Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

European Commission fines Google €4.34B in Android antitrust case

europa.eu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 975 posts

Re: European Commission fines Google €4.34B in Android antitrust case

#381

Post by mrweasel »

Xenos_Ender wrote: post #356
mrweasel wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The logic is that you're not allowed to use your position in one marked to gain influence in another. Google knows that most manufacturer needs their devices to ship with the Play Store, because that's where the apps are and smartphone without apps are useless. But they use the Play Store as leverage, forcing manufactures to also ship Chrome, rather than Opera, Firefox or their own browser and that's the bit that is…

Name an industry that doesn't use their position in one market to gain influence in another.

Most companies aren't in multiple different markets.

Honestly your comment is pretty much kindergarten level argumentation, so I think that maybe you should just take your ball and go home.

The question was regarding to the logic behind why Google is getting fined, while Apple is not, and I think I answered that question pretty well.

Re: European Commission fines Google €4.34B in Android antitrust case

#382

Post by dlp211 »

typon wrote: post #333
endorphone wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course there aren't because BMW absolutely squashed the possibility of that at the outset. But Google, apparently, deserves a $5B fine because they made a mistake of powering AOSP phones, the Amazon products, countless variations in China, set top boxes, etc. It is incredible seeing Google being seriously attacked on here for have an open source path as well. I feel like this is some sort of alternative universe.

If Google had gone the open source route out of the goodness of their hearts, you'd have an argument. Google went the open source route to bootstrap on top of a well known operating system (Linux), as well as to accelerate adoption and catch up to Apple as fast as they could. Then once they got market dominance, they abused their position to stifle competition.

There is nothing that you said that requires Android to be open source.

Re: European Commission fines Google €4.34B in Android antitrust case

#383

Post by r_singh »

mda wrote: post #361
r_singh wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, if dropped, this will motivate big electronics players to release smart phones powered by android that aren't Google infested. Sometimes when I'm in a cynical mood, I feel like my android phone isn't really mine, it's owned by google and exists purely to serve them. This would improve the smartphone market on so many levels. We need a great driver support for AOSP, multiple app stores, community driven updat…

This is a funny comment. You can get a samsung infested phone anytime, or Amazon, or any something from China? AOSP is created and being developed by google, calling Google's applications infestation is weird. You can also get an Apple infested (to the very core) phone as well.

Fair enough. I still feel like iPhones are infested with apple apps for my benefit or at least to not let other cos take advantage of me. Apple’s privacy oriented disposition makes this perception.

My iPhone serves me even if it is apple infested. My Nexus 6P can’t make me feel the same. Feels like it exists only to feed google data about me, and help me a little while doing so.

Re: European Commission fines Google €4.34B in Android antitrust case

#384

Post by pbhjpbhj »

ericdykstra wrote: post #121
realusername wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monopolies are not based on the profit but market share. Yes Apple has a very profitable niche but that does not mean Android does not have a near-monopoly on smartphones.

No, a monopoly is controlling a market to the point where competition is restricted via controlling supply or other means. A company can have 100% market share and not be a monopoly (which is always what happens when a new market emerges).

(Not OP:) In theory I agree. As soon as you have IPR like patents and copyright that are protecting the new product then you're inhibiting access for other companies; that is probably the case in a lot of new markets.

Re: European Commission fines Google €4.34B in Android antitrust case

#385

Post by miracle2k »

typon wrote: post #333
endorphone wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course there aren't because BMW absolutely squashed the possibility of that at the outset. But Google, apparently, deserves a $5B fine because they made a mistake of powering AOSP phones, the Amazon products, countless variations in China, set top boxes, etc. It is incredible seeing Google being seriously attacked on here for have an open source path as well. I feel like this is some sort of alternative universe.

If Google had gone the open source route out of the goodness of their hearts, you'd have an argument. Google went the open source route to bootstrap on top of a well known operating system (Linux), as well as to accelerate adoption and catch up to Apple as fast as they could. Then once they got market dominance, they abused their position to stifle competition.

Are you suggesting that to interpret the law correctly here, a court has to judge Google's motivation of releasing the Android code as Open Source?

Further, if Apple were to decide, tomorrow, to release iOS as open source, would they also be in violation of the law (possibly depending on their motivation?)

Re: European Commission fines Google €4.34B in Android antitrust case

#386

Post by dlp211 »

cortic wrote: post #360
endorphone wrote: post #286

This is a dangerous ruling that pushes the world further into the potential for trade wars by proxy. Contrary to numerous posts- -no, the law isn't "clear". This is an incredibly nuanced situation, and the notion that Google was just overtly flouting (ed: thx sjcsjc) the law is outright nonsense. Google has a huge litany of bad practices (I personally recently switched my daily driver to an iPhone for that reason), b…

>"well it's only a quarter's earnings across all of Google" actually, 2017 google made $110B so its not 1/4 but 1/22 of their profits last year.. enormous? meh.

That's revenue, not profits. That is also not even revenue but annual run rate based on Q4.

Re: European Commission fines Google €4.34B in Android antitrust case

#387

Post by rusk »

rusk wrote: post #199
repolfx wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The discussion was about "losing access". To do that the EU would have to impose not just tariffs but complete import bans on dozens or maybe hundreds of OEMs, many of which aren't American. It'd mean starting a phone-oriented trade war with most of the world's big economies, and handing the entire European market to Apple. But Android is much more popular than Apple phones in some EU countries (not all) mostly becau…

Losing access is a matter of degrees. It doesn't make sense for the EU to cut off access of their market to google products and services completely. > Google wouldn't give a crap LOL

> LOL

Just to put this in context, the population of the EU is 508M vs e.g. the USA 325M

That's an awful lot of €€€ to turn your nose up at.

Re: European Commission fines Google €4.34B in Android antitrust case

#388

Post by dragonwriter »

miracle2k wrote: post #385
typon wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Google had gone the open source route out of the goodness of their hearts, you'd have an argument. Google went the open source route to bootstrap on top of a well known operating system (Linux), as well as to accelerate adoption and catch up to Apple as fast as they could. Then once they got market dominance, they abused their position to stifle competition.

Are you suggesting that to interpret the law correctly here, a court has to judge Google's motivation of releasing the Android code as Open Source? Further, if Apple were to decide, tomorrow, to release iOS as open source, would they also be in violation of the law (possibly depending on their motivation?)

> Are you suggesting that to interpret the law correctly here, a court has to judge Google's motivation of releasing the Android code as Open Source?

The law often hinges on intent along with action, that's hardly novel.

Re: European Commission fines Google €4.34B in Android antitrust case

#389

Post by cornholio »

skj wrote: post #76
TekMol wrote: post #29

I wonder to what extend this was anticipated by the market. The stock is down about 1%. Not much considering that $5B should be about 1/3 of Googles yearly earnings. On the other hand, 1% of Googles stock is about $8B. From that viewpoint, one might think it has come unanticipated. Then again, stocks rise and fall 1% all the time. So it's hard to read something into it. Is this the same case as reported in January he…

5b is about one of Google's quarterly earnings.

5b is about one quarter of profit for Google. It's practically peanuts, 0.4% of their market capitalization.

Re: European Commission fines Google €4.34B in Android antitrust case

#390

Post by antpls »

r_singh wrote: post #324
archi42 wrote: post #279

Site is under maintanance, Google Cache link (hahaha): http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:europa.... //edit: oh, took only a minute or two :) nice work I really like this point: > [Google] has prevented manufacturers wishing to pre-install Google apps from selling even a single smart mobile device running on alternative versions of Android that were not approved by Google (so-called "Android forks")…

I agree, if dropped, this will motivate big electronics players to release smart phones powered by android that aren't Google infested. Sometimes when I'm in a cynical mood, I feel like my android phone isn't really mine, it's owned by google and exists purely to serve them. This would improve the smartphone market on so many levels. We need a great driver support for AOSP, multiple app stores, community driven updat…

> I also feel like Android could play a huge role in IoT if it weren't as Google infested as you call it.

Google does develop a fork of Android for IoT, called Android Things : https://developer.android.com/things/

It's basically an Android system with a minimal list of apps and services (no Google apps for example) intended to run only one user app.

Post reply on HN