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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

#151

Post by toyg »

moogly wrote: post #145
mrdevlar wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This already happened. The US government cut off a judge at the international criminal court from her Office365 account because she was pressing a war crimes case against Benjamin Netanyahu. It's the reason why in the last year you've seen multiple European governments very quickly build an escape hatch against US tech. We all expect that you'll use our dependency on US services as a weapon, you've already done so, s…

I call bullshit on the "very quickly" part there. It'll take a decade to phase out. And some don't seem interested at all (my employer for instance).

Some are more exposed than others.

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

#152

Post by petcat »

moogly wrote: post #145
mrdevlar wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This already happened. The US government cut off a judge at the international criminal court from her Office365 account because she was pressing a war crimes case against Benjamin Netanyahu. It's the reason why in the last year you've seen multiple European governments very quickly build an escape hatch against US tech. We all expect that you'll use our dependency on US services as a weapon, you've already done so, s…

I call bullshit on the "very quickly" part there. It'll take a decade to phase out. And some don't seem interested at all (my employer for instance).

> take a decade

More like several decades and 100s of billions of euros which nobody is going to pay. It will simply never happen and right now all the politicians are just quietly waiting for this whole thing to blow over.

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

#153

Post by vrganj »

rcxdude wrote: post #138
Ravus wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the cases provided for by the law and with provisions for compensation, private property may be expropriated for reasons of general interest. Excerpt from article 42 of the Italian constitution. This would cover, for instance, the entire eu-south-1 availability zone in AWS. I'm sure that other member states have their own provisions and you need to keep in mind that Google/Amazon/Microsoft employees in the relev…

That kind of thing is very much a nuclear option, though. Firstly because the state that does it needs to be very confident it can operate the asset it seizes without overseas support, and secondly because doing so tends to be bad for business in your country in general, as people understandibly get nervous about having stuff in places that have shown a willingness to just take it.

The nuclear option would be the US pulling cloud services over night. This would be the counterstrike, not the initial nuke launch.

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

#154

Post by criddell »

Krutonium wrote: post #13

And may it be used to prosecute them for the current bullshit they're doing with Android. Can the EU force Google to divest Chrome and Android? They should.

Be careful what you wish for.

Creating companies out of Android and Chrome seems like a way to quickly and maximally enshittify those technologies.

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

#155

Post by plantain »

lopis wrote: post #21
lukan wrote: post #4

“Android provides more choice for everyone and supports thousands of businesses. This judgment fails to recognize our significant investment to ensure Android remains open, interoperable and free,” a Google spokesperson told CNBC. Sure. Which is why alternative stores like F-Droid are under threat now. https://keepandroidopen.org/

So much happened since 2018 that this ruling feels ancient now. It was about Google making unfair deals with OEMs: > In 2018, the European Commission slapped Google with the record-breaking penalty on the grounds that it abused Android’s mobile dominance to give unfair advantage to its own apps via pre-installation deals with smartphone makers. While this specific problem is much better today, specially since of the…

If only this was applied evenly. Why is every Samsung/LG/literally every non-Pixel device full of uninstallable crapware?

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

#156

Post by dylan604 »

petcat wrote: post #152
moogly wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I call bullshit on the "very quickly" part there. It'll take a decade to phase out. And some don't seem interested at all (my employer for instance).

> take a decade More like several decades and 100s of billions of euros which nobody is going to pay. It will simply never happen and right now all the politicians are just quietly waiting for this whole thing to blow over.

> More like several decades and 100s of billions of euros which nobody is going to pay

And now you know where that $4.7B fine will be spent. Why spend your own money when you can spend someone else’s?

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

#157

Post by petcat »

bluecalm wrote: post #101
w3ll_w3ll_w3ll wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They'll blame it on WWII but both South Korea and Japan were similarly devastated and both managed to develop world-class technology industries in the ensuing decades.

Europe is the outlier and it's pointing to something fundamentally wrong that it was only able to produce a handful of interesting technology companies in all these years.

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

#158

Post by Kbelicius »

xienze wrote: post #67
petesergeant wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a shakedown. Nothing more. Perhaps believable, had it not survived eight years of litigation ending at the ECJ, or had there been some informal "pay up or else" demand attached, neither of which is true.

> Perhaps believable, had it not survived eight years of litigation ending at the ECJ You're of course making the assumption the ECJ isn't biased towards ruling in favor of the EU in these disputes... > or had there been some informal "pay up or else" demand attached, neither of which is true. Isn't there a formal "pay up or else" demand attached? If Google doesn't pay, then what? I would take this a lot more serious…

> No, they're OK with Google apparently not changing much of anything and being allowed to continue operating so long as they pay the fine first.

But google did change how they do things thanks to this case thus making everything you wrote some anti-government fiction.

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

#159

Post by bluGill »

moogly wrote: post #145
mrdevlar wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This already happened. The US government cut off a judge at the international criminal court from her Office365 account because she was pressing a war crimes case against Benjamin Netanyahu. It's the reason why in the last year you've seen multiple European governments very quickly build an escape hatch against US tech. We all expect that you'll use our dependency on US services as a weapon, you've already done so, s…

I call bullshit on the "very quickly" part there. It'll take a decade to phase out. And some don't seem interested at all (my employer for instance).

They will likely take a decade, but only because this isn't top priority. They could be out in a month if it was important to them. The alternatives exist, there is just a lot of pain in switching that they can avoid by doing this over a decade.
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