The EU feels to me like one of the few forces for good in the world at the moment
Pretty naieve view to accept an effectively unaccountable body of such incredible size. Almost every policy is without a voter mandate.
Google hit with €1.5B fine from EU over advertising
91–100 of 414 posts
Re: Google hit with €1.5B fine from EU over advertising
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
more like a part of the wrist itself. They are racking up $7B in fines at the moment
- "Let's make rules that cripple our competitors and see how long we can get away with it." - "What can we earn?" - "Billions." - "What's it going to cost?" - "Less than what we're going to make." - "Let's do it!"
> - "Less than what we're going to make."
Do you have a source for that assumption?
Re: Google hit with €1.5B fine from EU over advertising
#93That's small money for the Google. Last year they gave Google €4.34bn fine and in year 2017 they gave Google €2.42bn fine.
It seems like EU's policy of retribution on Big Tech for US fining European banks. https://www.fnlondon.com/articles/european-banks-face-dispro...
A good faith interpretation would be that the US has the most advanced system for financial regulation, while the EU is better (or emphasises) antitrust and privacy regulation.
Both seem to perfectly consistent with New York being the world's premier financial center and Europe being somewhat renown for stronger consumer protection.
(which leaves Volkswagen as a terribly embarrassing example of regulatory capture in Germany)
Re: Google hit with €1.5B fine from EU over advertising
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
It applies to everyone who wants to serve EU customers. As for startups: depending on what kind of personal data you are collecting, being GDPR complicit shouldn't take more than a day. If it takes longer you are building a business around personal data, and I think you should know your stuff (not just GDPR, but also what kind of data you are collecting and why).
> being GDPR complicit shouldn't take more than a day. either you're overly optimistic, or you have some 100x rock star doing the impl. because it took over 1 year to implement all of the GDPR required features for me, and we don't even store that much private data!
It took me half a day: Had to download a GDPR pivacy policy template, read through the thing. Double check all the sections applied to what I was doing (cookies, etc) and fill in my details.
What have you spend 1 year doing if I may ask? Did you previously store passwords in plain text and you had to update that?
Re: Google hit with €1.5B fine from EU over advertising
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
And the fact that iOS is installed on devices made by Apple itself. Android is the OS used by different phone manufacturers.
If iOS would have the marketshare of Android, it would be hit by the same regulations.
Agreed, and this needs to stop in my opinion. The EU makes an enormous amount of money by suing tech-giants over and over again without doing enough research to know what companies in this sector are doing.
Re: Google hit with €1.5B fine from EU over advertising
#96Re: Google hit with €1.5B fine from EU over advertising
#97With 500 million EU citizens, that's about €3 per person. This makes me wonder, how much does Google make from showing ads to one person?
About $8 billion revenue per quarter for EU + Middle East, let's say roughly 60% of people in Europe use the internet and > 90% of them use Google.
Therefore: 8,000,000,000 / (500,000,000 * 0.9 * 0.6) = $29.63 per person revenue per quarter. Could be as much as +- $10 given how arbitrary (research based, but still guesswork) my inputs were...
Somewhere around $100 per person per year seems insane but I guess how much do you spend per year on stuff?
P.S. please feel free to correct my figures!
Re: Google hit with €1.5B fine from EU over advertising
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fine is only part of the EUC action, the fined entity has also the obligation to change their behavior as suggested by EUC to stop asap their abusive actions.
How do you reconcile this with the knowledge they’ve been fine $x billion every year for the past 3 years (at least?)? At what point does Big Corp run out of things to abuse? If the fines just become a cost of doing business the finance and legal teams can probably get creative and invent new ways of mashing up old abuses over time. I think the underlying theme here, then, is that the fines are necessary but not suff…
This is why at some point executives need to face potential prison time. The EU should put the requirements to stop the abuse and if next year the change hasn’t taken place, investigate individuals responsible.
Re: Google hit with €1.5B fine from EU over advertising
#99That's small money for the Google. Last year they gave Google €4.34bn fine and in year 2017 they gave Google €2.42bn fine.
Unlikely: google has a 2017 revenue of 109.65 Billion US dollars. that's up to 5 % (conversion rates guessed) of it's total REVENUE. This will hurt their profits even more. A fine of this magnitude really makes the difference between funding a new product / moonshot or not I figure.
Nah, I think 10x the fine and you're really starting to hurt.
Re: Google hit with €1.5B fine from EU over advertising
#100I was wondering where funds from such a fine go: "Fines imposed on companies found in breach of EU antitrust rules are paid into the general EU budget. This money is not earmarked for particular expenses, but Member States' contributions to the EU budget for the following year are reduced accordingly. The fines therefore help to finance the EU and reduce the burden for taxpayers."
That happens to most fines, everywhere. In case this is in accusation of corrupt practices aimed to increase the EU budget, note: - Fines account for - The EU budget is relatively small compared to national governments' budgets. EU: 150 billion, Germany + France + UK = 5 Trillion (5,000 billion). That's leaving out 24 smaller economies. National governments have a lot of input in the decision-making process and could…
> The most likely explanation is that rather high standards of enforcement and corporate governance in the US require less EU intervention.
Or maybe the american political influence is stronger?