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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

#191

Post by dalbasal »

ripdog wrote: post #85
dalbasal wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IDK if it's "past a point," but in some cases maybe. I'm torn on that though. EG, what would it actually mean if FB or twitter became "regulated like utilities?" Interoperability? Portability? IMO, these are pretty finicky problems for a regulator. I think it would likely look like the mandated personal data dumps we have today. Some clunky feature that few use, and don't change the structure of the market. Useful tr…

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.

Google will continue to make money as it does now, through adwords as a "search partner." This is also how other SEs make money. The biggest antitrust case Google has lost so far has related directly to this.

Would they make less money? Yes, probably. It's hard to say how much, but it would still likely be enough to run Google.

I think it's easier to understand the paradigm with Twitter or FB, since they're simpler. Facebook currently makes about $100bn pa from ads. Circa 2015, they were operating profitably on about $10bn ad revenue. Twitter has had a similar (more modest) trajectory. They spend a lot of money running FB & Twitter, because they can, but there's no reason to think FB or Google Search on far less revenue than they bring in currently.

There are versions of what I'm suggesting that likely affect revenue moderately, and versions that could hit harder. IMO, in either case, I don't believe there is any meaningful consumer harm or ill effects outside of FB's shareholders or perhaps employees.

This isn't true of all monopolies/sectors. It's true of FB, Google, maybe twitter.

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

#192

Post by dalbasal »

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…

It isn't deemed acceptable, encouraged or allowed. It occurs, like spam.

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

#193

Post by dalbasal »

bagacrap wrote: post #108
oblio wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

because our utilities work so well and don't function at all like monopolies

Utilities aren't regulated to function like "non-monopolies," generally. They're regulated because (ATT, at least) they were seen as inevitable "natural" monopolies.

There really isn't one "theory of monopolies" that is useful in all times and places. Social Media is not Telecom or electricity. Amazon is not a railroad.

Trustbusting is an anti-monopoly strategy, and it doesn't really work in spaces where monopoly is unavoidable.

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

#194

Post by yupper32 »

Regardless of the merit of this particular fine, what happens when every country realizes they can just arbitrarily fine huge international companies to fund their countries?

In theory all 50 countries that Google has offices could fine them $100M - $10B based on whatever their laws are at the time, regardless of how ridiculous the laws are. It doesn't even have to be truly bad stuff. It could be something like, a country doesn't like that Google didn't censor something worldwide.

It seems like we need a more centralized way to deal with this.

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

#195

Post by bgorman »

CountDrewku wrote: post #159

Why is the EU the only one doing anything about monopolies? I'm tired of useless US politicians letting these massive corporations run our entire country. Break them up already.

Because none of the big tech companies are based in Europe, so there is limited political downside to going after them.

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

#196

Post by swiley »

zepto wrote: post #186
swiley wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. False. Once a scam has been detected, the developer account can be disabled, which adds cost to new attempts, unlike windows defender. > Nope, lots of people knew it was happening for years before Apple actually stopped it and it happens with other libraries still. That doesn…

I'm arguing that it hasn't prevented attacks to a degree that was worth the cost (completely forfeiting ownership of personal computers by anyone that wants to participate in group chats with iphone users.)

>Here you admit that significant classes of attack have been prevented.

I don't think people care whether they lost things on their phone because of malware or because of a fake CA cert, the attack works pretty much the same way and has the same result.

>False. Once a scam has been detected, the developer account can be disabled, which adds cost to new attempts, unlike windows defender.

You don't need a dev account to distribute malware in dylibs.

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

>That doesn’t change anything.

It means the App Store doesn't stop malware before it's able to exfiltrate data from large numbers of users for long periods of time. That's the justification for it.

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

#197

Post by ncphil »

jjaammee wrote: post #131
oblio wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Utilities are super heavily regulated. I'm not sure for the US, but for example frequently they can't enter new markets, so they can't leverage their monopoly to crush competition in other markets. And regarding working well, aren't a lot of people in favor of municipal broadband (an utility) vs Verizon & co. (oligopoly, not even a full blown monopoly)?

California PGE which provides electricity and gas to big portion of public is a moving train wreck. It's corrupted and dangerous. Pipeline explosion, electricity transmission line caused fire burn a whole town happened with worrying frequency. Heavy regulations don't prevent big bonus to executives and degrading infrastructure.

Making an electric or gas company a government entity would at least provide a chance to prosecute its corrupt operators for official misconduct and criminal fraud (see the slow moving train wreck called CalPERS, some executive frog-marching would fix that quickly).

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

#198

Post by gverrilla »

oblio wrote: post #111
jamescostian wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to help you see how to write more concise messages. Here's how I'd rewrite your entire message: "This is a very complex subject matter, and I don't know how to express my thoughts on it concisely. I don't want to get downvoted for my long-windedness." It's less than a 1/5 of characters, but conveys just as much of the on-topic and non-meta parts of your response.

Yeah, but then he wouldn't get to feel smart and make fun of me :-)

Making fun of you?

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

#199

Post by kolinko »

grawprog wrote: post #180
kolinko wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Did you read the links you provided?

The last article explicitly mentions that most of the malware needs iPhone to be jailbroken or the app to be installed outside of the App Store, which kind of proves my point.

The research by Panda Security also showed that the ratio of malware on Android compared to iPhone is 50 to 1.

https://www.pandasecurity.com/en/mediacenter/mobile-security...

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

#200

Post by gverrilla »

jamescostian wrote: post #101
gverrilla wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything is cryptic before we understand it. When we talk for instance about Google, governments, fines, power balance, etc, we're refering at least to an immense superposition of complex systems, or perhaps you could say an hypercomplexity, or perhaps totality may be the best word depending on your perspective. In that context, my cryptic poetics only constitute an heuristic which has the intent to provoke thought…

I'd like to help you see how to write more concise messages. Here's how I'd rewrite your entire message: "This is a very complex subject matter, and I don't know how to express my thoughts on it concisely. I don't want to get downvoted for my long-windedness." It's less than a 1/5 of characters, but conveys just as much of the on-topic and non-meta parts of your response.

Is this a joke?
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