These fines are quickly adding up to more than their profit in Europe anyways. Once they reach the point of running profit negative in Europe, wouldn't it actually a better business move to pull out?
>Once they reach the point of running profit negative in Europe, wouldn't it actually a better business move to pull out?
They can respect the EU regulation, stop the crap in the search and Android and continue making money from the products they sell to enterprises. They will lose some profits but the products that are respecting the laws will continue making money.
Except you know that won't make them happy. Take the shopping example. They had a product that benefited consumers and businesses, but in the middle, a very tiny slice of the population (which who were in the business of making product comparison sites) were losing, and they cost Googling billions. The EU didn't even tell Google /what/ the solution was, because there isn't any, they just blindly asked them to change things.
That shows you that it's not about "respecting" regulation. It's about shoving it in their face and forcing them to comply.
Google has a monopoly on search, this means if I do a search say "best programming language/framework for X" and if Google hijacks this and put Google products on top then they are abusing the monopoly. It sucks for them they can't abuse it and they can't push their products and make more money.
I think the idea is simple, do web search, don't promote your video,maps, lanugages,services , don't add special code for Google products/services , and stop prompting people to install Chrome if they search with other browsers.
They make changes to address each of the issues as they crop up, so the question they need to ask is whether the EU will keep finding reasons to hand out record fines. I guess that boils down to the degree to which they attribute the fines to their own behaviour, and the degree to which they attribute them to European/Vestagerian animus.
There is zero evidence for this accusation. The regulations against monopolies are neither new, nor are they enforced in a discriminatory manner against foreign companies. The EU administration is just doing a better job than it’s American counterpart. Which is a shame because historically, the US was pretty good at reigning into anticompetitive monopolies.
And what regulation exactly did they break with the shop comparison issue?
It made consumers lives better, as well as business' lives. The only one losing in there were other shopping comparison sites, but no regulations were broken, yet they still had to pay billions, and the EU /didn't even/ bother telling them what they could change to fix the issue, just that they should do something about it.
The whole "follow regulations" excuse is complete bullshit.
Or rather a tool to break up monopolies? I think they should have acted long time ago. I particulary like the changes they are compelled to make on Android.
