EU fines Google €890M for competition breaches over search and apps

SStevvo about 2 hours ago 74 commentsRead Article on theguardian.com

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Discussion (74 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

input_sh•about 1 hour ago

PDFs of decisions in case somebody wants to learn more:

Google Search decision: https://ec.europa.eu/competition/digital_markets_act/cases/2...

Android decision: https://ec.europa.eu/competition/digital_markets_act/cases/2...

dlahoda•about 1 hour ago

Skimmed (without AI).

Look like feature request lists.

warrenmiller•11 minutes ago

where does the money from these fines go to? to the people affected or just gov coffers?

victorbjorklund•5 minutes ago

Fines is for the government. Damages are for others (and sometimes govt).

dmos62•7 minutes ago

Goverment coffers fund public works.

timpera•31 minutes ago

The lengthy legal battle against these fines is going to be extremely interesting, especially on the Shopping/Hotels/Flights side since it is an extremely competitive market. I wonder if the lower EU court will keep its overly proactive approach despite the CJEU's reversals.

cmiles8•about 2 hours ago

For Google this is just like parking tickets to UPS. A cost of doing business in town.

riffraff•about 1 hour ago

this comment always comes up and it's _wrong_.

The goal of the regulation is to get the operators to comply, which they usually do after fines (EDIT: and litigations and whining, of course), because the costs of infractions are increased if they don't comply.

hirako2000•about 1 hour ago

The cost increases, but given the revenue Google generates how is that not just a tax?

I've never received a dollar from the EU as a victim. If the fines are moderate and big co keeps paying that's steady revenue for the EU institutions.

ben_w•about 1 hour ago

You appear to be arguing with the assumption that "get the operators to comply" is false.

These companies do, in fact, change behaviour in response to such actions; they may hire lawyers to find and exploit as many loopholes as they can, but they do ultimately comply. Even X ultimately complied in response to Brazil, and the EU is a much more important market for Google than Brazil ever was for X.

(Why would you expect to get dollars from an EU settlement?)

ivan_gammel•about 1 hour ago

It‘s nice to have such revenue to fund EU programs on digital sovereignty. European institutions give plenty of money to startups. You need an entry to the program, but when you are in, it can account for 50-70% or more in your early stage funding. And that‘s nice, because you keep more equity.

oblio•11 minutes ago

> I've never received a dollar from the EU as a victim.

There's this standard assumption that HN users are well educated.

Budgets don't work like that. It's not like the US federal government collects taxes and then deposits bags of gold coins on people's doorsteps.

Taxes, fines, etc are all collected and then they mostly go to a general, undifferentiated budget which is then divided by the various ministries (departments, whatever).

So yes, if you're a EU citizen you did get the back. As roads, hospitals, research funding.

cromka•42 minutes ago

> I've never received a dollar from the EU as a victim.

This isn't a class action.

Teever•14 minutes ago

If the cost of penalties doesn't exceed the cost of the offence then it's a winning move to offend.

The correct solution to this is to have fines scaled to the value of a company and an exponential doubling of fines for every re-offence that falls under the same category of crime with a cooling off period after a few years.

maccard•13 minutes ago

Because the goal isn’t to punish, it’s to get them to do what the law wants them to do. The fine is supposed to be a slap on the wrist - the actual desired behaviour is compliance

sajithdilshan•13 minutes ago

Not really, next time they just make a calculated risk decision, if the revenue from non-compliance is quite significant than the fine they have to pay later (if they have to, because I can imagine so many other cases which went unnoticed or didn't result in a fine) there is no reason for them to comply next time. It's not like they will be prohibited from doing a business after n number of compliance violations or fines

20k•about 1 hour ago

The issue is they usually comply with the specific law being broken, and then immediately stop complying with a different law

The goal should be to incentivise them to comply with the law as a whole, not to keep deliberately breaking different sections of the law to make profit above the level of fines

That's why people want the level of the fines to go up, to disincentivise the more broad lawbreaking

BadBadJellyBean•about 1 hour ago

The maximum fine the EU can impose with the DMA is "10 % of its total worldwide turnover in the preceding financial year". I think this would hurt even Google. And I think a billion dollars is not nothing.

dlahoda•about 1 hour ago

EU is just 1/20 of world population, why 10%? Seems dishonest. EU human valued 2x more of other human?

throw101010•38 minutes ago

The same principle evoked in the rest of this thread, if the penalties match exactly or are under the profits you can generate by injuring (in the legal sense) EU citizens it's not really a penalty but rather a cost of business. Plus markets are very interconnected, especially the digital ones.

EU competition law is not framed around valuing Europeans more than others, it is framed around protecting competition and market functioning inside the EU.

No need to moralize it and pretend anyone is using this "value" European humans more than other humans.

account42•42 minutes ago

The damages done that caused the fine are usually spread over multiple years.

BadBadJellyBean•41 minutes ago

Because they decided that way. Any other country in the world can decide the same thing but they don't have the same leverage as the EU. Google makes a lot of money in the EU.

dlahoda•about 1 hour ago

When fines became casual? Is it like taxes?

Tade0•about 1 hour ago

It is functionally just a form of tax that can't be offshored.

Corporations reliably break the law, the EU reliably enforces it.

I'm actually happy that this is the path the EU went, as there's a financial incentive to keep laws which benefit consumers.

spwa4•about 1 hour ago

No of course not. Ireland makes sure Google doesn't pay the minimum tax rate in the EU:

https://www.irishexaminer.com/business/companies/arid-417489...

€4.536bn on €86.6bn, or about 5% (which is one third of the amount Ireland promised in an international treaty they would charge ...)

Imustaskforhelp•44 minutes ago

well, Meta[0] is getting sued for a 1.4 Trillion$ by many US states combined if that interests you.

[0]: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/meta-says-it-s-staring-...

atoav•about 1 hour ago

fine = previous_fine²

stodor89•about 1 hour ago

Yep. If a train ticket costs 100 euro and the fine for freeloading is 5 euro, you'd be a fool to buy a ticket.

Don't blame Google for pushing boundaries. That's what people (and corpos) do in any competitive activity. Do blame our politicians for being incompetent and ill-meaning.

account42•41 minutes ago

Even if a train ticket costs 9 Euros and a fine is 60 Euros but you are almost never checked it quickly becomes cheaper to eat the fines.

dlahoda•about 1 hour ago

Nor. It more like train costs 15 and fine 5 if caught, and payed later.

firesteelrain•about 1 hour ago

Interesting to see how Google solves this in their UI because this isn’t a new problem: In 2017, they were fined for a similar problem with Shopping and the auction house concept to compete for placement was heavily scrutinized.

It’s all sort of intertwined now.

dlahoda•about 1 hour ago

Article has no reference how exactly fine was reasoned to be specific amount. Nor specific examples of violations.

robin_reala•33 minutes ago

Presumably that’s covered by article 30 of the law: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2022/1925/oj#art_30

jdw64•about 1 hour ago

I looked it up, and it seems that one issue is that Google, as a DMA gatekeeper, is supposed to provide anonymous data to other search services, but in practice, important parts of the actual data have been removed. The other issue is that competing AI services (not just Gemini) should also be allowed to run integrated app search.

Reading about it, both points seem valid to me.

BadBadJellyBean•36 minutes ago

Also apps need to be allowed to conduct their transactions outside the appstore and the appstore must allow them to advertise that.

benoau•19 minutes ago

And supposedly, "steering must be free". Or at least that's what they told Apple when fining €500M, I think today they both charge up to about 20% commission if apps use third party payments.

sylware•about 1 hour ago

google:

1 - restore interop with noscript/basic HTML browsers, stop favoring your 'whatwg cartel' web engine.

2 - gmail: restore interop with self-hosted SMTP servers without DNS (filtering on the IPv[46] literal from email address, this is stronger than SPF).

And there is probably more to add.

dlahoda•about 1 hour ago

What exactly monopoly is here?

hunglee2•about 2 hours ago

EU regulatory apparatus is maybe only part of the EU which is operates without obsequiousness to the US; on the one hand, this is necessary assertion of sovereignty, on the other you fear for the wider collateral damage which will inevitably ensue. Trump gonna respond to this with an escalation for sure

oaiey•about 1 hour ago

This is the fine after it got influenced by the political branch. It is a sign towards the companies that the law still bites and has to be adhered but reduced in this case to a level where it can be accepted by Google without major escalation in trade politics.

inigyou•about 1 hour ago

Trump has tariffed Canada 50% allegedly because of wildfires. He acts randomly, your actions don't matter either way.

louthy•about 1 hour ago

The Supreme Court has already said that blanket tariffs aren't allowed, so it's all bluster, as per usual.

inigyou•about 1 hour ago

The current government has defied the supreme court many times. It can do this because the police force is controlled by the government, not by the supreme court, so it won't arrest the government.

nubg•about 1 hour ago

This. There is one thing to have a lawful evil like Putin, who acts rationally. You know if you give him Crimea or whatever, he will stop bombing Kiev, or if you buy his gas, he will not suicide your politicians. With Trump, it's just like throwing a dice each time. It doesn't matter what you do, might as well do what's good for you.

inigyou•44 minutes ago

Actually you know that giving Putin Crimea won't stop him bombing Kiev, seeing as they gave him Crimea, and then he bombed Kiev to get Donetsk. He also suicided politicians while we were buying his gas.

"Once you pay the Danegeld, you'll never get rid of the Dane."

krisroadruck•about 1 hour ago

That's one read. For me it feels like practically (ASML, ARM, SAP not withstanding) their only "contribution" to tech is fines and exporting regulation. Sometimes this works out well (usb-c on iPhone), but most of the time it feels like if they want software, hardware, or the web to operate the way they want, perhaps they should try to actually produce some of it instead of being wholly reliant on others while also trying to dictate the terms. I also don't really feel like Trump will do anything, mainly because neither he, nor anyone else before him has any track record of attempting to block or slow EU overreach into US tech interests. Or maybe I'm just cranky and pessimistic.

cleansy•about 1 hour ago

Google, Apple and co are free not to do business in the EU. There is no "overreach". It's a 450M pop market with a high median per-capita income. There are many reasons why the EU has a rather small tech industry of its own, high up among them that the EU does comparatively little to protect its market compared to China where most US tech companies don't even bother to enter anymore. In China, if a fine like this hits you, you are not allowed to do business anymore until it's either paid or revoked in court. So yeah, the EU is very lenient on all accounts.

imp0cat•16 minutes ago

Is ASML really that insignificant?

mentalfist•about 2 hours ago

The diaper baby is so full of noise it's best to just ignore him

amazingamazing•about 1 hour ago

Speaking of competition how is the EU doing these days？feels like they missed the boat on pc, mobile, cloud and now AI.

jacekm•40 minutes ago

Pretty well, to the point where the US administration complains that there's a trade imbalance. (which is true for manufactured goods, false when we count in services)

sholladay•27 minutes ago

Mistral and ElevenLabs seem to be doing pretty well.

Also, here in the U.S., we’ve managed to screw up so badly on data privacy and basic rights that the EU has been systematically replacing their entire tech stack with sovereign components.

sunaookami•33 minutes ago

On a huge decline and the people are dissatisfied which leads to populist parties becoming more popular and the current governments trying to hold their power by passing draconian laws.

actionfromafar•12 minutes ago

Like the US.

transcriptase•20 minutes ago

It’s July, you won’t get a response from any European for at least another month

gear54rus•about 1 hour ago

Doing just fine calling most of the american insanity for what it is. Beating apple and the likes into submission and making them produce actually somewhat good products.

croes•about 1 hour ago

How is the US doing? Seems like the missed boat is the Titanic.

lnsru•about 1 hour ago

EU just killed all hardware startups with Cyber Resilience Act. It killed all the SMEs <50 employees in hardware area too. The lost income from European companies will be replaced with fines for US companies. That’s a strategy! Visionaries at work.

There is Wikipedia article about this topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyber_Resilience_Act

BadBadJellyBean•about 1 hour ago

I'm not familiar with the Act. Can you explain how it would kill theses startups?

lnsru•42 minutes ago

So basically you need 3 persons writing compliance documentation and taking care of cybersecurity. Basically another 200000€ personal cost year in low cost area. 250000€ or more in bigger cities. You have a microprocessor in your product and it’s done deal.

No big deal for corporations though. Buddy’s workplace hired new compliance department for this topic with 30 persons. That’s competition european way.

BadBadJellyBean•39 minutes ago

I'd rather have that than insecure hardware. It seems like it forces security to be a first class priority instead of an afterthought.

GJim•38 minutes ago

It kills those hardware startups that attempt to make money by selling us insecure crap?

See also, the GDPR killing startups that attempt to invade our privacy and exploit personal data without permission.

logicchains•25 minutes ago

And then there are no European hardware startups and your own options for hardware are Chinese and American, both with backdoors.