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throwaw12 55 minutes ago [-]
> U.S. ambassador to the EU Andrew Puzder told CNBC that Europe “can’t over regulate” and hit companies with “huge fines” if it is going to participate in the AI economy.
Imagine what these companies are doing in the US to their citizens, if ambassador is ready to defend them for violating rules/laws
9dev 22 minutes ago [-]
As he just found out, that's exactly what the EU can do. And as he's about to find out, the EU is way too important a market for the American economy to ignore or pull out of.
Play on your neighbour's yard, obey their rules.
abc123abc123 11 minutes ago [-]
I think rather, that it is the EU who cannot live without US cloud services and AI-services. Imagine if the US, behind closed doors of course, threatened to cut off all cloud services. Huge parts of the public and private sector could collapse.
istoleabread 1 minutes ago [-]
And achieve what exactly? EU being dependent on US cloud services also mean EU being a big part of their revenue. Parts of EU public and private sector may collapse but they will also switch to their own alternatives, the broken trust and lost revenue on the other hand will definitely not be recovered by US companies.
9dev 3 minutes ago [-]
If they did that, their pension system (in huge parts built on stock) would collapse. The American tech market is largely saturated, and needs room to grow. The EU is a market of almost 500 million people with a lot of money. The US simply cannot ignore it.
w3ll_w3ll_w3ll 9 minutes ago [-]
We would build our own alternatives. Russia is a much smaller market (120 million people) and they have their own tech companies.
f6v 3 minutes ago [-]
> We would build our own alternatives.
Right, and we haven’t because we just don’t wanna? The gap between US/China and the EU in AI is becoming wider by the day.
Russia has like 3-4 large tech companies (Sber, Yandex, VK, and maybe Ozon). And they completely rely on foreign hardware. I don’t even want to imagine how could Russia start building frontier AI in these circumstances.
jackvalentine 8 minutes ago [-]
You can do that, once, if you want to trigger an avalanche of realignment away from the U.S.
Not only would you lose the 450 million odd EU customers, but the rest of the world will reconsider doing business with you as well.
petesergeant 3 minutes ago [-]
> Imagine if the US, behind closed doors of course, threatened to cut off all cloud services. Huge parts of the public and private sector could collapse.
I think the EU member states would declare it a matter of national emergency and nationalize the relevant assets, with every other country these American companies sell to taking notes and considering doing the same pre-emptively, providing a huge investment boost to EU tech companies (and almost certainly China) while tanking the US economy, and poisoning the ability of the Americans to sell to Europe for the next hundred years.
cryo32 16 minutes ago [-]
Perhaps we don't want to participate in the US's AI economy?
4 minutes ago [-]
shevy-java 2 minutes ago [-]
Well, he is a corporate tool, aka a lobbyist, so unsurprisingly he acts in favour of companies. The question is why other countries should be subject to that. The EU may succumb to blackmail though, as Ursula showed before when she submitted to Trump.
lukan 1 hours ago [-]
“Android provides more choice for everyone and supports thousands of businesses. This judgment fails to recognize our significant investment to ensure Android remains open, interoperable and free,” a Google spokesperson told CNBC.
Sure. Which is why alternative stores like F-Droid are under threat now.
So much happened since 2018 that this ruling feels ancient now. It was about Google making unfair deals with OEMs:
> In 2018, the European Commission slapped Google with the record-breaking penalty on the grounds that it abused Android’s mobile dominance to give unfair advantage to its own apps via pre-installation deals with smartphone makers.
While this specific problem is much better today, specially since of the DMA, things also got so much worse. And even if a new anti-trust ruling would occur today, we could expect it to drag on almost a decade again...
xxs 15 minutes ago [-]
>This judgment fails to recognize our significant investment to ensure Android remains open
I wonder if that could be considered contempt of courts.
juliangmp 4 minutes ago [-]
It's perfectly fine to disagree with a court's decision, what's the crime here?
4thguy 11 minutes ago [-]
Also, very rich given their very active attempts at nailing the door shut on every version of Android except for Android + Google
Why did US antitrust and antimonopoly which has pioneered these concepts has been doing little to nothing for decades?
Google is too big and enjoys a monopoly in too many connected sectors (browsers, mobile os, search, advertising, data). Should've been broken up long ago.
pydry 9 minutes ago [-]
because campaign financing laws permit bribery
axegon_ 1 hours ago [-]
Good start. Nowhere nearly enough but a good start nonetheless.
zb3 33 minutes ago [-]
> U.S. ambassador to the EU Andrew Puzder told CNBC that Europe “can’t over regulate” and hit companies with “huge fines” if it is going to participate in the AI economy.
Thanks for reminding us not to rely on U.S. models as access to them might one day depend on letting U.S. companies break the law..
bilekas 58 minutes ago [-]
> the U.S. ambassador to the EU Andrew Puzder told CNBC that Europe “can’t over regulate” and hit companies with “huge fines” if it is going to participate in the AI economy
I love how the US will just let companies walk all over their citizens and then criticize others for not letting it happen. "Please think of the poor multi billion dollar companies".
48 minutes ago [-]
LunaSea 38 minutes ago [-]
"Trillion dollar company will definitely make tens of trillions of dollars in AI revenue but no, sorry, it can't pay a few thousand dollars to authors of content they trained on."
monegator 1 hours ago [-]
Good. Now, if only they also fought against developer integrity..
And may it be used to prosecute them for the current bullshit they're doing with Android.
Can the EU force Google to divest Chrome and Android? They should.
truthbe 38 minutes ago [-]
First step to fixing the mess we live in
1 hours ago [-]
netcan 37 minutes ago [-]
Apologies for the meta:
I feel that our understanding of trust and antitrust, along with the legal and regulatory premises... Just isn't very useful in the 21st century.
I understand the motivation, and justification for employing antitrust. Google's business model, and much of modern tech economy is really all about Monopoly-like market power.
In fact, one of the main concerns for AI investors is price competition, insufficient lock-in, weak network effects and consumer choice. They call this commodification... a telling choice of word. It's a worry that $trn valuations are impossible without something resembling monopoly to ensure longevity and high margins.
Peter Thiel gave a talk in favour of monopoly. It's worth reading. Even if you completely disagree, there are some subtle points that are relevant either way. A company facing market dynamism, price competition... Is unlikely to be investing billions in speculative r&d, for example.
Our core ideas about Monopoly, and antitrust... Tend to be highly derived of the industrial revolution, which is in turn all about manufacturing. Capital, labor, technology, marginal costs, marginal utility, price theory, etc. you can count the number which it's coming off the assembling line to understand the productivity of the firm. The product is concrete, and therefore productivity can be reasoned about.
There's no real way of applying this to Google. Google's users generally don't pay anything. Google doesn't have marginal costs.There is no price. The AdWords auction, is very clearly designed assuming monopolistic dynamics.. the seller is price maker and the buyer is a price taker. Prices are set as close as possible to buyer marginal value. Competition has no effect on pricing.
Otoh, where is the EU or any other antitrust regulator going with any of this. In the 90s, the Microsoft Monopoly was the biggest antitrust case. They used their os Monopoly to crush Netscape.
Now that it's history, we can look back and learn that the antitrust case just didn't matter one way or another. Nothing was really gained by victory, and nothing would have been lost by defeat.
The theory appears to be (a) regulated capitalism is good (b) tech monopolies clearly have market power and abuse it. There is no theory of desired outcome or the benefits of such an outcome. Are they regulating monopolies, preventing monopolies, pursuing an abstract notion of Justice?
9dev 11 minutes ago [-]
Even in a digital world, monopolies bring clear downsides. The case of Google being able to simply create realities by way of Chrome the rest of the market is forced to follow is a good example here.
I agree that the common understanding of antitrust regulations has become a leaky abstraction, but the general idea is still completely sound to me: A corporation should never be in a position where it can actively suppress competition, or act in a way that is harming consumers without an alternative available.
> Are they regulating monopolies, preventing monopolies, pursuing an abstract notion of Justice?
I suppose all of it; opportunities to prevent some monopolies were missed, to the detriment of all, so regulating them is the only option left. In other cases, we can still act to actively work against emerging monopolies. And above all is clearly a notion of justice, without which democracy itself would be a pretty futile exercise in bureaucracy.
Put differently, what do you suppose the EU should do? Just let global mega-corporations have their way? Even if Google users by and large don't pay for the services, we're all aware they monetise off of users still. To me, this is an implementation detail that doesn't really make a difference to the observation that yes, Google is (and other big tech corps are) clearly in a market dominating position it (they) should not be in.
> A company facing market dynamism, price competition... Is unlikely to be investing billions in speculative r&d, for example.
The comparison to manufacturing isn't necessary because this seems to be contradicting by much of tech history itself. Plenty of companies have spent plenty of billions on R&D to outpace their real competitors.
If we're to update our view of monopoly (and I agree we should) it should be to clamp down on them even more.
xxs 6 minutes ago [-]
>Now that it's history, we can look back and learn that the antitrust case just didn't matter one way or another. Nothing was really gained by victory, and nothing would have been lost by defeat.
You are missing the fact that the US administration did change and Microsoft was not broken... similar to the fact google/alphabet escaped that too
epolanski 15 minutes ago [-]
> Nothing was really gained by victory
Windows users have a prompt to choose their browser after installing the OS.
RugnirViking 3 minutes ago [-]
and you might think this is a small or pointless win, but the whole point of this is that because users have this choice, microsoft is forced to make internet explorer actually good so that people willingly choose it instead of abusing it to make life harder and worse for everyone else while making things easier for themselves.
Hence internet explorer was killed and we got edge
frollogaston 1 hours ago [-]
These are basically meant as tarriffs, right?
bilekas 56 minutes ago [-]
No, these are anti-trust fines. If you want to participate in the EU zone, you can't have monopolistic behaviors. It might sound strange for the US, but you can't simply corner a market and then claim it's innovation and 'good for the customer'. The EU has a LONG history of these regulations, it's nothing new but the more rich a company becomes the more these fines are just the price of doing business.
Instead, here's a wild take. Why don't they just follow the regulations and continue to make profits.
hparadiz 26 minutes ago [-]
Google made Android open source for free and you can even see this on this on HN as everyone glazes GrapheneOS. Without Android there would not be an entire ecosystem of software. Google even complied with a previous rulings about search engine choice and browser choice. In fact Android has always allowed you to set those things.
As usual Europe can't innovate so just taxes people out of their market entirely. Why would anyone want to locate their business in Europe after reading a headline like this? Have you guys ever considered making your own operating system? Your own tech companies?
9dev 7 minutes ago [-]
> Google made Android open source for free
And Hitler built the high ways and Germany. What does that even prove? They can still abuse Android for vendor lock-in, or as a sales funnel to their commercial offerings, or as a data source for a myriad of things users did never really consent to.
> As usual Europe can't innovate so just taxes people out of their market entirely.
Yawn. Last time I looked, big tech is still wholly present all across the EU, only that I have the option to install apps from alternative stores on my iPhone. Also, the EU as an institution isn't the same thing as European companies. Go check the machines in any factory near you, and I can pretty much guarantee you'll find a German one in it.
> Have you guys ever considered making your own operating system?
You might want to look up where Linus Torvalds created Linux.
hparadiz 3 minutes ago [-]
Linus lives in Portland. Stop with the cope.
I was also born in Europe. There's a reason I don't live there.
Make your own operating systems. Your own Googles and Apples. Seriously. Do it. I would welcome some choice and competition.
4thguy 13 minutes ago [-]
I think you might need to reconsider how open Android actually is given the recent moves.
hparadiz 10 minutes ago [-]
You don't even know how good you have it. With incentives like this what company would make anything open in the future? You're punishing them for it. They're gonna make it like iOS precisely because of rulings like this.
4thguy 3 minutes ago [-]
I'm sorry, but what does "pre-installation deals with smartphone makers" have to do with being open?
epolanski 9 minutes ago [-]
The EU's concern is less "is it technically possible?" and more whether Google's licensing and commercial agreements discourage effective competition.
In particular:
- Google forced every manufacturer to have search and chrome on every android phone if they wanted access to Google Play. No technical reason, just forcing their position.
- Manufacturers signed agreements making it de facto impossible to ship Android forks not approved by Google. If you want Play Services, you can't ship a different fork, no matter whether you're Sony or Samsung.
- Google paid manufacturers so Google Search was going to be the only search option on that phone, preventing competition.
None of these practices make the landscape better for the user or incentivize competition when the game is rigged at contract level.
SockThief 58 minutes ago [-]
> In 2018, the European Commission slapped Google with the record-breaking penalty on the grounds that it abused Android's mobile dominance...
What do you think?
pjc50 1 hours ago [-]
You could address the underlying issue?
xienze 30 minutes ago [-]
> Google has attempted to allay the Commission’s concerns over the years such as allowing Android users to switch between search engines and browsers so they are not tied to the company’s apps.
tgv 8 minutes ago [-]
Two words: Google Play.
petesergeant 10 minutes ago [-]
No, but they'll be treated them as such by the administration, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing
xienze 30 minutes ago [-]
More like an ATM. Need some money? Let an American tech company operate with no issue for years and then one day "whoa we checked and you've been violating <some vaguely-defined law about privacy> for years. Who knew? That'll be five billion Euros please."
xxs 13 minutes ago [-]
>That'll be five billion Euros please."
feel free to pull out of the market, if you dislike the rules. Google pulled out of China for instance.
realusername 25 minutes ago [-]
If anything, the EU has been slow to act, these companies have been operating against all possible antitrust laws for years and continue to do so despite being fined, probably the fine isn't large enough.
hparadiz 25 minutes ago [-]
That's literally what is happening here. It's a shakedown. Nothing more.
petesergeant 12 minutes ago [-]
> It's a shakedown. Nothing more.
Perhaps believable, had it not survived eight years of litigation ending at the ECJ, or had there been some informal "pay up or else" demand attached, neither of which is true.
aurareturn 23 minutes ago [-]
What’s next? ChatGPT needs to support Anthropic, DeepSeek, Google models in EU?
9dev 21 minutes ago [-]
Let your local AI agent summarise the AI act for you. It's reasonable for the most part.
flexagoon 20 minutes ago [-]
I don't believe that you actually see no difference between this and the case in the lawsuit.
Imagine what these companies are doing in the US to their citizens, if ambassador is ready to defend them for violating rules/laws
Play on your neighbour's yard, obey their rules.
Right, and we haven’t because we just don’t wanna? The gap between US/China and the EU in AI is becoming wider by the day.
Russia has like 3-4 large tech companies (Sber, Yandex, VK, and maybe Ozon). And they completely rely on foreign hardware. I don’t even want to imagine how could Russia start building frontier AI in these circumstances.
Not only would you lose the 450 million odd EU customers, but the rest of the world will reconsider doing business with you as well.
I think the EU member states would declare it a matter of national emergency and nationalize the relevant assets, with every other country these American companies sell to taking notes and considering doing the same pre-emptively, providing a huge investment boost to EU tech companies (and almost certainly China) while tanking the US economy, and poisoning the ability of the Americans to sell to Europe for the next hundred years.
Sure. Which is why alternative stores like F-Droid are under threat now.
https://keepandroidopen.org/
> In 2018, the European Commission slapped Google with the record-breaking penalty on the grounds that it abused Android’s mobile dominance to give unfair advantage to its own apps via pre-installation deals with smartphone makers.
While this specific problem is much better today, specially since of the DMA, things also got so much worse. And even if a new anti-trust ruling would occur today, we could expect it to drag on almost a decade again...
I wonder if that could be considered contempt of courts.
Google is too big and enjoys a monopoly in too many connected sectors (browsers, mobile os, search, advertising, data). Should've been broken up long ago.
Thanks for reminding us not to rely on U.S. models as access to them might one day depend on letting U.S. companies break the law..
I love how the US will just let companies walk all over their citizens and then criticize others for not letting it happen. "Please think of the poor multi billion dollar companies".
https://keepandroidopen.org
Can the EU force Google to divest Chrome and Android? They should.
I feel that our understanding of trust and antitrust, along with the legal and regulatory premises... Just isn't very useful in the 21st century.
I understand the motivation, and justification for employing antitrust. Google's business model, and much of modern tech economy is really all about Monopoly-like market power.
In fact, one of the main concerns for AI investors is price competition, insufficient lock-in, weak network effects and consumer choice. They call this commodification... a telling choice of word. It's a worry that $trn valuations are impossible without something resembling monopoly to ensure longevity and high margins.
Peter Thiel gave a talk in favour of monopoly. It's worth reading. Even if you completely disagree, there are some subtle points that are relevant either way. A company facing market dynamism, price competition... Is unlikely to be investing billions in speculative r&d, for example.
Our core ideas about Monopoly, and antitrust... Tend to be highly derived of the industrial revolution, which is in turn all about manufacturing. Capital, labor, technology, marginal costs, marginal utility, price theory, etc. you can count the number which it's coming off the assembling line to understand the productivity of the firm. The product is concrete, and therefore productivity can be reasoned about.
There's no real way of applying this to Google. Google's users generally don't pay anything. Google doesn't have marginal costs.There is no price. The AdWords auction, is very clearly designed assuming monopolistic dynamics.. the seller is price maker and the buyer is a price taker. Prices are set as close as possible to buyer marginal value. Competition has no effect on pricing.
Otoh, where is the EU or any other antitrust regulator going with any of this. In the 90s, the Microsoft Monopoly was the biggest antitrust case. They used their os Monopoly to crush Netscape.
Now that it's history, we can look back and learn that the antitrust case just didn't matter one way or another. Nothing was really gained by victory, and nothing would have been lost by defeat.
The theory appears to be (a) regulated capitalism is good (b) tech monopolies clearly have market power and abuse it. There is no theory of desired outcome or the benefits of such an outcome. Are they regulating monopolies, preventing monopolies, pursuing an abstract notion of Justice?
I agree that the common understanding of antitrust regulations has become a leaky abstraction, but the general idea is still completely sound to me: A corporation should never be in a position where it can actively suppress competition, or act in a way that is harming consumers without an alternative available.
> Are they regulating monopolies, preventing monopolies, pursuing an abstract notion of Justice?
I suppose all of it; opportunities to prevent some monopolies were missed, to the detriment of all, so regulating them is the only option left. In other cases, we can still act to actively work against emerging monopolies. And above all is clearly a notion of justice, without which democracy itself would be a pretty futile exercise in bureaucracy.
Put differently, what do you suppose the EU should do? Just let global mega-corporations have their way? Even if Google users by and large don't pay for the services, we're all aware they monetise off of users still. To me, this is an implementation detail that doesn't really make a difference to the observation that yes, Google is (and other big tech corps are) clearly in a market dominating position it (they) should not be in.
The comparison to manufacturing isn't necessary because this seems to be contradicting by much of tech history itself. Plenty of companies have spent plenty of billions on R&D to outpace their real competitors.
If we're to update our view of monopoly (and I agree we should) it should be to clamp down on them even more.
You are missing the fact that the US administration did change and Microsoft was not broken... similar to the fact google/alphabet escaped that too
Windows users have a prompt to choose their browser after installing the OS.
Hence internet explorer was killed and we got edge
Instead, here's a wild take. Why don't they just follow the regulations and continue to make profits.
As usual Europe can't innovate so just taxes people out of their market entirely. Why would anyone want to locate their business in Europe after reading a headline like this? Have you guys ever considered making your own operating system? Your own tech companies?
And Hitler built the high ways and Germany. What does that even prove? They can still abuse Android for vendor lock-in, or as a sales funnel to their commercial offerings, or as a data source for a myriad of things users did never really consent to.
> As usual Europe can't innovate so just taxes people out of their market entirely.
Yawn. Last time I looked, big tech is still wholly present all across the EU, only that I have the option to install apps from alternative stores on my iPhone. Also, the EU as an institution isn't the same thing as European companies. Go check the machines in any factory near you, and I can pretty much guarantee you'll find a German one in it.
> Have you guys ever considered making your own operating system?
You might want to look up where Linus Torvalds created Linux.
I was also born in Europe. There's a reason I don't live there.
Make your own operating systems. Your own Googles and Apples. Seriously. Do it. I would welcome some choice and competition.
In particular:
- Google forced every manufacturer to have search and chrome on every android phone if they wanted access to Google Play. No technical reason, just forcing their position.
- Manufacturers signed agreements making it de facto impossible to ship Android forks not approved by Google. If you want Play Services, you can't ship a different fork, no matter whether you're Sony or Samsung.
- Google paid manufacturers so Google Search was going to be the only search option on that phone, preventing competition.
None of these practices make the landscape better for the user or incentivize competition when the game is rigged at contract level.
What do you think?
feel free to pull out of the market, if you dislike the rules. Google pulled out of China for instance.
Perhaps believable, had it not survived eight years of litigation ending at the ECJ, or had there been some informal "pay up or else" demand attached, neither of which is true.