Wow!
Someone stood up to Google... and the sky hasn't fallen down.
The European Union's Court of Justice (ECJ) has dismissed Google's appeal of a €2.4 billion ($2.65 billion) 2017 antitrust ruling, finding it had abused its dominance in favor of its own Google Shopping service, diverting traffic that would otherwise have gone to rival comparison services. The 2017 decision at the time was the …
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Oh yeah, cry me a river, Google :-D
What, I'm supposed to be fined for theft of two crates of beer every Friday for years until somewhere in 2016, when I was caught? Even though I implemented changes to my method of acquiring beer in 2017 and bought it legally after that? How unfair!
IIRC Apple had to pay the fine into escrow. If anything that money should have been earning interest on it's own, and if not, sack whoever opened the bank account!
Edit, the interest was on the original 13 billion up to 2014, which was paid into escrow, along with the 13 billion when the appeal started. No more interest is due.
No, the official constitutional answer, according to Treaty, is that all fines levied go into EU “Own Resources”. That is, they go to the EU Commission budget. Specifically, it *doesn’t* get paid either to EU member nations; nor, as they are fines, do they become compensation to any other companies harmed. In fact, you can go to the EU budget, and there’s a line item calling out their target income from ECJ fines and penalties, for each year up to 2027. It’s a big line item, and they are anticipating/requiring strong growth over the next years.
I'm not a fan of Google, I switched from Android to iPhone and stopped using almost all of Google's services a few years back, but these EU lawsuits really bother me. It would be funny if all the government agencies in Europe who rely on Google services suddenly find their stuff simply not working. American companies really need to disregard these idiot laws from foreign countries.
No one is forcing Google to obey these "idiot laws". They're free to not provide their services to EU residents and the EU won't have a single thing to do about it.
Is the EU a regulation-happy ultra-bureaucracy which apparently has a line item in its budget to be filled with fine money? Apparently so, but that's not the kind of thing you can fix by just ignoring it...
Well for one thing, if google left europe, it would leave a google sized hole in search engine results that other companies would only be too happy to fill, after all, europe is a far bigger market than the US.
Which could lead to an interesting result... that google gets a european based competitor who then goes on to steal most of google's business and google vanishes into bankruptcy....
"American companies really need to disregard these idiot laws from foreign countries."
Well, for one thing, market size (and hence volume of potential profits to be made). You seem to think the USA is something unique. The USA has a population of about 330million, The EU has a population of about 450million. In terms of market size, that makes the EU somewhere the big US corporations WANT to be. And that means following the rules, even if they don't like them.
Luckily for those of us in the "here be dragons" rest of the world where we have "idiot laws", not all USAinas think like you.
They arent American when they have to pay tax.
WHo needs Americans like that ?
Its like having a father who never buys their kids any presents or never takes them out for an ice cream and never pays for anything else.
If everybody was like Google, where would America be ?
No roads, no schools, i would say no hospitals... but that woudl be too easy.
"These companies need legal certainty in advance, they shouldn't be punished after-the-fact for competing successfully".
Then this is a step in the right direction - having a legal certainty that anti-competitive behavior will be punished. For most people, competing successfully would not include competing unfairly.
You want a product, and it tells you some places where you can buy it. How it picks the places to include, how it ranks them, and whether it even found what you were looking for are not specified. Other services attempted a similar thing, and Google often pushed them down the page, both by putting a shopping block on top whenever you did a search that looked like you were trying to find a way to buy something and by moving them down in the search results that appeared below that.
In my experience, many of the "where to buy this item" services weren't very useful. They often reported prices from a small number of stores, missing cheaper places to buy it, and if you actually liked the prices they found, you could easily find that it wasn't available anymore or had some extra terms tacked on that made it unusable. Then again, I only tried using them a couple times, so maybe I just got unlucky.
Don't forget it only seems to ever return results from a handful of large aggregating retailers (Amazon, Etsy, eBay, that sort of thing), and seems to completely exclude real small businesses where the products you are after originate. It's like, on a planet of 8 billion or so people, there are only five shops. Of course, that's exactly the world that tech bros want us to live in.