Google fined €100M by Italian antitrust over Google Play abuse of dominance • Hacker News Board

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

#211

Post by seaman1921 » Thu, May 13, 2021, 6:02 PM UTC

seaman1921 wrote: post #207

HALtheWise wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The really sad thing about this case is that there is _no way_ that Google made anything like $100M from the charging station finder in Google Maps in Italy. That functionality reeks to me of something made by a small group of Googlers because they legitimately care about promoting electric cars and making life easier for their owners, not because Google particularly cares if they dominate the electric vehicle chargi…

exactly, this is not the reinforcement you want to give the big tech - putting fines for the actually useful stuff using crappy antitrust arguments? Come on. This will just encourage them to kill all the genuinely useful stuff they do because honestly their legal teams can't spend hours vetting all of these small features and apps which provide immense value to certain subsets of users. And for what ? The shitty Juic…

edit, s/reinforcement/punishment

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

#212

Post by emn13 » Thu, May 13, 2021, 6:03 PM UTC

Karunamon wrote: post #137

MikeUt wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All that "heavy investment", and they don't catch even the most obvious scams: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26888190 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26069660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26504158

This may be a hot take, but I have a problem with the way that first article equates "extremely overpriced" with "scam". A scam is when you've been deceived or defrauded. If you consent to pay $10 a week for an app that doesn't provide what it claims to, that's one thing, and that should be actionable. But if it does what it claims to, not liking the price does not equate to being a scam.

Except that you don't really get to pick to pay the price or not because of their monopoly position.

At best you get to take your marbles and refuse to play entirely; which isn't exactly a reasonable long term strategy.

There should be competition between app stores.

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

#213

Post by antipaul » Thu, May 13, 2021, 6:04 PM UTC

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.

Details on app review process, including picture of reviewer workstation, surfaced in the Epic game trial:

https://www.macrumors.com/2021/05/07/app-store-35-percent-of...

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

#214

Post by swiley » Thu, May 13, 2021, 6:07 PM UTC

zepto wrote: post #208

swiley wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mu…

> I'm arguing that it hasn't prevented attacks to a degree that was worth the cost Ok, but that’s not what you said before, > (completely forfeiting ownership of personal computers by anyone that wants to participate in group chats with iphone users.) This is false. There are many group chat programs, that people use cross platform and they are more popular than iMessage. Nobody if ‘forfeiting ownership’ of anything…

>> I'm arguing that it hasn't prevented attacks to a degree that was worth the cost

>Ok, but that’s not what you said before,

It's not worth the cost IE a scam, literally what I wrote in my first post.

>If you you want a platform that can do both iMessage, and install apps without review, then you can use a Mac.

Ah yes let me just go ahead and fold up the macbook so I can put it in my pocket. If you want to be included in a group of iPhone users that use iMessage you must own an iPhone. Apple knows this and that's why there's no web interface for iMessage.

>No, but you do to distribute it to App Store users.

Someone does, but it does not need to be the dylib author.

> just means that some apps slip through the protections.

This wasn't some, it was happening (and likely still is) on a massive scale and affected most popular apps.

>This is a repeat of your earlier fallacy: “if the protection doesn’t stop all attacks then we don’t need the protection”, which is obviously not true.

Forcing the "protection" on everyone, despite the extreme cost, is wrong. Especially since the "protection" does very little to stop this kind of attack in practice. Not a fallacy, it's not worth the cost IE a scam.

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

#215

Post by Animats » Thu, May 13, 2021, 6:18 PM UTC

KMag wrote: post #71

speedgoose wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Google leaves the Italian market, Italy could have a chance to create a local Google. Google's scale is huge and they have a lot of products, but a subset of these products, such as tracking, ads, search, emails, and videos, is achievable for a country like Italy in my opinion.

Maybe. I worked at Google on the indexing team from 2006-2010. During that time, I vaguely remember some announcement of a government-funded search engine project in France to beat Google. If I remember correctly, it wasn't the first time France tried a government-funded search engine. I suspect it's more a problem of network effects than it's a problem of money. Google just has so much data at this point that it's r…

In my time at Google, I also remember being slightly concerned about Cuil. Cuil was started by some ex-Googlers and had some sophisticated machine learning algorithms to find images to attach at the top of most search results pages. They were well-funded and supposedly had a larger corpus than Google.

Not that well funded. They had about $30m of VC money, ran through it, and shut down suddenly. They also had a terrible crawler, noted for hitting sites over and over at high rates for no useful reason.

I talked to their people. I asked them how they planned to get to profitability, since they didn't run ads. They didn't have an answer to that.

Right now, Neeva, and You are search startups in similar positions. Neeva is operating, and you can get on their wait list. They have a very intrusive questionnaire you have to answer to get in. Rather than tracking what you do on line, they just ask you.

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

#216

Post by ysavir » Thu, May 13, 2021, 6:24 PM UTC

HALtheWise wrote: post #162

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…

The really sad thing about this case is that there is _no way_ that Google made anything like $100M from the charging station finder in Google Maps in Italy. That functionality reeks to me of something made by a small group of Googlers because they legitimately care about promoting electric cars and making life easier for their owners, not because Google particularly cares if they dominate the electric vehicle chargi…

So it's okay for companies like google to abuse their market position so long as we think they're doing it for the greater good?

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

#217

Post by dalbasal » Thu, May 13, 2021, 6:28 PM UTC

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…

Antitrust law is weird, so I can't comment on this definitively. That said, in the EU-Adwords case, the focus was on "abuses," primarily in the contract with search partners. Adwords is their buyer, rather than seller. Technically, Google is the monopoly, adwords is the monopsony.

In any case, prosecutors needed to prove harm/abuse affected search partners, and the fine was presumably based around that.

There is a problem defining the market sometimes, but that wasn't a problem here. It's a "crack for economists" type of problem, with a lot more theory than needed for practical purposes.

The problem is/was that these courts aren't a tool that can do the job. Courts can keep monopolies from doing certain things, with varying degrees of effectiveness. They can't prevent a monopoly from being a monopoly.

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

#218

Post by Animats » Thu, May 13, 2021, 6:32 PM UTC

baybal2 wrote: post #23

waheoo wrote: post #3

It's almost like the government's around the world are waking up to the fact they can actually push back on the ultra mega corps of the world. Or they're seeing weakness in the US and taking their geopolitical shots.

People, it's good point actually. In a recent article on a new lobbying group trying to onshore chip production https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27121586 a lot of people pointed out it's this weakness incentivising lobbying. In other words US establishment invites regulatory capture through expectation of lobbying action creating even bigger opportunities to draw a dire picture, and demand more state intervention…

Right. That's called "lemon socialism". Britain, in its most socialist period, the 1950s, had the government owning the railroads, the coal industry, and the steel industry. All lemons, and all way overstaffed.

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

#219

Post by JI00912 » Thu, May 13, 2021, 6:39 PM UTC

anoncake wrote: post #151

kyrra wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Monopolies are inherently harmful to the customer. A monopoly implies lack of competition.

Depends why there is a lack of competition. Are there barriers of entry to the market? Were they put up by the company? Or do they just have such an awesome product at a great price they no one can offer a better / commutative alternative?

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

#220

Post by dalbasal » Thu, May 13, 2021, 6:45 PM UTC

kyrra wrote: post #188

anoncake wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Monopolies are inherently harmful to the customer. A monopoly implies lack of competition. I disagree. When you look at a company that is dominant in some part of the marketplace at a given point it time, you need to understand how they got there. The monopoly poster child Standard Oil rose-up when there used to be many more oil processing companies, but Standard Oil was able to do things for cheaper because they u…

There's usually some market reason for a monopoly to exist. Often, it's a temporary reason. That doesn't mean it isn't harmful to consumers, unless you think that market dynamics are inevitably beneficial.

Google, has several market reasons for their monopoly.

(1) The biggest reason is like economies of scale and network effects, but not quite. Online ad markets need to be huge to be good. Bigger market means tighter targeting segments, which is everything. This is why FB & Google make >10X more per customer than their no. 2s and 3s. Data aggregation is like this too. Some data on some users is not proportionally valuable to all data on all users.

(2) Software's infinite economies of scale. Economists like to point to this reason (0 marginal costs) as primary, but FWIW, I don't think it's why google is a monopoly. It probably is why software is monopoly-prone. It does explain the OS/Browser centralisation pretty well.

(3)Normal economies of scale and network effects.

(4)Path dependencies.

Does that mean that Google's monopoly benefits consumers? Who are consumers anyway? Formally, it's advertisers. If monopolies aren't assumed harmful, why do we even need to curb anti-competitive practices in the first place?

>> government granted monopolies; Copyright and IP; federal land, etc

Agreed. I'm not talking about "monopoly," the dictionary definition. I'm talking about the phenomenon in 2021, a handful of companies, most with a tell-tale >30% profit margin. I'm not talking about the exclusive cafe inside on IKEA.