5 ms·
For Google this is just like parking tickets to UPS. A cost of doing business in town.
by cmiles8 3mo ago
For Google this is just like parking tickets to UPS. A cost of doing business in town.
- riffraff 3mo agothis comment always comes up and it's _wrong_. The goal of the regulation is to get the operators to comply, which they usually do after fines (EDIT: and litigations and whining, of course), because the costs of infractions are increased if they don't comply.
- hirako2000 3mo agoThe cost increases, but given the revenue Google generates how is that not just a tax? I've never received a dollar from the EU as a victim. If the fines are moderate and big co keeps paying that's steady revenue for the EU institutions.
- ivan_gammel 3mo agoIt‘s nice to have such revenue to fund EU programs on digital sovereignty. European institutions give plenty of money to startups. You need an entry to the program, but when you are in, it can account for 50-70% or more in your early stage funding. And that‘s nice, because you keep more equity.
- mosura 3mo ago> You need an entry to the program, but when you are in, it can account for 50-70% or more in your early stage funding. It is almost entirely unsurprising that the EU tech industry is such a disaster area when people say things like this as if they are a good thing.
- brazukadev 3mo agoI find it more interesting that US Americans think letting their companies do whatever they want everywhere (as they currently do) is the better "strategy".
- mosura 3mo ago“Everyone opposed to EU policy is a US American” fallacy in play. As is the “letting their companies do whatever they want everywhere (as they currently do) is the better "strategy"” when this wasn’t said or even implied anywhere. It is amazing how HN has descended into arguing against people making points by saying they are someone else and saying something completely different.
- sam_lowry_ 3mo agoLooking at the ivan_gammel's startups now and chuckling.
- mosura 3mo agoLooking at the state of the EU tech industry and chuckling. The point of the EU subsidies is, surely, not to enrich a few people with the right connections but to stimulate a productive ecosystem that supports well paid skilled employment, right? Right?
- ivan_gammel 3mo agoYou don‘t need the right connections. You can be an outsider and spend 10% of the grant to hire a guy who will help you with paperwork and refining the idea to fit in support initiative. Basically, you look around what grants are there, find the ones you like and can align to, find a consultancy and get your 200k-1M€. Just make sure you can show something in the end, as promised. Honestly, I don’t know what are you talking about. Tech industry in Europe is far from being dead. Not least because for many American companies Europe as market is dead.
- sam_lowry_ 3mo agoDude, sorry for being rude, it's out of desperation, really. I worked for a unicorn once and it came with the maxxed-out Mac book and the most meaningless job ever in the industry that should not exist. I also wrote endless FP7 and ESA proposals for a living, and that was an utter waste of everyone's brainpower and public money. I am now working in public sector IT, and while the job can seem dull to the outsiders, I at least serve the citizens. After a fire erupted in my block, I could proudly say to my neighbors after the fact that there were bits of my code here and there that connected the first alert with the firefighters station.
- clear-octopus 3mo ago[dead]
- sajithdilshan 3mo agoI don't think that's a sustainable model. Also most of those fines goes into filling the gaps in budgets related to recurring costs of maintaining the bureaucratic behemoth rather than funding research or innovation.
- close04 3mo agoThe US was lucky to have Musk and DOGE fix that bureaucratic behemoth, if only the EU had the same luck. How long have you been working inside the behemoth? Can you tell us more about the inner workings, where the money goes, how much, etc?
- sajithdilshan 3mo ago[flagged]
- close04 3mo ago[flagged]
- ben_w 3mo agoYou appear to be arguing with the assumption that "get the operators to comply" is false. These companies do, in fact, change behaviour in response to such actions; they may hire lawyers to find and exploit as many loopholes as they can, but they do ultimately comply. Even X ultimately complied in response to Brazil, and the EU is a much more important market for Google than Brazil ever was for X. (Why would you expect to get dollars from an EU settlement?)
- cromka 3mo ago> I've never received a dollar from the EU as a victim. This isn't a class action.
- oblio 3mo ago> I've never received a dollar from the EU as a victim. There's this standard assumption that HN users are well educated. Budgets don't work like that. It's not like the US federal government collects taxes and then deposits bags of gold coins on people's doorsteps. Taxes, fines, etc are all collected and then they mostly go to a general, undifferentiated budget which is then divided by the various ministries (departments, whatever). So yes, if you're a EU citizen you did get the money back. As roads, hospitals, research funding, etc.
- stavros 3mo agoIt's a tariff on noncompliance, designed to make it cheaper to comply than to not comply.
- 20k 3mo agoThe issue is they usually comply with the specific law being broken, and then immediately stop complying with a different law The goal should be to incentivise them to comply with the law as a whole, not to keep deliberately breaking different sections of the law to make profit above the level of fines That's why people want the level of the fines to go up, to disincentivise the more broad lawbreaking
- p-e-w 3mo agoImagine regular laws worked that way, where a prior conviction is only relevant if it was for the exact same crime, and you can go around committing dozens of crimes and be treated like a first offender every time because this time you chose robbery and last time it was theft.
- shevy-java 3mo agoWell, usually for small crimes, repeated offenders get subsequently higher and higher fines. Now if only this were to work for corporations too ...
- riffraff 3mo agoThis is literally how it works for most fines. You don't get a higher fine every time you go very the speed limit or park in the wrong place. You don't get a higher fine if you don't have a bus ticket. This is not a felony. Perhaps it should be, but it's not.
- Teever 3mo agoIf the cost of penalties doesn't exceed the cost of the offence then it's a winning move to offend. The correct solution to this is to have fines scaled to the value of a company and an exponential doubling of fines for every re-offence that falls under the same category of crime with a cooling off period after a few years.
- maccard 3mo agoBecause the goal isn’t to punish, it’s to get them to do what the law wants them to do. The fine is supposed to be a slap on the wrist - the actual desired behaviour is compliance
- Teever 3mo agoThat is the incorrect way to apply fines. The first fine should sting and the second should be damaging to a company and the third should be crippling. The EU has been fining Google for years to no avail.
- HatchedLake721 3mo ago> The EU has been fining Google for years to no avail. Me after a quick research: 2017: €2.42 billion fine for favoring its own comparison shopping service. Results: huge changes to Google's shopping service. 2018: €4 billion fine over Android-related practices. Results: Google Play separately from Google Search and Chrome, and manufacturers gained more flexibility over preinstalled apps.
- bornfreddy 3mo ago2026: Google again found breaking the law.
- inigyou 3mo agoyeah, 8 years later? If someone was born on the last one they're now in 4th grade and halfway to being able to drive. Are these really correlated events?
- sajithdilshan 3mo agoNot really, next time they just make a calculated risk decision, if the revenue from non-compliance is quite significant than the fine they have to pay later (if they have to, because I can imagine so many other cases which went unnoticed or didn't result in a fine) there is no reason for them to comply next time. It's not like they will be prohibited from doing a business after n number of compliance violations or fines
- dinfinity 3mo agoExcept they did comply for all the cases where they were fined. They're not fined for one-off behaviors, but for how their services are structured. That's GPs point.
- OsrsNeedsf2P 3mo agoI work in this space (not for Google). These fines are 100% a tax, and would be levied for any reason whatsoever
- shevy-java 3mo agoNo, the comment is not wrong. It is correct. The big corporations don't really fix their evil behaviour. That's why fines keep on re-emerging. > because the costs of infractions are increased if they don't comply. See above. If the fines were to work, it would not become a repeating issue. I think mandatory jailtimes are the only solution. When the CEOs are suddenly for 10 years in a small room, slowly they will begin to stop their mafia-strategy.
- dlahoda 3mo agoWhen fines became casual? Is it like taxes?
- Tade0 3mo agoIt is functionally just a form of tax that can't be offshored. Corporations reliably break the law, the EU reliably enforces it. I'm actually happy that this is the path the EU went, as there's a financial incentive to keep laws which benefit consumers.
- spwa4 3mo ago> It is functionally just a form of tax that can't be offshored. Hey now, give the lobbyists some time. You know they don't do anything unless a pretty big dinner is involved and that takes a few weeks: https://www.politico.com/news/2026/07/24/trump-eu-tarriffs-tech-fines-01011576 https://www.politico.com/news/2026/07/24/trump-eu-tarriffs-t... And while this sucks, it's not like Europe's motives are any better. It's just about the money.
- spwa4 3mo agoNo of course not. Ireland makes sure Google doesn't pay the minimum tax rate in the EU: https://www.irishexaminer.com/business/companies/arid-41748966.html https://www.irishexaminer.com/business/companies/arid-417489... €4.536bn on €86.6bn, or about 5% (which is one third of the amount Ireland promised in an international treaty they would charge ...)
- atoav 3mo agofine = previous_fine²
- stodor89 3mo agoYep. If a train ticket costs 100 euro and the fine for freeloading is 5 euro, you'd be a fool to buy a ticket. Don't blame Google for pushing boundaries. That's what people (and corpos) do in any competitive activity. Do blame our politicians for being incompetent and ill-meaning.
- dlahoda 3mo agoNor. It more like train costs 15 and fine 5 if caught, and payed later.
- account42 3mo agoEven if a train ticket costs 9 Euros and a fine is 60 Euros but you are almost never checked it quickly becomes cheaper to eat the fines.
- ben_w 3mo agoBack when I lived in Cambridge, someone worked out this was actually true for one of the car parks. (Not those exact numbers, but the same point).
- suslik 3mo agoI lived in a city where police can fine you for biking in the night without the lights on, but police catches people so rarely that, per ride, the mathematical expectation of a fine was lower than the cost of batteries.
- BadBadJellyBean 3mo agoThe maximum fine the EU can impose with the DMA is "10 % of its total worldwide turnover in the preceding financial year". I think this would hurt even Google. And I think a billion dollars is not nothing.
- benoau 3mo agoLast year Google had $400 billion revenue so it's a massive amount of money, and they are allowed up to 20% for repeat offenders!
- mnicky 3mo agoThat would be something like 70% of their yearly global profit AFAIK.
- dlahoda 3mo agoEU is just 1/20 of world population, why 10%? Seems dishonest. EU human valued 2x more of other human?
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- account42 3mo agoThe damages done that caused the fine are usually spread over multiple years.
- BadBadJellyBean 3mo agoBecause they decided that way. Any other country in the world can decide the same thing but they don't have the same leverage as the EU. Google makes a lot of money in the EU.
- throw101010 3mo agoThe same principle evoked in the rest of this thread, if the penalties match exactly or are under the profits you can generate by injuring (in the legal sense) EU citizens it's not really a penalty but rather a cost of business. Plus markets are very interconnected, especially the digital ones. EU competition law is not framed around valuing Europeans more than others, it is framed around protecting competition and market functioning inside the EU. No need to moralize it and pretend anyone is using this "value" European humans more than other humans.
- Imustaskforhelp 3mo agowell, Meta[0] is getting sued for a 1.4 Trillion$ by many US states combined if that interests you. [0]: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/meta-says-it-s-staring-down-1-4-trillion-in-a-lawsuit-over-teen-mental-health-it-s-one-of-the-largest-corporate-penalties-ever-proposed/ar-AA28sIcu https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/meta-says-it-s-staring-...
- baq 3mo ago'a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking real money' ...but this is a private(ish) business, it doesn't have a printer in the back yard, a billion is a lot no matter how you look at it, especially if they're now facing a tough choice between cannibalizing their results with AI summaries or having AI competitors eating their lunch.
- jchw 3mo agoI suggest that whenever Google get fined less than. $1B, they get an instructional booklet reminding them of how to count that low.
- vrganj 3mo agoThis fine is more of a warning shot. The DMA allows for fines of up to 10% of global revenue or 20% in the case of repeat offenders. These 890M are a first warning. Now Google has some time to react, but if they don't implement what is required of them, another, higher, fine will be issued. 20% of global revenue is not just cost of doing business, to any business.
- petre 3mo agoWell it's 15% or their Q2 spending, to put things into perspective.