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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

#321

Post by elfakyn »

olalonde wrote: post #239
throwaway9d0291 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, not really. Basically the way the EU sees it, Google has a monopoly in a market: mobile operating systems. That is, if you're an OEM and you want to sell a device with an operating system, Google is currently the only place you can really turn. Apple exists but since it doesn't sell its operating system, it's not a participant in this market. So the EU saw Google saying to OEMs "you can have Android but you have…

As far as I know, Android is open source and any OEM is free to use it without asking permission. The licensing program is for the right to install proprietary Google apps like the Play Store or Google Maps. There are plenty of Chinese OEMs who aren't licensed and sell phones without the Play store.

Yes, and that directly causes a device to fail SafetyNet Attestation which can cause some third-party apps to not work even with sideloading/different app store.

Edit: like Netflix, Hulu, and Snapchat

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

#322

Post by Aunche »

mfoy_ wrote: post #277
jessriedel wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The top-level commentator isn't arguing that fines should be capped at the damages, he's arguing that they should be indexed to the damages (say, proportional to them). If I steal $50, the punishment is larger than $50, but it's determined relative to that magnitude, and in particular does is not just picked to be a fraction of my income. A $100,000 fine would be excessive punishment for stealing $50 dollars, and the…

It is indexed, just not to the damages, but to the revenue of the guilty party. Other countries in the EU do this as well, even in personal matters. For instance, a speeding ticket is based off a percentage of your annual income. Why? Because if you make $200k a year, a $50 fine isn't a big deal, at all, but if you barely scrape by, $50 could break your budget for the month.

Google isn't a single person. They're already more likely violate some laws and regulations just because they're so big. You can't double dip by treating every small infraction like it's a huge company-wide problem.

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

#323

Post by andrepd »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #314
hellllllllooo wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you're stealing $50 then a $150 fine is a deterrent even if you're a billionaire, because the expected value if you're caught is -$100, which has nothing at all to do with how much money you have. This is not true if you see $50 and $150 dollars as basically the same amount when compared to your overall wealth. Would you care about a 2 cent fine for overrunning you time on a 1 cent parking space?

> This is not true if you see $50 and $150 dollars as basically the same amount when compared to your overall wealth. Would you care about a 2 cent fine for overrunning you time on a 1 cent parking space? At which point you can be happy that the rich person is voluntarily paying the 3 cent fine instead of the 1 cent parking fee. If you made it a $1000 fine vs. a 1 cent parking fee then they would pay the parking fee,…

>At which point you can be happy that the rich person is voluntarily paying the 3 cent fine instead of the 1 cent parking fee.

No, because the issue here is not like a fee, it's about breaking the law and how you should be punished for it in order for it to deter you. A more apt comparison would be "you can be happy that the a rich person is voluntarily paying 500$ to park on top of a crosswalk. In this case you want to deter the person from doing something that harms others, not just to make them pay for it, which in this case means either a fine indexed to income or jail time, so it hurts you even if you are a billionaire.

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

#324

Post by andrepd »

jquery wrote: post #284
mfoy_ wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if the punishment for stealing was to be fined for 10% of the amount you stole. Like, you get to keep 90% of it. You'd rob a bank and then drop by the police station to drop off their cut just to avoid the hassle of "getting investigated" later. So obviously the punishment has to be worse than the value of doing it. But not 1:1 either, if you know you'll only catch 50% of robbers, then the fine would have to…

At $1.5B, it's about collecting revenue to fund EU activities. It's far beyond the amount of revenue the infraction generated by order(s?) of magnitude, and was a gray area to boot. Keeping the taxes as "fines" ensures they can give EU companies favorable treatment. It's the definition of corrupt: " a willingness to act dishonestly in return for money "

>It's far beyond the amount of revenue the infraction generated by order(s?) of magnitude

$1.5B is far below the amount of revenue Google got from advertising since 2006. I'm not sure what you mean by this.

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

#325

Post by AnthonyMouse »

andrepd wrote: post #323
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is not true if you see $50 and $150 dollars as basically the same amount when compared to your overall wealth. Would you care about a 2 cent fine for overrunning you time on a 1 cent parking space? At which point you can be happy that the rich person is voluntarily paying the 3 cent fine instead of the 1 cent parking fee. If you made it a $1000 fine vs. a 1 cent parking fee then they would pay the parking fee,…

>At which point you can be happy that the rich person is voluntarily paying the 3 cent fine instead of the 1 cent parking fee. No, because the issue here is not like a fee, it's about breaking the law and how you should be punished for it in order for it to deter you. A more apt comparison would be "you can be happy that the a rich person is voluntarily paying 500$ to park on top of a crosswalk. In this case you want…

Nope, deterrence is still only required proportionally. If someone parks on a crosswalk and the cost of that to society is $200 and the fine is $500 then the fact that they're paying $500 means you're still coming out ahead. And if the cost to society is more than $500 then you've set the fine wrong regardless of who is paying it.

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

#326

Post by gamblor956 »

utopcell wrote: post #295
gamblor956 wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For starters, Walmart and Google are very different things. Walmart is a store, and sells things. Best Buy is also a store, and sells many of the same things Walmart sells. They are competitors in the market for selling electronics. Competition between them is good, and so they aren't required to advertise each others' stores. Google is a search engine . Bing and Yahoo Search are also search engines. They crawl and s…

I understood the argument (it wasn't that complicated to make.) By this reasoning, Google Ads is a different product from Google Search and as such gets preferential treatment by being the only one presented in Google's search results. It's not hard to see these line of fines against Google for what they are: Money-grabbing attacks. With no knowledge on the matter, as an external observer, I wish this doesn't lead Go…

By this reasoning, Google Ads is a different product from Google Search and as such gets preferential treatment by being the only one presented in Google's search results.

I'm not sure what reasoning you're using, but it appears you aren't grasping the complexity of the argument.

For starters, Google search placement is a fundamental part of the search product, and is a wholly different product from Google Ads (which don't show up alongside search results). Search results and display ads aren't just different products--they're different markets (for example, print ads and tv ads are also advertising but are wholly separate forms of advertising from each other and from display ads and from search placement). So paying for placement in search results isn't an antitrust issue.

On the other hand, if buying search placement was contingent on also buying Google Ads, that would be a textbook example of antitrust abuse because Google's dominance in the search engine market is being used to leverage and interfere with the display ads market.

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

#328

Post by lostmsu »

scrumbledober wrote: post #228
andy_ppp wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you are comparing with Netflix, then you should consider family accounts, where many people share that $8/m

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

#329

Post by gamblor956 »

j16sdiz wrote: post #316
gamblor956 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You literally just provided the example. Product A: dominant search product Product B: non-dominant advertising product. If you want to use product A, you need to also use product B. That alone is sufficient to create an antitrust violation. It's almost literally the textbook example of an antitrust violation. But Google didn't stop there--they required exclusivity for product B for several years, and even after that…

Product A is not profit making, but it bring public goods. Do we want to subsidize it? Or just let it die as the free market works?

Product A, i.e., the search engine, is not just profit-making, it's been Google's primary source of revenue for the the past decade. Google makes billions on paid search results placement. It's the foundation of their business model. Display Ads, Android, etc., are relative drops in the bucket in comparison.

So, do we want to subsidize it? No, because it's a private product offered for profit.

Should we let it die? Sure. Google's not the best search engine anymore, just the biggest. If it has to face some competition, they'll start improving the product again, which benefits everyone. And if it doesn't improve the product, it deserves to die.

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

#330

Post by chocolatebunny »

jessriedel wrote: post #302
mfoy_ wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is indexed, just not to the damages, but to the revenue of the guilty party. Other countries in the EU do this as well, even in personal matters. For instance, a speeding ticket is based off a percentage of your annual income. Why? Because if you make $200k a year, a $50 fine isn't a big deal, at all, but if you barely scrape by, $50 could break your budget for the month.

First, the vast majority of the world does not use the day-fine system. But more importantly, it makes no sense to index corporate fines to a firm's revenue because corporations can be split/combined (unlike people). Indexing fines to firm size would lead to market distortions, especially in the case when those fines are a significant fraction of total revenue.

At this point it might actually make sense for Google to create a separate European entity so they won't get fined so heavily all the time in the EU. I guess they'd have to see how much of a benefit that would be relative to the amount of taxes they would save by being in Ireland (I'm not sure if that's still a thing).
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