"By decision of 18 July 2018, the Commission fined Google for having abused its dominant position by imposing anticompetitive contractual restrictions on manufacturers of mobile devices and on mobile network operators, in some cases since 1 January 2011. Three types of restriction were identified:
1. those contained in ‘distribution agreements’, requiring manufacturers of mobile devices to pre-install the general search (Google Search) and (Chrome) browser apps in order to be able to obtain a licence from Google to use its app store (Play Store);
2. those contained in ‘anti-fragmentation agreements’, under which the operating licences necessary for the pre-installation of the Google Search and Play Store apps could be obtained by mobile device manufacturers only if they undertook not to sell devices running versions of the Android operating system not approved by Google;
3. those contained in ‘revenue share agreements’, under which the grant of a share of Google’s advertising revenue to the manufacturers of mobile devices and the mobile network operators concerned was subject to their undertaking not to pre-install a competing general search service on a predefined portfolio of devices."
#1 is right up the alley that busted Microsoft, though.
Even, rumors says that a future doz update may brick _your_ hardware...
Imagine Google had gone the Apple route of vertically integrating handset production, distribution and sale in the same way Apple did. If they had, there would be no antitrust issue, just like there isn't with Apple.
That seems weird.
How is having third-party manufacturers (well, really it's just Samsung now) create more antitrust issues than the Apple model? That just doesn't seem right.
Much like when Jobs called up all the book publishers and told them straight up "we gotta agree on one price among us, and remember we are doing this to harm Amazon who we both hate". Now this was a slam dunk prosecution!
Android made a two-player competition better, but it did so at the expenses of other competing OSs which could not gains foothold.
It's practically the story of BeOS vs Windows.
Kinda like how Uber was forced to accept they were an employer because they dictated work hours to drivers. Google is being forced to accept they have the potential to be a monopoly, and have abused that.
Differing relationships come with differing obligations. It appears fairly straightforward that its illegal in Europe to impose such obligations on other market players. If they couldn't abide by that they could have declined to do business in the continent. It's not really weird that different places have different rules.
So they haven't paid this fine for over four years now and there is no penalty for it? Just because they have deep enough pockets to afford expensive lawyers? I am sure not having to pay those four billion in fines for over four years more than pays the cost of these lawyers even if they eventually have to pay this fine, right?
I mean I am glad to see a big fine like this but surely the fines must go up every day it is left unpaid.
The point is, the alternative scenario involves more actors making different choices.
Apple has lots of partners, but Foxconn and Pegatron make phones for many companies.
I think in this alternate universe, Windows Phone may have actually succeeded.
Edit: One of the companies has a slightly less obnoxious website which also lists brands[1]
The only name I recognize there is Bosch, I've never had any of their tools but my perception is that they are a mid-tier brand. It would be great to see players like DeWalt, Milwaukee, and Makita do something like this.
Also, I've mentioned this on hn before, there is already the Cordless Alliance, which does exactly this.
Sadly, there's only a couple of useful-in-a-mainstream-sense brands in there: Mafell and Metabo. The rest are very niche.
Ryobi should not be praised for failure to innovate. They did not do this out of a desire to preserve compatibility, but rather out of cheapness.
I have cordless tools across a number of battery platforms and while it's convenient when they can be shared, it's ultimately not a big deal to have a few if another company makes a better tool. Tradespeople won't lock themselves in if the right tool is on a different platform.
Right, but home users will. I have 5 Ryobi One+ batteries, so there's no way I'll buy a battery-operated tool from a different brand, even if the tool itself is better/cheaper than the equivalent Ryobi product.
That means every device manufacturer will claim, even if the law requires that devices must all have the same plug, that a competitors device drew too much current, or charged their battery too fast/too slow/at too a low a temperature, and thats why performance sucks.
In reality, these technical problems could be solved - but device manufacturers will make the small hurdle into a big one when explaining why they can't all standardize.
Many of the packs that I've seen the inside of has balancing circuitry included.
Also worth considering these packs are charged separate from the tool. So this means the tool cannot control the charge rate etc.
Lastly, based on my luddite eyes, the difference between makita, milwaukee, bosch, dewalt and ryobi batteries seem to me to only be a different keying in the plastic mating parts. This suspicion is amplified when you consider that some of these brands are made by the same company.
We should all be glad that didn't happen with micro-USB or some of the worse connectors years ago, because we would still be stuck with them. USB-C was innovated by the market, not by EU bureaucrats.
Curious/out of the loop: any (unbiased?) examples?
Are you sure EU has "pretty good track record" with these fines of Google, FB, et al.? If anything, I'd say the EU puts a mild theatre every now and then, and gives the US giants a free pass otherwise.
>Are you sure EU has "pretty good track record" with these fines of Google, FB, et al.?
I'm also a European. But unfortunately resident in UK. So all those benefits and more are now lost to me. Still. At least we showed Johnny Foreigner who's boss, eh?
Probably because I work in tech in the US, but that has not been my view.
What was the fine that the EU put on VW for intentionally cheating on emissions standards? And how does that compare with the many fines Google has gotten?
Europe needs to make sure these tech giants get to keep just enough money that they don't pull out of europe entirely, but not much more.
Big fines are a start, but a better approach is taxation, since that takes away the regulatory risk for the companies.
Although it's not the most important thing in the world, forcing standardization through law is the opposite of giving consumers choices.
Case in point: The enforced standardising of mobile phone chargers has given consumers more choice of chargers to use with their phone. Thas proven quite useful in practice, e.g. when they leave the one that came with their device at home because they didn't expect to need it, or when the manufacturer's own brand is more expensive than an alternative, or if they have an old phone.
I remember before USB-C standardised phone power, when visiting someone the chance that they had a power supply you could use was very low, because each one used a different connector. Even different models from the same brand. If you went travelling at short notice, you might have to buy a second charger just to keep you going for a few days. That's no longer required. Over the years you would end up with a box full of incompatible chargers, all e-waste. I think I have about 10.
This particular consumer benefit didn't happen voluntarily among manufacturers (unlike, say, SIM cards), so forcing it has increased consumer choice in some useful respects.
I prefer Apple's lightning connector (even though I don't have an iPhone), and other connectors better than USB-C would surely emerge if allowed to, so I do see benefits in not enforcing a standard like that too strictly. But the situation before USB-C mobile power was less consumer choice not more, for consumers of almost every phone.
Standardisation of the former means we don't have to have half a dozen sockets on the wall because every domestic appliance manufacturer uses a different design plug... or have each of those sockets provide a different voltage because every appliance manufacturer opted for a different voltage.
Standardisation of the latter leads to waiting 15 years for your Trabant.
You gain choice of charger to use with your phone, which most people do want, especially when outside their home.
You will still have phones that come with “standard USB C” cables where some support different power delivery, data speeds (or not support data transfer at all), very few will support video over USB C (which is standardized), etc.
So still when the Android user with the cheap power only USB C cord moves over to the hypothetical iPhone 15 with USB C, they will still have to throw away their USB C cable that potentially doesn’t support high speed data or video over USB C. Both supported by todays iPads with USB C.
If the same mandate had gone through when it was first proposed, we would have been stuck with micro USB.
Except that it's still a perfectly fine cable for charging, which is what most people do with their cables?
To be sure the company won't be in trouble financially, their global revenue can cover the fine, but that doesn't stop the EU from potentially being a net loss for the company going forward. Abandoning the EU would be a drastic step, though. It's going to be interesting to see how they adapt to this. Another fine on this scale and I think they will pull out.
It's often very open to interpretation what constitutes a market, what constitutes bundling, what constitutes dominance, what constitutes monopoly, what even constitutes a product. There's neither such a thing as clear-cut definitions, nor even common sense (since different people's common sense can be diametrically opposed).
It's things as basic as: is a Sony Walkman with headphones one product or two? What's the difference between Sony requiring you to buy headphones together with the tape player, or Android requiring Google to be the default search? Is "portable cassette player with headphones" a single market, or are "portable cassette players" and "headphones" separate markets?
There's no such thing as "just follow EU regulations". Google and other observers can genuinely believe it's following them, while a specific EU court and yet other observers can genuinely believe it's breaking them.
Google definitely wants to stay in this market, but I don't think the EU has as much leverage as they think.
> We are disappointed that the Court did not annul the decision in full. Android has created more choice for everyone, not less, and supports thousands of successful businesses in Europe and around the world.
s/Android/Windows/ and s/Europe/USA/ and it could be Microsoft at the end of the antitrust case in the 90s.
Same way IE did back when Microsoft provided it for "free".
Of course that definition is very peculiar. I was doubtful that it would stick but apparently it did.
This is fascinating that a regulator can define market as “users of YOUR_PRODUCT excluding all competitors you thought AND across the world EXCEPT the very place where everything is made”.
Now that it has stuck, it would change the dynamics of business. It started with tech but its going to trickle down :)
Apparently, "three strikes and you're out" only applies to individuals, who with a repeat offense of this magnitude would have their lives destroyed by the justice system, and get locked away for a decade or more.
In a company with as many independent lines of business as Google has it's possible to have multiple instances of anti-trust enforcement that don't look like "we already fined you but you're continuing with the prohibited behavior", and the Android, Ads, and Shopping cases do all look really different. Plus they're covering overlapping time periods, which limits how much the regulator can say "you should have listened to us before".
(Disclosure: I used to work at Google)
There's even judges who love baseball so much they quote it in opinions lol.
I don't know enough about New Zealand politics to know if those parties have a chance of actually doing so.
> Under RICO, a person who has committed "at least two acts of racketeering activity" drawn from a list of 35 crimes (27 federal crimes and eight state crimes) within a 10-year period can be charged with racketeering if such acts are related in one of four specified ways to an "enterprise." Those found guilty of racketeering can be fined up to $25,000 and sentenced to 20 years in prison per racketeering count. In addition, the racketeer must forfeit all ill-gotten gains and interest in any business gained through a pattern of "racketeering activity."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeer_Influenced_and_Corru...
The Wikipedia article also lists a few famous cases.
And not even to all criminal charges. Three strike laws usually apply only to felonies.
Do you mean "too difficult" or "too bigger punishment"? Either way, I disagree. If they reap the reward of huge salaries, they ought to take some of the risks.
What would that even mean? If you aren't allowed to participate in the Maps business for, let's say, 2 years, does that mean you cannot offer the app for download? Then everybody stays on the old version, and cannot install security updates.
Or that you cannot offer it as a new install? Then people changing their phones are screwed.
Or that you cannot offer new maps? Then people rely on the old ones, running into permanently closed roads.
Or that your servers must immediately stop serving map tiles? Customer's won't be very happy about that either.
That you cannot make any revenue from the service? Kinda hard to do when your service is maps, but the revenue source is ads.
And so on, ad infinitum.
Consumers tend to switch apps pretty quickly, but what about b2b software? Switching over to a database from another vendor can easily be a 3 to 5 years project, so it's likely that many customers would simply sit out such a jail time.
I would love this, but there are so many irritating practical problems with it that I'd prefer we expand the cases where we can "pierce the corporate veil"; we should absolutely shield people from personal liability from good-faith failures when we work for a company, but when we see fraud, wage theft, and so on, we should be a great deal more willing to chase personal liability for decision-makers.
Something that's driven a big change in safety culture in New Zealand was allowing certain types of health and safety prosecutions to proceed against individuals, so that (for example) a site manager who decides that start-of-day hazard briefings on a building site are a waste of 15 minutes can be fined or even imprisoned if someone ends up hurt as a result.
Realistically speaking, I don't see many politicians supporting this kind of change. I'm not even thinking of the issues around corruption, but merely the knowledge that hurting that company would in turn, also impact their own economy in the process.
Imagine if no business of a nation were searchable in Google for a 4 year period. It would be devastating.
Similarly, there are a lot of physical consequences to consider as well. If you lock out a company like Apple or Coke from operating in a country, suddenly there are a lot of related issues.
If Apple could not operate in a specific nation for a set amount of time, suddenly any stores they have would presumably be closed. This would impact customers ability to get their devices repaired. I would also have to assume that all employees at each of those locations would be fired, leaving a sudden glut of unemployment, impacting people who had nothing to do with the situation.
If Coke were to be banned for some set amount of time, it would make a lot of weird cases around things like Vending Machines and Grocery stores. The company might not be marketing or selling their products to distributors, but those distributors might still be selling that product. Once their stock ran out, if they were to attempt to purchase more from the company in a nearby country, who would be at fault? Coke, or the distributor?
I imagine it would create a ton of issues with other things, like agreements to pay X amount of money over time. Stock trading would be another big one, not just in individual stocks, but in mutual funds and ETFs that might be heavily invested in that company. In one sense, it might make investors and day traders more weary and discerning from who they decide to trade with, but trying to figure out which company is breaking which laws, and how likely they are to get caught doing it, is practically impossible to determine, without inside knowledge on the matter.
That would immediately force them to comply.
Edit: Although looking at that and this fine, if you own $1000 of google shares, you would owe $3…
Did it? I can choose between an iOS phone and an Android phone.
I may be able to choose from different manufacturers on the Android side, but on the software side there are just two options.
(Press at the time: https://www.theregister.com/2013/08/16/windows_phone_youtube... )
More broadly, that was also the time Microsoft was going after Android OEMs - never Google directly - threatening them with a secret list of patents that Android allegedly infringed[1]. The settlement almost always resulted in the OEM agreeing to manufacture Windows phones (HTC and Samsung, off the top of my head). As an outsider, it appeared to be part of a mobile marketshare shadow war.
1. I'm guessing to prevent invalidation or work-arounds.
Someone built an app for Nokia Symbian phones and released it with O2 UK? Well, go to hell if you had Sony Ericsson Symbian phone because that phones Symbian was incompatible on API level with the Nokia, despite having the same OS. You could even have the same Nokia, but good luck if yours had the T-Mobile DE bloatware and their own store with their own profit sharing deals.
Google enforces compatibility between Android phones with CDD/CTS/VTS which ensures that the phones support a consistent set of working APIs that application devs can rely on.
Before CTS/CDD/VTS tests grew enough, we Android devs had hellova time making sure our apps worked across Samsungs, LGs, Nokias and whatnot.
EU attacking Google for ensuring the Android ecosystem is actually compatible is just ensuring that Apple will dominate with it's lack of choice in the mobile market. The fact that EU officials excluded Apple from consideration of how mobile markets work is telling just how disconnected from reality they are. Apple swept away all the old competitors BECAUSE it didn't have the fragmented mess of lacking cross-device, cross-region and cross-carrier compatibility.
And just to be clear - I'm not against EU issuing out fines to big tech (god knows I've defended that a lot of times), but in this case it's actively toxic for us Europeans.
What do you mean by "just two options"?
The AOSP ecosystem has a healthy range of ROMs to choose from on many devices. The process of installing alternative firmware may not be for everyone, but the choice is there, which is pretty much nonexistent for iOS devices.
>The AOSP ecosystem has a healthy range of ROMs to choose from on many devices.
Android allows hundreds of companies to have a business and make millions or billions, many of which are in EU and wouldn't exist if Android had gone the Apple way.
Mobile OS: iOS Android (third options from Korea/China?)
Hardware: iPhone Pixel Galaxy etc.
I'm very happy every time they manage to give a slap on the wrist of these monopolies
[1082B for 2014-2020, 4B/1082B*6y~2.2%]
A loss of 4B is a decrease of revenue by 1.5% for google.
[googles revenue was 256B in 2021 4/256~1.5%]
Did you mean the budget of the EU itself? It's about what you said (180B€ in 2022). Of course, that doesn't account for individual member States' budgets. The EU's budget is dwarfed by the aggregate of all members' budgets, and it is lower than most of the big EU countries' budgets.
EDIT: I guess I offended some French people, hence the downvotes :)
So another way to look at this is 21% of profits in Europe for a year.
Wikipedia has more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitrust_cases_against_Google...
> In October 2018 Google revamped how it would distribute its Google Play Store with Android in the future: Charging a licensing fee for the store, without requiring installation of Google apps, but making it free to pre-install the Google apps if they want.
> Furthermore, Google's hardware partners will be allowed to market devices in the EU that run rival versions of Android or other operating systems.
> In March 2019 Google announced that it will give European users of Android phones an option of which browser and search engine they want on their phone at the time of purchase to further comply with the EU's decision.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/18/17580694/google-android-e...
Basically dirty stuff we all knew Google was doing, but kept getting away with until then
Speeding tickets are costlier than this in many jurisdictions.
Holy shit.
Is it some sign of being on HN too much?
Sure, 1.45% is small, because % is shitty at representing the real value at this point
at the end of the day it's fucking $4 000 000 000
It's year salary of 2200 well paid engineers
That's industry-changing level of possibilities
Quite lucrative.
And it's $4B after 4 years since the beginning of the investigation, a tiny increase to an already massive EU budget.
Banks going bankrupt is their own fault entirely. It's a "you had one job" kind of thing.
If you want to find someone who is bad at managing your money and somehow breaks the law at the same time, a bank is apparently your best bet.
The exclusive app stores are both iOS and Android's greatest strengths and failings at the same time. Apple is arguably the far worse offender there too. If there was an alternative app store on iOS everyone would jump ship immediately.
Imagine having crossplatform Steam/GoG Mobile stores for mobile games, etc.
Just like the case with Chinese phones now - I have bunch of people in my family angry because they bought Huawei and they now can't use their banking apps because it's an incompatible build of Android that requires publishing in a Huawei AppStore to work.
That's worse. That's strictly worse for everyone, even the OEMs will lose their market to Apple by driving their ecosystem into the ground... again. Samsungs, Nokias, ASUS, etc. did this tragedy of the commons failure repeatedly and reliably.
citation needed.
if there was an alternative app store, 90% of apple users wouldn't even be aware of it, the other 8% would hear about it and never use it, and maybe, _maybe_ 2% would install it.
You run another app and it gets killed in the background, not receiving messages, because it's not on the list of your phone manufacturer partners.
This is the situation with degoogled Android today - a huge compatibility mess.
So, it's a game of ever escalating fines. At some point, they'll hit diesel gate levels, which caused a bit of an existential crisis for VW a few years ago. That signal actually mostly came from the US BTW. The EU is demonstrating that that kind of thin can work both ways and that they might go there squeeze some US companies when they misbehave.
As for Google and Apple, Amazon, MS, Facebook, etc., they've been going through rounds of increasingly larger fines from different countries in the EU and them doing the absolute minimum to maybe toe the line but never entirely. It's not enough; they need to get more pro-active on this or they'll have to deal with bigger fines and lawyer fees. Very simple. Testing what is good enough in a court room like they have been doing is a costly strategy. Judges not amused/impressed so-far apparently.
(~4B is the 32bit integer limit...)
This is one of the aspects of government-based fines I dislike. The money should go to the people, the victims, not government. They go after a company that may have damaged consumers and then proceed to grab the fine instead of giving it to the people who were the actual victims of the transgression.
i'm pretty sure the panopticon that is google can determine who had an android phone, ever.
It’s like when you pay a parking fine, the money doesn’t go to the specific people inconvenienced or endangered by your wrong parking, it goes into the municipal budget.
Can they use that to finance grants or RFPs for other projects ?
Also, there's degrees of exit. Google can exit the market and have zero presence in the EU whilst still sub-licensing tech to affiliates who pay for the privilege and resell their stuff, whilst dealing with all the local regulatory overheads. Plenty of firms use that sort of model.
its psychology, the board or ceo would react preemptively based on the idea that shareholders would react on their behalf
shareholders (if they have voting power at all) would react for the same result at higher fine amounts than that
1. Other search engines regularly appearing in news / on screens would remind the non-EU users about alternatives.
2. Lost traffic is lost information. Google still relies on knowing your behaviour to improve targeting.
3. Giving a whole region to other search engines would build up their financial standing and they could threaten Google in other regions in the future.
The fine would have to be in range of 100 billion for them to exit
It is commendable that EU does not allow miscreants to tie up fines in an endless legal maze.
Probably any fine should accompany (but not depend on results from) criminal charges for a company officer.
Maybe the lines of business which require promiscuous data sharing in order to be profitable will stop operating in the EU, and give rise to other business models. Whether these newer ones will be better or worse is not yet known, though the gamble in the EU is that it won't be worse.
The GDPR applies to smalltech, too, and smalltech gets fined. For example, an individual got fined €600 about two months ago for pointing a video camera at a shared access road (https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ETid-1397)
You can find many more examples of small fines at https://www.enforcementtracker.com/.
It's about anticompetitive behaviour, i.e. antitrust. Antitrust is not particularly about tech companies, and it has been around a long time, since before modern computers.
It's about misusing a position of market dominance to prevent a healthy competitive market from operating. Very large companies which are market-dominant face this problem, but they also have the resources to understand and handle the responsibility. They can either do so, or face fines and injunctions to make them do so. In severe cases they can be forced to break up dominant business units, such as happened with the breakup of AT&T in the USA some years ago.
This is the same sort of thing as might have blocked nVidia from buying ARM, for example (until nVidia pulled out voluntarily). You can see how that has nothing to do with GDPR; it wasn't even in the EU.
- common carrier status for “platforms”
- PII laws, broadly
It's a shame that this fine is too generous to Google and it won't scare them. It should be much larger than that and should be in the multi-billions of dollars.