"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.
“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...
You mean un-uninstallable crapware? This has at least a technical reason: Preloaded apps are part of the read-only system image and cannot be removed. "Disabling" should be equivalent, though.
It's not just preloaded apps, though. A few months ago I prepared a Lenovo tablet for an elderly friend, and if I had just tapped through the OOBE wizard (which presented pages upon pages of optional crapware) without reading, it would have installed 20-30 preselected "popular" apps, mostly games. I had to manually deselect every single one.
Even getting Amazon tablet that’s specifically designed for children comes with useless apps you just cannot get rid off, because they need to shove all their services into your mouth hoping you will accidentally swallow at least some of them.
There used to be time when every company had a mission statement and some (sometimes silly) ambitions, today it’s all just money, nothing else, not even a pretending anymore.
This is really important. Unless it's straight up fraud or a safety issue, most market participants are totally allowed to ship garbage (who are we to judge?).
At some point when monopoly power tests start turning true then the bar is raised (as it should be).
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.
> Contempt of court is a legal offense that occurs when an individual or organization interferes with the administration of justice or willfully disrespects a court's authority, dignity, or orders.
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.
You did truncate the context: you have to add email addresses with IP literals. This does change everything.
google is more than anything else (and this has been a few years) following its agenda at making email just a private garden of messaging with a few "chosen ones" of his friends (selection based on $$$). They are presuming de facto anybody who does not fit their technical agenda to be a spammer. This is the same with their "web" with their web engines from the 'whatwg cartel'.
An IP/domain becomes a source of spam until it does. And with their billions of $$$, I guess they have an army of guys to handle that properly: trying hard enough to notify the owner with data, etc. Yes, this is 99% of the work which has to be done at gmail.
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.
I'm not sure I follow; they were given 90 days to comply with certain requirements from the EU, which they did, and the fine was something extra that took a while to resolve in the courts.
> 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.
"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."
> 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.
This already happened. The US government cut off a judge at the international criminal court from her Office365 account because she was pressing a war crimes case against Benjamin Netanyahu.
It's the reason why in the last year you've seen multiple European governments very quickly build an escape hatch against US tech.
We all expect that you'll use our dependency on US services as a weapon, you've already done so, so we're phasing you out. It'll take decades to repair the lost trust in US digital services among the governments of Europe.
If it's the same woman I'm thinking of Office365 is underselling it a bit - she's fully sanctioned by the US. She can't use debit/credit cards, any Apple/Google device or service, Amazon/eBay, etc. She's completely digitally crippled by sanctions. And she's one of several people.
As a European I really hope we create an entirely separate homegrown tech sector, and fast.
Yes, I'm aware of the rest of it, I just didn't feel it particularly relevant to the discussion.
Yes, I'm with you. I'm grateful that most of the news I hear about this is relatively positive. I'm actually kind of in awe of how fast it's all moving. For all the talk about slow Europeans, that single ICC action seems to have launched a ton of initiatives.
More like several decades and 100s of billions of euros which nobody is going to pay. It will simply never happen and right now all the politicians are just quietly waiting for this whole thing to blow over.
It isn't Google's money if they wrongfully profited it, and are fined. It belongs to the victims. The government of the victims will invest it in making the victims less dependent on the perpetrator? Well played.
In general, yes, but I disagree with "It isn't Google's money". But it is. It's right there in their accounts. Possession is 9/10ths of the law as they say.
In the end it is legal tender, owned by the government of said legal tender. But Google owes another legal entity money. They're in debt to that other legal entity, and they should pay said debt (pay the fine). It is actually 4.7 billion EUR.
And on top of all of the above, there's another reason Google owes us money. Google does not even pay fair taxes.
Why is that? Corporations approach governments looking for hand outs and governments give them. It's the politicians that should be the recipient of your ire. If corporations are using loopholes, politicians should close the loopholes. You're hating the player for playing the game. It's not like theGoog is refusing to pay taxes. They've just spent their money on lawyers to find out how to not owe as much tax as you think they should.
I'm not a fan of theGoog or any bigTech, but you especially seem to be taking this rather personally.
> Why spend your own money when you can spend someone else’s?
Funny you would say that in defence of giant mega-corporations, externalising huge chunks of the cost they generate to the rest of the world. OpenAI decided to run the largest social experiment humanity ever undertook without asking any of us. Microsoft is powering up old nuclear power plants to cover for their AI data center consumption. Apple is manufacturing in foreign countries under awful conditions so every American child can own an iPhone. Big Tech made San Francisco unaffordable even for well-compensated software engineers. Facebook actively made children addicted to push more apps.
We all, as a society, have to suffer through the effects of reckless greed from American companies (and we didn't even talk about Big Oil or Big Pharma yet!) Just because nobody bothers to put a price tag on it doesn't mean there isn't one.
The EU doesn't fine companies as a way to generate revenue, but because they break local laws and cause damages to someone.
> Funny you would say that in defence of giant mega-corporations,
It is funny because that's not what I was saying. At. All.
The reply was a reply to the question of why EU countries just hired US based companies instead of developing their own. The response to that was that it would cost too much money "100s of billions of euros". Now the EU is coming up with their own versions of things like Office and what not. I was merely suggesting that they have found a way to offset that "100s of billions of euros" by fining companies billions of euros.
They will likely take a decade, but only because this isn't top priority. They could be out in a month if it was important to them. The alternatives exist, there is just a lot of pain in switching that they can avoid by doing this over a decade.
A lot more people are working on it than I expected there to be.
It's the one time where the European Union's inability to advertise what they're doing is paying off in their favor. Then again, good, the operation of government isn't meant to be done through a tweet. We should resist the corruption of government to idiotic soundbites on platforms owned by American billionaires.
> In the cases provided for by the law and with provisions for compensation,
private property may be expropriated for reasons of general interest.
Excerpt from article 42 of the Italian constitution. This would cover, for instance, the entire eu-south-1 availability zone in AWS. I'm sure that other member states have their own provisions and you need to keep in mind that Google/Amazon/Microsoft employees in the relevant countries would predictably comply with local authorities, not obey a foreign power trying to collapse their governments.
If your power comes from saying "I own that", it's crucial not to enter complete hostility with nations, the only entities who can reply, "Says who?".
That kind of thing is very much a nuclear option, though. Firstly because the state that does it needs to be very confident it can operate the asset it seizes without overseas support, and secondly because doing so tends to be bad for business in your country in general, as people understandibly get nervous about having stuff in places that have shown a willingness to just take it.
Completely agreed, it is rational to de-escalate by several steps (e.g. to have cloud providers "spontaneously" decide to split into different, actually autonomous but still privately owned, corps, which in turn is a threat to returns of the home corp so they would put pressure on the US government not to escalate this far politically, and so on).
It's just that the possibility of the "nuclear option" works as a deterrent.
EU can live fine without US cloud services, and it's not very dependent on AI at the moment. If access would be cut off, companies would just switch to other solutions, which BTW are already there. The question is more how much time they would have to switch and adapt. An unannounced zero-day cut off would be of course harmful for a while (days, weeks, maybe months), but on most parts could be probably solved in a short timeframe for the important parts.
Also, EU (and probably most parts of the world) are already switching away at this moment already.
The EU is doing the exact opposite of switching away from US tech. In fact they just announced that the new EU digital ID wallet is going to require Google or Apple device attestation.
That is two US companies in complete control of the fundamental digital ID system of the entire EU.
Everything they say about "digital sovereignty" is performative nonsense because they simply have no other options and no capacity to build replacements themselves.
This is bad largely due to the effect on individuals who may find themselves banned from such services with no due process. As a threat to the EU's sovreignty as a whole it's one of the easier things to move away from if it gets weaponised (in comparison to cloud services that are intertwined with a country's economy and bureaucracy)
they did not "just announce" that, it was a rather technical decision several layers down, made a while ago. Sure, some things are not easily created without US companies but the overall tendency is pretty clear and it is: reduce absolute dependencies.
The EU could be fine but it's just not doing it. Companies in the EU and even EU institutions do keep on using US SaaS, from Microsoft to AWS to Oracle institutions and companies claim they want sovereignty but when it's time to deploy their IT plan, they just don't.
TL;DR: in theory yes, in practice it is just not happening at scale.
If they did that, their pension system (in huge parts built on stock) would collapse. The American tech market is largely saturated, and needs room to grow. The EU is a market of almost 500 million people with a lot of money. The US simply cannot ignore it.
This is not a flip the switch tomorrow hypothetical. The fallout of such an action would be huge for everyone, including the US stock market.
Here in Europe, every government and major corporation have recently added their dependance on US platforms to their risk management taxonomy. For the (unlikely) scenario you mention, for the scenario that their company/government somehow runs afoul of the US goverment and this is used as leverage, for espionage reasons, and for other reasons that may have already been in their risk overview (data privacy, compliance, etc) but were seen as manageable but are no longer so.
For some anecdotes: My former employer just moved off of AWS to a EU provider and will likely also move away from Google Cloud for their internal needs, my current employer has started evaluating moving off of Azure at the request of our clients (though they dismissed the idea of moving off of Office 365 internally), and my partner's company (a large corporate) has started prioritizing a transition plan away from AWS.
What do you believe is so unique about US cloud providers? True, it's a de facto triopoly of American-incorporated businesses, but then what? It's not like computing is alien tech that only the US can own. The US doesn't even make the chips. It's commodity at scale with a bit of convenience sold at a steep premium.
> Huge parts of the public and private sector could collapse.
temporarily yes, then EU will be able to build them on its own.
But what would also collapse is trust in all US companies, whole world will start working on their own solutions, no more AWS/GCP/Azure hegemony in the world. Everyone would close their internet, just like China did and develop own solutions
> Huge parts of the public and private sector could collapse.
Today, yes.
The possibility of this, combined with how seriously Greenland was taken, means the EU is collectively saying "as a matter of urgency, we need strategic independence from the US".
This will take a while. Ironically, access to AI will make the transition much faster.
However, this is currently mutual interdependence: if the US actually cut off non-AI cloud to the EU, the US would screw over one of their major suppliers thus preventing them from supplying stuff, and leave itself entirely at the mercy of China. If it cut off AI to the EU, there goes a big market for tokens and the current data centre supply looks even more sketchy than its effect on electricity prices has already made it look. (But one bit of good news is that US electricity prices would come down).
Yes, think about that and how the shares would drop in an instant.
Good thing european governments and industries start to work on real technological and financial independence. It is high time for cutting ties with a country that is acting as irrational and self centered as the usa.
Right, and we haven’t because we just don’t wanna? The gap between US/China and the EU in AI is becoming wider by the day.
Russia has like 3-4 large tech companies (Sber, Yandex, VK, and maybe Ozon). And they completely rely on foreign hardware. I don’t even want to imagine how could Russia start building frontier AI in these circumstances.
> Right, and we haven’t because we just don’t wanna? The gap between US/China and the EU in AI is becoming wider by the day.
We've repeatedly built things, they often get bought by US companies. This doesn't necessarily even involve them moving office, as for example Deep Mind was founded in the UK (while it was in the EU) and is still there (HQ: London; research offices in France & Germany so still in EU too) despite now being owned by Alphabet.
> Right, and we haven’t because we just don’t wanna?
We have, they get bought by American companies as their exit strategy.
If American companies decide to shutdown access then there's no pressure from the behemoths to stamp out competition, it would just be natural that alternatives take over since the market clearly exists and without American tech companies filling that market it would be pretty easy for alternatives to grow.
> Right, and we haven’t because we just don’t wanna?
The EU hasn't because European investors are shy about deploying capital. If you look at European weapons and aerospace, it's clear there's no particular technical or capability barrier.
There was a very real barrier to building tech companies. We couldn't listen to Spotify at work during the time people seriously called Berlin the "SV of Europe" (our office was in the neighborhood called "SV Backyard"). Why? We didn't have enough bandwidth, and the wait time for fiber was measured in years.
From anecdotes around me now I live in Berlin, I believe it extended at least into Brandenburg.
Even in 2019, some coworkers were complaining that the best offer from their landline company (in one of the small villages just outside the Berlin city limits) was dialup.
Berlin's reputation post reunification has been "poor but sexy".
Not that "largest by market cap" says much, given that it corresponds to "oh look a monopoly" as much as it does "innovation and real growth" (and also "bubble"), but you're wrong.
It's a culture thing. There are even smaller markets like Taiwan that developed industries EU didn't.
Western EU countries are very risk averse, anti-business and has too conservative hierarchy to develop this kind of culture. You can see it as early as in school system where the focus is on rising the floor while forgetting about the ceiling.
They'll blame it on WWII but both South Korea and Japan were similarly devastated and both managed to develop world-class technology industries in the ensuing decades.
Europe is the outlier and it's pointing to something fundamentally wrong that it was only able to produce a handful of interesting technology companies in all these years.
You're just blinded by propaganda. Europe has produced thousands upon thousands of interesting technology companies - it's just that very few of them are information technology companies.
Claiming that something is wrong with Europe in general because it didn't produce interesting technology is an utterly ridiculous and uninformed take.
I think it is a marketing failure. The web was mentioned before, but ARM, Wifi, Bluetooth, the CD, all European inventions. There are core parts of the internet that are completely dominated by a European company but nobody knows. If we go back to the past, everyone had a Nokia phone at some point. There are services companies like Booking and Spotify. Then Linux and Python are from Europe as well.
And achieve what exactly? EU being dependent on US cloud services also mean EU being a big part of their revenue. Parts of EU public and private sector may collapse but they will also switch to their own alternatives, the broken trust and lost revenue on the other hand will definitely not be recovered by US companies.
> Imagine if the US, behind closed doors of course, threatened to cut off all cloud services
That would be the single best thing that could happen to the EU.
I think people would be surprised by how quickly European and international companies and governments can rid themselves of the American tech stack. They use this stuff because it's convenient, solid, and cheap, not because it's the only option.
> Huge parts of the public and private sector could collapse.
Yes, both in the EU and the US, initially. It would also force the EU to finally invest in its own tech stack and end the US's ability to sell software globally.
People seem to believe that America's global economic dominance is a law of nature that will never change, regardless of what the US does. But it's not. There is no American exceptionalism, other than what America worked for.
If you continually kick your customers in the face, they'll eventually stop being your customers.
Which is when we'd enter economic warfare between the EU and US, something which no one wants to experience. If that were realistically threatened, and we've seen motions in that direction, it's about political and economical survival and we'd see a massive loss of market for US tech.
So what? It will hurt everyone, but end result will be that US companies won't be able to sell in other parts of the world, because everyone will have own standards, own solutions, new regulations will come up about data residency, which will require using unknown AWS alternative in a small country and even if you are willing to maintain 150 Datacenter across different countries, companies will be afraid of using US tech, to one day lose access to their data
Oh man you wanna talk about benefits? I actually don't even think the US should have given the internet to the world. It's basically been one giant gift. Sure it's created a situation where we sell the tech both as software and hardware and that has allowed us to redirect wealth from the world to the US however in hindsight it's making our enemies stronger and allowing technology like drones to proliferate. An alternate reality where we didn't do that would be a reality where people would be smuggling American tech to their countries the way they did with jeans in the 80s. We basically decided to make a bunch of money on the tech over the past 50 years but it's actually created a situation where our soldiers are gonna be dodging drones in the next big conflict where as if we never allowed advanced chips to proliferate around the world we would be sitting high on tech that is basically magic to the rest of the world. In hindsight I'm not sure if it was a good idea.
If there's one thing all historians agree on, it's that collaboration has always been the winning strategy in human history.
If the US had never opened up their innovations to the world, they wouldn't have been able to extract the gargantuan amount of money from it they did. If the US had not instated the Marshall plan after WW2, there would never have been as close ties between Europe and the US. If American companies hadn't outsourced much of the manufacturing to poorer countries, the standard of living would be a lot lower than it is today. If USAID hadn't improved and saved the life of millions of humans, American companies wouldn't be met with such universal acceptance and opportunities to sell their goods as they have.
It's not like the US isn't massively benefitting of their investments in the rest of the world. But it sure looks like you're pretty aligned with the current administration there, so we'll both see how this plays out in real time.
Hold on. Some people and institutions in the US are massively benefitting from what other Americans gave and are giving to the world. What they sometimes have been forced to give.
So whether these things are good depends on if you are on the winning or losing side of the equation. If your job gets out sourced it's a negative. If your stock shares increase in value then it's a positive.
> Oh man you wanna talk about benefits? I actually don't even think the US should have given the internet to the world. It's basically been one giant gift.
You didn't give the internet to the world. The world made it by copying stuff you had no power to prevent them copying.
The UK alternative was only phased out in favour of TCP/IP after the world wide web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee while working at the famously-not-American CERN. The American attempt at the web was Gopher: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)
> An alternate reality where we didn't do that would be a reality where people would be smuggling American tech to their countries the way they did with jeans in the 80s.
Only thing we might care to smuggle (if anything) would be the software, and it's not like a DVD is hard to hide. Nobody would be smuggling out hardware, we would not need to, we would not care to. And even that's a stretch, we're also quite capable of writing our own software, sometimes you buy our companies because they're better at it than yours.
> We basically decided to make a bunch of money on the tech over the past 50 years but it's actually created a situation where our soldiers are gonna be dodging drones in the next big conflict where as if we never allowed advanced chips to proliferate around the world we would be sitting high on tech that is basically magic to the rest of the world. In hindsight I'm not sure if it was a good idea.
You say that like other countries don't make stuff. It's often the other way around, because we're as smart and capable as you, despite what you may think, and even when things have been invented "in" the US, it has often been by an immigrant who in your alternate timeline would not have gone to the US.
The chips are made by machines sold by EU companies; batteries and brushless motors? China; IMU? Japan, Germany, Taiwan; even GPS, despite the US one being the famous one, has alternatives of GLONASS (Soviet), BeiDou, and Galileo.
TBH, the only thing that America genuinely brought to the table was the interaction of the first amendment and cryptography. Insufficient cryptography, insufficient security, e-commerce remains limited.
If we're on the topic of hardware, let's remember that a few years before ARPANET, Olivetti was a powerhouse rivaling IBM. The ELEA mainframe came out with a competitive design in 1957.
One of the reasons why things did not pan out is that, three years later, 58 years old Adriano Olivetti died of a heart attack on the train to Switzerland. Even discounting the theory of a CIA assassination (which has, nevertheless, been floated around), that was a butterfly-flapping-its-wings moment; without pressure from the US government wanting to maintain technological supremacy, he might have been under less stress and survived.
In that scenario, maybe the same international visitors who currently visit Milan for luxury fashion would also haul back high tech from the so-called Valle del Silicio stretching towards Turin along the Fondo river.
Or, of course, another one between a million different outcomes could have happened. Human creativity and inventiveness finds a way to flourish everywhere.
At one point in the 1980s, Olivetti was the world's third largest personal computer manufacturer[8] and remained the largest such European manufacturer during the 1990s
Wow, I'm genuinely surprised. I don't think I've even heard of them before now, despite growing up in the 80s and 90s in the UK. ZX Spectrum, BBC Micros, Acorns, but not Olivetti.
Funny you mention that. For me (Dutch), growing up in same time, Wimbledon and Roland Garros are the two main tennis tournaments. When these were on TV, Olivetti brand was prominently mentioned at the scoreboards. I always imagined they were a brand who made the computers used for the scoreboards, but otherwise had no idea what that brand meant. You wouldn't 'Google' or 'Wikipedia' it. You saw it, you asked your parents (or other peers), and they'd either know or not.
> where as if we never allowed advanced chips to proliferate around the world we would be sitting high on tech that is basically magic to the rest of the world
Much of America's technological progress is a direct result of them selling tech to the rest of the world and becoming the world's tech hub. Do you think that not selling anything to anyone outside the US would have had zero impact on tech progress across the world?
It would hurt, for a while. Then people would wake up and slowly better solutions would appear. Not unlike post-Trump NATO. But the US would have lost its leader position and a large market.
I think the EU needs a kick under the ass to stop its comfortable inertia.
Humanity has lived for thousands of years without cloud and AI services. We can definitely live without those. In fact, considering the damage that is being done to the environment (and thus ourselves) in name of those services, we’d very likely be better off without them in the first place.
A large reason US services have such a presence in Europe is that their flagrant disregard for rules and the pursuit of profit at all costs gives them an unfair advantage. If those US companies cut off their services, in the long run the ones in the EU would have the room to expand within the rules. That’s the opposite of the doomsday scenario you’re describing. Though of course an abrupt cut would be momentarily disruptive, countries in the EU are already taking steps to reduce reliance on US services (for example: LaSuite).
Cloud services would hurt because of the data stored there. Suddenly being cut off your own data is obviously an upheaval.
It also shows how untrustworthy a partner is when this threat is thrown around casually. Also why talks of tech sovereignty are a lot more prevalent now.
If you brought that up 10 years ago, people looked at you as if you were a crank conspiracy theorist. Now everyone takes it seriously. Maybe a decade from now this will have been addressed.
AI services are a lot less important than you presume. Cut access to it and the workd keeps moving as usual.
> 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.
I think the EU member states would declare it a matter of national emergency and nationalize the relevant assets, with every other country these American companies sell to taking notes and considering doing the same pre-emptively, providing a huge investment boost to EU tech companies (and almost certainly China) while tanking the US economy, and poisoning the ability of the Americans to sell to Europe for the next hundred years.
You don't win the opium wars by threatening to cut off the supply of opium.
It's funny how people complain that the EU has no Google, when Google should never have been allowed to exist in the first place. The current tech dystopia is a direct result of the US failing to enforce its antitrust laws.
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.
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.
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.
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..
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.
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.
Fine with me. You think the EU should change its regulations because foreign companies might not release some features directly? sounds like a non issue
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?
You don't even know how good you have it. With incentives like this what company would make anything open in the future? You're punishing them for it. They're gonna make it like iOS precisely because of rulings like this.
And Hitler built the highways in Germany. What does that even prove? They can still abuse Android for vendor lock-in, or as a sales funnel to their commercial offerings, or as a data source for a myriad of things users did never really consent to.
> As usual Europe can't innovate so just taxes people out of their market entirely.
Yawn. Last time I looked, big tech is still wholly present all across the EU, only that I have the option to install apps from alternative stores on my iPhone. Also, the EU as an institution isn't the same thing as European companies. Go check the machines in any factory near you, and I can pretty much guarantee you'll find a German one in it.
> Have you guys ever considered making your own operating system?
You might want to look up where Linus Torvalds created Linux.
> Go check the machines in any factory near you, and I can pretty much guarantee you'll find a German one in it.
It is always interesting to see how underestimated the EU is in terms of manufacturing and pharma for example, they're unsung and not always glamourous industries, but nobody does them like the EU.
The tech innovation does happen more in the US, there has always been simply more private capital thrown around there and thats fine. Comparing the EU and the US in terms of economic activities and procedures is a futile exercise. They're just not the same, and thats by design.
That still doesn’t take away from the point that innovation does happen in Europe; the first version of Linux was created and released while he was at the university of Helsinki. If you want another example, Fraunhofer created the MP3 format, which went on to revolutionise the world of digital audio. Many of the LLM foundational science came from European scientists.
However, when it comes to ones to turning science into products, the USA seems to have an edge quite often.
It’s just not as mono-dimensional as GP framed it.
The EU's concern is less "is it technically possible?" and more whether Google's licensing and commercial agreements discourage effective competition.
In particular:
- Google forced every manufacturer to have search and chrome on every android phone if they wanted access to Google Play. No technical reason, just forcing their position. This is why Samsung, despite investing on their browser, was still forced to ship with Chrome. Browser competition on mobile was rigged by default.
- Manufacturers signed agreements making it de facto impossible to ship Android forks not approved by Google. If you want Play Services, you can't ship a fork Android did not approve, no matter whether you're Sony or Samsung. Again, no technical reasons, just forcing their hand.
- Google paid manufacturers so Google Search was going to be the only search option on that phone, preventing competition.
None of these practices make the landscape better for the user or incentivize competition when the game is rigged at contract level.
As for the rest of your post: Europe (but also Japan or South Korea or pretty much the whole world) does not enjoy the corporate laws, abundance of capital and risk prone mentality the US does. Those are problems. Over regulation (or better, inconsistent one across EU) is also a plague.
But that's unrelated with the fact that companies living in monopolies commercially abuse their positions. US regulators themselves have found the practice of paying Apple to ship Google as default search engine to be questionable.
The point of those agreements is to make sure those phone manufacturers didn't basterdize android with their garbage crapware like they all want to do. Google is actually protecting the average user in this situation by mandating some standards. They could simply lock Android down as closed source forever and move on from all of this.
Nothing's stopping them from doing that, but you're incredibly naive if you think they're "protecting the average user" out of the goodness of their heart.
> The point of those agreements is to make sure those phone manufacturers didn't basterdize android with their garbage crapware
You're naive if you think these deals were about protecting the user. It's a commercial and strategic play to make sure users end up on Google's core business products.
Manufacturers get a free OS they don't need to develop, Google gets their core business products in every user's hands as default.
They didn't develop an open source browser and OS for any other reason than money.
And they pay (Apple, Mozilla, etc) or commercially force the usage of those products wherever they can.
Yes, looks like the classic where everyone is at legal risk and they're going to selectively use it. The article also mentions individual countries' digital services taxes where they dropped the pretense.
> 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.
Perhaps believable, had it not survived eight years of litigation ending at the ECJ, or had there been some informal "pay up or else" demand attached, neither of which is true.
> Perhaps believable, had it not survived eight years of litigation ending at the ECJ
You're of course making the assumption the ECJ isn't biased towards ruling in favor of the EU in these disputes...
> or had there been some informal "pay up or else" demand attached, neither of which is true.
Isn't there a formal "pay up or else" demand attached? If Google doesn't pay, then what? I would take this a lot more seriously if the EU said "look, these violations are so egregious we simply can't trust you to operate in the EU anymore." No, they're OK with Google apparently not changing much of anything and being allowed to continue operating so long as they pay the fine first.
Do you mean they were asked in 2018 to comply, but not fined until they refused? I only see things like https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-alphabet-inc-antitrust... where they were fined in 2018 for anti-competitive practices going back to 2011, and since then changed behavior while trying to appeal.
The fine is not a one-and-done like fines are levied against corporations in the USA, most fines against corporations in the EU can be levied many times if the infringing behaviour is not corrected.
> 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.
“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?
You mean un-uninstallable crapware? This has at least a technical reason: Preloaded apps are part of the read-only system image and cannot be removed. "Disabling" should be equivalent, though.
It's not just preloaded apps, though. A few months ago I prepared a Lenovo tablet for an elderly friend, and if I had just tapped through the OOBE wizard (which presented pages upon pages of optional crapware) without reading, it would have installed 20-30 preselected "popular" apps, mostly games. I had to manually deselect every single one.
Even getting Amazon tablet that’s specifically designed for children comes with useless apps you just cannot get rid off, because they need to shove all their services into your mouth hoping you will accidentally swallow at least some of them. There used to be time when every company had a mission statement and some (sometimes silly) ambitions, today it’s all just money, nothing else, not even a pretending anymore.
None of those companies have the market power Google does.
This is really important. Unless it's straight up fraud or a safety issue, most market participants are totally allowed to ship garbage (who are we to judge?).
At some point when monopoly power tests start turning true then the bar is raised (as it should be).
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?
Because it's factually and flagrantly incorrect.
> Contempt of court is a legal offense that occurs when an individual or organization interferes with the administration of justice or willfully disrespects a court's authority, dignity, or orders.
You can disagree with the judgment as long as you follow the orders.
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.
Exactly. Give an inch and they'll want a mile, or in this case mm and km.
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.
You are an hypocrit: spam from an email address with an IP literal?
> 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.
You did truncate the context: you have to add email addresses with IP literals. This does change everything.
google is more than anything else (and this has been a few years) following its agenda at making email just a private garden of messaging with a few "chosen ones" of his friends (selection based on $$$). They are presuming de facto anybody who does not fit their technical agenda to be a spammer. This is the same with their "web" with their web engines from the 'whatwg cartel'.
An IP/domain becomes a source of spam until it does. And with their billions of $$$, I guess they have an army of guys to handle that properly: trying hard enough to notify the owner with data, etc. Yes, this is 99% of the work which has to be done at gmail.
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.
I'm not sure I follow; they were given 90 days to comply with certain requirements from the EU, which they did, and the fine was something extra that took a while to resolve in the courts.
> alleged anti-competitive practices
I'd say that with court ruling these are no longer alleged. Right?
If you're in the EU, sure
> 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.
Good start. Nowhere nearly enough but a good start nonetheless.
"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."
> 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.
This already happened. The US government cut off a judge at the international criminal court from her Office365 account because she was pressing a war crimes case against Benjamin Netanyahu.
It's the reason why in the last year you've seen multiple European governments very quickly build an escape hatch against US tech.
We all expect that you'll use our dependency on US services as a weapon, you've already done so, so we're phasing you out. It'll take decades to repair the lost trust in US digital services among the governments of Europe.
If it's the same woman I'm thinking of Office365 is underselling it a bit - she's fully sanctioned by the US. She can't use debit/credit cards, any Apple/Google device or service, Amazon/eBay, etc. She's completely digitally crippled by sanctions. And she's one of several people.
As a European I really hope we create an entirely separate homegrown tech sector, and fast.
Yes, I'm aware of the rest of it, I just didn't feel it particularly relevant to the discussion.
Yes, I'm with you. I'm grateful that most of the news I hear about this is relatively positive. I'm actually kind of in awe of how fast it's all moving. For all the talk about slow Europeans, that single ICC action seems to have launched a ton of initiatives.
I call bullshit on the "very quickly" part there. It'll take a decade to phase out. And some don't seem interested at all (my employer for instance).
> take a decade
More like several decades and 100s of billions of euros which nobody is going to pay. It will simply never happen and right now all the politicians are just quietly waiting for this whole thing to blow over.
> More like several decades and 100s of billions of euros which nobody is going to pay
And now you know where that $4.7B fine will be spent. Why spend your own money when you can spend someone else’s?
It isn't Google's money if they wrongfully profited it, and are fined. It belongs to the victims. The government of the victims will invest it in making the victims less dependent on the perpetrator? Well played.
In general, yes, but I disagree with "It isn't Google's money". But it is. It's right there in their accounts. Possession is 9/10ths of the law as they say.
In the end it is legal tender, owned by the government of said legal tender. But Google owes another legal entity money. They're in debt to that other legal entity, and they should pay said debt (pay the fine). It is actually 4.7 billion EUR.
And on top of all of the above, there's another reason Google owes us money. Google does not even pay fair taxes.
Why is that? Corporations approach governments looking for hand outs and governments give them. It's the politicians that should be the recipient of your ire. If corporations are using loopholes, politicians should close the loopholes. You're hating the player for playing the game. It's not like theGoog is refusing to pay taxes. They've just spent their money on lawyers to find out how to not owe as much tax as you think they should.
I'm not a fan of theGoog or any bigTech, but you especially seem to be taking this rather personally.
> Why spend your own money when you can spend someone else’s?
Funny you would say that in defence of giant mega-corporations, externalising huge chunks of the cost they generate to the rest of the world. OpenAI decided to run the largest social experiment humanity ever undertook without asking any of us. Microsoft is powering up old nuclear power plants to cover for their AI data center consumption. Apple is manufacturing in foreign countries under awful conditions so every American child can own an iPhone. Big Tech made San Francisco unaffordable even for well-compensated software engineers. Facebook actively made children addicted to push more apps.
We all, as a society, have to suffer through the effects of reckless greed from American companies (and we didn't even talk about Big Oil or Big Pharma yet!) Just because nobody bothers to put a price tag on it doesn't mean there isn't one.
The EU doesn't fine companies as a way to generate revenue, but because they break local laws and cause damages to someone.
> Funny you would say that in defence of giant mega-corporations,
It is funny because that's not what I was saying. At. All.
The reply was a reply to the question of why EU countries just hired US based companies instead of developing their own. The response to that was that it would cost too much money "100s of billions of euros". Now the EU is coming up with their own versions of things like Office and what not. I was merely suggesting that they have found a way to offset that "100s of billions of euros" by fining companies billions of euros.
I feel dumb having to explain it.
I definitely started out typing out the plural, but thought I should temper my words a bit for some reason.
They will likely take a decade, but only because this isn't top priority. They could be out in a month if it was important to them. The alternatives exist, there is just a lot of pain in switching that they can avoid by doing this over a decade.
Some are more exposed than others.
I don't doubt there are some, but GP made it sound like every European company and institution is working feverishly on it, which just cannot be true.
A lot more people are working on it than I expected there to be.
It's the one time where the European Union's inability to advertise what they're doing is paying off in their favor. Then again, good, the operation of government isn't meant to be done through a tweet. We should resist the corruption of government to idiotic soundbites on platforms owned by American billionaires.
> In the cases provided for by the law and with provisions for compensation, private property may be expropriated for reasons of general interest.
Excerpt from article 42 of the Italian constitution. This would cover, for instance, the entire eu-south-1 availability zone in AWS. I'm sure that other member states have their own provisions and you need to keep in mind that Google/Amazon/Microsoft employees in the relevant countries would predictably comply with local authorities, not obey a foreign power trying to collapse their governments.
If your power comes from saying "I own that", it's crucial not to enter complete hostility with nations, the only entities who can reply, "Says who?".
That kind of thing is very much a nuclear option, though. Firstly because the state that does it needs to be very confident it can operate the asset it seizes without overseas support, and secondly because doing so tends to be bad for business in your country in general, as people understandibly get nervous about having stuff in places that have shown a willingness to just take it.
Completely agreed, it is rational to de-escalate by several steps (e.g. to have cloud providers "spontaneously" decide to split into different, actually autonomous but still privately owned, corps, which in turn is a threat to returns of the home corp so they would put pressure on the US government not to escalate this far politically, and so on).
It's just that the possibility of the "nuclear option" works as a deterrent.
The nuclear option would be the US pulling cloud services over night. This would be the counterstrike, not the initial nuke launch.
EU can live fine without US cloud services, and it's not very dependent on AI at the moment. If access would be cut off, companies would just switch to other solutions, which BTW are already there. The question is more how much time they would have to switch and adapt. An unannounced zero-day cut off would be of course harmful for a while (days, weeks, maybe months), but on most parts could be probably solved in a short timeframe for the important parts.
Also, EU (and probably most parts of the world) are already switching away at this moment already.
The EU is doing the exact opposite of switching away from US tech. In fact they just announced that the new EU digital ID wallet is going to require Google or Apple device attestation.
That is two US companies in complete control of the fundamental digital ID system of the entire EU.
Everything they say about "digital sovereignty" is performative nonsense because they simply have no other options and no capacity to build replacements themselves.
This is bad largely due to the effect on individuals who may find themselves banned from such services with no due process. As a threat to the EU's sovreignty as a whole it's one of the easier things to move away from if it gets weaponised (in comparison to cloud services that are intertwined with a country's economy and bureaucracy)
they did not "just announce" that, it was a rather technical decision several layers down, made a while ago. Sure, some things are not easily created without US companies but the overall tendency is pretty clear and it is: reduce absolute dependencies.
The EU and most of the rest of the world.
The UK is talking about sovereign AI but doing much the same with pushing reliance on Apple and Google.
I wish.
The EU could be fine but it's just not doing it. Companies in the EU and even EU institutions do keep on using US SaaS, from Microsoft to AWS to Oracle institutions and companies claim they want sovereignty but when it's time to deploy their IT plan, they just don't.
TL;DR: in theory yes, in practice it is just not happening at scale.
If they did that, their pension system (in huge parts built on stock) would collapse. The American tech market is largely saturated, and needs room to grow. The EU is a market of almost 500 million people with a lot of money. The US simply cannot ignore it.
You can do that, once, if you want to trigger an avalanche of realignment away from the U.S.
Not only would you lose the 450 million odd EU customers, but the rest of the world will reconsider doing business with you as well.
This is not a flip the switch tomorrow hypothetical. The fallout of such an action would be huge for everyone, including the US stock market.
Here in Europe, every government and major corporation have recently added their dependance on US platforms to their risk management taxonomy. For the (unlikely) scenario you mention, for the scenario that their company/government somehow runs afoul of the US goverment and this is used as leverage, for espionage reasons, and for other reasons that may have already been in their risk overview (data privacy, compliance, etc) but were seen as manageable but are no longer so.
For some anecdotes: My former employer just moved off of AWS to a EU provider and will likely also move away from Google Cloud for their internal needs, my current employer has started evaluating moving off of Azure at the request of our clients (though they dismissed the idea of moving off of Office 365 internally), and my partner's company (a large corporate) has started prioritizing a transition plan away from AWS.
What do you believe is so unique about US cloud providers? True, it's a de facto triopoly of American-incorporated businesses, but then what? It's not like computing is alien tech that only the US can own. The US doesn't even make the chips. It's commodity at scale with a bit of convenience sold at a steep premium.
> Huge parts of the public and private sector could collapse.
temporarily yes, then EU will be able to build them on its own.
But what would also collapse is trust in all US companies, whole world will start working on their own solutions, no more AWS/GCP/Azure hegemony in the world. Everyone would close their internet, just like China did and develop own solutions
> Huge parts of the public and private sector could collapse.
Today, yes.
The possibility of this, combined with how seriously Greenland was taken, means the EU is collectively saying "as a matter of urgency, we need strategic independence from the US".
This will take a while. Ironically, access to AI will make the transition much faster.
However, this is currently mutual interdependence: if the US actually cut off non-AI cloud to the EU, the US would screw over one of their major suppliers thus preventing them from supplying stuff, and leave itself entirely at the mercy of China. If it cut off AI to the EU, there goes a big market for tokens and the current data centre supply looks even more sketchy than its effect on electricity prices has already made it look. (But one bit of good news is that US electricity prices would come down).
Yes, think about that and how the shares would drop in an instant.
Good thing european governments and industries start to work on real technological and financial independence. It is high time for cutting ties with a country that is acting as irrational and self centered as the usa.
We would build our own alternatives. Russia is a much smaller market (120 million people) and they have their own tech companies.
> We would build our own alternatives.
Right, and we haven’t because we just don’t wanna? The gap between US/China and the EU in AI is becoming wider by the day.
Russia has like 3-4 large tech companies (Sber, Yandex, VK, and maybe Ozon). And they completely rely on foreign hardware. I don’t even want to imagine how could Russia start building frontier AI in these circumstances.
> Right, and we haven’t because we just don’t wanna? The gap between US/China and the EU in AI is becoming wider by the day.
We've repeatedly built things, they often get bought by US companies. This doesn't necessarily even involve them moving office, as for example Deep Mind was founded in the UK (while it was in the EU) and is still there (HQ: London; research offices in France & Germany so still in EU too) despite now being owned by Alphabet.
> Right, and we haven’t because we just don’t wanna?
We have, they get bought by American companies as their exit strategy.
If American companies decide to shutdown access then there's no pressure from the behemoths to stamp out competition, it would just be natural that alternatives take over since the market clearly exists and without American tech companies filling that market it would be pretty easy for alternatives to grow.
We hadn't because we didn't have to.
> Right, and we haven’t because we just don’t wanna?
The EU hasn't because European investors are shy about deploying capital. If you look at European weapons and aerospace, it's clear there's no particular technical or capability barrier.
There was a very real barrier to building tech companies. We couldn't listen to Spotify at work during the time people seriously called Berlin the "SV of Europe" (our office was in the neighborhood called "SV Backyard"). Why? We didn't have enough bandwidth, and the wait time for fiber was measured in years.
I remember 2008 very differently, was this a very localized Berlin problem?
From anecdotes around me now I live in Berlin, I believe it extended at least into Brandenburg.
Even in 2019, some coworkers were complaining that the best offer from their landline company (in one of the small villages just outside the Berlin city limits) was dialup.
Berlin's reputation post reunification has been "poor but sexy".
Nah, I’m talking 2016. I have no idea about commercial internet outside Berlin. But my residential connection in suburbs of Aachen in 2015 was copper.
It's actually pretty sad for the EU that the biggest tech company names on the continent are all Russian.
Not that "largest by market cap" says much, given that it corresponds to "oh look a monopoly" as much as it does "innovation and real growth" (and also "bubble"), but you're wrong.
Market caps of Russian examples from above:
Sber: $84 bn - https://companiesmarketcap.com/sberbank/marketcap/
Yandex: RUB 1327B (~= $17 bn) - https://tradingeconomics.com/yndx:rm:market-capitalization
VK: RUB 176.7B (~= $2.3 bn) - https://smart-lab.ru/q/VKCO/MSFO/market_cap/en/
Ozon: $8.9 bn - https://companiesmarketcap.com/ozon/marketcap/
Market caps of bigger EU tech firms:
- https://civixplorer.com/post/most-valuable-eu-companies-mark...ASML, SAP, ARM, Spotify, ...
How do you define biggest? Can't be by market cap.
Don’t believe everything you read in Pravda.
It's a culture thing. There are even smaller markets like Taiwan that developed industries EU didn't. Western EU countries are very risk averse, anti-business and has too conservative hierarchy to develop this kind of culture. You can see it as early as in school system where the focus is on rising the floor while forgetting about the ceiling.
They'll blame it on WWII but both South Korea and Japan were similarly devastated and both managed to develop world-class technology industries in the ensuing decades.
Europe is the outlier and it's pointing to something fundamentally wrong that it was only able to produce a handful of interesting technology companies in all these years.
You're just blinded by propaganda. Europe has produced thousands upon thousands of interesting technology companies - it's just that very few of them are information technology companies.
Claiming that something is wrong with Europe in general because it didn't produce interesting technology is an utterly ridiculous and uninformed take.
I think it is a marketing failure. The web was mentioned before, but ARM, Wifi, Bluetooth, the CD, all European inventions. There are core parts of the internet that are completely dominated by a European company but nobody knows. If we go back to the past, everyone had a Nokia phone at some point. There are services companies like Booking and Spotify. Then Linux and Python are from Europe as well.
And achieve what exactly? EU being dependent on US cloud services also mean EU being a big part of their revenue. Parts of EU public and private sector may collapse but they will also switch to their own alternatives, the broken trust and lost revenue on the other hand will definitely not be recovered by US companies.
> Imagine if the US, behind closed doors of course, threatened to cut off all cloud services
That would be the single best thing that could happen to the EU.
I think people would be surprised by how quickly European and international companies and governments can rid themselves of the American tech stack. They use this stuff because it's convenient, solid, and cheap, not because it's the only option.
> Huge parts of the public and private sector could collapse.
Yes, both in the EU and the US, initially. It would also force the EU to finally invest in its own tech stack and end the US's ability to sell software globally.
People seem to believe that America's global economic dominance is a law of nature that will never change, regardless of what the US does. But it's not. There is no American exceptionalism, other than what America worked for.
If you continually kick your customers in the face, they'll eventually stop being your customers.
Which is when we'd enter economic warfare between the EU and US, something which no one wants to experience. If that were realistically threatened, and we've seen motions in that direction, it's about political and economical survival and we'd see a massive loss of market for US tech.
It would hurt the EU more than it would hurt us and they're in denial about it.
> It would hurt the EU more than it would hurt us
So what? It will hurt everyone, but end result will be that US companies won't be able to sell in other parts of the world, because everyone will have own standards, own solutions, new regulations will come up about data residency, which will require using unknown AWS alternative in a small country and even if you are willing to maintain 150 Datacenter across different countries, companies will be afraid of using US tech, to one day lose access to their data
Let's say you are right on this. What's the point of hurting yourself? There would be no meaningful benefit.
Oh man you wanna talk about benefits? I actually don't even think the US should have given the internet to the world. It's basically been one giant gift. Sure it's created a situation where we sell the tech both as software and hardware and that has allowed us to redirect wealth from the world to the US however in hindsight it's making our enemies stronger and allowing technology like drones to proliferate. An alternate reality where we didn't do that would be a reality where people would be smuggling American tech to their countries the way they did with jeans in the 80s. We basically decided to make a bunch of money on the tech over the past 50 years but it's actually created a situation where our soldiers are gonna be dodging drones in the next big conflict where as if we never allowed advanced chips to proliferate around the world we would be sitting high on tech that is basically magic to the rest of the world. In hindsight I'm not sure if it was a good idea.
If there's one thing all historians agree on, it's that collaboration has always been the winning strategy in human history.
If the US had never opened up their innovations to the world, they wouldn't have been able to extract the gargantuan amount of money from it they did. If the US had not instated the Marshall plan after WW2, there would never have been as close ties between Europe and the US. If American companies hadn't outsourced much of the manufacturing to poorer countries, the standard of living would be a lot lower than it is today. If USAID hadn't improved and saved the life of millions of humans, American companies wouldn't be met with such universal acceptance and opportunities to sell their goods as they have.
It's not like the US isn't massively benefitting of their investments in the rest of the world. But it sure looks like you're pretty aligned with the current administration there, so we'll both see how this plays out in real time.
Hold on. Some people and institutions in the US are massively benefitting from what other Americans gave and are giving to the world. What they sometimes have been forced to give.
I don't think I implied they aren't, care to elaborate?
So whether these things are good depends on if you are on the winning or losing side of the equation. If your job gets out sourced it's a negative. If your stock shares increase in value then it's a positive.
> Oh man you wanna talk about benefits? I actually don't even think the US should have given the internet to the world. It's basically been one giant gift.
You didn't give the internet to the world. The world made it by copying stuff you had no power to prevent them copying.
Also, the rest of the world had other networks, the US version (TCP/IP) just happened to win enough mindshare to replace e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coloured_Book_protocols
The UK alternative was only phased out in favour of TCP/IP after the world wide web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee while working at the famously-not-American CERN. The American attempt at the web was Gopher: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)
> An alternate reality where we didn't do that would be a reality where people would be smuggling American tech to their countries the way they did with jeans in the 80s.
Only thing we might care to smuggle (if anything) would be the software, and it's not like a DVD is hard to hide. Nobody would be smuggling out hardware, we would not need to, we would not care to. And even that's a stretch, we're also quite capable of writing our own software, sometimes you buy our companies because they're better at it than yours.
> We basically decided to make a bunch of money on the tech over the past 50 years but it's actually created a situation where our soldiers are gonna be dodging drones in the next big conflict where as if we never allowed advanced chips to proliferate around the world we would be sitting high on tech that is basically magic to the rest of the world. In hindsight I'm not sure if it was a good idea.
You say that like other countries don't make stuff. It's often the other way around, because we're as smart and capable as you, despite what you may think, and even when things have been invented "in" the US, it has often been by an immigrant who in your alternate timeline would not have gone to the US.
The chips are made by machines sold by EU companies; batteries and brushless motors? China; IMU? Japan, Germany, Taiwan; even GPS, despite the US one being the famous one, has alternatives of GLONASS (Soviet), BeiDou, and Galileo.
TBH, the only thing that America genuinely brought to the table was the interaction of the first amendment and cryptography. Insufficient cryptography, insufficient security, e-commerce remains limited.
If we're on the topic of hardware, let's remember that a few years before ARPANET, Olivetti was a powerhouse rivaling IBM. The ELEA mainframe came out with a competitive design in 1957.
One of the reasons why things did not pan out is that, three years later, 58 years old Adriano Olivetti died of a heart attack on the train to Switzerland. Even discounting the theory of a CIA assassination (which has, nevertheless, been floated around), that was a butterfly-flapping-its-wings moment; without pressure from the US government wanting to maintain technological supremacy, he might have been under less stress and survived.
In that scenario, maybe the same international visitors who currently visit Milan for luxury fashion would also haul back high tech from the so-called Valle del Silicio stretching towards Turin along the Fondo river.
Or, of course, another one between a million different outcomes could have happened. Human creativity and inventiveness finds a way to flourish everywhere.
Wow, I'm genuinely surprised. I don't think I've even heard of them before now, despite growing up in the 80s and 90s in the UK. ZX Spectrum, BBC Micros, Acorns, but not Olivetti.
Apparently Olivetti controlled Acorn Computers (of ARM cpu fame) so maybe such things also contributed.
Funny you mention that. For me (Dutch), growing up in same time, Wimbledon and Roland Garros are the two main tennis tournaments. When these were on TV, Olivetti brand was prominently mentioned at the scoreboards. I always imagined they were a brand who made the computers used for the scoreboards, but otherwise had no idea what that brand meant. You wouldn't 'Google' or 'Wikipedia' it. You saw it, you asked your parents (or other peers), and they'd either know or not.
> where as if we never allowed advanced chips to proliferate around the world we would be sitting high on tech that is basically magic to the rest of the world
Much of America's technological progress is a direct result of them selling tech to the rest of the world and becoming the world's tech hub. Do you think that not selling anything to anyone outside the US would have had zero impact on tech progress across the world?
> I actually don't even think the US should have given the internet to the world.
Then European countries would have continued using their own networks.
> It's basically been one giant gift.
And Europa gifted their own part to it. Remember, World Wide Web originates from CERN in Switzerland, made by a brit.
You’re dodging their question.
That's why our relationship is ending.
It would hurt, for a while. Then people would wake up and slowly better solutions would appear. Not unlike post-Trump NATO. But the US would have lost its leader position and a large market.
I think the EU needs a kick under the ass to stop its comfortable inertia.
Not anymore :)
Humanity has lived for thousands of years without cloud and AI services. We can definitely live without those. In fact, considering the damage that is being done to the environment (and thus ourselves) in name of those services, we’d very likely be better off without them in the first place.
A large reason US services have such a presence in Europe is that their flagrant disregard for rules and the pursuit of profit at all costs gives them an unfair advantage. If those US companies cut off their services, in the long run the ones in the EU would have the room to expand within the rules. That’s the opposite of the doomsday scenario you’re describing. Though of course an abrupt cut would be momentarily disruptive, countries in the EU are already taking steps to reduce reliance on US services (for example: LaSuite).
The EU would counter that threat with the anti-coercion instrument. Shut Trump up really fast when he was last talking about annexing Greenland.
Cloud services would hurt because of the data stored there. Suddenly being cut off your own data is obviously an upheaval.
It also shows how untrustworthy a partner is when this threat is thrown around casually. Also why talks of tech sovereignty are a lot more prevalent now.
If you brought that up 10 years ago, people looked at you as if you were a crank conspiracy theorist. Now everyone takes it seriously. Maybe a decade from now this will have been addressed.
AI services are a lot less important than you presume. Cut access to it and the workd keeps moving as usual.
> 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.
I think the EU member states would declare it a matter of national emergency and nationalize the relevant assets, with every other country these American companies sell to taking notes and considering doing the same pre-emptively, providing a huge investment boost to EU tech companies (and almost certainly China) while tanking the US economy, and poisoning the ability of the Americans to sell to Europe for the next hundred years.
You don't win the opium wars by threatening to cut off the supply of opium.
The EU can certainly do a lot, with the exception of producing their own major tech companies.
The end goal shouldn't be "monopolies, but European", the end goal should be no monopolies.
It's funny how people complain that the EU has no Google, when Google should never have been allowed to exist in the first place. The current tech dystopia is a direct result of the US failing to enforce its antitrust laws.
Major tech companies are a bug, not a feature.
Is ASML "European" or a "monopoly" under your definition as one can't be both?
Why can't it be both? After all GP did not give any definitions. He simply and clearly stated:
> The end goal shouldn't be "monopolies, but European", the end goal should be no monopolies.
*ad companies
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
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.
Good. Now, if only they also fought against developer integrity..
https://keepandroidopen.org
"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
> 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..
...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?
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
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.
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
EU is not the reason we got Edge, it's just that IE was thoroughly beaten by Chrome. So they made Chrome 2.
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.
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?
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...
Fine with me. You think the EU should change its regulations because foreign companies might not release some features directly? sounds like a non issue
> You think the EU should change its regulations because foreign companies might not release some features directly?
I don't think anything about the EU, I don't live there. Just commenting on what the most likely outcome is going to be.
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?
I think you might need to reconsider how open Android actually is given the recent moves.
You don't even know how good you have it. With incentives like this what company would make anything open in the future? You're punishing them for it. They're gonna make it like iOS precisely because of rulings like this.
> You don't even know how good you have it
ie Quit complaining about the abuse you know about or there might be more of it.
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
> They're gonna make it like iOS precisely because of rulings like this.
And then what? It’s not like iOS is exempt from the rules. See all the trouble they’re having with the DMA.
I'm sorry, but what does "pre-installation deals with smartphone makers" have to do with being open?
> Google made Android open source for free
And Hitler built the highways in Germany. What does that even prove? They can still abuse Android for vendor lock-in, or as a sales funnel to their commercial offerings, or as a data source for a myriad of things users did never really consent to.
> As usual Europe can't innovate so just taxes people out of their market entirely.
Yawn. Last time I looked, big tech is still wholly present all across the EU, only that I have the option to install apps from alternative stores on my iPhone. Also, the EU as an institution isn't the same thing as European companies. Go check the machines in any factory near you, and I can pretty much guarantee you'll find a German one in it.
> Have you guys ever considered making your own operating system?
You might want to look up where Linus Torvalds created Linux.
> Go check the machines in any factory near you, and I can pretty much guarantee you'll find a German one in it.
It is always interesting to see how underestimated the EU is in terms of manufacturing and pharma for example, they're unsung and not always glamourous industries, but nobody does them like the EU.
The tech innovation does happen more in the US, there has always been simply more private capital thrown around there and thats fine. Comparing the EU and the US in terms of economic activities and procedures is a futile exercise. They're just not the same, and thats by design.
> You might want to look up where Linus Torvalds created Linux.
He also immediately relocated to the US and made the Linux Foundation an American company though.
That still doesn’t take away from the point that innovation does happen in Europe; the first version of Linux was created and released while he was at the university of Helsinki. If you want another example, Fraunhofer created the MP3 format, which went on to revolutionise the world of digital audio. Many of the LLM foundational science came from European scientists.
However, when it comes to ones to turning science into products, the USA seems to have an edge quite often. It’s just not as mono-dimensional as GP framed it.
The EU's concern is less "is it technically possible?" and more whether Google's licensing and commercial agreements discourage effective competition.
In particular:
- Google forced every manufacturer to have search and chrome on every android phone if they wanted access to Google Play. No technical reason, just forcing their position. This is why Samsung, despite investing on their browser, was still forced to ship with Chrome. Browser competition on mobile was rigged by default.
- Manufacturers signed agreements making it de facto impossible to ship Android forks not approved by Google. If you want Play Services, you can't ship a fork Android did not approve, no matter whether you're Sony or Samsung. Again, no technical reasons, just forcing their hand.
- Google paid manufacturers so Google Search was going to be the only search option on that phone, preventing competition.
None of these practices make the landscape better for the user or incentivize competition when the game is rigged at contract level.
As for the rest of your post: Europe (but also Japan or South Korea or pretty much the whole world) does not enjoy the corporate laws, abundance of capital and risk prone mentality the US does. Those are problems. Over regulation (or better, inconsistent one across EU) is also a plague.
But that's unrelated with the fact that companies living in monopolies commercially abuse their positions. US regulators themselves have found the practice of paying Apple to ship Google as default search engine to be questionable.
The point of those agreements is to make sure those phone manufacturers didn't basterdize android with their garbage crapware like they all want to do. Google is actually protecting the average user in this situation by mandating some standards. They could simply lock Android down as closed source forever and move on from all of this.
Nothing's stopping them from doing that, but you're incredibly naive if you think they're "protecting the average user" out of the goodness of their heart.
> The point of those agreements is to make sure those phone manufacturers didn't basterdize android with their garbage crapware
You're naive if you think these deals were about protecting the user. It's a commercial and strategic play to make sure users end up on Google's core business products.
Manufacturers get a free OS they don't need to develop, Google gets their core business products in every user's hands as default.
They didn't develop an open source browser and OS for any other reason than money.
And they pay (Apple, Mozilla, etc) or commercially force the usage of those products wherever they can.
> 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?
Yes, looks like the classic where everyone is at legal risk and they're going to selectively use it. The article also mentions individual countries' digital services taxes where they dropped the pretense.
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.
Two words: Google Play.
What about Google Play, did the EU tell Google not to preinstall the Play store or else get fined?
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.
Sure, if one doesn't like the tariffs then they can leave
That seems like a corcular argument.
Is this not chiefly a complaint about the rules? Saying "if Google doesn't like the rule it can leave" is a non argument.
That's literally what is happening here. It's a shakedown. Nothing more.
> It's a shakedown. Nothing more.
Perhaps believable, had it not survived eight years of litigation ending at the ECJ, or had there been some informal "pay up or else" demand attached, neither of which is true.
> Perhaps believable, had it not survived eight years of litigation ending at the ECJ
You're of course making the assumption the ECJ isn't biased towards ruling in favor of the EU in these disputes...
> or had there been some informal "pay up or else" demand attached, neither of which is true.
Isn't there a formal "pay up or else" demand attached? If Google doesn't pay, then what? I would take this a lot more seriously if the EU said "look, these violations are so egregious we simply can't trust you to operate in the EU anymore." No, they're OK with Google apparently not changing much of anything and being allowed to continue operating so long as they pay the fine first.
> No, they're OK with Google apparently not changing much of anything and being allowed to continue operating so long as they pay the fine first.
This is false. They were asked to:
- Stop tying Google Search and Chrome to the Play Store.
- Permit competing Android versions.
- Stop exclusivity incentives for Google Search.
- Provide genuine room for rival search engines and browsers.
This is separate from the fine and they were given 90 days in 2018 to comply with the above.
Do you mean they were asked in 2018 to comply, but not fined until they refused? I only see things like https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-alphabet-inc-antitrust... where they were fined in 2018 for anti-competitive practices going back to 2011, and since then changed behavior while trying to appeal.
> No, they're OK with Google apparently not changing much of anything and being allowed to continue operating so long as they pay the fine first.
But google did change how they do things thanks to this case thus making everything you wrote some anti-government fiction.
The fine is not a one-and-done like fines are levied against corporations in the USA, most fines against corporations in the EU can be levied many times if the infringing behaviour is not corrected.
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?