Its a reverse uno after decades of fines by the US against European banks and car makers.

They will just write it off against the tax they pay back in the US anyway (which is why the US doesnt like it).

If the US had working anti trust this wouldn't really even be a thing.

The market is a funnel, rewarding centralization, you can thrustbust the t-1000 all you want, but the mercury meets in the middle and guess who is back.

Yes, but that's by design in some sense. Monopoly is a carrot, entrepreneurs are donkeys on treadmills chasing after such carrots. The market's value to society in this metaphor is the energy produced by the treadmills, so while it's critical to offer donkeys the promise of a carrot, it's even more important they don't actually get it, because then they step off the treadmill and become a nuisance.

I agree you could make laws allowing for self-busting. As in, some management whistleblower having evidence of monopoly practices, reports it and the company gets autosplit- with the dissidents as manager of the new company.

(Actually I think it was Gallium but your point stands ;) )

This is only true if Google isn't ordered to change its behavior and the fine isn't higher next time.

The EU just finds a new thing to fine each time. Since the scope of US consumer internet companies is so vast, they can mine €1b fines more or less limitlessly.

Maybe US consumer internet companies should try following our laws?

What do they expect if they come to our countries and break the law there? Of course they're gonna get fined?!

The argument is that the laws are so broad that the EU can always find a violation even when companies try to follow the law, and that they mostly target foreign companies. TBH I find this focus defensible: the big US companies are just so much bigger that it makes more sense to police them than insignificant local players. But it is a good cash cow.

The problem is that American companies try to follow the letter of the law, while going as much against the spirit of the law as possible. This is why they complain it's "too broad", because they can't avoid the spirit as they would like to.

Example here: Facebook changing their ToS to claim usage itself constitutes freely given, informed consent under GDPR. No it doesn't, you knew that was against the spirit, you did it anyways, you got fined.

This is fundamentally how the EU legal system works, you're expected to do what the law wants from you, not find some clever way to avoid what the law is for while ticking the right checkboxes.

I had a whole in-depth conversation on this not too long ago, check it out if you want more context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48707697

Sometimes the "spirit of the law" seems to be "degrade your offerings until the European competitors who keep pestering us stop". Little consideration ever seems to be given to telling those European businesses to make a good product themselves. European competition regulators could be weighing consumer welfare more heavily.

I'm not sure I've observed any of that. American companies usually degrade out of spite in my experience - they'd rather not offer the product than to offer it lawfully.

It's a win-win: Wild west for the US and fines for the countries that have laws and enforce them.

I m not sure about that. It raises the cost of doing business, but US tech giants still get to dominate the EU tech landscape.

What's the alternative -- let US companies continue with their anti-competitive practices?

This is the exact same thing the US should he doing, but its in love with corporate overlords.

Look, US tech services can either follow our laws our they can get the fuck out of our market.

The way people treat them breaking our laws as their god given right and then frame our fine as anything but their own fault is starting to really annoy me.

Respect our sovereignty, follow our laws. Or don't, but then don't be surprised that breaking the law is punished.

Maybe things are different in the US, maybe corporate capture has progressed to a point where laws are optional for megacorps. But we still have rule of law and we'd like to keep it that way.

While there is “law”, how much agency does an average European individual have in shaping those laws? This is a multi national body for which you can’t vote for its leader. You can’t vote on any of its resolutions or referendums.

It’s representative democracy, like most democracies. It is, granted, a particularly complex and confusing one.

In practice, the average European has more agency in shaping EU law than the average American does in shaping US law; the US’s electoral system means that, realistically, on a federal level, most peoples’ votes simply do not matter (two party FPTP system, with most seats being safe). The EU parliament is at least multiparty proportional representation, and most member states’ governments are also elected via some sort of PR.

> for which you can’t vote for its leader

Most democracies don’t have a directly elected head of state; it’s _largely_ a thing in the Americas and Africa. In terms of big countries with a true presidential system, you’re really talking the US, Russia, Brazil, Nigeria and Indonesia. I’m, ah, not sure that we should be rushing to emulate those paragons of democracy :)

France does have a directly elected head of state (I wouldn't want to emulate that either, though their system is not purely presidential), as does South Korea, Mexico, Turkey and many other countries really.

I mean, look, again, Turkey? South Korea? You’re not really selling it.

" it’s _largely_ a thing in the Americas and Africa" " In terms of big countries with a true presidential system, you’re really talking the US, Russia, Brazil, Nigeria and Indonesia."

These are factual inaccuracies.

South Korea is a functioning democracy. They tend to jail their ex-presidents quite often, but then only those that do deserve it, which is more than we can say about a few western democracies which are very lenient about the criminality of politicians. Ah yes and the president is limited to serving one term.

The US doesn't have a directly elected head of state either. The demos elects the electoral college, which elects the head of state. Twice in recent memory directly against the popular vote, most recently Trump I.

For the Council, it is literally just a grouping of our democratically elected heads of state. Those we can of course vote for according to our countries own democratic systems.

For the Commission, our democratically elected national governments each send a representative, so those are as elected as any minister in government is.

For Parliament, the EU demos elects directly.

Not sure where the issue is? It all seems more democratic to me than, say, the Electoral College.

This time the American tech industry is the uncolonized native America, and the Europeans are the settlers that ran out of land to take over and decided they must forcefully re-colonize Americans and our design decisions and way of life by force.

This is such a ridiculous offender/victim reversal. American tech companies are free to do whatever they want in America. In our country, they need to follow our law. If they don't want that, they can get out.

What they're trying to do is colonize Europe with their lawlessness, they're trying to deny us our sovereign right of determining our own rules.

There's no right to come to our jurisdiction and then decide to ignore our rules. Either come and play by the rules or stay out.

I mean the current US president literally threatened to increase EU trade tariffs if the EU tries to get the big tech companies to pay their fair share of tax here. You can’t have it both ways.

The WTO is paralyzed since 2019. Nobody cares about it anymore:

"Since 2019, when the Donald Trump administration began blocking appointments to the body, the Appellate Body has been unable to enforce WTO rules and punish violators of WTO rules.[3][4][2] Subsequently, disregard for trade rules has increased, leading to more trade protectionist measures.[4][5] The Joe Biden administration maintained the freeze on new appointments."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appellate_Body