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European Commission fines Google €4.34B in Android antitrust case

europa.eu

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

#891

Post by cuban-frisbee »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #801
Radle wrote: post #663

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a company creates damages exceeding billions of dollars, it's quite obvious that they should receive penalty worth billions of dollars. That's basic proportionality.

> If a company creates damages exceeding billions of dollars, it's quite obvious that they should receive penalty worth billions of dollars. That is entirely tautological. It omits the reasoning under which that spectacular amount of irreparable damages have actually occurred to consumers. "They have a lot of money and we would like to have that" is not a valid method of calculating damages.

It may not be a reasonable way of calculating damages but it is a reasonable way of punishing wrong doing.

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

#892

Post by gkya »

zmmmmm wrote: post #873
IBM wrote: post #868

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android got market share because it was free, not because it was good. If Google didn't share ad revenue with carriers and OEMs or tried to extract a license fee ala Windows, Google would not be sitting on 80% global market share today.

> Android got market share because it was free, not because it was good. If free was all that mattered then one of the other smattering of "free" open source mobile OSes would have taken off. You can perhaps say that free is a necessary condition but it clearly isn't sufficient. Something else matters and to a first approximation that can be thought of as "goodness".

The world has changed. Today what determines the success of a mobile platform is availability if applications. If Ubuntu's thing could run WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram apps (especially the first b/c it has to be an app), it would have a completely different fate. If I was Mark Shuttleworth, I'd go to Facebook and offer porting WhatsApp for free. IDK the US, but for most of the world, it's an essential means of communication.

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

#894

Post by s73v3r_ »

paulie_a wrote: post #774
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #767

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users who have a valid necessity for Chrome can have it, in a very controlled fashion (extensions and cloud features disabled) on request and review.

Im ignoring that request and review process. I don't need a beaucratic process. Im just going to do it.

That's not your box, though. It's your employers.

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

#895

Post by AnthonyMouse »

Joeri wrote: post #840
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #801

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If a company creates damages exceeding billions of dollars, it's quite obvious that they should receive penalty worth billions of dollars. That is entirely tautological. It omits the reasoning under which that spectacular amount of irreparable damages have actually occurred to consumers. "They have a lot of money and we would like to have that" is not a valid method of calculating damages.

From the press release: the fine has been calculated on the basis of the value of Google's revenue from search advertising services on Android devices in the EEA. In other words, Google had an unfair advantage for search on android devices and leveraged that into revenue. The fine is a percentage of that ill-gotten revenue. There’s an official guideline for calculating damages when anticompetitive behavior is found:…

> the fine has been calculated on the basis of the value of Google's revenue from search advertising services on Android devices in the EEA.

"They have a lot of money and we would like to have that."

The actual "damages" have nothing to do with their total revenue, only the revenue incident to the behavior in question, which is an independent value and not a percentage of total revenue.

For example, if they improve their search engine which causes more people to use it, it doesn't change the actual amount of damage from separate actions -- it may even reduce it by transitioning some of the defaulted users into users who would make an affirmative choice in their favor -- but it would have increased the amount of the fine when calculated as a percentage of revenue because it would have increased their total revenue.

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

#896

Post by genericid »

stickfigure wrote: post #798
shanghaiaway wrote: post #794

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it's not open.

It's not that complicated. The Google apps and the app store are not open. Everything else is.

Google has abandoned most AOSP apps. It has moved large parts of the API into Play Services. Android is not open, what is open is merely an incompatible fragment of an OS.

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

#897

Post by genericid »

DannyBee wrote: post #724
LolNoGenerics wrote: post #701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I can create an open platform and control how it is used? That doesn't make sense.

Err, no, they controlled only the people who chose to use their apps or play store. That's still open, you can do whatever you want, it's just if you want their stuff, you play by their rules.

Windows is also open. You can do whatever you want, it's just if you want their stuff (except .NET and Powershell), you play by their rules.

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

#898

Post by AnthonyMouse »

reitanqild wrote: post #861
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #825

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You do understand that nobody, including politicians and FF users want to remove Chrome, Edge or Safari? It's punishment. If somebody wants it then somebody has a perverse incentive. > You do understand that doing that would probably cost those companies (and everyone else) a lot more? Exactly. You actually punish them, in the way directly contrary the the goal they were trying to achieve with their bad behavior, w…

> just because you're a foreign company, what are you supposed to do then? Most foreign companies aren't considered bad actors. We are talking about 1) the old Microsoft here - definitely a bad actor - getting rid of it seems to have been refreshing even for Microsoft shareholders. - 2) Google, a company we many of us loved at some point but who might now be in need of some refreshing at least in some areas.

> Most foreign companies aren't considered bad actors.

Google wasn't considered a bad actor until then they were.

> the old Microsoft here - definitely a bad actor - getting rid of it seems to have been refreshing even for Microsoft shareholders.

The old Microsoft deserved everything they got and then some. But even then, it would have been nice for the penalties to be more "actually effective in increasing competition in PC desktop operating systems" and less "suspiciously convenient transfer of large sums of money."

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

#899

Post by zmmmmm »

gkya wrote: post #892
zmmmmm wrote: post #873

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Android got market share because it was free, not because it was good. If free was all that mattered then one of the other smattering of "free" open source mobile OSes would have taken off. You can perhaps say that free is a necessary condition but it clearly isn't sufficient. Something else matters and to a first approximation that can be thought of as "goodness".

The world has changed. Today what determines the success of a mobile platform is availability if applications. If Ubuntu's thing could run WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram apps (especially the first b/c it has to be an app), it would have a completely different fate. If I was Mark Shuttleworth, I'd go to Facebook and offer porting WhatsApp for free. IDK the US, but for most of the world, it's an essential means of co…

> If I was Mark Shuttleworth, I'd go to Facebook and offer porting WhatsApp for free

Microsoft tried buying app support and it didn't save their mobile platform. It generally resulted in crappy apps that were never an ongoing priority for their creators. If anything it cemented the status of the OS as a second class citizen.

You can try every way you like, but nothing completes the picture than to say that there were good things about Android that made it survive as the competition to iOS where everything else failed. The OS being "good" (on a relative scale, there were obviously some bad things about it) is, like everything else, necessary but not sufficient.

In my view, the real reason Android succeeded is because it was customisable by the OEMs. They were staring at a future where they were completely locked out of doing any customisation of operating system and totally at the mercy of Apple. They would do anything to prevent that future and Google gave them a lifeline to do so. That customisability was a byproduct of Android being open source, but obviously Google could have made it closed source to the public but licensed it to OEMs with a proprietary license allowing customisation too. I think the latter wasn't viable because it would have required too much trust in Google.

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

#900

Post by glennpratt »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #669
lloydde wrote: post #653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What Chrome also did far better than everyone else was a user local install, ie an install that didn’t require admin on the PC. Shadow IT installs was a huge advantage over Firefox in Chrome’s first years.

I still have to fight this occasionally. :| In one instance, I ended up just telling the antivirus software at a company to flag Chrome as a virus and block it from executing. Software installation requiring admin rights is by design , and circumventing it is unethical as heck.

By whose design? Certainly not Microsoft who enabled this pattern and continues to expand on it.

On top of that Portable Firefox came out in 2004.

This non-security through irritation gives IT a bad name.

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