"The court said these are X" and "it is a fact that these are X" are distinct claims, and a lot of journalistic manners is pretending you never state as fact things that could be disputed.
Of course, since there are lots of ways to describe things in bad faith without ever breaking that rule, it can ring hollow once you lose trust...
Are court decisions universally recognized? If a court rules someone true in one area, couldn't it still be considered slander/libel in another area if another court rules it as not being true?
It is a bit like saying convicted murderer vs murderer. One is claiming the conviction for murder happened (which generally correlates to the murder happening but doesn't openly claim such) while the other directly claims the murder happens. If the conviction is later overturned, does the second claim open one up to more libability for a false claim?
Are laws in any country universally recognized and respected?
> If the conviction is later overturned, does the second claim open one up to more libability for a false claim?
Common sense would say before you go claim libel you first demand correction, or place onus on publisher to correct a publication with the new developed news.
I know it became normal to police speech nowadays but if a conviction - even before appeal - doesnt allow the use of a label/word, what does?
Now, being CNBC reporting this i guess the issue is less about risk of libel and more to do with the current stance that europe is out to get american companies
The people of CNBC's audience are assumed to have reason to want Google to not lose the case. Major news outlets are biased towards capital holders. This is what journalism looks like when it speaks to its intended audience.
The EU doesn't have any equivalent companies. Out of the highest 50 grossing companies in the world (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_r...) the only ones in the EU are Lidl's parent company, a handful automakers, and one French oil conglomerate. Grocery has practically no margin, the big European auto makers are all declining rapidly, and the EU already does everything it can to make existence impossible for oil conglomerates.
“Android provides more choice for everyone and supports thousands of businesses. This judgment fails to recognize our significant investment to ensure Android remains open, interoperable and free,” a Google spokesperson told CNBC.
Sure. Which is why alternative stores like F-Droid are under threat now.
So much happened since 2018 that this ruling feels ancient now. It was about Google making unfair deals with OEMs:
> In 2018, the European Commission slapped Google with the record-breaking penalty on the grounds that it abused Android’s mobile dominance to give unfair advantage to its own apps via pre-installation deals with smartphone makers.
While this specific problem is much better today, specially since of the DMA, things also got so much worse. And even if a new anti-trust ruling would occur today, we could expect it to drag on almost a decade again...
The EU's DMA mostly losing its fight against Apple is what's driven Google to make similar moves, which will eventually lead to the elimination of F-Droid and other truly third-party markets, and may even make open-source or even freeware as untenable on Android as it is on iOS.
Worldwide markets for communications are based on the notion that bandwidth and infrastructure is too limited and expensive to allow competition, so effectively every country has adopted a model of overseeing government-mandated monopolies or oligopolies with consumer-protection regulations to counter the lack of competition. The EU has shown that the more those protections try to crack down, the more they fail, and as long as competition is unfeasible or outright illegal, consumers will suffer.
There's a reason an iPhone costs significantly more than a much more capable iPad, and that iPads had USB-C ports well before iPhones. If we had a cell-phone system that was as open as the ISM bands that WiFi operates on, we would have much better hardware for much cheaper.
Absolutely. If anyone disagree with learned opinion of their lordships, they must be charged with contempt of court and barred from speaking on court judgements in future.
Why I cannot send email from my self-hosted, no dns, servers to gmail? email addresses with IP literals are much stronger than SPF (email is dropped if the IP of the SMTP client does not match the IP literal in the envelope and in all appropriate 'from' headers).
I cannot browse youtube with a noscript/basic HTML browser (basic <video> HTML element).
It is not enough, much more is needed to make those companies behave.
> Why I cannot send email from my self-hosted, no dns, servers to gmail?
Because email is a cesspool ruined by spammers and Google is doing the only sensible thing they can to block the scams and pill ads from reaching their users inboxes.
The most interesting bit here is not really the fine but how long it took. By the time a platform case reaches the final court decision, the market has usually already moved on to the next platform bottleneck
While that's true, in theory the company will have changed their policies and way of working already, and the industry will be aware and move away from it. In theory.
And yet, history and the present moment shows that fines alone do not change behavior. They are simply incorporated into the budget. Google has revenue far in excess of the fine due to their monopolies and that will continue to unabated.
These huge but turn-out-to-be nothing fines by the EU due to antitrust reasons seem a joke already. It is a laughable small percentage of the profits being imposed every now and then and when they feel like. The same holds for similar fines by specific countries. I will not be surprised if the paid sums end up to burocratic fueling or even corrupt high rank pockets. They have absolutely no impact to the company's behaviour. It's like the parking fine on the street costs less than a paid lot.
> the U.S. ambassador to the EU Andrew Puzder told CNBC that Europe “can’t over regulate” and hit companies with “huge fines” if it is going to participate in the AI economy
I love how the US will just let companies walk all over their citizens and then criticize others for not letting it happen. "Please think of the poor multi billion dollar companies".
Notice how HN people talk about it - companies breaking laws and defrauding are framed as "risk taking" and those following the law "risk averse". It is about "legal risk".
They dont see any value in "doing the right thing" if the right thing dont earn money and power. They cant even imagine a person doing the right thing for any reason other then being afraid.
This approach is more US-centric than "HN people". I've heard this often with phrases like "better to ask for forgiveness than for permission" which is probably because you can get away with a lot more on the business side in the US without having personal accountability.
In many European countries, news agencies use "alleged" until conviction or appeals are completed. Truth as an absolute barrier to defamation is a purely American ideal.
> U.S. ambassador to the EU Andrew Puzder told CNBC that Europe “can’t over regulate” and hit companies with “huge fines” if it is going to participate in the AI economy.
Imagine what these companies are doing in the US to their citizens, if ambassador is ready to defend them for violating rules/laws
As he just found out, that's exactly what the EU can do. And as he's about to find out, the EU is way too important a market for the American economy to ignore or pull out of.
I think rather, that it is the EU who cannot live without US cloud services and AI-services. Imagine if the US, behind closed doors of course, threatened to cut off all cloud services. Huge parts of the public and private sector could collapse.
Well, he is a corporate tool, aka a lobbyist, so unsurprisingly he acts in favour of companies. The question is why other countries should be subject to that. The EU may succumb to blackmail though, as Ursula showed before when she submitted to Trump.
Why did US antitrust and antimonopoly which has pioneered these concepts has been doing little to nothing for decades?
Google is too big and enjoys a monopoly in too many connected sectors (browsers, mobile os, search, advertising, data). Should've been broken up long ago.
"Trillion dollar company will definitely make tens of trillions of dollars in AI revenue but no, sorry, it can't pay a few thousand dollars to authors of content they trained on."
Well, I guess occasional $4.7B fines are just the cost of doing business for Google. They have a monopoly in multiple categories, such as search engine, online advertising and strong dominance in maps and video hosting -- surely at this point money isn't an issue for them anymore.
I'd like to see a world where the data vendor is separate from the app/UI product vendor.
e.g. anyone could build a skin over map data, short form video data, long form video data, short form text content.
Data vendor makes money through selling the data, app vendors make money through either subscriptions, ads, or selling new data back to the data vendor.
The market for pretty much everything would become intensely competitive and price much closer to marginal cost of service.
However, PII+personal data would become more of a concern with this model.
Could this be some sort of """legalized""" corruption?
Because the profits Google makes by very consciously and very deliberately doing what it is doing amount to many billions of dollars. And they are obviously not going to stop, while on the meantime we get one of these articles almost every year.
So then the EU signals how "tough" they are... Google pays for the cost of doing business in the EU... little people like us think that "we are fighting the big bad corporation", and all is good for one more year.
> U.S. ambassador to the EU Andrew Puzder told CNBC that Europe “can’t over regulate” and hit companies with “huge fines” if it is going to participate in the AI economy.
Thanks for reminding us not to rely on U.S. models as access to them might one day depend on letting U.S. companies break the law..
a) split up Google
b) but the responsible CEOs and higher ups to court
c) allow competition to happen again by having basic
laws that can not be bypassed by mega-corporations in
general
I feel that our understanding of trust and antitrust, along with the legal and regulatory premises... Just isn't very useful in the 21st century.
I understand the motivation, and justification for employing antitrust. Google's business model, and much of modern tech economy is really all about Monopoly-like market power.
In fact, one of the main concerns for AI investors is price competition, insufficient lock-in, weak network effects and consumer choice. They call this commodification... a telling choice of word. It's a worry that $trn valuations are impossible without something resembling monopoly to ensure longevity and high margins.
Peter Thiel gave a talk in favour of monopoly. It's worth reading. Even if you completely disagree, there are some subtle points that are relevant either way. A company facing market dynamism, price competition... Is unlikely to be investing billions in speculative r&d, for example.
Our core ideas about Monopoly, and antitrust... Tend to be highly derived of the industrial revolution, which is in turn all about manufacturing. Capital, labor, technology, marginal costs, marginal utility, price theory, etc. you can count the number which it's coming off the assembling line to understand the productivity of the firm. The product is concrete, and therefore productivity can be reasoned about.
There's no real way of applying this to Google. Google's users generally don't pay anything. Google doesn't have marginal costs.There is no price. The AdWords auction, is very clearly designed assuming monopolistic dynamics.. the seller is price maker and the buyer is a price taker. Prices are set as close as possible to buyer marginal value. Competition has no effect on pricing.
Otoh, where is the EU or any other antitrust regulator going with any of this. In the 90s, the Microsoft Monopoly was the biggest antitrust case. They used their os Monopoly to crush Netscape.
Now that it's history, we can look back and learn that the antitrust case just didn't matter one way or another. Nothing was really gained by victory, and nothing would have been lost by defeat.
The theory appears to be (a) regulated capitalism is good (b) tech monopolies clearly have market power and abuse it. There is no theory of desired outcome or the benefits of such an outcome. Are they regulating monopolies, preventing monopolies, pursuing an abstract notion of Justice?
Even in a digital world, monopolies bring clear downsides. The case of Google being able to simply create realities by way of Chrome the rest of the market is forced to follow is a good example here.
I agree that the common understanding of antitrust regulations has become a leaky abstraction, but the general idea is still completely sound to me: A corporation should never be in a position where it can actively suppress competition, or act in a way that is harming consumers without an alternative available.
> Are they regulating monopolies, preventing monopolies, pursuing an abstract notion of Justice?
I suppose all of it; opportunities to prevent some monopolies were missed, to the detriment of all, so regulating them is the only option left. In other cases, we can still act to actively work against emerging monopolies. And above all is clearly a notion of justice, without which democracy itself would be a pretty futile exercise in bureaucracy.
Put differently, what do you suppose the EU should do? Just let global mega-corporations have their way? Even if Google users by and large don't pay for the services, we're all aware they monetise off of users still. To me, this is an implementation detail that doesn't really make a difference to the observation that yes, Google is (and other big tech corps are) clearly in a market dominating position it (they) should not be in.
> A company facing market dynamism, price competition... Is unlikely to be investing billions in speculative r&d, for example.
The comparison to manufacturing isn't necessary because this seems to be contradicting by much of tech history itself. Plenty of companies have spent plenty of billions on R&D to outpace their real competitors.
If we're to update our view of monopoly (and I agree we should) it should be to clamp down on them even more.
>Now that it's history, we can look back and learn that the antitrust case just didn't matter one way or another. Nothing was really gained by victory, and nothing would have been lost by defeat.
You are missing the fact that the US administration did change and Microsoft was not broken... similar to the fact google/alphabet escaped that too
> A company facing market dynamism, price competition... Is unlikely to be investing billions in speculative r&d, for example.
Simple solution: tax companies more heavily and use the money for public investment in research.
The problem with people like Thiel is they’re incapable of thinking past their own self-interest, which makes many perfectly good solutions seem unthinkable to them. No one should listen to them when it comes to anything resembling public policy.
Unless your goal is creating a society that is centred around being the perfect habitat for Peter Thiel and Peter Thiel only, you should not listen to anything that guy says.
PT's theory is full of strawmen, subtle leaps of logic, unproven postulates, and plain self-serving lies.
It seems he basically posits to have single-handedly reinvented monopoly theory. But such extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, which I'm not quite seeing. Some cherry-picked examples (like that old MS antitrust case) just don't cut it. And the mere existence of these monopolies in our time is not at all sufficient proof of a positive outcome (for whom, anyway?) in the end (what end, has anybody seen it yet?). In fact, I'd argue that it takes some quite rose-tinted glasses or a billionaire's mile-high distance to the ground to not see the huge problems they're posing to society right now.
The fact that this is coming from his position of great power, and that he himself is benefitting immensely from the theory he advocates, should be enough to make you pause and think really hard about what philosophy he's trying to sell you there, and why.
The puppet master wants you to cheer for our tech overlords and accept them as benevolent dictators because trust me bro. But do you really think what's driving this man's reasoning is the good of mankind - of you and me? If so, I have a bridge to sell you.
and you might think this is a small or pointless win, but the whole point of this is that because users have this choice, microsoft is forced to make internet explorer actually good so that people willingly choose it instead of abusing it to make life harder and worse for everyone else while making things easier for themselves.
Hence internet explorer was killed and we got edge
Peter Thiel himself is a good reason to avoid monopolies. He is dangerous fascist with political goals that would make life of most of us hell. He defends monopilies, because he is seeking to create one and then use its power to harm the rest of us.
So the best we can do for the future is to prevent Thiels of the world from monopoly creation.
No, these are anti-trust fines. If you want to participate in the EU zone, you can't have monopolistic behaviors. It might sound strange for the US, but you can't simply corner a market and then claim it's innovation and 'good for the customer'. The EU has a LONG history of these regulations, it's nothing new but the more rich a company becomes the more these fines are just the price of doing business.
Instead, here's a wild take. Why don't they just follow the regulations and continue to make profits.
> Instead, here's a wild take. Why don't they just follow the regulations and continue to make profits.
Far more likely that Google is just going to follow Apple's lead and stop releasing new features in the EU that the rest of the world gets to enjoy.
From The Washington Post:
> Behind all this lies the dream that Europe could be a “regulatory superpower.” It wanted to create a market too big to skip that would, by virtue of its heft, end up exporting its rules to the rest of the world. That hasn’t worked out.
> When adapting a product for Europe costs more than European market access is worth, companies no longer comply. They simply leave out the feature.
Google made Android open source for free and you can even see this on this on HN as everyone glazes GrapheneOS. Without Android there would not be an entire ecosystem of software. Google even complied with a previous rulings about search engine choice and browser choice. In fact Android has always allowed you to set those things.
As usual Europe can't innovate so just taxes people out of their market entirely. Why would anyone want to locate their business in Europe after reading a headline like this? Have you guys ever considered making your own operating system? Your own tech companies?
> Google has attempted to allay the Commission’s concerns over the years such as allowing Android users to switch between search engines and browsers so they are not tied to the company’s apps.
More like an ATM. Need some money? Let an American tech company operate with no issue for years and then one day "whoa we checked and you've been violating <some vaguely-defined law about privacy> for years. Who knew? That'll be five billion Euros please."
That's one way to see it, if you squint hard enough.
As I see it, a company unlawfully gained billions by breaking the law while doing business in our jurisdiction.
There's nothing "vaguely defined" about european privacy laws. Google just chose to ignore them best they could, and thought they'd get away with it because they're so big.
The fact that it took years to build a solid case against their myriad of corporate lawyer weasels isn't the gotcha you think it is.
If anything, the EU has been slow to act, these companies have been operating against all possible antitrust laws for years and continue to do so despite being fined, probably the fine isn't large enough.
> Europe’s top court has upheld Google’s fine of around 4.1 billion euros ($4.67 billion) over alleged anti-competitive practices.
If they lost the case, and the appeal was dismissed, what is ‘alleged’ about it?
"The court said these are X" and "it is a fact that these are X" are distinct claims, and a lot of journalistic manners is pretending you never state as fact things that could be disputed.
Of course, since there are lots of ways to describe things in bad faith without ever breaking that rule, it can ring hollow once you lose trust...
Are court decisions universally recognized? If a court rules someone true in one area, couldn't it still be considered slander/libel in another area if another court rules it as not being true?
It is a bit like saying convicted murderer vs murderer. One is claiming the conviction for murder happened (which generally correlates to the murder happening but doesn't openly claim such) while the other directly claims the murder happens. If the conviction is later overturned, does the second claim open one up to more libability for a false claim?
> Are court decisions universally recognized?
Are laws in any country universally recognized and respected?
> If the conviction is later overturned, does the second claim open one up to more libability for a false claim?
Common sense would say before you go claim libel you first demand correction, or place onus on publisher to correct a publication with the new developed news.
I know it became normal to police speech nowadays but if a conviction - even before appeal - doesnt allow the use of a label/word, what does?
Now, being CNBC reporting this i guess the issue is less about risk of libel and more to do with the current stance that europe is out to get american companies
I noticed too this in another recent court case journalism recently. Bad journalism or fear?
The people of CNBC's audience are assumed to have reason to want Google to not lose the case. Major news outlets are biased towards capital holders. This is what journalism looks like when it speaks to its intended audience.
Scary to think that that's a real question with an unclear answer now.
Scummy targeting of US companies like this should see US regulators randomly fining EU companies triple the amount.
The EU doesn't have any equivalent companies. Out of the highest 50 grossing companies in the world (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_r...) the only ones in the EU are Lidl's parent company, a handful automakers, and one French oil conglomerate. Grocery has practically no margin, the big European auto makers are all declining rapidly, and the EU already does everything it can to make existence impossible for oil conglomerates.
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What is invalid about the claims, and how is the fine not appropriate given the legal framework Google agreed to work in within the EU?
The US should have fewer scummy companies.
Do note that the US also famously brought a recent antitrust case against Google.
The evidence here is that Google is the one acting badly and being punished in accordance, by both the EU and the US.
Unless of course literally everyone in the world is wrong except you.
Trump said that (unsurprisingly, he did say something along those lines)
“Android provides more choice for everyone and supports thousands of businesses. This judgment fails to recognize our significant investment to ensure Android remains open, interoperable and free,” a Google spokesperson told CNBC.
Sure. Which is why alternative stores like F-Droid are under threat now.
https://keepandroidopen.org/
So much happened since 2018 that this ruling feels ancient now. It was about Google making unfair deals with OEMs:
> In 2018, the European Commission slapped Google with the record-breaking penalty on the grounds that it abused Android’s mobile dominance to give unfair advantage to its own apps via pre-installation deals with smartphone makers.
While this specific problem is much better today, specially since of the DMA, things also got so much worse. And even if a new anti-trust ruling would occur today, we could expect it to drag on almost a decade again...
If only this was applied evenly. Why is every Samsung/LG/literally every non-Pixel device full of uninstallable crapware?
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The EU's DMA mostly losing its fight against Apple is what's driven Google to make similar moves, which will eventually lead to the elimination of F-Droid and other truly third-party markets, and may even make open-source or even freeware as untenable on Android as it is on iOS.
Worldwide markets for communications are based on the notion that bandwidth and infrastructure is too limited and expensive to allow competition, so effectively every country has adopted a model of overseeing government-mandated monopolies or oligopolies with consumer-protection regulations to counter the lack of competition. The EU has shown that the more those protections try to crack down, the more they fail, and as long as competition is unfeasible or outright illegal, consumers will suffer.
There's a reason an iPhone costs significantly more than a much more capable iPad, and that iPads had USB-C ports well before iPhones. If we had a cell-phone system that was as open as the ISM bands that WiFi operates on, we would have much better hardware for much cheaper.
>This judgment fails to recognize our significant investment to ensure Android remains open
I wonder if that could be considered contempt of courts.
It's perfectly fine to disagree with a court's decision, what's the crime here?
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Also, very rich given their very active attempts at nailing the door shut on every version of Android except for Android + Google
Absolutely. If anyone disagree with learned opinion of their lordships, they must be charged with contempt of court and barred from speaking on court judgements in future.
Very related: https://f-droid.org/2026/07/01/adv-malware.html
> Sure. Which is why alternative stores like F-Droid are under threat now.
I would love to read the internal memos one day when Google decided to make their lifes hard.
When they saw everyone with a closed platform (apple, nintendo, sony, microsoft) not deal with any of this anti-competitive mess.
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Why I cannot send email from my self-hosted, no dns, servers to gmail? email addresses with IP literals are much stronger than SPF (email is dropped if the IP of the SMTP client does not match the IP literal in the envelope and in all appropriate 'from' headers).
I cannot browse youtube with a noscript/basic HTML browser (basic <video> HTML element).
It is not enough, much more is needed to make those companies behave.
You misunderstand the security apparatus required to prevent spam if you believe that IP matching is sufficient.
> Why I cannot send email from my self-hosted, no dns, servers to gmail?
Because email is a cesspool ruined by spammers and Google is doing the only sensible thing they can to block the scams and pill ads from reaching their users inboxes.
[dead]
The most interesting bit here is not really the fine but how long it took. By the time a platform case reaches the final court decision, the market has usually already moved on to the next platform bottleneck
While that's true, in theory the company will have changed their policies and way of working already, and the industry will be aware and move away from it. In theory.
This was from 2018, and google has gotten worse.
Do the fines get reapplied for the 8 years that passed while they did nothing?
Google has what, 100B+ revenue in EU? This is a once-only, 4% fine from 8 years ago.
Still too little.
The point of fines is to correct behavior, not to cause financial ruin.
And yet, history and the present moment shows that fines alone do not change behavior. They are simply incorporated into the budget. Google has revenue far in excess of the fine due to their monopolies and that will continue to unabated.
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> alleged anti-competitive practices
I'd say that with court ruling these are no longer alleged. Right?
If you're in the EU, sure
These huge but turn-out-to-be nothing fines by the EU due to antitrust reasons seem a joke already. It is a laughable small percentage of the profits being imposed every now and then and when they feel like. The same holds for similar fines by specific countries. I will not be surprised if the paid sums end up to burocratic fueling or even corrupt high rank pockets. They have absolutely no impact to the company's behaviour. It's like the parking fine on the street costs less than a paid lot.
> the U.S. ambassador to the EU Andrew Puzder told CNBC that Europe “can’t over regulate” and hit companies with “huge fines” if it is going to participate in the AI economy
I love how the US will just let companies walk all over their citizens and then criticize others for not letting it happen. "Please think of the poor multi billion dollar companies".
Notice how HN people talk about it - companies breaking laws and defrauding are framed as "risk taking" and those following the law "risk averse". It is about "legal risk".
They dont see any value in "doing the right thing" if the right thing dont earn money and power. They cant even imagine a person doing the right thing for any reason other then being afraid.
This approach is more US-centric than "HN people". I've heard this often with phrases like "better to ask for forgiveness than for permission" which is probably because you can get away with a lot more on the business side in the US without having personal accountability.
"Europe's top court on Thursday upheld Google 's fine of around 4.1 billion euros ($4.67 billion) over alleged anti-competitive practices."
Are they 'alledged', it seems the court doesn't think so!
In many European countries, news agencies use "alleged" until conviction or appeals are completed. Truth as an absolute barrier to defamation is a purely American ideal.
I live in one of those countries, and this is true while sub judice, but this is the top court rejecting an appeal. It is decided, no alleged about
1. This is an american news organization
2. As you can see in the quote, the appeals are complete
Good start. Nowhere nearly enough but a good start nonetheless.
> U.S. ambassador to the EU Andrew Puzder told CNBC that Europe “can’t over regulate” and hit companies with “huge fines” if it is going to participate in the AI economy.
Imagine what these companies are doing in the US to their citizens, if ambassador is ready to defend them for violating rules/laws
As he just found out, that's exactly what the EU can do. And as he's about to find out, the EU is way too important a market for the American economy to ignore or pull out of.
Play on your neighbour's yard, obey their rules.
I think rather, that it is the EU who cannot live without US cloud services and AI-services. Imagine if the US, behind closed doors of course, threatened to cut off all cloud services. Huge parts of the public and private sector could collapse.
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The EU can certainly do a lot, with the exception of producing their own major tech companies.
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Perhaps we don't want to participate in the US's AI economy?
Unbelievable. Heading towards a dystopia at full speed.
To small a fine.
EU should crank that up tenfold for it to not become "the cost of doing business"
> ...if it is going to participate in the AI economy.
The US is so thoroughly bought out that your ambassadors are saying embarrassing shit like this, how pathetic
Well, he is a corporate tool, aka a lobbyist, so unsurprisingly he acts in favour of companies. The question is why other countries should be subject to that. The EU may succumb to blackmail though, as Ursula showed before when she submitted to Trump.
Why did US antitrust and antimonopoly which has pioneered these concepts has been doing little to nothing for decades?
Google is too big and enjoys a monopoly in too many connected sectors (browsers, mobile os, search, advertising, data). Should've been broken up long ago.
because campaign financing laws permit bribery
Good. Now, if only they also fought against developer integrity..
https://keepandroidopen.org
Just more "disguised taxation" on US based digital services, by the EU. Tariff the heck out of EU goods !
Do you really believe the EU needs to "disguise" taxes? And that a $23 trillion economy wants to wait 8 years to collect $4.7 billion?
"Trillion dollar company will definitely make tens of trillions of dollars in AI revenue but no, sorry, it can't pay a few thousand dollars to authors of content they trained on."
...still not enough to meaningfully incentivise giving a crap about the law over just paying the fine.
Ah, a real slap on the wrist. That'll teach 'em...
In all seriousness we need a couple more orders of magnitude before they'll listen or care.
Google needs to learn being monopolistic and anti-competitive makes less money than playing nice. Otherwise nothing will change.
Well, I guess occasional $4.7B fines are just the cost of doing business for Google. They have a monopoly in multiple categories, such as search engine, online advertising and strong dominance in maps and video hosting -- surely at this point money isn't an issue for them anymore.
I'd like to see a world where the data vendor is separate from the app/UI product vendor.
e.g. anyone could build a skin over map data, short form video data, long form video data, short form text content.
Data vendor makes money through selling the data, app vendors make money through either subscriptions, ads, or selling new data back to the data vendor.
The market for pretty much everything would become intensely competitive and price much closer to marginal cost of service.
However, PII+personal data would become more of a concern with this model.
Could this be some sort of """legalized""" corruption? Because the profits Google makes by very consciously and very deliberately doing what it is doing amount to many billions of dollars. And they are obviously not going to stop, while on the meantime we get one of these articles almost every year.
So then the EU signals how "tough" they are... Google pays for the cost of doing business in the EU... little people like us think that "we are fighting the big bad corporation", and all is good for one more year.
So they managed to delay paying a fine by 8 years...?
And this is this cause for celebration and justification for more such legislation?
> U.S. ambassador to the EU Andrew Puzder told CNBC that Europe “can’t over regulate” and hit companies with “huge fines” if it is going to participate in the AI economy.
Thanks for reminding us not to rely on U.S. models as access to them might one day depend on letting U.S. companies break the law..
And may it be used to prosecute them for the current bullshit they're doing with Android.
Can the EU force Google to divest Chrome and Android? They should.
First step to fixing the mess we live in
Be careful what you wish for.
Creating companies out of Android and Chrome seems like a way to quickly and maximally enshittify those technologies.
These fines are no longer sufficient.
We all see that Google does not care about fines.
It is time to:
a) split up Google b) but the responsible CEOs and higher ups to court c) allow competition to happen again by having basic laws that can not be bypassed by mega-corporations in general
YES! The EU rocks!
Apologies for the meta:
I feel that our understanding of trust and antitrust, along with the legal and regulatory premises... Just isn't very useful in the 21st century.
I understand the motivation, and justification for employing antitrust. Google's business model, and much of modern tech economy is really all about Monopoly-like market power.
In fact, one of the main concerns for AI investors is price competition, insufficient lock-in, weak network effects and consumer choice. They call this commodification... a telling choice of word. It's a worry that $trn valuations are impossible without something resembling monopoly to ensure longevity and high margins.
Peter Thiel gave a talk in favour of monopoly. It's worth reading. Even if you completely disagree, there are some subtle points that are relevant either way. A company facing market dynamism, price competition... Is unlikely to be investing billions in speculative r&d, for example.
Our core ideas about Monopoly, and antitrust... Tend to be highly derived of the industrial revolution, which is in turn all about manufacturing. Capital, labor, technology, marginal costs, marginal utility, price theory, etc. you can count the number which it's coming off the assembling line to understand the productivity of the firm. The product is concrete, and therefore productivity can be reasoned about.
There's no real way of applying this to Google. Google's users generally don't pay anything. Google doesn't have marginal costs.There is no price. The AdWords auction, is very clearly designed assuming monopolistic dynamics.. the seller is price maker and the buyer is a price taker. Prices are set as close as possible to buyer marginal value. Competition has no effect on pricing.
Otoh, where is the EU or any other antitrust regulator going with any of this. In the 90s, the Microsoft Monopoly was the biggest antitrust case. They used their os Monopoly to crush Netscape.
Now that it's history, we can look back and learn that the antitrust case just didn't matter one way or another. Nothing was really gained by victory, and nothing would have been lost by defeat.
The theory appears to be (a) regulated capitalism is good (b) tech monopolies clearly have market power and abuse it. There is no theory of desired outcome or the benefits of such an outcome. Are they regulating monopolies, preventing monopolies, pursuing an abstract notion of Justice?
Even in a digital world, monopolies bring clear downsides. The case of Google being able to simply create realities by way of Chrome the rest of the market is forced to follow is a good example here.
I agree that the common understanding of antitrust regulations has become a leaky abstraction, but the general idea is still completely sound to me: A corporation should never be in a position where it can actively suppress competition, or act in a way that is harming consumers without an alternative available.
> Are they regulating monopolies, preventing monopolies, pursuing an abstract notion of Justice?
I suppose all of it; opportunities to prevent some monopolies were missed, to the detriment of all, so regulating them is the only option left. In other cases, we can still act to actively work against emerging monopolies. And above all is clearly a notion of justice, without which democracy itself would be a pretty futile exercise in bureaucracy.
Put differently, what do you suppose the EU should do? Just let global mega-corporations have their way? Even if Google users by and large don't pay for the services, we're all aware they monetise off of users still. To me, this is an implementation detail that doesn't really make a difference to the observation that yes, Google is (and other big tech corps are) clearly in a market dominating position it (they) should not be in.
Yours is a common misunderstanding about antitrust being about prices. That is a distinctly American view, and not useful for analyzing European antitrust decisions. Read https://www.newyorker.com/business/adam-davidson/teddy-roose...
> A company facing market dynamism, price competition... Is unlikely to be investing billions in speculative r&d, for example.
The comparison to manufacturing isn't necessary because this seems to be contradicting by much of tech history itself. Plenty of companies have spent plenty of billions on R&D to outpace their real competitors.
If we're to update our view of monopoly (and I agree we should) it should be to clamp down on them even more.
>Now that it's history, we can look back and learn that the antitrust case just didn't matter one way or another. Nothing was really gained by victory, and nothing would have been lost by defeat.
You are missing the fact that the US administration did change and Microsoft was not broken... similar to the fact google/alphabet escaped that too
> A company facing market dynamism, price competition... Is unlikely to be investing billions in speculative r&d, for example.
Simple solution: tax companies more heavily and use the money for public investment in research.
The problem with people like Thiel is they’re incapable of thinking past their own self-interest, which makes many perfectly good solutions seem unthinkable to them. No one should listen to them when it comes to anything resembling public policy.
Unless your goal is creating a society that is centred around being the perfect habitat for Peter Thiel and Peter Thiel only, you should not listen to anything that guy says.
PT's theory is full of strawmen, subtle leaps of logic, unproven postulates, and plain self-serving lies.
It seems he basically posits to have single-handedly reinvented monopoly theory. But such extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, which I'm not quite seeing. Some cherry-picked examples (like that old MS antitrust case) just don't cut it. And the mere existence of these monopolies in our time is not at all sufficient proof of a positive outcome (for whom, anyway?) in the end (what end, has anybody seen it yet?). In fact, I'd argue that it takes some quite rose-tinted glasses or a billionaire's mile-high distance to the ground to not see the huge problems they're posing to society right now.
The fact that this is coming from his position of great power, and that he himself is benefitting immensely from the theory he advocates, should be enough to make you pause and think really hard about what philosophy he's trying to sell you there, and why.
The puppet master wants you to cheer for our tech overlords and accept them as benevolent dictators because trust me bro. But do you really think what's driving this man's reasoning is the good of mankind - of you and me? If so, I have a bridge to sell you.
> Nothing was really gained by victory
Windows users have a prompt to choose their browser after installing the OS.
and you might think this is a small or pointless win, but the whole point of this is that because users have this choice, microsoft is forced to make internet explorer actually good so that people willingly choose it instead of abusing it to make life harder and worse for everyone else while making things easier for themselves.
Hence internet explorer was killed and we got edge
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Peter Thiel himself is a good reason to avoid monopolies. He is dangerous fascist with political goals that would make life of most of us hell. He defends monopilies, because he is seeking to create one and then use its power to harm the rest of us.
So the best we can do for the future is to prevent Thiels of the world from monopoly creation.
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What are eu companies doing that would warrant a fine?
Blocking free speech as required by EU bureaucrats.
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These are basically meant as tarriffs, right?
No, these are anti-trust fines. If you want to participate in the EU zone, you can't have monopolistic behaviors. It might sound strange for the US, but you can't simply corner a market and then claim it's innovation and 'good for the customer'. The EU has a LONG history of these regulations, it's nothing new but the more rich a company becomes the more these fines are just the price of doing business.
Instead, here's a wild take. Why don't they just follow the regulations and continue to make profits.
> Instead, here's a wild take. Why don't they just follow the regulations and continue to make profits.
Far more likely that Google is just going to follow Apple's lead and stop releasing new features in the EU that the rest of the world gets to enjoy.
From The Washington Post:
> Behind all this lies the dream that Europe could be a “regulatory superpower.” It wanted to create a market too big to skip that would, by virtue of its heft, end up exporting its rules to the rest of the world. That hasn’t worked out.
> When adapting a product for Europe costs more than European market access is worth, companies no longer comply. They simply leave out the feature.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/06/14/apple-wit...
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Google made Android open source for free and you can even see this on this on HN as everyone glazes GrapheneOS. Without Android there would not be an entire ecosystem of software. Google even complied with a previous rulings about search engine choice and browser choice. In fact Android has always allowed you to set those things.
As usual Europe can't innovate so just taxes people out of their market entirely. Why would anyone want to locate their business in Europe after reading a headline like this? Have you guys ever considered making your own operating system? Your own tech companies?
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> In 2018, the European Commission slapped Google with the record-breaking penalty on the grounds that it abused Android's mobile dominance...
What do you think?
Yes?
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You could address the underlying issue?
> Google has attempted to allay the Commission’s concerns over the years such as allowing Android users to switch between search engines and browsers so they are not tied to the company’s apps.
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No, but they'll be treated them as such by the administration, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing
More like an ATM. Need some money? Let an American tech company operate with no issue for years and then one day "whoa we checked and you've been violating <some vaguely-defined law about privacy> for years. Who knew? That'll be five billion Euros please."
That's one way to see it, if you squint hard enough.
As I see it, a company unlawfully gained billions by breaking the law while doing business in our jurisdiction.
There's nothing "vaguely defined" about european privacy laws. Google just chose to ignore them best they could, and thought they'd get away with it because they're so big.
The fact that it took years to build a solid case against their myriad of corporate lawyer weasels isn't the gotcha you think it is.
If anything, the EU has been slow to act, these companies have been operating against all possible antitrust laws for years and continue to do so despite being fined, probably the fine isn't large enough.
>That'll be five billion Euros please."
feel free to pull out of the market, if you dislike the rules. Google pulled out of China for instance.
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That's literally what is happening here. It's a shakedown. Nothing more.
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What’s next? ChatGPT needs to support Anthropic, DeepSeek, Google models in EU?
Let your AI agent of choice summarise the AI act for you. It's reasonable for the most part.
I don't believe that you actually see no difference between this and the case in the lawsuit.
Are you just doing word association here?