscene levels and cash in.
Whenever someone tries to start a new taxi company, it'll be small and local, so Uber just lowers their ride prices in that region again until they go out of business. And because they're small they don't have as much money as Uber so they'll go bankrupt first. Uber keeps the monopoly.
Such monopolies are long-term bad for the entire economy.
On an international level, it's China and steel again. China subsidizes their industry, industry in other countries can't compete and goes bankrupt, China can now raise their prices.
Well written. The comparison with physical goods as you're making it is one I'm a big fan of, and should be made much more often.
It's laughable that tarriffs and import taxes only apply to physical goods. If the EU had even an ounce of self-respect, the second the US came out with the tarriffs, they would've come out and said:
"We think this is a fantastic idea by Mr. Trump. Aligned with his views, we are instituting accompanying digital tarriffs to fix the digital trade defecit. We're sure he'll agree that the trade balance should be corrected in both the physical as well as digital worlds".
And that's why the US is so mad at the likes of Brazil - finally, after decades of getting rinsed, countries are starting to take (wholly insufficient) measures here and rightly instituting the equivalent of digital tarriffs.
The EU presumbly knows they're currently very dependent on the US tech industry, and doesn't want to collapse the EU to the way Trump doesn't know the US is dependent on imported materials and will collapse the US.
(It's probably more about keeping up politicians' stock market investments though)
A key focus on VC glut. I think that another idea to consider here is that the VC's just spend like billions on projects and they don't care about consequences, all they want in the end is profit and maybe growth.. And so, maybe something like airbnb gets the money and expands which effectively removes the competition, making a monopoly who might get fined or what not but still in the end, it all turned perfect for VC.
VC funding (I think) drives on monopoly creation. Maybe that's why we were seeing a huge amount of VC funding in AI because they think that they want to monopolize "intelligence" this time so its the end goal as they are trying to monopolize the means towards creation...
I really want to learn how US got VC trapped. The whole economy's system issue arises from VC. Like, AI hype started from VC spending billions which then justified the absurd AI growth in things like magnificent 7 on stock market.
We really have these billionaires pulling quite deals which secretly shape the world to a much larger extent and they don't do it because of some evil reason but a plain old reason: money.
But the fact that all they care about money makes the companies inside VC justify doing evil things because morality isn't the end goal, helping isn't the end goal. Its money and more money and even more money. Guess what? Exploitation pays the most short term and these VC's prefer short term too.
VC and corruption seems to be the worst issues that I think really influence way way more of the world secretly and thus making "democracy" as one HN user pointed out on a different thread, a "copium for the masses"
The EU has been chronically unable to fill the gaps in their economy. If you look at the list of europes biggest companies, it's the same companies as it was 30 years ago...automotive and oil and gas. There are no major tech companies in Europe, which is so insane it's comical. Let that sink in...a continent full of intelligent tech workers has never been able to get a major tech company off the ground.
Regulation may be good, but understand, actually, recognize, that it is also suffocating. People bragging that they have no weeds in their fields, when they have no fresh crops either....
> There are no major tech companies in Europe, which is so insane it's comical. Let that sink in...a continent full of intelligent tech workers has never been able to get a major tech company off the ground.
This is plainly untrue if you're talking about tech beyond the mag-7 sized supergiants.
> Regulation may be good, but understand, actually, recognize, that it is also suffocating. People bragging that they have no weeds in their fields, when they have no fresh crops either....
And yet it is the tech giants in the US, oh so praised for their size, that are the "weeds" in many regards.
What good is Google when it's reliant on an advertising monopoly itself built entirely on monopolistic and fraudulent exploitation of the rest of the economy.
What good is Amazon when it's reliant on crushing all other retail and local manufacturing?
What good is Amazon when it's reliant on crushing all other retail and local manufacturing?
I give them money, and in return I get stuff that "all other retail" failed to provide.
That's good.
That's exactly the point of the author.
Amazon crushed all other retail in the first place and therefore, now all other retail can't provide some stuff and you buy them from amazon
That isn't good.
Man I am thinking of this as an ouroboros. Amazon got big because they crushed all other retail and they crush all other retail because they are big.
I think that the ouroboros that I am talking about should be known as the monoboros (get it? I am trying to have some fun by mixing monopoly and ouroboros, I hope you don't mind it)
Or just call this ouroboros a monpoly, man. it hurts me sometimes that you can't bring change in this world because of the way the world is right now and that bad things can happen in this world and its far far from perfect. I don't get how you guys or even anyone stays optimistic, I really wish to be a optimist logically but I can't come to that conclusion other than the fact that hey I run on emotions and bad emotions lead to bad things happening for me personally so I need to shut down bad emotions just so that they happen better for me. But that seems a little like running away from the truth. Should I feel okay running away from truth?
(Shrug) Generally, the ones they crushed needed crushing. See also Wal-Mart.
Nah, Amazon got big WHILE all the other retailers were huge. Amazon was nothing, and the other retailers sucked so bad (consistently) that Amazon was able to eat their lunch and crush them.
Amazon didn’t win because they were huge. They got huge by winning.
Now, they can afford to be shitty (unfortunately), which is actually helping local retail near as I can tell.
> Now, they can afford to be shitty
I dunno, I think it's easy to forget just how bad it used to be. I'll take "cheap junk" I can get off Amazon for a few bucks even today.
[flagged]
Please don't spread racist conspiracy theories.
Please stfu and gtfo with your baseless accusations calling everyone racist just becausse they have a different viewpoint that's not parroting the mainstream.
It's not conspiracy when there's facts and pointing out the facts isn't racist.
Without those „Fachkräfte“ the healthcare system would crash.
And the biggest companies aren’t automotive, gas and oil.
https://companiesmarketcap.com/european-union/largest-compan...
Maybe therefore the downvotes
This is by revenue
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_E...
If we use that as a measure than the US isn’t much different than the EU. Besides Amazon, Apple and Alphabet the usual old suspects
>Without those „Fachkräfte“ the healthcare system would crash.
Really? How many of the illegal boat immigrants work in the German healthcare sector? Because last time I checked they were mostly EU workers who got their job before crossing the border. Actual doctors and nurses don't need to cross borders illegally to get a job. I wasn't talking about skilled, LEGAL immigrants like doctors and nurses, I was talking about the other „Fachkräfte“ that tend to make the news.
>And the biggest companies aren’t automotive, gas and oil.
Maybe he meant in the tech sector. Because I can't take the LVMH sweatshop seriously even if they're making a lot of money. And the other companies on the list, FANG are worth more than all of them combined. I think even Nvidia is worth more than all of them.
You know that "Fachkräfte" doesn't mean immigrants, right?
Fachkräfte is often one of reasons used to justify immigration in the EU and especially Germany.
„Fachkräfte“ in quotes is often used by right wing racists to sarcastically describe immigrants if one of them commits a crime
> if one of them commits a crime
What about when many commit crimes? Starting with the act of immigrating illegally.
> How many of the illegal boat immigrants work in the German healthcare sector
Nice try of moving goalposts. „Fachkräfte“ is about refugees and legal immigrants.
But undeclared work in the care sector is what makes it affordable for many private people.
> Maybe he meant in the tech sector. Because I can't take the LVMH sweatshop seriously even if they're making a lot of money.
Why do you start at number 3 and ignore SAP and ASML?
Another goalpost. Parents point wasn’t about being better but existence
Nvidia is higher overvalued thanks to the AI bubble.
But Nvidia highly depends on TSMC and they depends on ASML
>But undeclared work in the care sector is what makes it affordable for many private people.
The same argument used to justify slavery. Amazing.
And also, the illegal boat migrants don't work in the care sector but instead cost the state in welfare.
It is not only revenue, it is mining data, feeding it into Gemini and selling it back to people in the form of ML models.
If you can prove Google did this, the GDPR fines will make them bankrupt. Corporations are rightfully terrified of breaking GDPR.
GDPR hasn't been really enforced. I don't think anyone is scared of GDPR anymore.
MasterCard leaked address + full credit card data about 90.000 people in Germany. Everyone that signed up for a lawyer (that was paid 15% of a possible payout) got 250-300€, including me. If only 10.000 signed up, it's already 2.5 millions.
https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/mastercard-zahlt-kunden-...
That is such a tiny amount it’s absurd?
Have I got news for you...
I'm aware of a single record case that cost the perp 350K. You really don't want to get zapped with the maximum fines based on wilful transgressions on large numbers of people.
edit: I misremembered, it was 100K higher.
Oh no. You are aware of a single cade that is 100K or higher?
Somehow that doesn't stop the proliferation of tracking across the web's largest properties and companies.
https://www.enforcementtracker.com/
Yup. Small fish, tiny fines. The actual wide spread abuse? Nope
You seem to pop up on threads on a daily basis just making up shit and pretending it’s a fact. I guess it really matches the bio you wrote here in your profile but JFC… why..
[flagged]
Oh, you mean, standing up against full monopolies?
The only good thing about blatantly uncharitable comments like this is that at least one can discard them without remorse.
My comment was not uncharitable. I edited to add more context.
The added context being your uncharitable opinion?
I don't really know what you mean by this
> I edited to add more context.
Either this was also just edited in or I misread, but what I originally replied to was "I just added more context".
Your original comment above is no longer visible as it's been flagged. I don't see your edit, and no one else does either.
Thanks for the info
Legal jurisdiction of dozens of countries is extortion to you, huh?
Legal jurisdiction of dozens of countries is not extortion
I think it is more likely that Trump point blank tells them they aren't allowed to pay this and that the EU isn't allowed to fine them any longer.
I don't think I expressed anything about their likelihood of payment - just that they won't stop doing business in the EU.
I think your scenario is a real possibility, but ironically one that would cost the US a lot more than it gains. It's really playing with fire, running the risk of even just 1% of EU businesses and consumers opting for EU services over US ones. And just that 1% represents far more than all of the yearly fines to Google/Meta/Apple combined.
And ursula will brag how she got a deal with trump, where google doesn't get fined. ...like with the tarrifs, where US got everything they wanted and EU got nothing.
No, they will not leave the EU because the EU is not reading the room right now. You think Trump will do nothing to protect FAANG? To be honest, despite being European, I'm surprised the US has let itself be pushed around for so long. I don't say I agree with it, it's just realpolitik.
Being made to follow laws is being pushed around?
If Trump makes Google not pay the fine you think that will have no negative side-effects? His actions have been incredibly positive for European tech companies, 5 years ago the only ones that even considered not going for the US options were a few companies in Germany. Demand has skyrocketed and making Google not pay this would give it a huge boost.
It is hard to understand in a country where big corp corruption for political parties is considered normal, and even gets prime time with gift ceremonies, and dinners.
Laws that the EU passed in order to fine big tech one could argue. Just saying, you think Trump (and later Vance) will stand idly by? EU is a shell of its former self economically, there's not much we can do besides cozying up to an actual dictatorship (China) who literally shot thousands of students, turned them into pulp using tanks and flushed them down the drain. I know we all hate Trump, but the US is the better ally here still.
It is hard to understand what Trump will do… it is hard to talk about this without going on some US politics tangent, which I think is not appreciated on this site. But he isn’t particularly affiliated with FAANG really. He has some startup guys in his orbit, but they aren’t FAANG.
And he’s, uh… very motivated by what others have to offer him… so FAANG clearly has some leverage there, but I don’t think it is necessarily a sure thing they’ll work something out.
He has no options other than punching himself (and the rest of the US) in the face.
Which is kind of his thing so I guess he may try something
Or they are.
How about a little tariff reduction to get rid of this fine for Google.
That’s how Trump makes his deals.
BTW where is the US pushed around? Reversed victim and offender?
What is he going to do? Nuke Paris?
[flagged]
Odds aren't terrible that Trump will have a fatal stroke before his term is up, the EU will outlive him, and can't and shouldn't tie its sovereign domestic policy and enforcement to cross-Atlantic chain-yanking that changes direction from week to week.
No matter what anyone does, he just moves the goal posts. Let him keep his ball.
You never know they might have kept Cheney's heart surgeon somewhere to keep patching him up
Just a note, in case anyone thinks this is an insufficient punishment:
> The Commission has ordered Google (i) to bring these self-preferencing practices to an end; and (ii) to implement measures to cease its inherent conflicts of interest along the adtech supply chain. Google has now 60 days to inform the Commission about how it intends to do so.
It is on top of ordering them to fix the business practices. They can always issue more fines if Google doesn’t comply.
IMO some of us here want to see these companies hurt. That’s a non-goal for the EU, they are looking for compliance, not vengeance or something silly like that.
Why not both ? ;-)
Because the rule of law, specifically the principle of proportionality, does not allow us to penalize some entities only to hurt them. That might be something entertaining to see for many of us, but civilized societies typically limit the public power from being used in such a way.
Haha, yeah.
But they probably benefit from appearing steady, measured, and fair-minded.
the EU is the master of appearing steady, measured, and fair-minded
whilst being entirely fueled by both emotion and protectionism
I bet this move isn’t protectionist enough to actually scare Google away.
> Google has now 60 days
I hope I am wrong, and would be happy if that were the case, but I find these deadlines laughable. In reality Google will delay this in courts for at least 5 years. In which time they will make some extra billions, and then the fine will be cut to a quarter of the current value. And by then they will have invented a new way to abuse consumers, just different enough to be the object of a new investigation and new court case that also takes years.
Noncompliance fines from day 61, 62, … will start ticking regardless I assume?
They will until a court revises the decision. Google can request an "expedited decision" but even that will take some time that only stops the fines.
I don't think this decision is wrong, I'm from the EU, and I think companies like Google have too much power anyway, but I don't like the ability of the commission to enforce things.
Here in Sweden we have a legal tradition where the government doesn't have power over the enforcement of the laws-- parliament can make any law it likes, and it can be anything, but enforcement and the courts are isolated from the politicians.
I really don't like that the commission can make up rules, or fine people etc. It's a bad system. It should be done by an impartial regular, or prosecutor or a court. This kind of system opens up the commission to political blackmail and threats from powerful states, it opens up for corruption, it opens up for uneven enforcement, and there's just no reason to have the system this way.
You could easily imagine a world where Google was a big US government darling and where they put their weight on the commission and got an outcome that isn't in accordance with law, but with the right system, one more like the Swedish system, that won't be possible.
I have my issues with how legislation is set up in the EU, but it's not like the commission can just make its own laws. The commission can only submit proposals, which then have to be approved (or changed) by the council and parliament. (In fact, the commission is the only party that can submit proposals, something that is very weird to me) As such, the commission is not part of the legislative branch, but the executive. The main job of the executive is to enforce the law, e.g. with fines.
In fact, this seems to be pretty similar to Sweden, quoting from [1]:
> Most state administrative authorities (statliga förvaltningsmyndigheter), as opposed to local authorities (kommuner), sorts under the Government, including the Armed Forces, Coast Guard, Customs Service and the police.
It appears that the swedish government can also initiate legislation, just like the commission (although the Riksdag can initiate on their own, something the European parliament cannot).
Also, fwiw: The fines can also be adjusted or cancelled by the court of Justice of the EU
My problem is actually that they have enforcement and rulemaking power.
There's this stuff about clarifying the DSA, for example. They simply shouldn't have such a power.
The Swedish IRS (whose directors are appointed in a fashion similar to the commission) publishes regular clarifications of tax law and how they implement the tax law in their enforcement of Swedish tax law. How is that any different?
In the end you can still go to court about it, secondly the government can't interfere in individual cases.
The commission though, is literally doing things relating to individual cases, and they're politicians directly appointed by European governments.
Simply, it's not rule of law, it's rule by the council.
People and companies regularly go to court regarding the Commission’s decisions, what makes you think that does not happen in the EU?
For example Danske Fragtmænd, challenged the Commission's decision that capital injections by Denmark and Sweden into Postnorrd did not constitute unlawful state aid.
(https://www.lexxion.eu/en/stateaidpost/what-competitors-must...)
> they're politicians directly appointed by European governments.
Just like Generaldirektörer in Sweden then.
and this is not enough to not make the rulemaking by the commission into rulemaking.
I gave the example of their to designate terrorist organization, which as you probably know is a power that is impossible constitutionally in Sweden. The commission has actual authority which is extremely broad and wielded in individual cases.
This is not a power that they should have.
In Sweden SÄPO (the security police) primarily government entity that designates terror organisations. The leader of SÄPO is a political appointee from Regeringen and the prime minister of Sweden.
In other words the executive branch has rulemaking powers in Sweden according to you.
How is that meaningfully different from how a EU commissioner is appointed?
We do not designate terrorist organizations. SÄPO does not have such a power. The courts interpret the following definition:
>3 § Med terroristorganisation avses i denna lag en sammanslutning av personer som begår eller på annat sätt medverkar till terroristbrott eller gör sig skyldiga till försök, förberedelse eller stämpling till terroristbrott.
Thus the government, SÄPO, the authorities etc. have no power over what is a terrorist organisation. There's designation or possibility of designation. Only the above definition defines it.
Notice that even state organizations of friendly states can in principle be terrorist organizations according to this definition. It's among the most beautiful laws we have.
I was initially opposed to the inquiry to develop this law, because I feared that we'd something deranged, something against our constitution where the government or some authority designates organizations as terrorist and where it's thus a political matter, but we got really lucky. This law is like a pearl, and it's moral delight, so beautiful that one should cry. Actual generality, actual equality before the law, actual apolitical court-based and truth-based, where others have political determinations.
That’s not the relevant law. Did perhaps google translate not work?
The law which allow SÄPO to designate terror organisations is this: https://www.regeringen.se/regeringens-politik/utrikes--och-s...
Funnily enough this means that SÄPO generally consults with EU and UN regarding the classification status.
Isnt the commission basically just he executive branch of the EU?
My understanding is Sweden's "SEC" (in US terms) is called Finansinspektionen. Wouldnt this EU commission be like the Finansinspektionen issuing a fine or revoking a license if a bank didnt comply with regulations? My understanding is the Finansinspektionen can do this sort of thing but has to go to the court for larger actions.
Perhaps the EU commission has a bit more leeway?
> Isnt the commission basically just he executive branch of the EU?
The European Commission is both the executive and legal branch. They propose the legislation that the European Parliament can only approve or reject. On the other hand, the European Patliament can not propose anything at all.
It's common for the executive branch to have the right to propose legislation, and often the main way legislation is proposed in many countries.
While I agree this should ideally also be available to the EP, it doesn't make the EC a legislative branch. It's very much the executive.
That’s not quite accurate. There is an extended process in which the Parliament and the Council can give input and propose and discuss changes to the Commission’s proposal, to work out a compromise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_legislative_pro...
How feasible is it in practice? In the US, it's possible in practice to remove officials via impeachment as well as amend the constitution, but in practice they are almost impossible to achieve. In practice the legislature is almost deadlocked for most non-budget bills as well, so the executive ends up running the country, with an assist from the judiciary.
Reaching agreement through the trilogue is the standard practice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilogue_meeting#Increasing_us...
Yes, and they are non-public and they effectively excluse parliamentary debates.
You are even less accurate. The Council is not an independent body. It represents the member states directly.
The Commission is elected by member states and thus represents them indirectly.
And all of them represent the EU citizens who elected both the Parliament and the Member States governments. I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make. The point I tried to make is that the Parliament has significant input to the legislation in the process, it’s not just a binary yes or no.
The commission is not elected, it is appointed by the member states (I think it should be elected, but I'm in the UK so wouldn't have a vote anyway)
The Swedish government can't intervene in the decisions of finansinspektionen.
Law comes from parliament alone, and the constitution does not permit for the executive (regeringen) to intervene in individual cases.
I see. So my undrestanding is the finansinspektionen answers to the ministry of finance, which is part of the executive branch, but the finansinspektionen is probably a bit more insulated from the executive branch than say, the SEC.
The problem with this is big tech companies are very adept at stringing court-based enforcement along, that would defer this punishment until well into the 2030s and even the 2040s for actually rectifying the issues.
Then you have to fix the courts in general so that such things are impossible.
It should at least have to be agreed by both the EU Commission and the EU Parliament.
Who does "enforcement" in Sweden? Is the police somehow under the courts? Same for things like consumer protection agencies, environment protection and so on? Are prosecutors somehow in the same group as the judges? That may work for you, but I see some potential for abuse there as well. I think that is how it turned out in Japan, once you are prosecuted conviction is a foregone conclusion.
The way it works is that the goverment (The politicians in executive positions) are allowed to write policy for all goverment agencies but they're not legally allowed to tell the agency how to handle any given individual case.
Who hires / appoints the chiefs of the agencies?
The government, specifically the Regering and the prime minister: https://sv.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utn%C3%A4mningsmakten_i_Sver... (sorry only in Swedish)
No, they are not. The police is under the control of the central government (and that includes the courts). Yes, it is true that swedish politicans dont want to give the impression they control the actions of the police etc but of course in the end they do. The difference is maybe in the US politicans say "I gave the order to the police to do X" while in Sweden they would say in private "you probably should do X or we might find a replacement"
You get that "myndigheterna" are under the government right? And that the government controls the authorities.
Yes, but they can't actually make intervene in any individual case.
What do you say when Arbetsmiljöverket (labour regulation), Skatteverket (IRS), Ekobrottsmyndigheten (monterary crimes) take enforcement actions in Sweden and hand out decisions for fines and such?
The EU Commission does not make up rules anymore than these government agencies in Sweden does.
That's fine. They aren't politically appointed and in the end their decisions are checked by the courts.
The EU commission on the other hand actually has power.
As one other example, consider the Swedish terrorism law. There's no such thing as designating something a terrorist organization-- that's constitutionally impossible, instead it's determined by the courts. Meanwhile the EU commission can actually designate a group as a terrorist organization, no court case necessary.
The appointment of directors of these Swedish agencies is effectively identical to the appointment to the commission.
The director of arbetsmiljöverket does not intervene in individual cases either, and in the end the law is what matters.
>Ingen myndighet, inte heller riksdagen eller en kommuns beslutande organ, får bestämma hur en förvaltningsmyndighet i ett särskilt fall ska besluta i ett ärende som rör myndighetsutövning mot en enskild eller mot en kommun eller som rör tillämpningen av lag.
No authority [...] may decide how an administrative authority is to decide in a case involving use of authority against an individual[...]
Furthermore, the commission is not like a directors of an agency. They are politicians. I would compare them to government ministers, who are appointed in a similar way.
Oh man, I’m confused why you keep arguing like the 12th chapter of the Swedish Regeringsform does not exist. What you write is not what is reality in law or reality in effect in Sweden.
I'm literally arguing based on things in the 12th chapter, so I don't understand your remark.
Very fair. Doing anything with online advertising, either as an advertiser or as a publisher, without it involving any of Google's platforms is nearly impossible.
What's worse, doing anything at all without it involving any online advertising is nearly impossible, too.
Oh nice. I hope other countries follow suit. It’s quite a shame Google didn’t get Chrome divested from them in the US, would’ve been a “nature is healing” moment for the web.
"would’ve been a “nature is healing” moment for the web". I wish this was true.
The healing will be when all ads and marketing will be down to zero. This companies like Facebook and Google make their billions putting on your face what you don't want or need and someone else pays them good money for that.
You may think it's too radical but we must make marketing illegal. Then fix the web.
This is a pipe dream. Advertising always has existed and always will. It comes and goes in different forms, but people like selling things they make or services they provide. Without a way of getting those things in front of people, nothing new could come to light.
I agree that some sites make advertisements a massive eyesore, but that's a problem that can be solved in other ways.
While that’s technically true it’s not true about the current type of advertising.
The ads we see online now (and the tracking that goes with it) are what, 20 years old?
The type of marketing and advertising we live with now is a direct descendent of research and work done in the last century (thanks Bernays).
The whole point of Google was to get people answers to questions they have. Our current approach to advertising creates the problems in people’s heads only to immediately sell the solution.
> Without a way of getting those things in front of people, nothing new could come to light
This argument sounds intuitive, but are we really sure about that? People willingly seek out marketing materials to find things they want to buy. I've seen people flip through coupon books and catalogs as idle entertainment. That plus word of mouth may well be sufficient to keep knowledge of new products and such in circulation. Hell, it might even yield better-informed consumers, allowing the market to function more efficiently.
One thing I'd worry about is ads would become unviable or banned somehow would be that companies would militarize the word of mouth element. Basically like the old tupperware parties.
Without a way of getting those things in front of people, nothing new could come to light.
Most of the things I own / purchase / use… I have neither seen a commercial for nor pursuaded by it if I saw it in passing. So there are other ways. Right now few of the largest companies on the planet contribute little-to-nothing to society other than showing garbage down people’s throats. Perhaps there is some happy medium but I don’t think society can ever reach it any longer
>Without a way of getting those things in front of people, nothing new could come to light.
If my environment was not inundated with advertisement, I'd only be seeing more things that I'd be willing to pay for, not less.
>I agree that some sites make advertisements a massive eyesore, but that's a problem that can be solved in other ways.
Ads are not simply a way of getting your product in front of people. Ever wonder why ads are the fig leaf for mass surveillance? It's because they constitute some primitive, mild, poorly understood, but completely socially acceptable form of *non-consensual behavior modification*.
That this has been tolerated up to now is a historical contigency. Much like other civilizational essentials like tobacco products and leaded gas, as soon as someone prices in the externalities - whether through regulation or through disruption - the societal attitudes to them will quickly change from "unavoidable" towards "inexcusable".
You could say the same about prostitution and gambling. It's still worth to treat it as it should be treated and to try to curb it.
How can you compare a prostitue to a marketing person? A prostitute is still a person.
So what do you do if you have a better product and a "name brand" disadvantage? Advertising commodifies information flow instead of letting it pool with the people who already have access to it. Think of all the products that got big nowadays because they could convince VCs to fund ad spend, and saw a return for it.
I think advertising has a huge, positive, 2nd order effect on the world.
Entire advertising industry could be replaced by one database of products and services at a fraction of the cost to the consumer.
Please expound. Are we going to fill in yearly surveys explaining what we like and don't like? Where does the information come from? Who determines the algorithm for placement? Will there now be no way to opt-out of ads at all, there's now a national quota on how many ads were exposed to a year or something?
There's no algorithm. Just a query language. Nothing is pushed to consumer. You want to buy something. You search. Companies can't pay anyone for any kind of publishing. Anyone is free to build tools and content that helps with the search. However companies can publish information about their products and services only through the database.
lol you don’t understand people
I think you have trouble understanding. People happily use similar things already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_shopping_website
Marketing is extremely necessary in order to have competitive markets.
We can discuss about what are the best means or even limits in the contents of advertising but making it illegal is non sense.
National monopoly on advertising could be sufficient replacement.
Yeah the reality is they'll probably just find a way to sell MORE data to make the money for these fines.
> You may think it's too radical but we must make marketing illegal. Then fix the web.
I've given some thought to this, and outright banning marketing sounds basically impossible. Not just from a "good luck getting that bill passed" sense, but in a practical one. Where do you draw the line on "marketing"? Presumably my writing a glowing review of a product I like won't be banned, and online banner ads will. I'm not trying to make a "the line is blurry therefore no regulation can happen" argument, rather I think "marketing" isn't really the right line. Specifically, what ought to be banned is the sale of attention. Anything where money or favors are changing hands in order to direct attention intentionally to your product, service, etc. So you can absolutely have a marketing page extolling the virtues of your brand. You cannot pay to have that page shoved in front of people's eyeballs.
Yes, I know that this kills the ad-based funding of the current internet. Let it burn. A mix of community-run free services and commercial paid services is infinitely preferable to the "free" trash we've grown dependent on.
To make an ethical argument: quantifying and selling human attention is gross anyway. Some things just don't belong on a market.
What you suggest is fundamentally unsustainable.
> practical one
I had a decent idea. Not that it's easily practical, but it's more practical than other solutions.
Major problem today is information asymmetry. Google giving you free YouTube videos is front and center. Google paying for it by linking your location and this and that fingerprint from here and there is hidden in whitewashed language 3 settings menus deep. Many things are hidden in bottom right of a billboard in fine print, t&c fine prints, etc,.
What I propose is the law making sure that all information about the product that you intend to or are forced to by regulation to make public, public in the same measure. That is, if you're going to advertise "coca cola, open happiness" you also need to have in the same fontsize "39g of sugar" right next to it. Similarly google search bar needs to say what info of yours helped serve the ads you see, right next to the content paid for by those ads.
If you're going to hide less palatable stuff in your t&c, then marketing logos slogans all become illegal for you. And all information even positive ones must also be in fontsize8 t&c fine print.
Real estate ads can't put *artists impression at the bottom right of their ad in fine print, it has to be as big as the main tagline.
You get the idea. What I gave are just examples, slight variations of the idea that still focus on information symmetry as the main goal, will also work.
> Presumably my writing a glowing review of a product I like won't be banned
If you didn't take money from sources overtly connected to the brand or otherwise shady you won't be banned.
> would’ve been a “nature is healing” moment for the web.
A more likely scenario is that some other big techs like MSFT or Meta would acquire Chrome and replace the monopolist position. This is the sad truth that many people try to underplay; Nature won't heal by itself. The market is already structured to incentivize monopolist behaviors, thanks to the scaling nature of big techs. You need correction to the market itself, which can only be done by an extremely competent legislative body but we won't have that anytime soon. But at least the EU has done something with DMA so there are still some hopes.
I don't think we should expect much from the us justice system at the moment. All the biggest tech companies CEO were publicly donating millions on trump investiture, one can only imagine what else happens privately.
in my garden, if I see one rat it means there is at least a dozen more.
Running a browser without an ecosystem behind it is a money pit and would be worth almost 0.
Doesn’t matter, as consumers, we’re absolutely ducked from all sides as long as our “window into the web” is fully controlled by a single corp.
Is it? I use Firefox. Can’t you just not use chrome, no legal interventions required?
Firefox is only financially sustainable because of the massive payments Google makes to Mozilla to set Google as the default search service.
Tell that to billions of normies who followed Google's (illegal) ads of Chrome.
And if Chrome were to be divested it would have just gotten swallowed up by a different corp, most likely to end up in worse hands imo.
Can you name any other company that if they owned Chrome it would've been better for the users and the web?
In that case people (some of them at least) would switch to a different browser. Reducing Chrome market share would be healthy for the web too.
Or we'll just get a duopoly where Microsoft and Apple control the web, both of which don't really have business incentives to improve it.
You mean, like it is now?
Google has done a ton for PWAs. If apple didn't have the monopoly they have on the ios ecosystem and actually granted PWAs the same accesses they get on android, you'd likely see them taking off.
They're essentially apps that don't have to go through the app store.
Yes, but with companies that have even less incentive to actually make the web decent.
The issue is that Google is both the browser, the web standards, the ads, the mail, the search, the phone, the AI, the maps… not a chance to compete with any of that as long as it’s all in one. The only other barely approaching this level is Apple, and we know they have their own anticompetitive aspects. Allowing corps to grow so much should never have been a thing.
If 10% of intel could be "sold" to the government maybe Chrome should be too? And the there could be 20 year ban written into law on selling it back to private.
>Can you name any other company that if they owned Chrome it would've been better for the users and the web?
Mozilla? Red Hat? Valve?
> Mozilla?
Already has a browser. With debatable success.
> Red Hat?
Would probably rather end up under the Linux Foundation and not RH. How development would then continue is up for debate.
> Valve?
They already use CEF for their Steam client IIRC, but I don't think they are too much interested in owning an entire browser. Especially considering Valve itself is a relatively small company emplyee wise.
Mozilla already owns a browser, and gets free money from Google to do that. Yet, they have been mismanaging the whole time.
What makes you think they'll suddenly do a good job when the funding goes away, and they have to now support a large userbase which pays $0 to use the product.
Mozilla would immediately go bankrupt because Google wouldn't have to sponsor them anymore.
Red Hat has been acquired and is already well underway on the enshitification road.
Browsers are way too far from Valve's core business.
Can someone elaborate on the first accusation — "DFP favours AdX over rival Ad exchanges by e.g. informing it in advance of the best bid from competitors"? I'd be really curious to understand how it does this, like what information is actually shared that isn't also shared with other ad exchanges.
What the US couldn't do, Europe just did ?
> The Commission has already signalled its preliminary view that only the divestment by Google of part of its services would address the situation of inherent conflicts of interest, but it first wishes to hear and assess Google's proposal.
aka, breaking a monopoly.
thanks god for Europe.
> What the US couldn't do, Europe just did ?
The remedy phase in the US trial over similar ad tech issues starts later this month, so it is premature to call it “what the US couldn’t do”.
(You may be confusing it with the recent partial ruling in the remedy phase of the separate search antitrust case.)
The US just won two antitrust trials in a row against Google in the past year. One for Google Ads and the other for Google Search (the chrome one).
Yeah, and then we decided not to break them up. Discussed yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45120050
It’s amusing to see how HN, notoriously pro-privacy and anti-ads seemingly dislikes this kind of news.
It also traditionally heavily anti Europe, for reasons
[flagged]
They also started to support censorship and government approved social media content.
See the recent thread about Nepal banning many apps and the comments are full of people saying that the EU should do the same or require that the content be even more moderated on all the platforms.
It's very sad to see.
I come here for the hacker news but it seems we are being overrun by a new kind of people who love when the EU intervenes to "regulate" the markets and fully believe that the EU is "pro" privacy (TM) and can't wait to impose new regulations all the while it's actually working to undermine encryption for everyone in Europe.
I guess the old saying is true, War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.
I've been assuming that most of the anti-American comments here were probably written by Americans, but I don't really know.
That’s my take as well. Europeans (in my experience) tend to be less, ahem, ignorantly optimistic, of how well it would go.
Wouldn't it be something if the EU focused on fostering a tech scene rather than attacking it. This is like the 4th time they have gone to the Google bank demanding a $1B+ ransom.
And before we "Just don't break the laws" take note of the fact the the EU has a dead tech scene. I don't know how they expect competition to grow when they block all the sunlight in their tech fields.
If you don't want Google dominating your populations technology, try creating conditions to grow a replacement.
That’s a complete red herring.
This is not Europe racketing Google. Google is losing the same kind of trial everywhere in the world including the US for one simple reason: they are actually using anticompetitive practices in the ad tech market.
Honestly the most likely to benefit from this verdict are other American companies. You are welcome for us doing the enforcement your country refuses to do.
Almost all the most famous anti-trust cases in America like against Microsoft
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor...
were not about monetary fines, they are first and foremost about changing practices (behavioural remedies). Microsoft didn't even pay any money, they had to change how they operated their business in the US.
Likewise with both the recent antitrust trials in the US against Google: In one government prosecutors wanted them to sell off Chrome, the other they are trying to break Google Ads monopoly by breaking it up.
This is not a system extracting billions of the dollar for the 4th time in a couple years. Especially as others have mentioned that this commission is also the one inventing the rules, so it can keep doing it indefinitely for new reasons.
> Microsoft didn't even pay any money, they had to change how they operated their business in the US.
They had to do that, or else what? Some form of cruel and unusual punishment that doesn’t involve fines?
Isn’t this process about compliance with laws too? They have had time to follow the laws but chosen not to.
At this point there's about a hundred (or more) years of research, experience, law etc. in competition policy.
Competition doesn't necessarily just win in the mid-term. Competitions works - if the conditions are right, markets are anonymous and dynamic, not two-sided, not plaqued by information symmetries and - importantly - vertical entanglements. Competitions also works out in the long term. Like, take a hundred years and squint.
However, in the meantime of all this, there are many cases where the market outcome moves strikingly far away from the optimum. What that means is that the market situation destroys value (consumer welfare, societal roi, whatever)
You can scan the OP for about three sections and see that Google is violating any reasonable and established take on how market regulation, leading to an inefficient market outcome.
This is not some special European temperament. This is just standard and - just to make this clear - 100% American economic theory as previously applied and pioneered mainly in the good US of A. If this doesn't get applied in the US now, we may call this regulatory capture.
Personally, I feel it also really speaks to the situation that Google is lauded as representing the US tech scene. I disagree here. I think the US tech scene goes far beyond Google. Google ain't even a particular strength, probably more of a weakness by now.
By contrast, you could (and should) bring up about a million things the EU and the commision in particular does to stifle a EU tech scene. Bog standard application of competition policy ain't it.
Do you think that the adtech industry "scene" is somehow exclusive to the USA? Antitrust enforcement doesn't appear out of thin air just to throw a spanner in the works just for the hell of it, it's because the local competition complained. You may not agree with it but they are "fostering" them as you wish.
> Wouldn't it be something if the EU focused on fostering a tech scene rather than attacking it.
It really wouldn't.
We're having the wrong conversation here.
The reality is that these fines mean nothing for the average EU consumer. There's really no difference between a consumer in the EU, the US or China. As a EU consumer you win nothing from these fines. You won't be able to sue Google or any other company if they're abusing you or your data. You're just reading these stupid headlines about these huge fines and that's the end of it. Europe has huge power and could really change the way big companies work, but instead it chooses to do nothing but apply random huge fines here and there that change nothing in the grand scheme of things. It's a shame.
They get the fine money. Either to the EU (relieves tax burden on member states) or directly to member states depending on the situation.
I'm not talking about those 10 EUR that I get as a european citizen. I'm talking about consumer friendly legislation. No amount of money will compensate for the fact that big corporations rule EU just like they rule any other place on this planet.
>No amount of money will compensate for the fact that big corporations rule EU just like they rule any other place on this planet.
That seems hard to quantify. But if it were true, why would the EU let large corporations operate in the EU?
I suppose the answer would be they are only damaging some people but other value them? And EU is catering more to those other stakeholders?
Personally I dont think large corporations have caused such incalculable harm to society but if they have, why even have them?
What do you think the GDPR is? Between 'Schrems' and the GDPR there has been a massive amount of change already and it is only gathering steam.
>the 4th time they have gone to the Google bank demanding a $1B+ ransom
Even if I accepted this premise, from a realpolitik lens, why not? The USA has gone to the 'taffif/trade war bank' like 40 times, so maybe fight fire with fire?
> And before we "Just don't break the laws" take note of the fact the the EU has a dead tech scene.
What are you implying? That letting foreign companies break laws would help the tech scene?
Or that the attention is so limited that any attempt of enforcing law necessarily means there is less attention to fostering the tech industry?
(Neither of the above interpretations make any sense)
> And before we "Just don't break the laws" take note of the fact the the EU has a dead tech scene. I don't know how they expect competition to grow when they block all the sunlight in their tech fields.
Google is abusing his position to prevent other companies to compete, hence decreasing the likelihood of European tech companies emerging.
Beside, I don't see how having strong monopolistic companies is beneficial to Americans citizens beside the tech bros working in Silicon Valley ? American companies are being ripped off on advertising just as bad as european companies used to be, and obviously they were following google rip off on goods price and customer had to pay more.
I love these takes.
You don't like outsiders poisoning your wells? You should poison it yourself instead!
[flagged]
> take note of the fact the the EU has a dead tech scene
Because American megacorps are killing it with their monopolistic actions?
Haha, no. The EU tech scene was dead (and has stayed dead) long before American megacorps even existed.
Why do you think Silicon Valley was in… Silicon Valley? It certainly isn’t because it monopolistically killed EU chip fabs!
They just didn’t exist, and went out of their way to be a huge hassle to exist, and the EU still doesn’t have decent chip fabrication abilities.
It’s the same for software.
Maybe it was a real EU fault at that time, but now the monopolies definitely affect the market, as proven by the court.
Even if you nuked every one of them, the EU tech scene would still be dead. It’s a cultural problem. The EU would rather be comfortable than competitive.
And they are.
How do you know that?
Americans work 500 hours a year more than their German counterparts. 300 more than the EU average.
Americans are working 14.5 months a year while Europeans are working 12!
These numbers would be admirable if they had something to show for it, instead: illiteracy below level 1 28% [0]; life expectancy 79.5 years (as opposed to - for example Italy 83.9 [1]; rank 13 when it comes to cost of living [2]... I could go on with health etc. So, what exactly do you get out of all that additional labour?
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_State... [1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/life-expe... [2]https://www.worlddata.info/cost-of-living.php
I think you’re just reinforcing the point?
Empirical evidence, genius. Just look at the output. EU has outcomes that lag Asia. What is wrong with you people?
The current output is affected by the illegal monopolies, as I already explained.
I don’t think you read their comment - they were referring to Asia?
How are US monopolistic practices hurting Europe while helping Asia?
I’ve lived there, among many other places. It’s pretty obvious in dozens of ways when you see it up close.
East Asia (currently) has a completely different mindset, with tradeoffs, which is why it has completely replaced Silicon Valley for actual Silicon. And frankly, is starting to do the same for software.
They’re in a panic. Euro boomers destroyed the place after their forefathers died to build it and keep it alive.
Awaiting amusing tweets (truths?) from the american baby in chief
I read this whole article a couple times and don't really u understand what was wrong here.
Google is using their own ad exchange to fill ads? Isn't that... Their entire business model? Does the EU just want more intermediaries to exist? At the end of the day doesn't Google still get to decide how much an ad is worth when someone searches 'car insurance'?
To me this reads like the EU should pass a law describing exactly what they want.
>For example, Google Ads was avoiding competing ad exchanges and mainly placing bids on AdX, thus making it the most attractive ad exchange.
I just don't know why Google couldn't do this. Is this an instance of if they just never used other ad exchanges at all no one would be mad? Like Google getting called a monopoly by requiring the play store to be installed on android phones, while Apple obviously does exactly this just on their own hardware?
From what I quickly gather, these are the things Google did that are against the EU anti-trust rules:
- Companies advertising through Google were not allowed to collaborate with other advertising companies under Google's contract. - Google runs an ad exchange (AdX) where advertisers and advertising spaces can connect, and Google didn't share platform's data with other members, giving them an unfair market advantage. - They also manipulated the way deals were made on the platform to their advantage.
To me it sounds just wrong anyway that Google runs this platform where companies compete with each other but also Google itself, so they'll always have more control.
I think it's a good idea having these anti trust rules, because otherwise you'll eventually get a a gigantic monopoly economy, and I just think that's not a good idea.
Cost of doing business. If these fines are to have any teeth, they need to be of a magnitude proportionate to company size. Otherwise, they are more of a petty cash shakedown.
Its definitely not the first time google was fined by EU see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitrust_cases_against_Goog...
I can't find any details about those past cases with regards to - did they actually ended up paying anything at all?
Penalties bases on income is a very good practice: it works this way in Finland.
Can it be that any Berlusconi pays, for a speed ticket, the same amount as ordinary people?
Very good: super good. Too easy to make business for monopolists.
I seriously do not understand how Microsoft made it so far not to experience the same.
European Commission fines Google an amount equal to three Meta ML Experts signing bonus...
eu's real issue with google and meta is that they are not french. beautiful healthcare system and worker rights are phenomenal but it's like a different planet out there
Ok, now can we also have a three-strikes policy please, with prison sentences. Otherwise this is just the cost of doing business.
Agreed. Megacorps where noone has actual honest skin in the game and every unethical decision can be paved over with money are bad news for most of us.
Almost 3bn euros is one hell of a cost of business though, that's approximately a euro for every 2.5 people on the planet
Until the rich people who green light things like this go to jail it will literally never stop. Someone, somewhere needs to be responsible for policies that break the law and they need to go to jail.
My company has a committee that votes on these kinds of things.
You as a prosecutor, who will you take to jail? whole committee? Those who voted in-favour? Somebody who brought the proposal? Only CEO?
Each of these decisions if done consistently over time, would invoke changes in companies, to get some fall-guys in right places.
For usual corporate crimes: Usually CEO and/or a few senior individuals who you could prove was part of a conspiracy and aware it was a crime, through emails, chat logs etc.
It's 15% of their yearly net profit in the region. Not even revenue.
3bn sounds like a lot because we haven't gotten used to the absurd profit levels that these monstrosities have reached.
I actually do think that's significant, if someone took 15% of your yearly earnings this year that would definitely be noticed. I'm not saying it's the right amount, I'm saying that is enough to be felt and therefore isn't the tiny fines you often tend to see
My yearly earnings are revenue, not profit.
For Google that's a slap on the wrist.
But a slap which can easily be repeated (even with more force), if Google does not comply.
Google has been serving a lot of ads over the years.
Huh? Google generated 350B in revenues in 2024...
3B is pocket change to them
[flagged]
How would that work? Infraction > Officers quit; new set of officers > infraction > officers quit; new set of officers…
execs will jump with golden parachute after first strike.
Just another day in the office. European Commission... commission...
Oh no, someone from the Commission just down voted me.
Bet it was those who were asked about corruption and cut the microphone to those who really care.
We do deserve better in Europe.
This one is for Google. But Facebook and others do the same. How can we let them do this.
If you have responsability and let this happen, you just allow it.
Not the one who down-voted you, but I thought about it.
I believe the reason you got down-voted was because you comment did not add anything of productive to the discussion.
chump change
[flagged]
They should have force Google to sell to a EU buyer instead? Like the true, elected capitalist way?
[flagged]
Yeah, its not like the US is also pursuing an antitrust actions against Google, including one for its abusive ad tech practices.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-prevails-l...
Lina Khan's success record is/was horrendous.
In the most recent case, Google may have "lost" but the government got nowhere near what it was asking for either.
Honestly, on this particular case that's on the judge and your current culture, not Khan. Before the 80s, Google would have been forced to separate its two ads divisions, to make some space for new companies and actors.
If Lina Khan only victory is that people are now aware that having a government this friendly with monopolies isn't normal, that's probably better than most politicians since Clinton.
> Honestly, on this particular case that's on the judge and your current culture, not Khan. Before the 80s, Google would have been forced to separate its two ads divisions, to make some space for new companies and actors.
The case in which the government didn’t get what it wanted was the online search case; the trial in the remedy phase of the ad tech case starts later this month, so talking about the difference between what Google would have gotten in the 1980s for that and what they are actually getting now is premature speculation.
Oh sorry then, i guess my lack of following and my pessimism has taken over proper verification. Hopefully the US government break Google adtech in two different companies.
Do you think it's fair to put the recent case on Lisa Khan when a) the Google antitrust lawsuit was started in Trump v1.0 and b) the trial remedy was during Trump 2.0? If anything, that Google was found to have antitrust behavior bolsters her success rate. She's not in charge there anymore, so blaming her is very very suspect.
They let them get away with tons for years/decades before doing anything serious
US big tech has become so hostile to democracy and human values it's laughable.
[flagged]
This is what needs to stop. Just stick to the substantive contributions please.
Wow you really are persistent. I am too easy to engage in ragebaits it seems
[flagged]
One comes from an orangutan because he wants to get it hard and please his fanbase and the other is because a specific company broke a law of a region.
The two couldn't be more different than that. And I find it hard to believe your comment is genuine given the obvious difference.
[flagged]
It is not that the EU can't compete, it is that the US don't enforce their own antitrust laws - and that the EU has to step in to ensure fair competition.
[flagged]
Depends if it even gets paid. Probably a couple of years in dispute at least
[flagged]
Only as a response to the US establishing anti competitive practices for their tech industry.
You can keep your US tech companies. In EU we actually need our own. It's long overdue.
It is almost like a 15% tariff on Google. I wonder who did that first.
[flagged]
[flagged]
US Tech Giants use tax optimisation created by the single market to avoid EU taxes to the tune of billions a year. That’s on top of them getting far too much access to public markets in the EU including for plenty of things EU companies are bared from by the Buy American Act in the US.
The idea that EU is somehow a mob boss shaking down American tech companies is plain ridiculous. Just take a look at the EU-US trade balance in service and you will understand in which direction the money is actually flying.
[flagged]
US tech does everything it can to forcefully monopolize a market; US tech gets fined by countries who care about it.
You don’t seem to understand how the EU works, or what it even is in the first place. A hint: it’s not a singular entity when it comes to "needing" money.
I'm looking forward to my north/south rail corridor funded by Google. Better than waymo.
It has nothing to do with money and everything to do with ideology.
This is a ridiculous take, the EU has a budget of 180 billion a year. People keep repeating this but its just idiotic.
> EU needs money; EU fines US tech companies. No surprise there.
And it’s just a coincidence that they chose a company engaged in wrongdoing which breaks their laws, huh?
Please, with this cynical edgelord shit.
I fully expect and won't blame the form of archery that will pursue this comment, but... Impulse must have its way once in a while.
With the unprecedented extrajudicial approach the US has recently taken against certain recreational boaters in the Caribbean, perhaps they will realize Google is far worse and apply similar tactics.
Lawsuits will never amount to anything. And they are taking over the world. And in my opinion, they're verifiably more hostile than any boater I've ever been made aware of, including people on jet skis.
With the very substance of reality dissolving before our eyes, and considering we may be but a twitch of a jingo fingertip away from nuking the homeless, why not?
Nvidea has a market cap greater than ALL of Germanys stock market. They should figure this out instead of extorting non-EU companies.
thats all the EU knows to do
That's a shallow dismissal, which is against the HN guidelines.
People like you killed this website. You are an interloper.
People like you killed this website with senseless comments. You are an interloper.
.
Innovation consists of forming unbreakable monopolies and then jacking up prices apparently.
What did Google do that its competition didn't?
Figure out how to monetize (really good) search. Was that a real question?