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Google loses fight over record $4.7B EU antitrust fine
- aurareturn 3mo agoWhat’s next? ChatGPT needs to support Anthropic, DeepSeek, Google models in EU?
- 9dev 3mo agoLet your AI agent of choice summarise the AI act for you. It's reasonable for the most part.
- flexagoon 3mo agoI don't believe that you actually see no difference between this and the case in the lawsuit.
- petesergeant 3mo agoAre you just doing word association here?
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- monegator 3mo agoGood. Now, if only they also fought against developer integrity.. https://keepandroidopen.org https://keepandroidopen.org
- lukan 3mo ago“Android provides more choice for everyone and supports thousands of businesses. This judgment fails to recognize our significant investment to ensure Android remains open, interoperable and free,” a Google spokesperson told CNBC. Sure. Which is why alternative stores like F-Droid are under threat now. https://keepandroidopen.org/ https://keepandroidopen.org/
- nicce 3mo agoVery related: https://f-droid.org/2026/07/01/adv-malware.html https://f-droid.org/2026/07/01/adv-malware.html
- lopis 3mo agoSo much happened since 2018 that this ruling feels ancient now. It was about Google making unfair deals with OEMs: > In 2018, the European Commission slapped Google with the record-breaking penalty on the grounds that it abused Android’s mobile dominance to give unfair advantage to its own apps via pre-installation deals with smartphone makers. While this specific problem is much better today, specially since of the DMA, things also got so much worse. And even if a new anti-trust ruling would occur today, we could expect it to drag on almost a decade again...
- plantain 3mo agoIf only this was applied evenly. Why is every Samsung/LG/literally every non-Pixel device full of uninstallable crapware?
- graemep 3mo agoNone of those companies have the market power Google does.
- AdamN 3mo agoThis is really important. Unless it's straight up fraud or a safety issue, most market participants are totally allowed to ship garbage (who are we to judge?). At some point when monopoly power tests start turning true then the bar is raised (as it should be).
- heftig 3mo agoYou mean un-uninstallable crapware? This has at least a technical reason: Preloaded apps are part of the read-only system image and cannot be removed. "Disabling" should be equivalent, though. It's not just preloaded apps, though. A few months ago I prepared a Lenovo tablet for an elderly friend, and if I had just tapped through the OOBE wizard (which presented pages upon pages of optional crapware) without reading, it would have installed 20-30 preselected "popular" apps, mostly games. I had to manually deselect every single one.
- frollogaston 3mo agoThese are basically meant as tarriffs, right?
- pjc50 3mo agoYou could address the underlying issue?
- xienze 3mo ago> Google has attempted to allay the Commission’s concerns over the years such as allowing Android users to switch between search engines and browsers so they are not tied to the company’s apps.
- tgv 3mo agoTwo words: Google Play.
- frollogaston 3mo agoWhat about Google Play, did the EU tell Google not to preinstall the Play store or else get fined?
- SockThief 3mo ago> In 2018, the European Commission slapped Google with the record-breaking penalty on the grounds that it abused Android's mobile dominance... What do you think?
- nba456_ 3mo agoYes?
- frollogaston 3mo agoYes, looks like the classic where everyone is at legal risk and they're going to selectively use it. The article also mentions individual countries' digital services taxes where they dropped the pretense.
- axegon_ 3mo agoGood start. Nowhere nearly enough but a good start nonetheless.
- bilekas 3mo ago> the U.S. ambassador to the EU Andrew Puzder told CNBC that Europe “can’t over regulate” and hit companies with “huge fines” if it is going to participate in the AI economy I love how the US will just let companies walk all over their citizens and then criticize others for not letting it happen. "Please think of the poor multi billion dollar companies".
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- watwut 3mo agoNotice how HN people talk about it - companies breaking laws and defrauding are framed as "risk taking" and those following the law "risk averse". It is about "legal risk". They dont see any value in "doing the right thing" if the right thing dont earn money and power. They cant even imagine a person doing the right thing for any reason other then being afraid.
- cbg0 3mo agoThis approach is more US-centric than "HN people". I've heard this often with phrases like "better to ask for forgiveness than for permission" which is probably because you can get away with a lot more on the business side in the US without having personal accountability.
- throwaw12 3mo ago> U.S. ambassador to the EU Andrew Puzder told CNBC that Europe “can’t over regulate” and hit companies with “huge fines” if it is going to participate in the AI economy. Imagine what these companies are doing in the US to their citizens, if ambassador is ready to defend them for violating rules/laws
- 9dev 3mo agoAs he just found out, that's exactly what the EU can do. And as he's about to find out, the EU is way too important a market for the American economy to ignore or pull out of. Play on your neighbour's yard, obey their rules.
- abc123abc123 3mo agoI think rather, that it is the EU who cannot live without US cloud services and AI-services. Imagine if the US, behind closed doors of course, threatened to cut off all cloud services. Huge parts of the public and private sector could collapse.
- w3ll_w3ll_w3ll 3mo agoWe would build our own alternatives. Russia is a much smaller market (120 million people) and they have their own tech companies.
- f6v 3mo ago> We would build our own alternatives. Right, and we haven’t because we just don’t wanna? The gap between US/China and the EU in AI is becoming wider by the day. Russia has like 3-4 large tech companies (Sber, Yandex, VK, and maybe Ozon). And they completely rely on foreign hardware. I don’t even want to imagine how could Russia start building frontier AI in these circumstances.
- hparadiz 3mo ago
- Krutonium 3mo agoAnd may it be used to prosecute them for the current bullshit they're doing with Android. Can the EU force Google to divest Chrome and Android? They should.
- LunaSea 3mo ago"Trillion dollar company will definitely make tens of trillions of dollars in AI revenue but no, sorry, it can't pay a few thousand dollars to authors of content they trained on."
- netcan 3mo agoApologies for the meta: I feel that our understanding of trust and antitrust, along with the legal and regulatory premises... Just isn't very useful in the 21st century. I understand the motivation, and justification for employing antitrust. Google's business model, and much of modern tech economy is really all about Monopoly-like market power. In fact, one of the main concerns for AI investors is price competition, insufficient lock-in, weak network effects and consumer choice. They call this commodification... a telling choice of word. It's a worry that $trn valuations are impossible without something resembling monopoly to ensure longevity and high margins. Peter Thiel gave a talk in favour of monopoly. It's worth reading. Even if you completely disagree, there are some subtle points that are relevant either way. A company facing market dynamism, price competition... Is unlikely to be investing billions in speculative r&d, for example. Our core ideas about Monopoly, and antitrust... Tend to be highly derived of the industrial revolution, which is in turn all about manufacturing. Capital, labor, technology, marginal costs, marginal utility, price theory, etc. you can count the number which it's coming off the assembling line to understand the productivity of the firm. The product is concrete, and therefore productivity can be reasoned about. There's no real way of applying this to Google. Google's users generally don't pay anything. Google doesn't have marginal costs.There is no price. The AdWords auction, is very clearly designed assuming monopolistic dynamics.. the seller is price maker and the buyer is a price taker. Prices are set as close as possible to buyer marginal value. Competition has no effect on pricing. Otoh, where is the EU or any other antitrust regulator going with any of this. In the 90s, the Microsoft Monopoly was the biggest antitrust case. They used their os Monopoly to crush Netscape. Now that it's history, we can look back and learn that the antitrust case just didn't matter one way or another. Nothing was really gained by victory, and nothing would have been lost by defeat. The theory appears to be (a) regulated capitalism is good (b) tech monopolies clearly have market power and abuse it. There is no theory of desired outcome or the benefits of such an outcome. Are they regulating monopolies, preventing monopolies, pursuing an abstract notion of Justice?
- MDCore 3mo ago> A company facing market dynamism, price competition... Is unlikely to be investing billions in speculative r&d, for example. The comparison to manufacturing isn't necessary because this seems to be contradicting by much of tech history itself. Plenty of companies have spent plenty of billions on R&D to outpace their real competitors. If we're to update our view of monopoly (and I agree we should) it should be to clamp down on them even more.
- zb3 3mo ago> U.S. ambassador to the EU Andrew Puzder told CNBC that Europe “can’t over regulate” and hit companies with “huge fines” if it is going to participate in the AI economy. Thanks for reminding us not to rely on U.S. models as access to them might one day depend on letting U.S. companies break the law..
- epolanski 3mo agoWhy did US antitrust and antimonopoly which has pioneered these concepts has been doing little to nothing for decades? Google is too big and enjoys a monopoly in too many connected sectors (browsers, mobile os, search, advertising, data). Should've been broken up long ago.
- pydry 3mo agobecause campaign financing laws permit bribery
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- emsign 3mo agoYES! The EU rocks!
- maxldn 3mo ago> Europe’s top court has upheld Google’s fine of around 4.1 billion euros ($4.67 billion) over alleged anti-competitive practices. If they lost the case, and the appeal was dismissed, what is ‘alleged’ about it?
- stogot 3mo agoI noticed too this in another recent court case journalism recently. Bad journalism or fear?
- 9dev 3mo agoScary to think that that's a real question with an unclear answer now.
- seanclayton 3mo agoThe people of CNBC's audience are assumed to have reason to want Google to not lose the case. Major news outlets are biased towards capital holders. This is what journalism looks like when it speaks to its intended audience.
- silexia 3mo ago[flagged]
- dlcarrier 3mo agoThe EU doesn't have any equivalent companies. Out of the highest 50 grossing companies in the world (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_revenue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_r...) the only ones in the EU are Lidl's parent company, a handful automakers, and one French oil conglomerate. Grocery has practically no margin, the big European auto makers are all declining rapidly, and the EU already does everything it can to make existence impossible for oil conglomerates.
- frollogaston 3mo ago
- shevy-java 3mo agoThese fines are no longer sufficient. We all see that Google does not care about fines. It is time to: a) split up Google b) but the responsible CEOs and higher ups to court c) allow competition to happen again by having basic laws that can not be bypassed by mega-corporations in general
- Luker88 3mo agoThis was from 2018, and google has gotten worse. Do the fines get reapplied for the 8 years that passed while they did nothing? Google has what, 100B+ revenue in EU? This is a once-only, 4% fine from 8 years ago. Still too little.
- cbg0 3mo agoThe point of fines is to correct behavior, not to cause financial ruin.
- lkey 3mo agoAnd yet, history and the present moment shows that fines alone do not change behavior. They are simply incorporated into the budget. Google has revenue far in excess of the fine due to their monopolies and that will continue to unabated.
- cbg0 3mo agoI'm not sure I follow; they were given 90 days to comply with certain requirements from the EU, which they did, and the fine was something extra that took a while to resolve in the courts.
- Pawenniag 3mo agoThe most interesting bit here is not really the fine but how long it took. By the time a platform case reaches the final court decision, the market has usually already moved on to the next platform bottleneck
- Cthulhu_ 3mo agoWhile that's true, in theory the company will have changed their policies and way of working already, and the industry will be aware and move away from it. In theory.
- yahavthehackern 3mo ago[flagged]
- gib444 3mo agoSo they managed to delay paying a fine by 8 years...? And this is this cause for celebration and justification for more such legislation?
- jimnotgym 3mo ago"Europe's top court on Thursday upheld Google 's fine of around 4.1 billion euros ($4.67 billion) over alleged anti-competitive practices." Are they 'alledged', it seems the court doesn't think so!
- Tangurena2 3mo agoIn many European countries, news agencies use "alleged" until conviction or appeals are completed. Truth as an absolute barrier to defamation is a purely American ideal.
- DivingForGold 3mo agoJust more "disguised taxation" on US based digital services, by the EU. Tariff the heck out of EU goods !
- cbg0 3mo agoDo you really believe the EU needs to "disguise" taxes? And that a $23 trillion economy wants to wait 8 years to collect $4.7 billion?
- mordae 3mo ago> alleged anti-competitive practices I'd say that with court ruling these are no longer alleged. Right?
- frollogaston 3mo agoIf you're in the EU, sure
- nalekberov 3mo agoWell, I guess occasional $4.7B fines are just the cost of doing business for Google. They have a monopoly in multiple categories, such as search engine, online advertising and strong dominance in maps and video hosting -- surely at this point money isn't an issue for them anymore.
- adam_arthur 3mo agoI'd like to see a world where the data vendor is separate from the app/UI product vendor. e.g. anyone could build a skin over map data, short form video data, long form video data, short form text content. Data vendor makes money through selling the data, app vendors make money through either subscriptions, ads, or selling new data back to the data vendor. The market for pretty much everything would become intensely competitive and price much closer to marginal cost of service. However, PII+personal data would become more of a concern with this model.
- gyulai 3mo ago...still not enough to meaningfully incentivise giving a crap about the law over just paying the fine.
- LoganDark 3mo agoAh, a real slap on the wrist. That'll teach 'em... In all seriousness we need a couple more orders of magnitude before they'll listen or care. Google needs to learn being monopolistic and anti-competitive makes less money than playing nice. Otherwise nothing will change.
- silexia 3mo ago[flagged]
- Ylpertnodi 3mo agoWhat are eu companies doing that would warrant a fine?
- silexia 3mo ago[flagged]
- greenleafone7 3mo agoCould this be some sort of """legalized""" corruption? Because the profits Google makes by very consciously and very deliberately doing what it is doing amount to many billions of dollars. And they are obviously not going to stop, while on the meantime we get one of these articles almost every year. So then the EU signals how "tough" they are... Google pays for the cost of doing business in the EU... little people like us think that "we are fighting the big bad corporation", and all is good for one more year.
- random_user_n1 3mo ago[flagged]
- tsoukase 3mo agoThese huge but turn-out-to-be nothing fines by the EU due to antitrust reasons seem a joke already. It is a laughable small percentage of the profits being imposed every now and then and when they feel like. The same holds for similar fines by specific countries. I will not be surprised if the paid sums end up to burocratic fueling or even corrupt high rank pockets. They have absolutely no impact to the company's behaviour. It's like the parking fine on the street costs less than a paid lot.
- tomfow 3mo ago[flagged]