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Google loses EU appeal and is fined a record $4B

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Re: Google loses EU appeal and is fined a record $4B

#281

Post by twblalock »

Normille wrote: post #70

Cool. The EU does have its [many!] faults. But they have a pretty good track record when it comes to consumer rights and consumer choice. Next up I'd like to see them do the same for the plethora of incompatible cordless power-tool systems out there as they did with insisting all mobile phones standardise on a USB connector.

> Next up I'd like to see them do the same for the plethora of incompatible cordless power-tool systems out there as they did with insisting all mobile phones standardise on a USB connector.

We should all be glad that didn't happen with micro-USB or some of the worse connectors years ago, because we would still be stuck with them. USB-C was innovated by the market, not by EU bureaucrats.

Re: Google loses EU appeal and is fined a record $4B

#282

Post by kube-system »

wvenable wrote: post #159
Normille wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The AOSP ecosystem has a healthy range of ROMs to choose from on many devices. But it's not true choice is it? It's just the same old same old with a different skin on top. Much the same as the similarly claimed 'choice' in Linux distros pretty much boils down to the same old same old collection of apps running on the same old same old collection of desktop environments. But with eleventy billion superficial skins l…

I'm not clear on what you want? There are two mobile operating systems, do you want some company to make another one? What is stopping them?

Anticompetitive practices are stopping them. That’s the point of these fines. Google controls the predominant non-Chinese marketplace for apps that are compatible with android-based operating systems, and they use it as a hostage to force other device manufacturers to arbitrarily force other google products upon their uses, for the purpose of unfairly expanding their market dominance.

Re: Google loses EU appeal and is fined a record $4B

#283

Post by uni_rule »

antonymy wrote: post #280

The fallout from this should be interesting. This fine is a substantial part (roughly 25%!) of Google's overall revenue from the EMEA region (Europe, Middle East, Africa), of which the EU is probably like 90%, at least, of the total, so it's probably toing the line of actually making the EU unprofitable to Google considering the costs of future compliance to avoid being fined again. Worse: this was not as steep as th…

I hate that fines proportional to the revenue giant companies make from doing shady shit are the exception and not the rule

Re: Google loses EU appeal and is fined a record $4B

#284

Post by antonymy »

saiya-jin wrote: post #118
yieldcrv wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

probably 15-20% of annual revenue its psychology, the board or ceo would react preemptively based on the idea that shareholders would react on their behalf shareholders (if they have voting power at all) would react for the same result at higher fine amounts than that

Not annual, but projected maybe over decade... once you lose the market you lost it also next years. Lets not forget its 500 million of above-average rich folks that use google services extensively. The fine would have to be in range of 100 billion for them to exit

Their annual revenue from the EU is only 17 billion dollars, as of 2021. The current fine is about a quarter of that. This is revenue, not profit. So this fine very likely impacted the bottom line for what Google is pulling out of the EU. And it was not even as big as they could've made it. It's very likely the EU refrained from the maximum fine amount because it would've pushed Google's EU operations firmly into the red.

And this is setting aside the costs of compliance to avoid more fines. Even if the costs are less than another fine, they're not nothing. You're looking at an entire year's profits from the EU essentially being wiped out by this fine, plus reduced profits going forward due to increased compliance costs and probably losing sales. And this is your best case scenario.

It would not take a 100 billion dollar fine to make Google leave the EU, it would only take another fine like this one.

Re: Google loses EU appeal and is fined a record $4B

#285

Post by everforward »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #260
everforward wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google exiting the market for 3 months would have enormous economic impact, in a bad way. They're too integrated into the economy to "just" close them out of the economy for 3 months. The world could tolerate YouTube being gone for a while. What about Android though? Is the entire world supposed to replace their phone while Play Services are down, and Android isn't getting security updates? What about GCP? How many b…

> Google exiting the market for 3 months would have enormous economic impact, in a bad way so too big to fail. Like with banks, they should be allowed to do anything with impunity and we should use taxpayer money to bail them out when they fuck up?

I'm not saying they shouldn't be punished, I'm saying that the specific punishment of suddenly shutting them down is going to punish everyone.

E.g. we could simply seize all profits for 3 months, so Google sees no profit but the world can keep spinning. We could fine them a % of their cash holdings, if we wanted to. We could force them to split off lines of business so we don't have to worry about a catastrophic failure if we do need to kill the whole business.

I just don't think suddenly shutting them down is the right move. There are ways to punish them with far less collateral damage.

Re: Google loses EU appeal and is fined a record $4B

#286

Post by weatherlite »

antonymy wrote: post #280

The fallout from this should be interesting. This fine is a substantial part (roughly 25%!) of Google's overall revenue from the EMEA region (Europe, Middle East, Africa), of which the EU is probably like 90%, at least, of the total, so it's probably toing the line of actually making the EU unprofitable to Google considering the costs of future compliance to avoid being fined again. Worse: this was not as steep as th…

The EU seems fine with the idea actually - it wants more independence on technology and said so several times. There will be many many pissed off European users for sure but that never stopped the EU elite from making a decision. Still - seems like a reach to me.

Re: Google loses EU appeal and is fined a record $4B

#287

Post by josefx »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #85
RandomWorker wrote: post #13

That increases the budget of the eu parliament with 2.2% on a yearly basis if paid out in one go. [1082B for 2014-2020, 4B/1082B*6y~2.2%] A loss of 4B is a decrease of revenue by 1.5% for google. [googles revenue was 256B in 2021 4/256~1.5%]

EMEA represents about 31% of revenues. Google makes about 76B in net income. So another way to look at this is 21% of profits in Europe for a year.

Another way to look at this is 2% if you split it over all the years the illegal behavior has been going on and then going through the courts.

Re: Google loses EU appeal and is fined a record $4B

#288

Post by babelfish »

antonymy wrote: post #280

The fallout from this should be interesting. This fine is a substantial part (roughly 25%!) of Google's overall revenue from the EMEA region (Europe, Middle East, Africa), of which the EU is probably like 90%, at least, of the total, so it's probably toing the line of actually making the EU unprofitable to Google considering the costs of future compliance to avoid being fined again. Worse: this was not as steep as th…

To be clear, while the fines might make operating in the EU unprofitable, they could just...follow EU regulations...and remain profitable, albeit at a likely lower margin

Re: Google loses EU appeal and is fined a record $4B

#289

Post by everforward »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #263
everforward wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google exiting the market for 3 months would have enormous economic impact, in a bad way. They're too integrated into the economy to "just" close them out of the economy for 3 months. The world could tolerate YouTube being gone for a while. What about Android though? Is the entire world supposed to replace their phone while Play Services are down, and Android isn't getting security updates? What about GCP? How many b…

You put everything read only, and you give a 2 years notice before applying the sentence. What do you think inflation is ? Their externalities being taxed on the population. Since we have to pay no matter what, at least they should feel it too.

> You put everything read only, and you give a 2 years notice before applying the sentence.

This is probably still a multi-billion dollar cost when spread across the economy. There are going to be tens of thousands of workers who now have to work on migrating off Gmail/GCP/GSuite rather than doing anything actually productive. A migration like that is usually a multi-year effort, involving huge man-hour expenditures.

We could just set a fine equal to their profit for X months and accomplish roughly the same thing without upending half the businesses in the world.

> What do you think inflation is ? Their externalities being taxed on the population. Since we have to pay no matter what, at least they should feel it too.

Inflation is a decrease in the value of currency, and the causes are not well-understood. Pinning it on Google is pretty spurious. We had low inflation through years of Google doing shady things. I can't ascribe a cause to inflation, but I can pretty confidently say that Google doing shady things isn't the major cause.

Re: Google loses EU appeal and is fined a record $4B

#290

Post by josefx »

wongarsu wrote: post #27
legitster wrote: post #15

So... What's the end result? Google has to charge for Android? Ask users their search preference?

I think this is about Google's Android certification, that allows manufacturers to ship Android with any google app. Some like the Play Store are basically required by users, but Google makes it a "get all or none" deal with a lot of other demands, which includes a google search widget.

The deal isn't just "all or none" on a single phone, it is all or none over the entire inventory. If you sell an android phone with the play store you are no longer allowed to sell any android devices without it.
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