Google Urges EU Judges To Cut or Cancel a 'Staggering' $5 Billion Fine (bloomberg.com) 45
Google called on European Union judges to cut or cancel a "staggering" 4.3 billion euro ($5 billion) antitrust fine because the search giant never intended to harm rivals. From a report: The company "could not have known its conduct was an abuse" when it struck contracts with Android mobile phone makers that required them to take its search and web-browser apps, Google lawyer Genevra Forwood told the EU's General Court in Luxembourg. The search-giant's power over mobile phones is the focus of a week-long court hearing. Google's lawyers are arguing that the European Commission blundered by demanding changes to allegedly anti-competitive contracts with suppliers of phones running its Android operating system -- the engine room for the vast majority of mobile devices in the region. At the very least the court should "dial down" the fine, an EU record, because it was wrongly based on advertising revenue from Google's home page that isn't directly linked to Android phones at the heart of the EU's decision, Forwood said. The European Commission's lawyer, Anthony Dawes, scoffed at Google's plea, saying the fine was a mere 4.5% of the company's revenue in 2017, well below a 10% cap.
Smells familiar (Score:1)
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Yeah, microsoft suffered so badly, and totally didn't go back to doing the same shit again...
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The only problem was that Microsoft's fine was a slap on the wrist.
Seems to me that one of the involved parties has learned a lesson from the Microsoft case. :-)
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Nope they never... (Score:2)
What never? Hardly ever....
Fuck you Google (Score:5, Insightful)
Fine does seem too high (Score:3)
$5B is about 10% of their global profit last year. While bundling might have been anti-competitive, the agreement was essentially the cost of the software. Was the revenue gained proportional to the development cost of Android, or proportional licensing costs for competing operating systems?
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Re:Fine does seem too high (Score:4, Informative)
Competition rules in the EU [europa.eu]
"If you infringe the EU's competition rules, you could end up being fined as much as 10% of your annual worldwide turnover."
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Which seems unreasonable except in the most eggregious of situations. 10% of revenue vs 10% of profits is my concern. The former is lunatics for gross abuse, the latter is a(high) tax.
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5B is still too low. These fines need to be high enough to preemptively discourage even risking breaking the law. As is, given the limited legal resources available to regulators, a fine such as this isn't really leveragable more than once every few years, even if Google or some other corporate behemoth chooses to systematically flout the law until being called on it.
And that means the current system is broken; the costs of compliance (especially if they really succeed in crippling competition, or locking
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I couldn't agree more, if an individual breaks the law they can go to jail, they cannot earn any money for years, the equivalent should be applied to companies, no profit for your shareholders, or your execs (isn't that why they are paid so much, because of the responsibility they bear /sarcasm) for years. The punishment can't be you make less profit, it can't be just a cost of doing business. If this happens shareholder will insist on companies not trying to pull these types of shenanigans.
Yes I know peopl
Required? (Score:2)
If you require someone to take something of yours or they don't get access to you, whether in products shipped or in this case, the operating system, that seems like a pretty good case for abuse.
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Absolutely!
The company said it "could not have known its conduct was an abuse" when it required phone makers to ship Google Search, Google's YouTube, and the Google Play store on their phones - not to mention while also forbidding them from offering other app stores - in order to partake in the market for Android-based smartphones instead of its weak, no-man's land cousin, the market for AOSP-based phones?
It boggles the mind that they'd even think of laying this pathetic excuse of a claim of ignorance bef
How did they now know? (Score:4, Insightful)
Google has skyscrapers packed full of lawyers and compliance experts. For them to whine that they did not know is rubbish. If anything the fine is too low.
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If Google is pleading "incompetence", I actually might even believe that ;). They really are...
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Don't be evil... (Score:2)
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They did not know that EU regulators are not as easy to buy out as American ones.
Perhaps they should have thought harder? (Score:3)
I never intended to speed either.. (Score:3)
You can't hire PhDs and then play dumb (Score:3)
Seriously. The company known for hiring highly educated people to work on its algorithm are going to pull an "I didn't know" like they're a 5 year old?
Fines are supposed to hurt. (Score:3)
All government fines should based on a percentage of a company's worth.
-It tickles, that's a slap on the wrist!
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To me it should percentage of revenue, that should also be extended to people it should be a percentage of income, or at least the punitive part should be. For example if you take $100 from someone it should be $100 + percent of income to stop you doing it again.
I don't know the technical definition of "abuse" (Score:3)
Android without the Google services and apps is of absolutely no interest to Google since they would gain nothing from it.
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The fine is limited by EU law.
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Law is defined by the government. :)
You write "We shall remove that law" on a piece of paper, present it in "parliament", have them vote on it, aand it's gone.
If they want it can be done in a day, probably.
That's how it was created in the first place, after all. It's not a law of physics.
Ignorance of the law is no excuse (Score:2)
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I'm not so sure about that though.
That makes sense if the amount of laws is manageable and can be expected by anyone to be known.
But nowadays, the laws are a mess of deliberate traps and deliberate ambiguities that allow loopholes in either direction, either to be abused by firms or to abuse firms/people with.
I still agree on the general sentiment, and I agree that a firm as big as Google can be expected to know and handle it. After all such firms often wrote it in the first
Equal Under The Law (Score:3)
But because this is a golden opportunity for us to understand just how far we have all fallen from the notion that we are all equal before the law.
How many private individuals, charged with an offence and ordered to pay a fine, would have the temerity to turn back to the court and argue with the judge?
How many of us would demand a discount?
How many of us could afford to delay and argue for the sake of it - could afford to pay lawyers to do so for us, hoping that if the delay is long enough, a change in administration might bring a more friendly judge to a case?
Or how many might not even bother with that, and instead bank on the idea that since the worst case is that the fine stands, then the longer we can delay agreeing to pay it, the more inflation will eat away at the value of the fine, reducing it in real terms when we do finally concede that we have to abide by the law?
Let's be realistic here. As private individuals, we simply couldn't dream of acting like that. Yet Google do all this and more. A significant part of the reason for this is the litigious nature of US Shareholders, who will not hesitate to file another suit against Google if they think they have the tiniest chance of arguing that Google "gave up too easily".
But this is insane.
Perhaps we need a new approach to the imposition of fines against the largest companies. A simpler set of laws and calculations on penalties that make it easier to ensure that the fines are punitive in nature - but more than that, a scheme in which the size of the fine is incrementally increased by every calendar month that passes from the moment the fine is handed down to the moment it is paid.
OK, there might be some way of refining this to make it fair - for example if the company wishes to file an appeal and wins the appeal, things get pegged back to the start or vacated completely. But there has to be some form of powerful incentive to stop these global corporations from being so abusive.
It's like they think the law doesn't apply to them.
Perhaps the other option would be for the European General Court to say, "OK, here are your choices: either pay up in full in 30 days, or we will deploy a preliminary injunction to outlaw all Google services in the EU until the fine is paid. You can carry on negotiating over the final amount - in good faith - if you want. But if you want to do that, you have to deposit the full amount of the fine in escrow as a precondition. So either pay up - in full - or have your entire business operation suspended in the EU until agreement is reached. Your call..."
Oh, without any shadow of a doubt this won't happen. The US Government would suffer a fit of collective apoplexy and it would become a major international incident. But I'm starting to think that Google believe that anything less than that counts as a win. And they really don't care what their arrogance does to international relations.
Remember - the whole point of sanctions against companies is to ensure that neither they nor other companies feel it is in their interests to continue with the actions that invited the sanction in the first place. This is going to have no disincentive effect whatsoever. So yeah.
Add another $100 million a day until the cheap bastards pay up.
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To me the solution is to ban lawyers, well not really but ban private lawyers paid for by individuals, justice should not depend on the size of your wallet. You should not be able gain an advantage just because you can afford a better lawyer. Lawyers should be appointed randomly by the state, you have a limited time to argue your case before a Judge or Jury, forget about boxes of documents designed to just make everything harder, then there is a decision. You should still have the right to appeal just like
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How many private individuals, charged with an offence and ordered to pay a fine, would have the temerity to turn back to the court and argue with the judge?
How many of us would demand a discount?
Actually this isn't even nearly as uncommon as you may think. It's incredibly common for traffic violations that aren't cut and dry, and insanely common on offenses that borderline on criminal convictions being recorded. Shit one of my friends got done a 3rd time for drunk driving and went to whine to a judge to get his punishment reduced below the threshold of a criminal conviction and succeeded. Didn't even have a defense against it or claim he wasn't doing it.
People go to argue their fines literally all
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But: “Two wrongs don’t make a right”
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The thing about laws is, that it's still all humans holding them up.
It's still about who has the biggest club to enforce them and believes in them.
The paper itself is meaningless.
So if somebody really big comes around, he automatically gets to argue more.
The problem is that you and I are not as big, because we allow abominations like Google to grow like that.
And they would never grow like that, if all their income had to come from actual work, and the hourly rate would be reasonable compared to your and my
Ah, that makes all the difference (Score:3)
If Google says that they intended no harm then the fine should of course be canceled.
WTF is the matter with these bozos?
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>WTF is the matter with these bozos?
They got used to the lenient way they're treated in the USA, where being a large company almost always gets you either a "get out of jail free" card, or else a symbolic punishment, like fines in the thousands of bucks for companies that make billions.
In truth, I'm getting really tired of this mollycoddling of criminals, as long as they're rich enough. This isn't limited to Google, or even to (large) companies; a lot of powerful people - politicians, businessmen, media
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EU prosecutor: Alright. It's a deal. *Cuts Google CEO's throat* ... I INTENDED no harm. So we're good, right? You said so. *evil grin*
That's how you know it's a good fine. (Score:3)
If the fine is significant enough that they complain about the size of it then it's a suitable fine. If they don't complain then they have already incorporated it as a cost of doing business.
Oh, boo hoo! (Score:2)
No! RAISE it! (Score:2)
Every time they complain... 1 billion more.
Or rather, 20%, so it grows exponentially.
And that's still a bargain! Pray we don't just disown "your" entire business in our countries and nationalize it so it actually benefits us instead of letting you rip us off like it's been until now!
If ... (Score:2)
If you cannot pay the fine, then don't do the crime.
Isn't that what the conservatives say.