For reference, that's 0.25% of Alphabet's revenue last year.
Another reference: It's ~0.75% of Alphabets 2025 income.
EU Fines Google $1.02B for Favoring Its Own Services
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Re: EU Fines Google $1.02B for Favoring Its Own Services
#32It drives me insane when in Europe the link between Google Search and Google Maps is broken and I often have to copy paste an address between the two. Thanks EU, what if I like Google's integrations?
I share the frustration but maybe if Google hadn't gained a monopoly status Google Maps wouldn’t have been in its current sorry state. My assessment is that EU is doing too little too late, the fine should have been something like 20B and used towards creating a non-profit, open and extendable map service ideally with the people who already do great mapping tech that don't show up in Google search results at the top.…
Eh, on the other hand the EU has now effectively forced usb-c for devices after apple refused to play it clean for years and they still got people who complained (how dare the regulator be opiniated toward tech !).
The EU loves to play it the european way, and while on the surface it seems "oh that means regulations" in reality it's a "figure it out yourselves and please behave like adult, we don't want to deal with that" and we ask for some sort of regulatory association or whatever that we can refer to to talk to them all.
It's worked in a ton of industries including ones where we have no moat but somehow tech companies are always incapable to behave. At least the US ones, eg for the phone thing it ended up being Samsung who told the EU "hey I've been playing ball for years and Apple isn't , make them or I stop too".
Re: EU Fines Google $1.02B for Favoring Its Own Services
#33It drives me insane when in Europe the link between Google Search and Google Maps is broken and I often have to copy paste an address between the two. Thanks EU, what if I like Google's integrations?
This is intended to drive you insane on purpose. It is just malicious compliance intended to make users blame the anti-monopoly regulators instead of the monopolists.
This is a corporation with tens of thousands of software developers. If they wanted to do better, they could. As always: If the UI is bad for you, that probably means that particular implementation is good for the corporation.
Re: EU Fines Google $1.02B for Favoring Its Own Services
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the US had working anti trust this wouldn't really even be a thing.
The market is a funnel, rewarding centralization, you can thrustbust the t-1000 all you want, but the mercury meets in the middle and guess who is back.
(Actually I think it was Gallium but your point stands ;) )
Re: EU Fines Google $1.02B for Favoring Its Own Services
#35It drives me insane when in Europe the link between Google Search and Google Maps is broken and I often have to copy paste an address between the two. Thanks EU, what if I like Google's integrations?
What drives you nuts is Google's malicious compliance and your ignorance: what EU forbidden is defaulting to it in a way that they can't be decoupled. What Google was allowed to do was adding a option to enable it.
They didn't. That's specifically to piss you off on EU.
Re: EU Fines Google $1.02B for Favoring Its Own Services
#36Don't worry, EU will give it back in almost every gov running on the American BigTech, it's just a show. The Granny In Chief has to get the emails somehow. /s
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Re: EU Fines Google $1.02B for Favoring Its Own Services
#37It drives me insane when in Europe the link between Google Search and Google Maps is broken and I often have to copy paste an address between the two. Thanks EU, what if I like Google's integrations?
The EU told them they can not by default prefer their own maps product when linking from their search product, they have to allow the user to choose. They could have simply added a selector when a user first clicks on the maps preview in the search result, and then remembered it on device or across that user's account. But of course, then the user could choose a competitor's product and Google would have to honor it.…
I wonder if the EU will someday figure out a patch for this "Deteriorate everyone's user experience in a way that is technically compliant and blame the EU" behavioural exploit...
Re: EU Fines Google $1.02B for Favoring Its Own Services
#38Re: EU Fines Google $1.02B for Favoring Its Own Services
#39That's last week's fine, isn't it? If so, it's a dupe.
Re: EU Fines Google $1.02B for Favoring Its Own Services
#40It drives me insane when in Europe the link between Google Search and Google Maps is broken and I often have to copy paste an address between the two. Thanks EU, what if I like Google's integrations?
I think this is a larger web-standards problem.
There is no standard clickable "link" for physical locations. There is no URL-equivalent you can send to someone, they click it, it open up their map viewer of choice. You can send Lat Lon coordinates and then have the recipient copy and paste them. It generally works though there isn't a standard format and no service will make it clickable like an email address, so the whole process remains clunky.
When you "Share" a location in Google Maps or OSMand, you get back a URL link to their service and not an service agnostic "link" to the geographic location.