Alphabet unit Google lost an appeal against a 2.42-billion-euro ($2.8-billion) antitrust decision on Wednesday, a major win for Europe’s competition chief in the first of three court rulings central to the EU push to regulate big tech.
Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager fined the world’s most popular internet search engine in 2017 over the use of its own price comparison shopping service to gain an unfair advantage over smaller European rivals.
The shopping case was the first of three decisions that saw Google rack up 8.25 billion euros in EU antitrust fines in the last decade.
Good.
And when Google will respond “so what, we’ll just cut you off from our services”, the EU will drop charges. Just like it did about taxation of the GAFAM. Big news in the headlines, little responsibility in the backstage.
Which is exactly why the GAFAM need to be broken up, because any one of them has enough power they can tell any government “Ya know what? Watch us black hole your country and BTW FU buddy” and anyone short of the USA or maybe China would have to cave.
My view is any middle ranking power (which is what the major countries of Europe are individually) have the skills and capacity to replace any US tech giant if they so wish. The GDP of China is quite small relative to its population. It’s not much better or bigger than any middle ranking power at the moment.
National policies which specify open standards and punish feature creep lock in strategies are one way to mitigate as is maintaining a plurality of suppliers. Then there is other law and trade agreements to block unfair advantages. In fact the biggest problem the US has at the moment is more and more Europeans are choosing not to study or work in the US. The US cannot rely any longer on stealing our best brains, or creating business partnerships with the US taking the dominant role and treating their European partner like a doormat, or open up a European factory and rely on sucking up all the local talent and destroying the local competition before it gets started.
I can live without gmail and docx and any one of a number of US sourced technologies. I don’t need to buy Chinese “fast fashion” either. Russia doesn’t sell anything I want and with their attitude I wouldn’t want it either.
The last thing anyone pushing an abusive relationship wants is for you to have your own mind or ditch them for an alternative. It’s easy for the US to be a “superpower” when they get the first choice of the crop and pay for their military through half their population living in poverty. Not so easy when they cannot take people for grated and have to work at it.
I’m not sure where you come from but many of the European power plants run on Russian gas so it’s possible you depend on them for electricity. It’s the same with Chinese electronics.
I suspect the damage done by Google and their cronies is tenfold their fines and upwards. As for threats by the US tech giants bring it on I say. The last thing they want is for Europe to learn to live without them.
HollyB,
Oh there’s no doubt about that. A global monopoly that harms competition for even one year will cause more damage than that. But on the other hand, the EU is just one court, It really should be the responsibility of courts around the world to enforce antitrust. The problem is when they don’t. Huge corporations tend to get away with everything until it’s impossible to ignore, but by then the damage is already done and the penalty is a slap in the hand. It can’t really make the competition whole.
This is why the future is going to belong to massively consolidated corporate entities that own and control everything