Google fined ~1 billion USD for breaches of the Digital Markets Act

It sounds to me like Google was succeeding precisely because their products were better...

This wouldn't be the first time European regulators have tried to kneecap American companies in order to help their domestic "competitors" (and I use the term loosely)

...and typically predicated on the flimsy rationale of "because your site is accessible by people in our country, that means you're technically operating in our country, therefore we get to tell you what to do" (which displays a staggering lack of knowledge of how the internet works and where responsibility lies in a practical sense)

There have been other recent examples of this.

Like when France opted to raid & fine Grok due to people using it to generate CSAM material...meanwhile, their "home grown" company, Mistral, was teaching people how to make bombs, generating hacking code for them, and teaching them child grooming tips, and French President Macron was taking their CEO out to swanky dinners and inviting them to government discussion panels.


Tuta Mail, Posteo, and Mailfence aren't lagging behind Gmail because because of Google's self promotion lol.

And the somewhat humorous part is, even their search engines (which they claim "follow the rules" and use "honest algorithms") still end up prioritizing Google products organically.




The bit in the BBC article:
The European Commission imposed a €460m penalty after finding Google favoured its own services for helping people book flights and hotels over competitors in search results.


What exactly are these alternatives they were suppressing?



And the user has the option to click the flights tab, which uses their home grown tool.

Vs. Quant



"We don't offer that feature...so if you figured out a way to do it, then that's not fair"

Apparently they like competition, so long as it's the type of competition where nobody wins and everyone agrees not to get too much better than the most mediocre player in the market.

ThatRobGuy said:

It sounds to me like Google was succeeding precisely because their products were better...

This wouldn't be the first time European regulators have tried to kneecap American companies in order to help their domestic "competitors" (and I use the term loosely)

...and typically predicated on the flimsy rationale of "because your site is accessible by people in our country, that means you're technically operating in our country, therefore we get to tell you what to do" (which displays a staggering lack of knowledge of how the internet works and where responsibility lies in a practical sense)

There have been other recent examples of this.

Like when France opted to raid & fine Grok due to people using it to generate CSAM material...meanwhile, their "home grown" company, Mistral, was teaching people how to make bombs, generating hacking code for them, and teaching them child grooming tips, and French President Macron was taking their CEO out to swanky dinners and inviting them to government discussion panels.


Tuta Mail, Posteo, and Mailfence aren't lagging behind Gmail because because of Google's self promotion lol.

And the somewhat humorous part is, even their search engines (which they claim "follow the rules" and use "honest algorithms") still end up prioritizing Google products organically.

View attachment 381892


The bit in the BBC article:
The European Commission imposed a €460m penalty after finding Google favoured its own services for helping people book flights and hotels over competitors in search results.


What exactly are these alternatives they were suppressing?

View attachment 381893

And the user has the option to click the flights tab, which uses their home grown tool.

Vs. Quant

View attachment 381894

"We don't offer that feature...so if you figured out a way to do it, then that's not fair"

Apparently they like competition, so long as it's the type of competition where nobody wins and everyone agrees not to get too much better than the most mediocre player in the market.

Click to expand...

I have less than zero expertise on this topic but the full-throated (seemingly) knee-jerk defense of Google seems odd.

Pommer said:

I have less than zero expertise on this topic but the full-throated (seemingly) knee-jerk defense of Google seems odd.

Click to expand...

I've been in the tech field for over 20 years...

It's not a knee-jerk defense, it's reality with regards to how the European Tech sector stacks up against the American tech sector.

For anyone else who's been in the tech world, and had clients/vendors/etc... from European countries, you know what I'm talking about.

I won't doxx a company by name (as it would violate an NDA I signed), but we were working with an SMS provider based in Europe a few years back (not because we needed their expertise, but because needed their, shall we say, "relaxed" rules for 18 months or so in the face of impending TCPA regulations regarding sending out SMS notifications, and Twilio and AWS were starting to preemptively crack down early)

Countless hours of being on screen share sessions with their "Senior" devs (and they weren't a small org by any means, they had thousands of clients globally and were a $300M/year company), while we told them where their code errors were, in exchange for a 30% license cost reduction of course (negotiated by our CTO at the time -- sort of a "you can borrow my guys for a few weeks, but we want a better price")



Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta... All American companies.

The European Union has many strong points on various things, but the tech sector isn't one of them.

"The proof is in the pudding" as they say... evidenced by fines imposed for reasons that can reasonably construed as "you're beating us by too much"

The EU has tried to fine US tech companies to the tune of tens of billions over the past decade...

You don't see that as much from the Asian countries (who have robust tech sectors of their own, and can compete).