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Google loses challenge against EU antitrust ruling, $2.8B fine
- PhileinSophia 5y agoWhat is their crime?
- callamdelaney 5y agoGot to fill that Brexit budget gap somehow..
- sizzle 5y agoFinally sensible regulations with teeth, I really admire the EU and their no nonsense approach to holding corporations accountable.
- amelius 5y agoThe cost of doing business.
- rm2040 5y agoA fine doesn’t solve the issue. Could it be the EU is taking their cut? and will repeat for the other techcos every X years?
- mikeiz404 5y agoAdding this for some context. While it’s not clear to me if the fine accounts for Google’s total revenue from Google Shopping while the infringement occurred it at least is based on a percentage of revenue which increases with each reoccurrence. According to [1] “the starting point for setting the fine will take into account a percentage of the value of sales to which the infringement relates, multiplied by the number of years of participation in the infringement. Under the fines Guidelines in force since 1998, the starting point of the fine is based on a lump sum, depending on the degree of gravity of the infringement, to which a 10% increase is added per year of infringement.” and “The Commission's fine of €2 424 495 000 takes account of the duration and gravity of the infringement. In accordance with the Commission's 2006 Guidelines on fines (see press release and MEMO), the fine has been calculated on the basis of the value of Google's revenue from its comparison shopping service in the 13 EEA countries concerned.”[2] 1: http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-06-256_en.htm?locale=en http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-06-256_en.htm?loca... 2: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_17_1784 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_17_...
- corrigible 5y agoI'm sure they'll appeal again
- mdrzn 5y agoStill pocket change for a multibillion company like Google. I hope EU will keep hammering them with fines until they change, or until they start noticing the loss.
- shadowgovt 5y agoOr until they decide it's not worth the cost to do business in Europe. As of 2018, they were pulling about 32.2 billion euros in revenue in the European market, so there's quite a ways to go.
- nixass 5y agoOf course they will decide to leave the market twice as big (population wise) as US' one
- nyxaiur 5y agoThey didn't even follow through with their threat to leave the Australian market or the UK or France or Belgium or Germany. I don't even know whom they didn't threaten.
- shadowgovt 5y agoThat's what I'm saying... the EU could probably double or triple these fine levels, easy, before Google decides this isn't worth just factoring into cost-of-business. Of course, if the laws are structured fairly, such steep fine levels would absolutely cripple domestic software companies that ran afoul of them...
- missedthecue 5y agoI feel like I've seen this headline a hundred times in the past 5 years.
- shadowgovt 5y agoProbably because the cases in question started in 2017. The headlines we see are the percolation of these three cases through the entire appeals and resolution process.
- hn_throwaway_99 5y agoNote Google still has the option of appealing to EU's top court, so the appeals process isn't even necessarily done I'm this case.
- jacquesm 5y agoI hope they do and that the fine gets doubled as a result. Companies always appealing to the highest courts is only a function of the amount of cash they have, whatever happened to: "Judge says so, so that's it". It's just trying to do an end-run around the system by always clogging up the courts from low to high.
- aidenn0 5y agoHonestly, just adding a market-rate interest charge on the original fine seems Good Enough to me. I suspect the interest on a $3B fine is larger than the court fees and lawyers anyways, and it's not like time value of money isn't something companies will neglect to take into account.
- r00fus 5y agoWasn't the market-rate interest actually negative in some European countries in recent years? There has to be some mechanism for some additional cost for the defendants to prevent appealing all court decisions...
- kerng 5y agoFine should probably much higher honestly.
- colinmhayes 5y agoGoogle has another $7 billion in fines working through the EU court.
- Ygg2 5y agoAssuming they don't appeal and lower them.
- Permit 5y agoI haven't been following this case, what makes you say it should be higher?
- cbg0 5y agoPlenty of people don't understand the concept of fining corporations, which is to punish them and get them to correct their ways, not to destroy them financially to the point where they end up firing people, which will now be out of work, which is a pretty big problem.
- breakfastduck 5y agoOnly if a fine is so low it effectively has 0 impact on their revenue it's not punishing them, is it? Doing so much that they are impacted financially IS.
- nathanyz 5y agoFining is because you can't put a corporation in jail. It is basically an alternative meant to speak the language of profit/loss that corporations live and die by. So in this case if you don't make it so that the bad behavior is "unprofitable", then there is really no incentive to change as profitable business practices will not be discontinued and fines just become part of the operating costs.
- arenaninja 5y agoAmazon and Facebook when?
- spicyramen 5y agoAnyone has the link how they come up with this number?
- riffraff 5y agothere is this[0] > The Commission's fine of €2 424 495 000 takes account of the duration and gravity of the infringement. In accordance with the Commission's 2006 Guidelines on fines (see press release and MEMO), the fine has been calculated on the basis of the value of Google's revenue from its comparison shopping service in the 13 EEA countries concerned. But I didn't see a detailed calculation anywhere. [0] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/MEMO_17_1785 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/MEMO_1...
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoWhere does the $2.8 billion go?
- chaoskanzlerin 5y agoMember states' contributions to the EU budget get decreased proportionally
- morsch 5y agoThe EU budget, according to https://ec.europa.eu/competition-policy/antitrust/procedures/fines_en https://ec.europa.eu/competition-policy/antitrust/procedures... Also https://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-googles-27-billion-fine-stacks-up-against-each-eu-countrys-annual-budget-contribution-2017-06-27 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-googles-27-billion-fin...
- kache_ 5y agough
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y agoGood. Now, do the same to Apple and force them to allow installing third-party apps (and sign up for alternative push notifications services).
- alach11 5y agoA lot more information about the case is available here [0]. The ruling is about promoting Google Shopping results above other comparison shopping websites. The fine "has been calculated on the basis of the value of Google's revenue from its comparison shopping service in the 13 EEA countries concerned." [0] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_17_1784 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_17_...
- yawaworht1978 5y agoInteresting calculation. Did they deduct taxes paid, salaries and dev time? If not, this was a negative sum game for google. Would be very curious to know.
- AnssiH 5y agoIf you are willing to read, here's the original decision PDF, including details about fine: https://ec.europa.eu/competition/antitrust/cases/dec_docs/39740/39740_14996_3.pdf https://ec.europa.eu/competition/antitrust/cases/dec_docs/39...
- brewdad 5y agoI should hope so. The whole point of these fines should be to prevent the behavior rather than just make it a cost of doing business.
- mtsr 5y agoRevenue, not profit, so that by definition doesn't deduct any costs.
- hulitu 5y agoGoogle does not pay significant taxes in EU. Just like other companies they use a lot of tricks to avoid paying taxes.
- Crash0v3rid3 5y agoSounds like the tax laws needs changing. I don’t know how we can blame companies from leveraging loopholes if they are available.
- ddmma 5y agoHad a project related to Drive, exactly 8 years ago mentioned on my twitter about their aproach on literaly all searches related to their services https://imgur.com/a/iM7XhaB https://imgur.com/a/iM7XhaB
- caslon 5y agoWhat's wrong with what they're doing there? Your project was named extremely generically and is spelled like a typo; correct the typo and Google and IBM have cloud services most assuredly more popular than your own, and you still managed to come in first.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ddmma 5y agoDomain was created using reversed engineered on the their analytics. You’re right, heil Google
- marcodiego 5y agoGoogle contributes so much to open source that news like this makes me react ambiguously.
- schleck8 5y agoThis is the new "you can't be a bad person if you are an animal friend" equivalent I assume?
- marcodiego 5y agoNo. This is simply the same felling I get when someone that has helped me sometimes get caught doing something wrong.
- krageon 5y agoMaybe if they contributed a little more to an open internet they wouldn't have this problem :)
- DeathArrow 5y ago>Thomas Vinje, a partner at law firm Clifford Chance and who advises several Google rivals, said Vestager should expand her investigation into other areas. >"Today's judgment gives the European Commission the ammunition it needs to tighten the screws on Google in other areas where it is throwing its weight around, like in online advertising, app stores and video streaming," he said. Great idea. Search isn't the only area Google has done bad things. And Google isn't the only big tech company which has done bad things.
- kybernetyk 5y agoIf you can’t build your own tech industry you just rob the other guys’ one.
- malermeister 5y agoIf you can't follow our laws, get out of our market.
- kybernetyk 5y agoThat would be a bitter day for Europe. I think only Spotify users wouldn't care - but then again on what would they listen to their music?
- malermeister 5y agoThe new breathing room created by removing market-distorting monopolists would allow the local tech scene to flourish. Not sure why that would be a bad thing?
- thunkshift1 5y agoThey are ‘robbing’ the ones who wont allow others to flourish like they have
- native_samples 5y agoProblem is, Google never shut down competing sites or did anything to block them in any way. In fact they funded platforms that could be used to access them. That's the difficulty with this sort of ruling. What, exactly, does the EU think Google did wrong here? Putting new stuff into search results? That should not be illegal and no such law exists. Reality is the EU will be perceived as both financially robbing America's tech industry and blaming it for its own failures to develop competitive services, regardless of what spin "EU citizens" try to put on this. The perception is inevitable when the supposed crime is so difficult to understand.
- Fckd 5y agoGoogle the new Evil
- Shadonototra 5y agoThey haven't replaced anyone, they complement the list of Evils Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple They all share a same trait, born from the same place, operates globally, there is a weird pattern over there
- elwell 5y agoNot agreeing or disagreeing, but how exactly is Google evil?
- ajuc 5y agoAbusing their monopoly to destroy competition for example? This is why they were fined. Then there's censorship and working with authoritarian regimes like China.
- kerblang 5y agoMostly tangential: I find it amusing that I got served 3 different ads for Google Fiber on that reuters page (2 of them were the same ad). Of course this is because I looked at Google Fiber a week ago to see if it was in my neighborhood yet, but it isn't and at this point probably never will be.
- stjohnswarts 5y agoI wonder why the EU won't sink these huge fines back into the process of keeping the companies in check rather than just disbursing it to random cost centers. They could do even better work if they doubled or tripled their investigators and lawyers. That would really send a chill through those who love to rob us of our privacy.
- Jensson 5y agoMaking fines fund the people who determine the fine is a really bad incentive structure, you will see a lot more fines for sure but the system would be much more prone to corruption.
- adamc 5y agoGood. Google has been dominating search for a long time. At the very least, it is important to constrain how they can use that advantage. (I would rather see search de-monopolized. Not holding my breath...)