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Alphabet as a whole yes, but the question I think is how much they made from Google Shopping specifically. If the fine was greater than amount of money they mad
by NineStarPoint 5y ago
Alphabet as a whole yes, but the question I think is how much they made from Google Shopping specifically. If the fine was greater than amount of money they made with what they were getting fined about (multiplied by the chance of getting caught, probably higher for google than most), then they EU would successfully discourage similar rule breaking in the future. While alphabet's total income for the year may be that high, most of that comes from ads and not shopping, and penalizing just the shopping related income makes sense in that light.
The alternative argument is that what you really want a fine to do is penalize law-infringing heavily enough that a companies' shareholders make not getting fined again high priority. In that light, you're primarily concerned about levying fines against a company's profit margin/funds they're using to invest in future growth. In which case, yeah, this fine is far too paltry to concern investors in a vacuum.
- notyourwork 5y agoI disagree. If you use just the percentage from one line of business, this gives the bigger players ability to become bullies when entering new business segments. Google has hundreds of billions of cash on hand, so they can encroach on any new business they want with below board tactics and the fine is based on only percentage of revenue that comes from that new line of business would under penalize them.