The $18.94B number is net income in Q3 2021, not in a single month.

$18.94 billion would have been a more acceptable amount to fine them. You have to make these companies really hurt in order to get their attention.

So, is the thought that the net benefit of Google's anti-competitive behavior related to comparison shopping services in Europe alone is greater than 1% of Alphabets total income over a calendar year?

No, otherwise the fine would simply be a cost of doing business, and there would still be a positive ROI for Google on the behavior that got them in trouble. The fine needs to be greater than the revenue generated by anti-competitive behavior.

A truly fair punishment would require identifying when the unlawful behavior started, calculating all profits derived from it, taking it away and only then fining them.

Making unlawful business decisions shouldn't be a calculated power move for them. It should put them in a worse position than they started. Like a chess game that gets rewound all the way back to the last legal move, but it costs them a rook or queen as well for the trouble they caused.

A truly fair punishment would be people going to jail (or the threat of it), like is the case for virtually any other crime. This shit isn't going to stop unless people refuse to do it because of the risk of jail.

Setting aside the whole “fair” issue, I suspect Alphabet could convince a lot of execs to risk going to jail for a lot less than the fine levied here.

Corporations don’t go to jail.

But if by being an employee of such corporation you would have possibility of going to jail, there would be not that many candidates.

Then there's no incentive to perform lawful behavior.

Assuming < 100% chance of getting caught for an unlawful behavior, you're incentivizing unlawful behavior if the downside is essentially capped at $0.

Alphabet as a whole yes, but the question I think is how much they made from Google Shopping specifically. If the fine was greater than amount of money they made with what they were getting fined about (multiplied by the chance of getting caught, probably higher for google than most), then they EU would successfully discourage similar rule breaking in the future. While alphabet's total income for the year may be that high, most of that comes from ads and not shopping, and penalizing just the shopping related income makes sense in that light.

The alternative argument is that what you really want a fine to do is penalize law-infringing heavily enough that a companies' shareholders make not getting fined again high priority. In that light, you're primarily concerned about levying fines against a company's profit margin/funds they're using to invest in future growth. In which case, yeah, this fine is far too paltry to concern investors in a vacuum.

I disagree. If you use just the percentage from one line of business, this gives the bigger players ability to become bullies when entering new business segments. Google has hundreds of billions of cash on hand, so they can encroach on any new business they want with below board tactics and the fine is based on only percentage of revenue that comes from that new line of business would under penalize them.

Minor quibble, but that link says “Quarterly Financials.” So $6.31 billion a month.

Thanks, I edited to correct this mistake.

That said, someone's OKR in legal just got tanked haha