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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

#171

Post by gentleman11 »

icpmoles wrote: post #5

Quick summary: the biggest electricity provider in the country (ENEL) made an app (Juicepass) to find and manage their charging stations across the country. The Android Auto functionality of the app has been rejected by Google for non disclosed "security concerns while driving". The antitrust ruled out it was because Google wanted to sabotage competitor apps to the charging stations finder built-in in the Google Maps…

Not sure why nobody else is asking this, but what is the evidence? Did an investigation reveal that this actually was the reason for the App Store rejection?

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

#172

Post by qubex »

fouric wrote: post #168
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…

> Whether it's 100m or 2bn doesn't really matter. ...yet, it will absolutely matter if it's $20B - Google's 2020 operating income was $41B. You're making the claim that since Google wasn't fined enough, fines don't work - which is absurd. Try making the fines a reasonably large percentage of gross revenue from the previous year - say, 10%. 10% of Google's 2020 gross revenue ($182B) is $18B, which is almost half of th…

The problem with this is that you can easily bankrupt a company by codifying exceedingly onerous terms.

Google (to take your example) happens to be able to (barely) afford 10% of their revenue taken from their income. Another company with a different cost structure (perhaps in another sector) might not be able to afford that. The upshot is that providing a codified “one size fits all” punishment could be disastrous (if you consider preserving companies to be desirable: for the sake of this argument I do, but entirely legitimately you might not).

In the case of Italy (I’m Italian) and it’s awkward, glacial justice system, that’s a very dangerous assumption to make. This place is already hostile enough towards businesses.

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

#173

Post by spoonjim »

speedgoose wrote: post #126
spoonjim wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest blocker is talent. Who’s going to join the French Government’s Google at 1/3 the pay with no sushi in the cafeteria?

There is plenty of extremely talented people who do not work for Google or any random unicorn in California. Some people prefer to stay where they currently live. And you are not going to make many Frenchmen move continent for an American cafeteria menu.

There are some extremely talented French people but why would they work for the French government instead of remotely for... whoever they want? Unless they don’t speak English.

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

#174

Post by swiley »

zepto wrote: post #167
swiley wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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…

> Only if it gets noticed. True, but they are getting better at noticing. >> 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. You know about that because they were stopped . And since then Apple has tightened the rules and stepped up detection. >>The whole thing is a scam. >Clearly…

Noticing malware after it's installed based on a hash isn't any better than eg windows defender. The App Store doesn't help with that at all.

>You know about that because they were stopped. And since then Apple has tightened the rules and stepped up detection.

Nope, lots of people knew it was happening for years before Apple actually stopped it and it happens with other libraries still.

>No, because that would enable social engineering attacks once again.

People still get tricked into installing CA certs which is just as effective since everything has to be done in a browser due to the App Store restrictions. So no this hasn't prevented social engineering attacks, it's only changed them and it's come at an extreme cost.

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

#175

Post by kolinko »

oblio wrote: post #25
bsdubernerd wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And a quick reminder to everybody else that walled gardens don't actually help the consumer. They only arbitrarily restrict choice, they don't actually improve security (if any, that's provided by the sandboxing, not by the store "review"). If this company (ENEL) wasn't a huge state-wide electric company (inheriting their power and ties from the previous state-owned monopoly) how many chances do you think they had to…

Walled gardens are just security theater. The App Store revenue was $72bn in 2020, yet the review time for an app is a few hours. App reviewers barely have any qualifications, they're just "call center operators" running off a script.

And yet, over it’s 13 years of history there were only single instances of viruses/malware.

Compare that to Google Play

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

#176

Post by Pxtl »

icpmoles wrote: post #5

Quick summary: the biggest electricity provider in the country (ENEL) made an app (Juicepass) to find and manage their charging stations across the country. The Android Auto functionality of the app has been rejected by Google for non disclosed "security concerns while driving". The antitrust ruled out it was because Google wanted to sabotage competitor apps to the charging stations finder built-in in the Google Maps…

"ruled" or "ruled out"? Because those have opposing meanings.

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

#177

Post by unobtaniumstool »

saddlerustle wrote: post #76
mikro2nd wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting that the Italian judiciary is incapable of acting independently and impartially?

The majority of italians rate the independence of courts to be poor, which is among the lowest ratings in the EU [1] [1] https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/justice_scoreboar...

Italy also ranks between Grenada and Saudi Arabia in terms of corruption.

https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2020/index/ita

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

#178

Post by _jal »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #141
zepto wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but if they catch you, you’ll get kicked out of the store altogether.

Why? We do it all the times, we ship most of our app behind feature switches and enable them in the future for subsets of users

It is partly an intent issue. If you are attempting to pull one over on Apple by hiding app behavior during review, well, they are not going to be happy about that.

Other folks are also noting that, because humans are sometimes bad at evaluating each others' intent, it is probably a good idea to attempt to make one's intent clear if going this route, lest you annoy the gatekeeper.

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

#179

Post by egocentric »

permo-w wrote: post #148
bsdubernerd wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And a quick reminder to everybody else that walled gardens don't actually help the consumer. They only arbitrarily restrict choice, they don't actually improve security (if any, that's provided by the sandboxing, not by the store "review"). If this company (ENEL) wasn't a huge state-wide electric company (inheriting their power and ties from the previous state-owned monopoly) how many chances do you think they had to…

I agree that the downsides outweigh the positives, but they do provide security to a certain extent. For example, you can give your grandma an iPad or a chromebook, and there’s very little chance of her accidentally installing x nasty malware. Give her a proper laptop, and at any one time she’s about 6 clicks from something dodgy, especially if she’s on social media.

That's because of system-level protections like the sandbox, not App Review or the App Store.

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

#180

Post by grawprog »

kolinko wrote: post #175
oblio wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Walled gardens are just security theater. The App Store revenue was $72bn in 2020, yet the review time for an app is a few hours. App reviewers barely have any qualifications, they're just "call center operators" running off a script.

And yet, over it’s 13 years of history there were only single instances of viruses/malware. Compare that to Google Play

https://www.techradar.com/news/apple-app-store-is-apparently...

https://threatpost.com/click-fraud-malware-apple-app-store/1...

https://www.tomsguide.com/news/iphone-apps-infected-malware

https://9to5mac.com/2021/05/07/emails-reveal-128-million-ios...

https://www.theiphonewiki.com/wiki/Malware_for_iOS

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