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.
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
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.
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.
> 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".
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
More like "not to even start", as I am sure they are just factoring in possible fines upfront.
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.
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.
Since no one is running ‘pure’ capitalism, what is your point exactly?
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/
> 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.
"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.
Because 55m is a rounding error.
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.
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?
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.
> 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).
Why would people find it unpopular, they're not a monopoly, there's alternatives. Oh wait
>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.
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.
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...
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.
Just to be clear, Google makes $55m in profits every 2.5 business hours.
If Google has 5 billion users, that's about 5 cents per user per day.
Exactly. When you frame it like that, the fine goes from “headline punishment” to “cost of doing business.”
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.
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
tldr: avazhi was rightGood 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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 have not used Google for like 4 years now. Their search has not been close to the best for a long time now.
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.
The ecosystem lock-in is strong
Startpage is now my new default. Privacy is their selling pitch.
Nope. This will benefit Google because now that you can't pay for default status, Google is the de facto default for free.
Plenty of people, including me, have no real desire to switch.
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.
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. :-(
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 :)
To the surprise of no one. Either way, Telstra should never have been privatised and Optus should've been slapped with bigger fines.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
and the proceeds will be returned to the consumers who were affected by this?....
$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.
> 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.