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Google hit with €1.5B fine from EU over advertising

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Re: Google hit with €1.5B fine from EU over advertising

#221

Post by boudin »

hopler wrote: post #130
boudin wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If iOS would have the marketshare of Android, it would be hit by the same regulations.

No, if Apple opened it's OS to OEMs, it would be hit. Apple isn't getting fined for it's app store which is essentially the same structure as Google's OEM hardware setup

It's based on marketshare. iOS doesn't have enough marketshare on the smartphone market to be bothered by those laws. If apple was controlling the whole smartphone market, it could fall under those laws, even if its operating system wasn't open to other manufacturer.

Re: Google hit with €1.5B fine from EU over advertising

#222

Post by andrewla »

matt4077 wrote: post #85
kierenj wrote: post #35

I 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…

> - Fines account for This is maybe not as comforting as you think it sounds. 1.5B is 1% of the budget that you describe below, which is non-trivial -- that's make or break money. I'm guessing it exceeds the total annual contribution of several member states (I tried to find the actual budget, but talk about incomprehensible documents [1] -- what's an "own resource"? What's with the obsession with sugar?). To that end it seems like fines like this are a critical part of the EU's budget.

> If you sum up all the fines collected by continent

I'm wondering if you have a reference for that -- I can't really find anything definitive and it would be interesting as a data point.

[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...

Re: Google hit with €1.5B fine from EU over advertising

#223

Post by esarbe »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #219
sosodev wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Why should corporations get off easy when we don't?

I believe part of the purpose of corporations is to create an entity that is capable of doing "icky" things that might be unpalatable for a person to do, but need to be done nonetheless. Specific examples of "icky" things include building war weapons, producing/testing drugs that we know will kill some patients, performing tasks which create pollution which will kill people, etc. I want to be clear that I'm not propo…

If that's the case, that sounds like a good argument to not allow incorporation.

Re: Google hit with €1.5B fine from EU over advertising

#224

Post by everdev »

sosodev wrote: post #201
yeahitslikethat wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as the punishment for the crime is less than the crime itself, crime will perpetuate. If you steal 1.000,00€ from a bank, they don't fine you 1€. No. They send you to jail for years.

Exactly. Why should corporations get off easy when we don't?

Corporate law has lots of grey area, robbing a bank doesn't.

Re: Google hit with €1.5B fine from EU over advertising

#225

Post by pound »

sosodev wrote: post #204
freeflight wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I thought I was "paying" for that by having 15 minutes long "ads" thrown at me every for every 5 minutes of content I watch. YouTube seems to be getting really bad in that regard, even worse than TV.

That's not quite right. While you can get ads that are 15 minutes long they can always be skipped within 5 seconds. That's not even comparable to television.

not _always_

There are ads on Youtube that cannot be skipped, and they can be much longer than 5-6 seconds.

Re: Google hit with €1.5B fine from EU over advertising

#227

Post by mirekrusin »

Jabbles wrote: post #209
zaroth wrote: post #161

This is not for AdSense on Google.com, this is for third-party sites with a search feature showing search ads to their own customers. A third-party site who wants to show ads in their own search results could partner with Google to include AdSense ads in their own results. The Google contract originally required exclusivity, and then was changed to require Google ads to be more prominent. In the context of the market…

Vestager said the fine had been calculated based on Google's online advertising revenue in Europe. https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-google-margrethe-vest...

Seems like there are ways to avoid tax and ways to "recover" it back.

Re: Google hit with €1.5B fine from EU over advertising

#228

Post by scrumbledober »

andy_ppp wrote: post #97
amelius wrote: post #28

With 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…

This really puts things in to perspective. Subscription startups looking to get some percentage of the population to pay $10 a month can never reach the scale of google advertising when they are extracting nearly that much value on average from every single person.

Re: Google hit with €1.5B fine from EU over advertising

#229

Post by AnaniasAnanas »

cm2187 wrote: post #37
AnaniasAnanas wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google does indeed need to be broken up, but much less than Microsoft. Google has actually done good for the whole world with their open source initiatives, opening of webm, etc - plus all(?) of their products are easily replaceable, unlike say windows which has exclusive programs written for it.

I don't define surveillance capitalism as "good for the world".

Me neither? As I said in my post I consider their contributions to open source to be what is good for the world - nothing to do with surveillance.

Re: Google hit with €1.5B fine from EU over advertising

#230

Post by zaarn »

black_puppydog wrote: post #212
zaarn wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1.5b€ isn't a lot; Germany + France + UK = 5 Trillion (5,000 billion) as a sibling comment mentioned. They don't care about 1 billion here or there.

It would be a lot for any one of Google's competitors to fight over. That is, if the money were e.g. supposed to go directly to the competitors that were harmed here, there would be a huge allocation fight within minutes of this decision...

But it doesn't, it goes into the EU budget.
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