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Google loses fight over record $4.7B EU antitrust fine

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Re: Google loses fight over record $4.7B EU antitrust fine

#101

Post by bluecalm »

w3ll_w3ll_w3ll wrote: post #44
abc123abc123 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think rather, that it is the EU who cannot live without US cloud services and AI-services. Imagine if the US, behind closed doors of course, threatened to cut off all cloud services. Huge parts of the public and private sector could collapse.

We would build our own alternatives. Russia is a much smaller market (120 million people) and they have their own tech companies.

It's a culture thing. There are even smaller markets like Taiwan that developed industries EU didn't. Western EU countries are very risk averse, anti-business and has too conservative hierarchy to develop this kind of culture. You can see it as early as in school system where the focus is on rising the floor while forgetting about the ceiling.

Re: Google loses fight over record $4.7B EU antitrust fine

#102

Post by PurpleRamen »

abc123abc123 wrote: post #39
9dev wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As he just found out, that's exactly what the EU can do. And as he's about to find out, the EU is way too important a market for the American economy to ignore or pull out of. Play on your neighbour's yard, obey their rules.

I think rather, that it is the EU who cannot live without US cloud services and AI-services. Imagine if the US, behind closed doors of course, threatened to cut off all cloud services. Huge parts of the public and private sector could collapse.

EU can live fine without US cloud services, and it's not very dependent on AI at the moment. If access would be cut off, companies would just switch to other solutions, which BTW are already there. The question is more how much time they would have to switch and adapt. An unannounced zero-day cut off would be of course harmful for a while (days, weeks, maybe months), but on most parts could be probably solved in a short timeframe for the important parts.

Also, EU (and probably most parts of the world) are already switching away at this moment already.

Re: Google loses fight over record $4.7B EU antitrust fine

#103

Post by 9dev »

stogot wrote: post #96
maxldn wrote: post #49

> Europe’s top court has upheld Google’s fine of around 4.1 billion euros ($4.67 billion) over alleged anti-competitive practices. If they lost the case, and the appeal was dismissed, what is ‘alleged’ about it?

I noticed too this in another recent court case journalism recently. Bad journalism or fear?

Scary to think that that's a real question with an unclear answer now.

Re: Google loses fight over record $4.7B EU antitrust fine

#104

Post by wvh »

abc123abc123 wrote: post #39
9dev wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As he just found out, that's exactly what the EU can do. And as he's about to find out, the EU is way too important a market for the American economy to ignore or pull out of. Play on your neighbour's yard, obey their rules.

I think rather, that it is the EU who cannot live without US cloud services and AI-services. Imagine if the US, behind closed doors of course, threatened to cut off all cloud services. Huge parts of the public and private sector could collapse.

It would hurt, for a while. Then people would wake up and slowly better solutions would appear. Not unlike post-Trump NATO. But the US would have lost its leader position and a large market.

I think the EU needs a kick under the ass to stop its comfortable inertia.

Re: Google loses fight over record $4.7B EU antitrust fine

#105

Post by 9dev »

antonvs wrote: post #99
netcan wrote: post #16

Apologies for the meta: I feel that our understanding of trust and antitrust, along with the legal and regulatory premises... Just isn't very useful in the 21st century. I understand the motivation, and justification for employing antitrust. Google's business model, and much of modern tech economy is really all about Monopoly-like market power. In fact, one of the main concerns for AI investors is price competition,…

> A company facing market dynamism, price competition... Is unlikely to be investing billions in speculative r&d, for example. Simple solution: tax companies more heavily and use the money for public investment in research. The problem with people like Thiel is they’re incapable of thinking past their own self-interest, which makes many perfectly good solutions seem unthinkable to them. No one should listen to them w…

Unless your goal is creating a society that is centred around being the perfect habitat for Peter Thiel and Peter Thiel only, you should not listen to anything that guy says.

Re: Google loses fight over record $4.7B EU antitrust fine

#106

Post by furyg3 »

abc123abc123 wrote: post #39
9dev wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As he just found out, that's exactly what the EU can do. And as he's about to find out, the EU is way too important a market for the American economy to ignore or pull out of. Play on your neighbour's yard, obey their rules.

I think rather, that it is the EU who cannot live without US cloud services and AI-services. Imagine if the US, behind closed doors of course, threatened to cut off all cloud services. Huge parts of the public and private sector could collapse.

This is not a flip the switch tomorrow hypothetical. The fallout of such an action would be huge for everyone, including the US stock market.

Here in Europe, every government and major corporation have recently added their dependance on US platforms to their risk management taxonomy. For the (unlikely) scenario you mention, for the scenario that their company/government somehow runs afoul of the US goverment and this is used as leverage, for espionage reasons, and for other reasons that may have already been in their risk overview (data privacy, compliance, etc) but were seen as manageable but are no longer so.

For some anecdotes: My former employer just moved off of AWS to a EU provider and will likely also move away from Google Cloud for their internal needs, my current employer has started evaluating moving off of Azure at the request of our clients (though they dismissed the idea of moving off of Office 365 internally), and my partner's company (a large corporate) has started prioritizing a transition plan away from AWS.

Re: Google loses fight over record $4.7B EU antitrust fine

#107

Post by ben_w »

hparadiz wrote: post #82
cryptonym wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say you are right on this. What's the point of hurting yourself? There would be no meaningful benefit.

Oh man you wanna talk about benefits? I actually don't even think the US should have given the internet to the world. It's basically been one giant gift. Sure it's created a situation where we sell the tech both as software and hardware and that has allowed us to redirect wealth from the world to the US however in hindsight it's making our enemies stronger and allowing technology like drones to proliferate. An altern…

> Oh man you wanna talk about benefits? I actually don't even think the US should have given the internet to the world. It's basically been one giant gift.

You didn't give the internet to the world. The world made it by copying stuff you had no power to prevent them copying.

Also, the rest of the world had other networks, the US version (TCP/IP) just happened to win enough mindshare to replace e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coloured_Book_protocols

The UK alternative was only phased out in favour of TCP/IP after the world wide web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee while working at the famously-not-American CERN. The American attempt at the web was Gopher: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)

> An alternate reality where we didn't do that would be a reality where people would be smuggling American tech to their countries the way they did with jeans in the 80s.

Only thing we might care to smuggle (if anything) would be the software, and it's not like a DVD is hard to hide. Nobody would be smuggling out hardware, we would not need to, we would not care to. And even that's a stretch, we're also quite capable of writing our own software, sometimes you buy our companies because they're better at it than yours.

> We basically decided to make a bunch of money on the tech over the past 50 years but it's actually created a situation where our soldiers are gonna be dodging drones in the next big conflict where as if we never allowed advanced chips to proliferate around the world we would be sitting high on tech that is basically magic to the rest of the world. In hindsight I'm not sure if it was a good idea.

You say that like other countries don't make stuff. It's often the other way around, because we're as smart and capable as you, despite what you may think, and even when things have been invented "in" the US, it has often been by an immigrant who in your alternate timeline would not have gone to the US.

The chips are made by machines sold by EU companies; batteries and brushless motors? China; IMU? Japan, Germany, Taiwan; even GPS, despite the US one being the famous one, has alternatives of GLONASS (Soviet), BeiDou, and Galileo.

TBH, the only thing that America genuinely brought to the table was the interaction of the first amendment and cryptography. Insufficient cryptography, insufficient security, e-commerce remains limited.

Re: Google loses fight over record $4.7B EU antitrust fine

#108

Post by hparadiz »

ben_w wrote: post #107
hparadiz wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh man you wanna talk about benefits? I actually don't even think the US should have given the internet to the world. It's basically been one giant gift. Sure it's created a situation where we sell the tech both as software and hardware and that has allowed us to redirect wealth from the world to the US however in hindsight it's making our enemies stronger and allowing technology like drones to proliferate. An altern…

> Oh man you wanna talk about benefits? I actually don't even think the US should have given the internet to the world. It's basically been one giant gift. You didn't give the internet to the world. The world made it by copying stuff you had no power to prevent them copying. Also, the rest of the world had other networks, the US version (TCP/IP) just happened to win enough mindshare to replace e.g. https://en.wikiped…

[flagged]

Re: Google loses fight over record $4.7B EU antitrust fine

#110

Post by cbg0 »

hparadiz wrote: post #92
epolanski wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU's concern is less "is it technically possible?" and more whether Google's licensing and commercial agreements discourage effective competition. In particular: - Google forced every manufacturer to have search and chrome on every android phone if they wanted access to Google Play. No technical reason, just forcing their position. This is why Samsung, despite investing on their browser, was still forced to ship…

The point of those agreements is to make sure those phone manufacturers didn't basterdize android with their garbage crapware like they all want to do. Google is actually protecting the average user in this situation by mandating some standards. They could simply lock Android down as closed source forever and move on from all of this.

Nothing's stopping them from doing that, but you're incredibly naive if you think they're "protecting the average user" out of the goodness of their heart.
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