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Google fined €100M by Italian antitrust over Google Play abuse of dominance

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Re: Google fined €100M by Italian antitrust over Google Play abuse of dominance

#151

Post by anoncake »

kyrra wrote: post #142
JI00912 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IMO, we need some way to declare a company "Big" and apply special rules to them. Careful though. A monopoly may abuse its position, which is bad, but a big company may be big because they are good and people use them, which is good.

This is actually the difference between the US and the EU when it comes to monopoly lawsuits. The US has to prove that the behavior of a monopoly was harmful to customers/consumers. The EU has no burden of proof and can just take market size as a way to go after them. The general problem I see here is how you slice the market to say a given company has a monopoly. It sometimes feels like those going after large compa…

Monopolies are inherently harmful to the customer. A monopoly implies lack of competition. If lack of competition is not harmful to the customer, then competition is not beneficial. If competition is not beneficial in a given market, there is no reason for it to be a market to begin with and the monopoly should be expropriated.

Re: Google fined €100M by Italian antitrust over Google Play abuse of dominance

#152

Post by permo-w »

carlob wrote: post #67
genericacct wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that ENEL is owned by the employers of the ruling judges is just a coincidence.

ENEL has been privatized a long time ago and the Italian government has just a plurality stake.

just a plurality?

wouldn’t a plurality make them the controlling shareholder?

Re: Google fined €100M by Italian antitrust over Google Play abuse of dominance

#153

Post by nradov »

salawat wrote: post #91
ripdog wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally good comment, but if search is separated from ads, how does it make money? I'm totally on board with splitting up Google, but losing Google search (or search becoming notably worse) would not be worth it for me. The competition is just so bad, and always has been.

Part of why searching is as painful as it is is because it has been deemed acceptable to pollute the search space. SEO should be neither encouraged or allowed. It is nothing less than adversarial corruption of a shared index. Boolean searching works. Go back to a library catalog sometime and be amazed at how quickly you can get relevant results when every Tom, Dick, and Methuseleh aren't shoveling extra irrelevant fe…

There is no practical way to disallow SEO. Search results have to be ranked somehow in order to be usable for most people. And site owners will always figure out tricks to game the ranking algorithms.

Re: Google fined €100M by Italian antitrust over Google Play abuse of dominance

#154

Post by nradov »

truth_seeker wrote: post #21

How far fine will help ? who will get benefitted ? how many people really understand ANTITRUST in its entire scope ? IMHO, The market dominance of features provided by big tech companies like google and many other companies which provides something as a service must be consciously evaluated whenever product (and its new releases with new features) hits the market. Big tech companies like google have too much monopoly…

Liechtenstein and Seychelles deserve their own local vendors? Seriously?

Re: Google fined €100M by Italian antitrust over Google Play abuse of dominance

#155

Post by maxwell »

Lutzb wrote: post #90
dalbasal wrote: post #26

The way antitrust is working in recent years is kind of ridiculous. Google in Europe is becoming a rich case study in antitrust meh. You find that adwords engages in a blatant "monopolistic abuse" in some specific sense. In the Adwords EU case for example, Google was both monopsonising (google search) and monopolising search advertising. But, the actual violations are specific, like exclusivity requirements and other…

The fix is not fines. Threat to split the company.

Splitting up companies increases the value of the "babies", and doesn't prevent reforming, as with AT&T and Standard Oil.

What about revoking corporate charters and nationalizing?

I'm against capital punishment (due to the possibility of wrongful convictions), but if corporations want to be people, let's start executing them.

Shut 'em down, Uncle Sam takes the assets.

Re: Google fined €100M by Italian antitrust over Google Play abuse of dominance

#156

Post by swiley »

zepto wrote: post #139
swiley wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your definition of "thorough" and mine are very different. I highly doubt they could do a meaningful review without the complete source code for the app. It's not unusual that apps change their behavior after the review and this sometimes comes from binary dylibs that the developer didn't write. The whole thing is a scam.

> It's not unusual that apps change their behavior after the review Which leads to the account being banned. > and this sometimes comes from binary dylibs that the developer didn't write. Which are detected through analysis if they are common spyware. >The whole thing is a scam. Clearly not.

>> It's not unusual that apps change their behavior after the review

>Which leads to the account being banned.

Only if it gets noticed.

>> and this sometimes comes from binary dylibs that the developer didn't write.

>Which are detected through analysis if they are common spyware.

Facebook got away with it for many years.

>>The whole thing is a scam.

>Clearly not.

If it weren't then they would let people choose to use the App Store. It only exists to protect Apple's services from competition.

Re: Google fined €100M by Italian antitrust over Google Play abuse of dominance

#157

Post by tyingq »

collaborative wrote: post #123
mupuff1234 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes me wonder how easy it is to just hide certain features during the review process.

It's extremely easy, but it also is extremely easy to get permanently banned if they find out you "switched on" a hidden feature once the app got into production. A permanent ban can be very damaging, so one needs to make sure to be completely legit when it comes to app store submission reviews and app store ratings

I wonder how this works with webviews. Do they expect you to resubmit the same binary if a page displayed in a webview changes?

Re: Google fined €100M by Italian antitrust over Google Play abuse of dominance

#158

Post by amacneil »

collaborative wrote: post #123
mupuff1234 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes me wonder how easy it is to just hide certain features during the review process.

It's extremely easy, but it also is extremely easy to get permanently banned if they find out you "switched on" a hidden feature once the app got into production. A permanent ban can be very damaging, so one needs to make sure to be completely legit when it comes to app store submission reviews and app store ratings

Can confirm. We got the Coinbase iOS app banned for doing this back in the day, when Apple did not allow bitcoin apps (IIRC showing the price was ok, transacting was not). Even after they relaxed their bitcoin restrictions (and calls to the head of app store), they still made us wait out the 12 month ban before reinstating the app.

https://www.coindesk.com/coinbase-bitcoin-app-apple-app-stor...

https://venturebeat.com/2014/12/14/bitcoin-wallet-coinbase-n...

Re: Google fined €100M by Italian antitrust over Google Play abuse of dominance

#160

Post by kavalg »

oblio wrote: post #27
dalbasal wrote: post #26

The way antitrust is working in recent years is kind of ridiculous. Google in Europe is becoming a rich case study in antitrust meh. You find that adwords engages in a blatant "monopolistic abuse" in some specific sense. In the Adwords EU case for example, Google was both monopsonising (google search) and monopolising search advertising. But, the actual violations are specific, like exclusivity requirements and other…

> IMO, we need some way to declare a company "Big" and apply special rules to them. If those rules are onerous, that might create some organic pressure to split and/or help smaller incumbents compete. Past a point, they should be regulated like an utility.

And we need an effective regulator. For example, I am baffled by the level of oligopoly allowed in the EU cellular/telecom industry. It is quite obvious that prices are synchronized between providers if you watch their dynamics over time. They are currently killing prepaid cards as well.
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