Google admits anti-competitive conduct involving Google Search in Australia
If I'm reading this correctly, this is about the deals Google had, between December 2019 and March 2021, with Telstra, Optus and TPG (apparently Australia's three largest telecommunications companies), to be the default (and only) pre-installed search engine on Android phones sold by those companies, and those companies would in return be paid by Google some fraction of its search-ads revenues.
Some things I'm curious about, and would be helpful context:
- Why did they stop in 2021, and is it normal for these things to take 4+ years to resolution?
- Does Google have similar deals in other countries, e.g. in the US does it have similar deals with T-Mobile, Verizon, AT&T? If yes are they are similarly anticompetitive, and if not why not?
- Similar question about the agreements Google has with Mozilla and Apple, to be the default search engine on their browsers.
- Roughly how much would this deal have been worth to Google? I imagine it's not very likely the providers would have chosen a different default search engine, though without this deal they'd likely have more options pre-configured so users would have had more choice (and this I imagine is the primary anti-competitiveness complaint in the first place).
> Does Google have similar deals in other countries
Wikipedia has pages on antitrust cases against Google in the world [0] and specifically in U.S. [1,2] and in European Union [3].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Google#Antitrust
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitrust_cases_against_Google...
Thanks, I was asking specifically about deals with telecom companies to be the default search engine, and your second link [1] seems to be relevant, in that it mentions Verizon, though the deal with Apple seems to have been the core of the case:
> Much of the trial centered on Google's deal with Apple to have Google search as the default option on the Safari web browser. Witnesses from Google, Verizon and Samsung testified about the impact of Google's annual payments of approximately $10 billion to maintain default status for Google search.
Google has had these deals in many other countries with both carriers and manufacturers. In many cases, that agreement has already been found completely illegal (possibly why they stopped here).
The deal is the Android MADA and you can find examples of it going back over a decade.
Pretty wild that it took this long for something so obviously anti-competitive to come to light formally. I mean, locking in default search exclusivity on millions of devices in exchange for ad revenue kickbacks? Classic textbook behavior.
This is for 14 months of behaviour mostly in 2020. The telcos had already settled their side more than a year ago.
It isn't that long in terms of regulator response, believe it or not.
It came about out of an inquiry that released a report in 2021, that was further investigated and reported to government in 2022 and 2023.
Without knowing the inside story, this may have been gearing up to major litigation (the only way to fine someone in Australia), but settled at the last minute. Suing someone like Google comes with a lot of discovery time, particularly if they are trying to not be cooperative (and I have no idea if they were or not in this case).
That said, if you think this behaviour is bad, you should see what they pay Apple per year. Or even Mozilla.
It's been well-known since 2014. It's taken a lot of momentum to get to the point governments actually decided to do something about it.
> It's taken a lot of momentum
and a lot of lobby money.
The amount of money Google has funneled into politicians on every side of the aisle definitely helped keep the gravy train going a long time.
It’s my opinion that Telstra, TPG and Optus should also be fined, since they were taking part and a beneficiary of the anti-competitive behaviour - they were willing parties.
This isn’t naive behaviour, this sits neatly under the definition of anti-competitive behaviour and bears similarity Microsoft’s anti-competitive behaviour involving PC vendors.
Just to be clear, Google makes $55m in profits every 2.5 business hours.
Exactly. When you frame it like that, the fine goes from “headline punishment” to “cost of doing business.”
If Google has 5 billion users, that's about 5 cents per user per day.
Good deal, search and YouTube are both pretty good
If they were that good, why would Google have to waste money pre-installing them as defaults?
To keep somebody else from doing that. Now they don't have to because nobody can.
Because most people can't even change the search engine even if they wanted to. Whatever Google is the best search engine or not, pre-installing is a different problem.
That really misses the point. That is, fines do nothing if they are a rounding error on revenue.
Sure, but how much of that is from this deal? The goal isn’t to stop Google from doing business, it’s to make this behaviour unprofitable with a little wrist slap too. And also a shot across the bow that if they continue to do it it’ll be enforced much more strongly.
That is a bit silly. The goal is to make anti-competitive and all negative conduct net-negative, not just unprofitable when caught. Otherwise, it is like a millions of dollars to none gambling, profits no one caught you, a slap on the wrist if you got caught. Not useful.
The sane calculaltion is to make the fine amount equals to (loss to society or profit to corporation) / (chance of getting caught). In some cases, I guess it can be argued that chance of getting caught is so small that the fine should bankrupt someone, but still we should not do it arbitrarily just because the target is a big corporation.
Surely the punishment should be more than just break even.
Add a multiplier so that doing the activity is discouraged, not just neutral in terms of expected value.
here is hoping that the penalty means a whole lot less than the precedance...
They have now set a "bar" for acceptable behaviour... the 55million is just a "you've been put on notice"
Using bottom line of their most recent quarterly income statement[1], and given Google operates 24/7, then that's more like every 4.3 business hours. /s
[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204425...
Did you account for the $55 being AUD, and the income statement being in USD?
Shockingly that looks to be really close. Just going with the gp's number's
55m AUD -> 35.87 USD
(35.87/55)4.3 = 2.8
How long till we see someone write G$$GLE like script kiddies do with M$FT?
So we now have META, MSFT, GOOG, AAPL all with major government actions against them.
Maybe its just not possible to get that big without doing something anti competitive?
Don't Steal. Governments hate competition.
Once there is some meaningful effect on the bottom line, revenue, market cap, criminal liability for shareholders, this is just a waste of time. Googles revenues and profits grew significantly from 2019/2021, even if they get the massive fine, it will be insignificant for the company, as well as for the executives who made the decision to go with something like this.
Similar as with Meta and their MITM approach when they bought Onavo to spy on users.
Damn, it still surprises me that Google search pre installed, is not just a normal thing. As in it is pre install because Google pays for it, not because vendors thinks it’s the better search. Seeems more obvious when written out like this
People had the same reaction back in the days when Microsoft was actively paying and bullying PC makers to preinstall Windows.
And they got skewered when they began using those contracts to explicitly exclude Netscape from those PCs. It's one thing to pay for distribution, it's another to use your Windows monopoly to bully OEMs into not distributing your competition.
Is anyone actually going to switch their default search engine on their phone now? We're so locked into the Google ecosystem. Feels like a slap on the wrist that won't change user habits one bit.
DuckDuckGo's market share has grown to around 2.5% globally despite the friction, suggesting that a meaningful minority of users will switch when given clearer choices.
I'm one of those people. It seems like all search engines give pretty similar results, so why not use the one with more privacy? I can even do a quick LLM ask on DDG and with different models. Helpful when search terms are not getting the right match.
I think most people's judgement about DDG is from a few uses and from some time ago. It's worth giving it a shot if you haven't in awhile. But give it a real shot, like use it for a few days to get over the "I hate it because it's different" game that our minds play.
And a major benefit now is you don't just get a fucking popup on your phone every time you're just trying to search something. Like seriously, wtf google. Needy much?
because behind DDG is bing, microsoft, one of the evilest companies on earth.
DDG has its own crawler, but yes, it does get most of its index from Bing. But I believe also from places like Yandex (or used to).
I'm no Microsoft fan, but man you're splitting hairs here. And most of the non-Google engines get a good portion of their index from Bing because it is available and saves everyone from getting scraped to death. Though I guess that's happening now anyways...
https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources
> it does get most of its index from Bing
But you (supposedly) get the added anonymity of that going through DDG's servers, and their promise not to do some of their own tracking to put the two together, and they combine Bing's results with their own crawled results.
Isn't that how it works?
2.5% is a very small share
One out of every 40 searches worldwide being made using your product is, in your opinion, a very small share?
In a thread about a monopoly abusing its power, the least you can do is to stop measuring success by how monopolistic a company is.
> One out of every 40 searches worldwide being made using your product is, in your opinion, a very small share?
I meant in terms of Google's dominance in search. Currently, not even ChatGPT / LLM search are shrinking Google's dominance - Google keeps growing search traffic and revenue. It does seem though that the whole search market has grown with LLMs , people now query for stuff they've never queried before.
> In a thread about a monopoly abusing its power, the least you can do is to stop measuring success by how monopolistic a company is.
How do you measure success then? All companies want to dominate their industries why are we picking on Google? This is capitalism.
You're absolutely right, we shouldn't pick on just Google. We should pick on basically every company that owns over 50% of its market share, as I'm sure how they got there is by abusing their power in one way or the other.
A healthy economy is the one where you have 50 smaller companies each with 2.5% market share, not one with over 80% and everyone else being called a failure like you just did. Hope that clears things up!
It's not clear to me why Google has to be broken up. Google built the best browser around, people aren't using it for no reason, and then it used its user base to direct them to their search - which to me sounds reasonable (most people would use Google for search even if they're on a different browser. Whether it's habit or simply a superior search engine - that's what they want).
Making Google sell chrome, to me , wouldn't be different than making Nvidia sell a big part of their GPU know how or making Microsoft sell Windows or making Apple get rid of the App Store.
I use Kagi on my phone. Pretty easy switch. Will anyone switch? Demonstrably yes?
Do us Kagi users have anything like a denonym? Some name we can use like "Kagi-ers" or "Kagools" - but much cooler-sounding, of course...
I dunno, I try not to make corporation use part of my identity. It's a fact I use their products, and I think I like that product, but I'd never claim some attachment beyond they make a decent thing worth paying for.
I will point out that on an iPhone this is not an easy switch, since Apple hardcodes the search engine options and you need to use a browser extension which hijacks your search from another engine to redirect it to Kagi.
I did it on my iPhone. I took me something like a minute.
I haven’t been using Google search for years. It is far worse than it used to be.
The web is also far worse than it used to be.
Content was so much better 15-20 years ago, when Google’s tooling was also better.
99% of content creators create content for a single reason: to monetize it. Usually through ads.
The end result is that most content, even if decent, is ruined by ads.
I miss the days of personal blogs made by professionals. They didn’t really want to impress the general public but instead their peers. Such a great time. No long prologues, no dumbing down, no politics, just pure facts and opinions about their own field.
Twenty years ago, there was more than a dozen websites that people went to.
At this point, what percentage of searches are just end up with the user clicking on Amazon, Reddit, or Wikipedia? So much of the other content is low-effort slop, even before AI.
Agreed. It actually is pretty awful now. Unfortunately, I still find it better than the alternatives (chiefly Bing/DDG). Every time I want to try out DDG, I just find it doesn't quite get what I want either, and Google does just a bit better.
Try https://www.startpage.com/, https://search.brave.com/, https://kagi.com/ or https://github.com/searxng/searxng.
You.com used to have really good search, but it looks like they have veered off into the AI chat space instead.
searxng is a self hostable meta search engine that allows you to basically just use the best search engines and easily switch between them.
You should give kagi a whirl I rarely need to go past page 1 or even the first result for most queries.
I changed my default search engine to DuckDuckGo when Google opted me into AI search.
Speak for yourself, hasn't been the default on any of my devices for a long long time.
I have not used Google for like 4 years now. Their search has not been close to the best for a long time now.
Startpage is now my new default. Privacy is their selling pitch.
Plenty of people, including me, have no real desire to switch.
The ecosystem lock-in is strong
I haven't found a good replacement for YouTube that isn't just filled with conservative conspiracy stuff, but for search I've been happy with Kagi.
It cost money but that doesn't bother me too much, because it means they have a means of making money that isn't just selling my data. I also like that I get to rank the results instead of a program trying to predict what to rank at the whims of some kind of marketing.
It's a natural consequence of YouTube's practices unfortunately. If the majority of banned users are weird racists and the like, the majority of people looking for an alternative will be likewise.
The only other major market is weird tech nerds like us, but tbh, a lot of us would rather setup a peertube node then actually make any content for it.
Oh, no argument.
I did used to have Rumble installed on my phone specifically for a single creator that was banned from YouTube, but this guy isn't racist, and isn't even conservative. The ads on the videos were something, lots of conspiracy baiting and "vaccine alternatives" and gold investing. I uninstalled it after a few months because it was using an obscene amount of data, even when I wasn't using the app. I don't know why and I couldn't be bothered to investigate.
I have a super fancy video camera that I bought specifically to make YouTube videos, and I had fun setting it up, but then I realized I don't have any ideas for videos to make.
> YouTube that isn't just filled with conservative conspiracy stuff
I often see people complaining about this; but it's just not something I ever experience myself (provided I'm using my account, of course). While I do cultivate my YouTube recommendations using the "Do not recommend again" menu item, I think I've only needed to click that a few times a year - plus most of the videos I watch are from video producers I'm subscribed to (mostly retrotech, sci/tech/edu youtubers and archive film accounts; I do subscribe to a bunch of defence-economics and political youtubers but only because they don't engage in theatrics: it's all very bookish and academic, so that also helps keep the bad content away.
...so if you're seeing extremist and/or conspiratorial content, may I ask if you're clicking the "Do not recommend" menu option (not just the Dislike button) - and have you built a Subscriptions list of consistently non-extremist content? I imagine those are the 2 main things that informs YouTube's recommendation algo.
You've misunderstood, they're saying all the youtube alternatives are like that, not that youtube is.
Here's the kind of thing Youtube censors
https://rumble.com/vt62y6-covid-19-a-second-opinion.html
I wish it were all "discredited". It isn't. It would arguably be wrong to censor things that were actually that
What are some youtube alternatives? YT has so much history and is so pervasive that I hadn't even considered there WERE alternatives.
Or are they all similar to the rumble.com link below, standard 2020's coded propaganda and clickbait bullshit?
edit: Nevermind, looks like they ARE mostly conservative conspiracy crap. Carry on. :-(
one yt alternative would be odysee, another newer project that is not super similar to YT, but an alternative for people looking for more educational, family friendly vlogs is https://lifey.org - still a new project, but growing
If my youtube subs' sponsored segments are anything to go by: Nebula, CuriosityStream, and Magellan.
...though the the problem with creating _good_ content on YouTube that still gets watched by millions over a decade after it was originally posted (looking at you, Jay Foreman) is your sponsored segments and this-month-only coupon codes will age poorly.
Netflix is an alternative, or cable TV.
Not quite equivalent really.
Part of the whole appeal of YouTube is user-generated content. It's fun to see stuff that people have made that wouldn't realistically make it onto TV.
Then there is no alternative to any product or service in the world, because offerings are never identical.
Sorry, bad wording on my end. YouTube isn’t filled with conservative extremist content, and my recommendations aren’t either.
I am saying that the “alternatives” to YouTube (e.g. Rumble, Bitchute) are overwhelmingly filled with conservative conspiracy crap; basically stuff that isn’t allowed on YouTube.
Cheerfully withdrawn :)
Nope. This will benefit Google because now that you can't pay for default status, Google is the de facto default for free.
Google has been denied this privilege. Where does it say others have as well?
Search is dead to me now. I'm using LLMs, mostly ChatGPT, for most of my inquiries.
It's so laborious to sift through shitty Google search results when ChatGPT will uncover unknown unknowns.
I don't want OpenAI to become the new monopoly de jour, but I'm certainly happier as a user with their platform than I am with Google search.
Google stopped being a powerhouse tool when they dropped advanced search predicates a decade or more ago.
FWIW DDG offers a few LLMs and they have search capabilities. Makes it a bit convenient to switch over if one of the LLMs is being extra dumb that day.
> Telstra and Optus to only pre-install Google Search on Android phones they sold to consumers, and not other search engines.
> In return, Telstra and Optus received a share of the revenue Google generated from ads displayed to consumers when they used Google Search on their Android phones.
So Telstra and Optus entered into this agreement and profited from it, too. Singling out Google is a strange choice given that all parties profited.
It's not about who made money directly. It's about Google using its market dominance to increase its market dominance. Telstra and Optus are not accused of abusing their market dominance because they don't have anything like market dominance so they are hardly a concern in this particular situation.
> So Telstra and Optus entered into this agreement and profited from it, too. Singling out Google is a strange choice given that all parties profited.
Kind of like how Microsoft was found[0] to do something similar with PC manufacturers?
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
> Singling out Google is a strange choice given that all parties profited.
Profiting isn't the misdeed, artificially suppressing competition is. Only Google experienced the benefit of suppressed competition, and that's why they were the ones paying the kickback, not receiving it.
Back in the iPhone 4 era, I had a simple app on the App Store called "3D Coin Toss" that I wrote in a day. With zero promotion, it brought in a predictable ~$700/quarter from ads and an IAP to disable them.
Interestingly, all my discoverability came from Google. My app was on the first page of search results, which drove users directly to the App Store.
Then, Google decided to compete. Searching for "coin toss" started returning Google's own top-of-page inline coin-tossing app as the very first result. Users could now toss a coin without leaving search results. Unsurprisingly, my user acquisition tanked.
It was my first experience with this, and I remember thinking, "Is this fair? Why is Google competing with me?"
Is this a troll comment?
I doubt it, but it does highlight how weird the notion of "competition" is when juxtaposed with the notion of "a search engine controls its own results page."
(Personally, I resolve the paradox with "The goal is for neither Google nor app developers to 'win', the goal is to make it as easy to flip a coin as possible." Is my keyboard manufacturer competing with both if they put a button in the corner of the keyboard that either lights an LED or doesn't when pressed? Does the coin in my pocket compete with all three?)
> In the undertaking, Google commits to removing certain pre-installation and default search engine restrictions from its contracts with Android phone manufacturers and telcos.
> The three telcos can configure search services on a device-by-device basis, and in ways that may not align with the settings set by Google. They can also enter into pre-installation agreements with other search providers.
Before we go patting Australia on the back for helping consumers, all they are really doing for the end user is allowing another corporation to set your defaults.
The anticompetitive behavior they are admitting to isn't that they are taking away choice from the end user, it's that they have agreements in place to prevent telocos from forcing their own software on you or signing contracts with Google competitors to force their software on you.
Remember this when you're next phone comes with the non-removable Telstra browser.
Definitely not anti-competitive in the rest of the world though.
Google is a plague, and the sooner its gone the better.
Actually, Google has faced major antitrust enforcement globally for similar conduct:
EU: Already fined Google €8+ billion across multiple cases, including specifically for Android pre-installation requirements. Just issued new violations under the Digital Markets Act.
US: Federal judge ruled in Aug 2024 that Google illegally maintained search monopoly through exclusive default agreements including on mobile. DOJ seeking various remedies including divesting Chrome. This case is still in progress.
I believe your sarcasm detector is overdue for service.
and the proceeds will be returned to the consumers who were affected by this?....
To the surprise of no one. Either way, Telstra should never have been privatised and Optus should've been slapped with bigger fines.
$55 million is pocket change for Google.
yeah, I think those laws should be updated to be a percentage of global revenue.
Hell, even country revenue would be a big boost.
Oh, that's all?
Google is one of the most anticompetitive companies to have ever existed. MaBell has nothing on the new AI overlords.
The browser / web / search / ads thing is insane, and the fact that they've made it so companies have to pay to protect their own brand is beyond fucked. It ought to be illegal.
And they own the largest media company in the world and have a commanding lead in AI and autonomous vehicles. They're bigger than most countries and are poised for world domination.
Break these MFs up already.
To think the government got mad at Microsoft for IE. Jeez. We used to have a spine when it comes to antitrust.
That spine belonged to the government, which is now owned by the corporations. To be fair, they still have that spine, probably stronger than ever, but it's being used to protect themselves now.
>The browser / web / search / ads thing is insane
X does it too. Instagram does it too. TikTok does it too. YouTube does it too. Reddit does it too. LinkedIn does it too.
It's not insane, it's the standard way to monetize a platform. You have an app that takes you to a page to discover content. When discovering content ads are shown. When viewing the content ads are shown from the platform.
X doesn't have its own browser, and neither do Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, nor LinkedIn. YouTube is basically a part of Google, and it's a good example of anticompetition when they deliberately degrade the performance of their site on non-Google browsers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38345858
All of them have dedicated mobile apps. X even has a desktop app. These platforms stand on there own and are not trying to replace Chrome. Their apps are for their own platform and not the web platform.
Also the post you linked to targeted users of adblockers and affected Chrome users using adblockers.
Google owns every pane of ingress to the internet. They own the defaults, and that's what matters to 99.9% of normies. They own the web standards and the whole kit and kaboodle. Nevermind app store monopolies, as that's a whole different subject.
If I own a brand, I have to pay Google ads to rank for my own brand. Google doesn't like the concept of a "URL bar". It's a search bar. My closet competitors can pay for placement against my trademarked name and there's not a damned thing I can do to stop it.
One company should not own all of that surface area. That's practically the whole internet outside of social networks and buying off Amazon.
Google just sits there taxing the whole internet. (And half of mobile...)
Fixes? Here are a few:
1. Take Chrome away. That's the lynchpin of this racket.
2. Make Google (and Apple) support non-scare wall app installs from the web as a default. No hidden settings menus. (The EU would be great and enforcing this.) Don't let them own login or payments either.
3. Best yet: break the company into pieces. If it was good enough for MaBell, it'll be good enough for Google. It'll be worth more as parts anyway - so much of that value is locked away trying to be the sum of parts. YouTube alone is bigger than Disney and Netflix.
My previous post lists other ways users can ingress to the internet. Chrome is not the only app that connects to the internet.
>If I own a brand, I have to pay Google ads to rank for my own brand
Google will still rank your page even without ads. Normal search results are shown after ads. Other platforms as I mentioned before have search ads. This is not a unique thing.
>Google just sits there taxing the whole internet. (And half of mobile...)
Investing billions of dollars into platforms for other people to build upon for free is not "just sitting there." Unlike other apps like TikTok where the company has to spend resources developing mobile apps, websites can utilize the browser Google is writing.
>Take Chrome away.
If you remove a platform a similar one will take its place.
Why are you carrying water for Google of all corporations? Praising them for investing into the browser and claiming that we should be thankful for their work is nothing short of appalling. That rhetoric is carrying water for the fundamental belief that monopolies are good as long as their stranglehold produces some positive side effects that we can appreciate.
Chrome isn't the only browser that exists, no, but it damn well isn't for the lack of trying. They've been trying to smother every alternative and now that they've largely succeeded, they're trying to push hostile changes like Web Environment Integrity and Manifest V3 that take even more power away from their users.
Other companies have search, other companies have ads, other companies have apps, other companies host video, one other company has a mobile platform and a browser, but they don't have all of those combined, and the one company that has most of those (Apple) is just as anti-competitive and just as problematic as Google. What makes them anti-competitive is how they leverage their dominance in ALL of those areas to smother any fair alternative in their crib.
>Why are you carrying water for Google of all corporations?
Because if I don't do it, who will?
>that monopolies are good as long as their stranglehold produces some positive side effects
Chrome is not a monopoly as it compete against the apps I previously provided.
>they're trying to push hostile changes like Web Environment Integrity and Manifest V3 that take even more power away from their users.
The changes are not hostile. Their goal is to improve the web.
>and the one company that has most of those (Apple)
Apple has all of them.
> My previous post lists other ways users can ingress to the internet. Chrome is not the only app that connects to the internet.
I'm glad the normies will read your post and find other routes of ingress.
Defaults and distribution matter. Google has your parents and grandparents on lock.
> Investing billions of dollars into platforms for other people to build upon for free is not "just sitting there."
They've spent more in stock buybacks. No better way of saying they don't know how to spend the money.
It doesn't matter how much the trillion dollar company spent. They're an ecological menace. We need a forest fire to clear away the underbrush and ossification, to create new opportunities for startups and innovation capital. Google is like an invasive species. Like lionfish. They're ruining tech for everyone else, taking far too much meat off the bone across every channel.
> Unlike other apps like TikTok where the company has to spend resources developing mobile apps, websites can utilize the browser Google is writing.
I wouldn't know because I use Firefox, but on the subject of apps - these are taxed by Google too.
> If you remove a platform a similar one will take its place.
That's literally the point. Something with less surface area moves in and competes.
Companies should face evolutionary pressure constantly. Business should be brutal and painful and hard. Google is so big they'll never feel any pain. That's been bad for the web, for competition, for diverse innovation. Everything just accrues to Google.
Not to mention these tech conglomerate oligopolies get to put an upper bounds cap on startups and the IPO market. They get to dump on new companies and buy them on the cheap when they give up. It's easy to threaten to subsidize competition for any new company when you're making hundreds of billions a quarter.
If defaults are so unfair how did Chrome ever become the dominant browser in the first place? Build a better browser and people will use it, just like they did with Chrome. Probably won't happen today, not because of Google being the default, but because browsers are a mature product and it just isn't nearly as easy to make something noticeably better.
>I'm glad the normies will read your post and find other routes of ingress.
Some of the apps I listed have billions of users. The normies know about them.
>They've spent more in stock buybacks
This is moving the goal posts. They still have done a tremendous amount of work creating and maintaining platforms that millions of people are building upon. Companies can always do more, but you can't say that they are doing nothing at all.
>these are taxed by Google too.
Ad revenue, which makes up the bulk of revenue, is not taxed.
G'Day Aussie friends, and thank you. One small step for a country, and in the right direction.
Why aren’t these discouraged with such massive fines that the board and shareholders oust executives? Just another example of how weak the laws are from stopping unfair competition by mega corps. Small businesses and even rich startups have the decks stacked against them.
The principle of fines being made proportional to income - and set at a % level that hurts - is one of the few possible paths to fairness in this area.
Like some European country(s) do with personal fines, afaik.
How is it fair? I would think if two parties commit the same crime they should be charged the same. Isn't fairness in law defined as being blind to the perpetrator?
Google doesn't do stuff to be evil. It does so bc it makes economic sense on the margin. It doesn't like paying fines and arbitrary enforcement will just be used politically. You might like this case bc Google bad, but what if NBC gets fined an insane amount by current admin for their interview cropping, to discourage bad behavior, because you know, fairness.
IMO the fairway thing would be to remove as much discretion as possible so not to make things political by either side
> How is it fair? I would think if two parties commit the same crime they should be charged the same. Isn't fairness in law defined as being blind to the perpetrator?
The purpose of a fine is not supposed to be a fee for a crime but a penalty that has deterrent effects. A flat fine is not an equal deterrent for people of different financial means.
In Finland the system is called "day fine", meaning it should match approximately a day of labor/income. In some situations you can even go to sit in prison for time proportional to the day fines, although this is nowadays rare.
Proportional to income is "the same" under the equivalence of time and money. A fine is some % of your income which is some % of your working time. The fine as a penalty should roughly be equivalent to time spent in prison, so that is some fixed amount of time which automatically translates to some lost amount of salary. Going to prison being an alternative to paying a fine when you aren't solvent.
Otherwise it isn't a penalty and is just the price of being permitted to do a thing which might be out of reach for the poor. That's just fundamentally unfair to permit the rich to do things we consider immoral if they are just able to afford it.
Non proportional fees just means there as a level of wealth where the law effectively no longer applies to you. Imagine if parking tickets cost you a penny, would you care where you parked? This is effectively the same thing.
> Isn't fairness in law defined as being blind to the perpetrator?
Fairness in this case would mean giving equal fines for equal crimes.
But equality in which units? There's a case to be made that dollars are an implementation detail and that the political system cares about utility units.
If you want the fine to equally disadvantage all parties in utility units then the dollar values are going to be different. Because the idea is that each criminal should be equally unhappy with receiving the fine.
There is one side of the political spectrum that feels that the penalty for a crime should be set irrespective of the perpetrator because that's fair. Two people that commit the same infraction pay the same absolute amount.
There is another side that feels the penalty should "hurt" the same amount because that's fair. Two people that commit the same infraction feel the same amount of pain (theoretically), roughly corresponding to paying the same relative amount.
IMO this falls apart when you accept the almost tautological fact that these laws are enforced selectively, so "fairness" goes out the window almost immediately. Enforcement is used as political pressure and as punishment. Under that view, the second option above feels much worse than the first.
> Isn't fairness in law defined as being blind to the perpetrator?
If you jail different people, they lose out on different amounts of income. Is that unfair?
Now remove the physical jail component and keep the rest of the punishment. Is that unfair?
> How is it fair? I would think if two parties commit the same crime they should be charged the same.
I think the reasoning as that when Google does it, it affects far more people than if (say) I sold a single phone with only my own apps pre-installed. Should I be fined $55 million?
Wow people actually think like this? Have you ever been poor? Genuinely wondering.
10% hurts the same no matter your income.
Fines are about punishment and deterrence. You cant deter a millionaire with a 100$ fine like you can a pensioner on a fixed 1000$ income.
You actually need to have it scale beyond a flat percentage to be punitive. Someone getting fined 10% of their fixed income can end up homeless. A billionaire getting fined won’t see their lifestyle impacted at all.
And not based on income alone, but including their entire net worth.
Being charged the same percentage of income is still the same punishment. It’s a non-controversial concept in economics that there is a marginal utility to money, as in, if you have a billion dollars, then getting an extra hundred doesn’t give you more utility. However a struggling family would be thrilled at a hundred bucks and maybe that means eating for the next several days. These people should not be charged with the same static dollar amount.
It seems disingenuous to talk about marginal utility in this context, you're bringing up a non-controversial thing to try to make charging different people different dollar amounts for the same crime also seem non-controversial, which it is certainly not, at least based on the comments here.
You can say it's the same percentage so it's the same punishment, but you can't pretend this isn't a recent change in jurisprudence.
Leaving a second comment to provide another perspective.
The more your wealth (and note that income is a crude approximation here), the easier your ability to pay. Hopefully you agree that a $50 parking fine means virtually nothing to a billionaire; it may as well not exist. Whereas to someone living at the poverty line, it is incredibly significant.
If you feel it's fair to penalize everyone the same absolute amount of money, that means you believe that rich people have effectively earned themselves a right(!) to violate laws that poor people can't afford to.
Or, putting it more bluntly, it means you think rich people are superior to poor people.
Is that fair?
Like the famous "Finnish businessman hit with €121,000 speeding fine" !
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/06/finnish-busine...
And that is how you get to no traffic deaths in a year
https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/2...
The EU also does this with corporate fines, GDPR violations are up to the higher of 20 million euros and 4% of global turnover.
Up to. It should be minimum instead.
Scares them well enough and the "up to" won't kill a smaller business, provided the transgression wasn't too serious.
I had trainings upon trainings about this, particularly because in my line of work I deal with medical data, which is categorised as sensitive.
I don’t think it scares the big players enough; they still violate it. I’ve also had trainings about it.
When you rob a bank, there isn't a minimum fine where you can walk away and still keep some of the banks stolen money.
If we want to stop bad behaviour, there can be NO PROFIT from illegal actions.
So if a company makes billions of dollars, through illegal actions, all of those billions of dollars need to be the fine, and the board and senior executives should also face personal fines, so they aren't also profiting.
I completely agree
I don't think eu and the thing that gave us the cookie banner is a model of good governance.
Exponential growth in the fine value for reoffenders within a a 1-2 time period is also a good mechanism to ensure compliance.
A educated guess would be that the establishments intentionally want to have these monopolies around, so they stand down on the antitrust stuff, and in they would get total control and surveillance. That is how you get these guy like Peter Thiel going to Standford to recommend everyone to start a monopoly as their business model. In reality these guy (groups with low cost access to capital) have no clue how to really run a business they are just heavily subsidize by the establishment.
Until the penalties actually hurt, there's zero incentive to stop
Make management penally responsible like in make other cases, and the largest investors/employees who benefited from the scheme through dividends or stock attribution and then suddenly it will get resolved. They don’t care about civil cases since they are already rich and even if the company dies tomorrow they are going to be fine
This is the thing. There needs to be personal responsability, not just some diffuse (and weak-ass) fine. As it stands the literal worst thing that can happen is the CEO gets fired with a multimillion dollar severance. Is this a joke?
Just look at 2008. I'm convinced many things started to go downhill hard when the worst global financial meltdown since the 1930s went down with not one single person going to jail.
Only the big fishes. Small retail investors and small home owners could not pay their loan anymore, got evicted and some eventually got jailed.
> some eventually got jailed.
Who are you referring to?
More like "not to even start", as I am sure they are just factoring in possible fines upfront.
This was a settlement, if the fines were massive, the settlement wouldn't have come as easily. And then if you start fining companies from other countries a lot, it becomes a trade issue and things get messy. In the worst case those companies just pull out of your market, and you are left with small businesses and startups but that might not make up for the services that the mega-corps were providing, and that might have adverse effects on other businesses in your country.
So what happens is that they wind up going with non-massive fines to enforce compliance as a trade off (like you wouldn't deal out the death penalty for someone who was caught stealing).
The problem is that we've taken "you wouldn't deal out the death penalty for someone who was caught stealing" and used it as justification to make the fines significantly less than the profits from breaking the law, thus incentivizing lawbreaking.
I don't think you get it. Detroying a company doesn't make the situation better, most regulation is centered around "punish and correct," rather than "vindictive destruction." The company has to survive to learn its lesson, or you haven't really made any progress.
who said anything about destroying a company? I just said that the fine should be more than the profit from breaking the law or you're not punishing and correcting, you're encouraging lawbreaking and taking a cut of the profits.
For GDPR they already are, it should indeed be made to be the same for anti-competitiveness laws.
https://gdpr.eu/fines/
> The less severe infringements could result in a fine of up to €10 million, or 2% of the firm’s worldwide annual revenue from the preceding financial year, whichever amount is higher.
> These types of infringements could result in a fine of up to €20 million, or 4% of the firm’s worldwide annual revenue from the preceding financial year, whichever amount is higher.
And then there's places like China, where the effective fines are "you either comply to the letter or you won't get to operate in this country".
Isn't Apple just not paying those fines? I mean that $2bn (0.5bn?) is what, 1%? Operating Income is ~109Bn[0]
[0] https://www.marketbeat.com/stocks/NASDAQ/AAPL/financials/
Would love a source on them not paying. They've appealed the latest one rather than refusing to pay [0].
The 500 million one is also for anti-trust rather than GDPR, which is the one that includes % global revenue fines.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
> And then there's places like China, where the effective fines are "you either comply to the letter or you won't get to operate in this country".
It's have friends in the party or just roll over and do as we say. The "letter" does not matter. Remember the letter literally says there's freedom of speech there. And why did Google leave? Haha.
Maintaining friends in the Party, often Party Members inside your HR department and inside the board of your Chinese corporate division, means rolling over on their priorities a carefully considered percentage of the time. What that percentage is depends on context, but the whole structure of corporate life allows the Party to lean on the scale of decisionmaking as necessary to pursue national priorities. In most issues, in most areas, they aren't going to try to intervene because it doesn't benefit the Party to micromanage.
This works for Chinese businesses pretty well.
The problem for Western businesses is that "Creating domestic competition to any Western business with a comparative advantage which becomes too important to China" is always, on some level, a national priority.
My favorite Party explainer - https://chovanec.wordpress.com/2011/05/08/primer-on-chinas-l...
"letter" here wasn't intended to mean "letter of the law", rather "letter of whatever we tell you to do".
“today”
They can and will change it later.
Why did Google leave? Because they didn't want to follow the law. Maybe they thought China would fold but they miscalculated.
The incoherent views of the hn user: "We need to do something about the corporations" but also "China is evil for doing something about the corporations"
If you try to take the average of the views of all HN users, and use that as a representative HN user, you are going to be confused.
Has Apple or Google actually paid any of this large GDPR fines?
The punishment should be percentage of government ownership. This dilutes the shareholders shares, which punishes who needs to be punished, but avoids the 'your fines will shut down the company' argument. Also when the government has ownership they have access to much more internal visibility and just general hassle. No company wants that.
>Why aren’t these discouraged with such massive fines that the board and shareholders oust executives?
Because the politicians and "regulators" rotate back into the private sector and earn generational wealth for playing ball.
Because 55m is a rounding error.
Because capitalism is not able to regulate itself, no matter how much people say it can.
And this has been known for 150+ years and it has been written about extensively, its just not considered acceptable/appropriate knowledge. Marxists study this.
The form of capitalism that existed when Marx wrote his thing, stopped being used in most places around the Great Depression era.
Capitalism as we have it today is (roughly speaking) to laissez faire capitalism as modern China is to Maoism.
Marxism isn't as wildly flawed as some want it to be — but it is very, very out of date, a response to a world which we no longer live in.
Turned out there were a lot of ways to regulate capitalism besides all-in on Marxism.
> The form of capitalism that existed when Marx wrote his thing, stopped being used in most places around the Great Depression era.
The type of capitalism Marx described is alive and well.
It exists in the undeveloped parts of the world, and it is maintained through force by many capitalist blocks and their allies. People around the world are kept exploited because their economies eventually tie into ours, and their exploitation makes us "competitive". Just because its not you and your kids toiling all day doesn't mean there aren't any.
And it was like that here too, it was only undone through force by socialists, that's why you're allowed to work 8 hours a day only, we have a minimum wage, and children aren't working in factories.
This didn't happen by the graciousness of profiteers, it happened through the threat posed by the masses, people were killed on American streets for this. Don't ever forget that. That's how they rewrite history.
Don't think it can't arise again, it evidently is... slowly.
Marxists have been systemically debunked, at this point it’s the flat-earthers of economics. Yet they come back tirelessly.
Then why it's so pertinent that capitalist countries waste billions fighting it wherever it arises?
More murder and war has been perpetrated as part of anti-Marxism than any other cause in history.
- The Vietnam "War" (Genocide) - The Korean "War" (Genocide too) - The whole Afghanistan affair that still resonates on today - Balkanization (induced by NATO) - Indonesian govt killing 1.5 million in a single year (CIA) - US trained South American Death Squads - Invasion of Barbados by the US - the overthrow of Burkina Faso - the overthrow of Allende - the School of the Americas - Nazis killed more non-semitic East Europeans than jews in the name of anti-marxism
You could, in a very real sense, draw a line through the history of modern warfare and the history of anti-Marxism.
Only for Americans is it a myth because they are primed by their billionaire controlled media and educational system to avoid it.
All in all, its a theory of socio-economic development that implies the democratization of production. That's literally whats so bad about it.
Marxism and Marxist theory has made prescient points about capitalism that have repeatedly been confirmed in the past ~200 years.
Obviously they did not get everything right (far from it), as their most fervent acolytes believed. But then again, in economics, who does?
> Marxism and Marxist theory has made prescient points about capitalism that have repeatedly been confirmed in the past ~200 years
Sort of? Marxism is like economic phlogeston. It’s experimentally predictive to many extents. But it gets some basics wrong and is superseded in its entirety by better models, particularly for information-age and increasingly-automated economies.
And communism and socialism do so much better?
Just look up all the ecological and environmental disasters in Eastern Europe and Russia, or the insane economic fuckups from the ‘great leap forward’ (or even going on right now!) in China for a breath of fresh air, amiright?
People be people. No system is going to magically solve these problems, but some (anything authoritarian, usually!) can certainly make them worse.
Which is why democratic socialism exists, which has capitalism constrained by regulation as well as government participation in the economy.
Most industries require regulations, to maintain competition, to avoid market manipulation, to maintain public health and safety, and to stop crime.
Some industries require government intervention or even participation, to ensure the existence of nationally critical infrastructure and to protect national resilience and safety.
"Pure" capitalism is just as much a nonsense as "pure" communism.
This may sound rude, but "democratic socialism" is just wishful thinking. How can regulations stop corruption? Is that really your best bet?
I'm a socialist because I know you can't stop it that way. It's simply impossible. They will corrupt/lobby/influence their way around it. They currently do.
What is your plan? To REALLY SUPER DUPER trust the next candidate you have zero control over?
"Democratic socialism" is not democratic or socialism. Socialism is actually democratic and prevents exploitation.
The only way to actually stop it is to not allow individuals to profit off of others. Individuals shall make their OWN assets through their own muscles. No ownership of property that allows you to reap what others sow. It's logically the only way to avoid power imbalances. And it's something that we all enforce and control through local councils.
Remember, democracy is not trust, its control.
Since no one is running ‘pure’ capitalism, what is your point exactly?
His point seemed really clear to me.
Mind clarifying then?
If you want a real answer: If one country started implementing fines so massive that it was devastating multi-national companies then many companies would simply stop serving those countries.
We got a little peek into this when the GDPR was rolled out and many small and medium companies simply blocked GDPR countries rather than risk the massive fines spelled out in the GDPR. This has lessened somewhat as it has become more clear that those massive fines aren’t being handed out and the language has been clarified, but I sat through multiple meetings where companies were debating if they should block GDPR countries until the dust settled even though they believed themselves to be compliant. They didn’t want to risk someone making a mistake somewhere and costing the company a percentage of global revenues.
Talking about massive fines that destroy big companies and crush their executives is really popular in internet comment sections but it would be extremely unpopular if people woke up one day and found Google was blocked in their country for fear of violating some law with extreme damages.
That said, the current slap-on-the-wrist model clearly isn't working either
> it would be extremely unpopular if people woke up one day and found Google was blocked in their country for fear of violating some law with extreme damages
This may be true, but arresting drug dealers would also be unpopular with a lot of junkies. :-)
The problem is that these kinds of harmful practices (by companies) are like a slow frog-boil. The companies foreground the benefits and hide the costs until people are lulled into dependence and are unwilling to roll it back. But that doesn't mean we don't need to roll it back. It might hurt, but we still need to do it.
it feels like there's some lack of equivalence that makes this analogy invalid.
Unless junkies have started a new service to help me find the nearest hospital that I'm not familiar with. Otherwise, spontaneously blocking Google could cause material harm to people reliant upon it. You'd be surprised how many users are so net-ignorant that they wouldn't even know how to get to Bing if their default page stopped resolving.
No, that's not the real answer at all, it's anything but.
You have no idea just how much revenue Google et. al make from e.g. the EU. The shareholders would absolutely eat Google alive for just walking away from many billions of dollars rather than just complying. I've said this here before:
> A point we're still lightyears away from. The lengths they go to in order to operate in China are magnitudes greater than to operate in the EU, yet EU makes them $10+ billion more profit than China.
> What would actually happen is that the US would start seriously threatening (blackmailing) the EU to a degree where it's forced to relent long before Apple would pull out.
> Apple's estimated operating profit from the EU is around $40 billion dollars. If the US government wouldn't get involved, they could force Tim Apple himself to live on top of the Alps and he'd happily do it rather than lose that $40 billion, or shareholders would vote him out ASAP.
You can substitute Apple for Google or any SV big tech.
>We got a little peek into this when the GDPR was rolled out and many small and medium companies simply blocked GDPR countries rather than risk the massive fines spelled out in the GDPR.
So you do "% of global revenue", "gatekeeper/minimum size applicability" and so on. Absolutely trivial stuff, this has been figured out ages ago.
This kind-of sort-of already happens now with Big Model / AI release. Rest of the world already gets features & model drops much much before the EU does.
I am honestly interested in any examples you might have, cause I do spend a bit of effort keeping up with whether LLM releases are delayed or lack certain features in EU member states specifically and know no recent example of that.
GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro and Claude 4 were released across the same time frame (staggered releases that affect users even within regions not withstanding) for EU and US customers.
ChatGPT Agents meanwhile had a three week delay, but that was not EU specific and affected other countries such as Switzerland as well. Previously, I have also seen the very much not EU UK included in such delayed releases.
Essentially, all recent LLM releases I am aware off either dropped simultaneously for EU and US customers or, if they were inaccessible within the EU early on, that generally included none-EU countries with different or no applicable regulation as well. Any example of differences in accessible features I know of hasn't been limited to EU member states.
I think image/video generation models tend to get released later? And some subscription products?
Just checked, the releases of Dall-E 3, GPTImageGen, Google Veo 2, Imagen 3 and 4, took place simultaneously for EU and US as part of global launches.
Sora was the only outlier here, though as always, the restrictions did not encompass just the EU and were lifted shortly there after, just like with ChatGPT Agents:
> Right now, users can access Sora everywhere ChatGPT is available, with the exception of the United Kingdom, Switzerland and the European Economic Area. We are working to expand access further in the coming months.
> The lengths they go to in order to operate in China are magnitudes greater than to operate in the EU, yet EU makes them $10+ billion more profit than China.
> You can substitute Apple for Google or any SV big tech
Except Google pretty much doesn't operate in China and shareholders seem fine with that.
Because Google never made such profits in China even when they did operate there, neither do they really have the opportunity to do so, even if they'd comply with everything they'd be asked of.
Entirely different from their EU operations to just give one example.
Not for long if the EU government keeps raiding it for billions.
EU social welfare programs are all in a precarious state and the EU is currently taking on massive debts to re-arm again. Their economy is also not growing and China is eating their lunch economically (autos, manufacturing, industry).
Public opinion has turned so dramatically against big tech that triggering $10B in fines is like taking candy from a baby. Expect this to 10X by the end of the decade.
The incentive structure is there and the EU has already realized they can raid US companies in the name of 'privacy' without much pushback (hilariously, they're also constantly trying to undermine encryption at the same time...so we know they don't actually care about "privacy," just easy money).
That would really require an absolutely dramatic escalation of the fines, as the current ones - even the Meta €1.2 billion fine they got in 2023 - are absolute drops in the ocean compared to even just their yearly EU profit.
And the reality is that the US government would start blackmailing the EU long before that dramatic escalation is reached.
It’s not so much privacy as data ownership.
Ah yes. "privacy" in quotes. Because these supranational megacorps should just be allowed to do anything and everything. And any attempt to reign them in is a raid.
So, iiuc your argument, they're too big to punish by lawful process in democratic countries. Then I argue they should be split up, which is another popular argument.
Where do I sign up to be too big to punish?
But that's great for capitalism and competition, isn't it? Ethical startups popping up left and right to take over from big evil incumbent. What a market to seize.
Why would people find it unpopular, they're not a monopoly, there's alternatives. Oh wait