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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

#71

Good for Italy -- they have no chance of creating a Google, so their best path to tech dollars is a regular cadence of these $100m fines (but not so often that Big Tech exits the Italian market).

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 really tough to get marginally enough better search results than Google to get a significant number of people to switch. Personally, I use DDG for ideological reasons.

I hope competition heats up in the ads and search spaces, but I'm not holding my breath, even with significant government funding.

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. On launch day, Cuil inexplicably attached the image of a porn star with an unrelated name to a journalist's search for his own name. It also had tons other very bizarre choices of images, all inexplicably blamed on scaling issues due to unanticipated demand. Also, at the time that Yahoo shut down its search infrastructure to outsource Bing's search back-end, our internal quality metrics actually showed Yahoo ahead of Bing. I'm sure getting all of that Yahoo traffic to siphon up more behavioral data helped Bing's search results in the long term.

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

#72
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…

What are the rules for Android Auto?

Distracted driving is a big problem, but my experience is that people have superstitious ideas about what is safe and what is dangerous in areas like that.

You can certainly do experiments, and the conclusion you seem to reach is that you're in a lot safer with a car that has physical buttons for the audio, heat, etc. (Had "luxury" carmakers been on the ball five years or so they would have kicked the infotainment systems to the curb and would be giving customers a premium experience today -- how many $1000 does Android Auto knock off the resale value of your car?)

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

#73
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.

a) Apple has invested heavily in automated review methods over the years. b) I don't know what qualifications you think an app reviewer needs. They are not looking through the code but simply playing with the app on a range of devices. c) It is only a few hours for updates. Initial app submissions often take days/weeks and are very thorough.

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

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

#74
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 fact that ENEL is owned by the employers of the ruling judges is just a coincidence.

assuming this to be true and of factual, in praxi [thus procedural], significance in this case, then of course Google hasn't done any wrong ?

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

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that ENEL is owned by the employers of the ruling judges is just a coincidence.

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...

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

#77
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry but I can't express myself in a "less poetic form", because this space is not suitable for in-depth conversation and also because I don't have enough domain over the language. There's a book I can recommend though: Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord, 1967.

Writing concise yet non cryptic messages is both an art and a skill. Might be worth practicing.

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, because I do not wish to abandon the totality point of view, and that would be impossible otherwise in a space like this where concision is the rule. I hope you can understand what I'm trying to say - although it took me 20 minutes to write this short reply, I'm still not confident it will adequately communicate what I'm thinking or purvey the apropriate "emotionality", which is rather cultural in essence.

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

#78
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…

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…

When Apple's App store first came out consumers were sour about a decade of "crapp(s)" on Microsoft Windows.

That is, you pretty much expected to download software and have it trash your machine on a regular basis.

Things are better today, half of that is people realizing that it has to get better ("national security" today, but it's much bigger than national in scope) and the other half is people realizing it is possible to get better, and Apple's App store is one reason for that.

---

Improvements in HW and SW are what helped Microsoft, not the Microsoft store -- since Win 8 I think I've had a Windows machine where it was really possible to download third-party apps from the Microsoft store about 10% of machine*years. Part of that is that it was disabled on corporate laptops I've used, the other part is that the metadata database for the Microsoft store gets corrupted on a regular basis.

I've contacted Microsofties about that and what they tell me is that I should delete my account on my computer and then reinstall the account and spend or two work days reconfigurings all of the "normal" Windows apps that I used on an everyday basis (Firefox, Jetbrains, Creative Cloud, Python, ...) I tell them "there's a procedure to rebuild the metadata database because I've see the database get rebuilt when the six month OS updates happen" and they act as if they didn't hear anything.

For that matter Microsoft seems to be a counter-example to "the power of monopoly".

For instance there are several third-party gaming "app" stores for Windows such as Steam. One thing they all have in common is that they work.

When Win 8 came out DropBox and a number of imitators had apps that worked for Windows. There was one DropBox imitator that didn't work, and that was Microsoft's OneDrive. Office was jiggered to push you to save files to OneDrive, but if you were saving files to OneDrive you could frequently NOT BE ABLE TO SAVE FILES AT ALL!

To add insult to injury, this would also trigger harassment from Word the next time I open it about the files it didn't let me save. It's like this

https://tonyortega.org/2021/04/12/scientology-answers-danny-...

I guess it proves that running an "app store" without brand awareness doesn't lead to industry dominance.

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

#79
This is a huge reason why China imposes certain rules on foreign corps if they wanted to operate there. The media and politicians makes it all about politics, but it is an entirely reasonable way to deal with foreign mega corps. Local competitors would not survive against something like Google without government protection. 100 mil fine every once in a while is just the cost of doing business for them. How many similar cases have occurred that never went to court?

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

#80

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...

this is because they think the courts are politicized, not because the judiciary takes input from the government. In fact there has been a constant conflict between judges and government for the last 30 years.
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