> 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.
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.
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.
> 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).
> 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
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?
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.
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.
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 over 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.
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).
> 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.
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.
“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...
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
> 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..
> 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".
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.
"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."
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
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
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.
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 high ways and 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.
Eh, if that’s the only thing you read from that comment, I’m not really interested in continuing the conversation.
The opportunities for tech are worse in the EU compared to the US, nobody denies that. But I don’t think the existence of Google and Apple is the only criterion of success to judge a continent on. The world has room for different approaches to things.
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.
> 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."
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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).
> 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
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.
We hadn't because we didn't have to.
It's actually pretty sad for the EU that the biggest tech company names on the continent are all Russian.
ASML, SAP, ARM, Spotify, ...
How do you define biggest? Can't be by market cap.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 over 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
*ad companies
Perhaps we don't want to participate in the US's AI economy?
> ...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.
“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...
>This judgment fails to recognize our significant investment to ensure Android remains open
I wonder if that could be considered contempt of courts.
Also, very rich given their very active attempts at nailing the door shut on every version of Android except for Android + Google
It's perfectly fine to disagree with a court's decision, what's the crime here?
Very related: https://f-droid.org/2026/07/01/adv-malware.html
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
> 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?
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.
> 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..
> 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".
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
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
Good. Now, if only they also fought against developer integrity..
https://keepandroidopen.org
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."
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
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.
> 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.
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...
>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
> 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
YES! The EU rocks!
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.
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.
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 high ways and 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.
Linus lives in Portland. Stop with the cope.
I was also born in Europe. There's a reason I don't live there.
Make your own operating systems. Your own Googles and Apples. Seriously. Do it. I would welcome some choice and competition.
Eh, if that’s the only thing you read from that comment, I’m not really interested in continuing the conversation.
The opportunities for tech are worse in the EU compared to the US, nobody denies that. But I don’t think the existence of Google and Apple is the only criterion of success to judge a continent on. The world has room for different approaches to things.
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.
> 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?
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.
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'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.
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.
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'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.
What’s next? ChatGPT needs to support Anthropic, DeepSeek, Google models in EU?
Let your local AI agent 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?