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- Hacker News
- Expect threats by the Trump administration towards EU.
US: our beloved tech companies (also funded our POTUS elections) tried to navigate the complex regulation landscape in the EU to innovate and accidentally stepped into very complex rules. But EU is fining them for being good boys.
Shame on you EU, for not supporting criminals as much as US does
by throwaw12 - He already has: https://www.trumpstruth.org/statuses/40235by kalleboo
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- Curious, where do the 1B go? What is this money used for and who benefits from this fine?
- Being upset that Google search shows Google Maps is like being upset that you can't get a Burger King Whopper at McDonald's.by xnx
- Ehh… I honestly believe that you should either be a market, and resale other products, or you should be a boutique, and sell your own.
Mixing in branded items in a market with special treatment is very obviously anticompetitive. We see amazon doing that to high margin items egregiously. We see Costco doing it less egregiously.
We should fight against anticompetitive practices pretty seriously.
by scoofy - The EU should demand that Google must be split up. Maps, Youtube, Search, Ads, Android, GCP should all be separate companies. Everything else is just childs play.by amai
- That's last week's fine, isn't it? If so, it's a dupe.by cromka
- You've submitted this 8 times OP; Please just read the site we beg of you
- For reference, that's 0.25% of Alphabet's revenue last year.
- Another reference: It's ~0.75% of Alphabets 2025 income.by jstummbillig
- That reference doesn't matter. The reference that matters is profit due to presence in Europe market. If it is lower than fines per year, it makes sense to pull out of the market.
- The issue is that app developers can not offer alternatives to this, not that Google's apps only favour their own services. This is the exact same issue Japan had with Apple. Both were fair rulings. Forcing developers to use services is just removing free competition.by ktallett
- The EU has found a clever way to charge US tech companies for market access without triggering a WTO violation.by qq66
- 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.by urbandw311er
- This is the exact same thing the US should he doing, but its in love with corporate overlords.by troupo
- 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.by Iolaum
- What's the alternative -- let US companies continue with their anti-competitive practices?by phoronixrly
- This is only true if Google isn't ordered to change its behavior and the fine isn't higher next time.by amelius
- 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.
by vrganj - If the US had working anti trust this wouldn't really even be a thing.by jabwd
- 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).
by blitzar - It drives me insane when in Europe the link between Google Search and Google Maps is broken and I often have to copy paste an address between the two. Thanks EU, what if I like Google's integrations?by plantain
- Instead of going insane, why not try to think about how to solve this problem? With the correct markup, your browser could recognise the address as a physical location and ask you how you would like to handle the address. You would choose Google Maps.
We need to stop being so helpless. A proper user agent should be able to do what you want it to.
- I think this is a larger web-standards problem.
There is no standard clickable "link" for physical locations. There is no URL-equivalent you can send to someone, they click it, it open up their map viewer of choice. You can send Lat Lon coordinates and then have the recipient copy and paste them. It generally works though there isn't a standard format and no service will make it clickable like an email address, so the whole process remains clunky.
When you "Share" a location in Google Maps or OSMand, you get back a URL link to their service and not an service agnostic "link" to the geographic location.
by geokon - Im sure you are right, but I’m not sure what you mean. I can search for an address fine in search and I get an embedded map that I can click to open Google Maps. How does it work in the US?by plufz
- I share the frustration but maybe if Google hadn't gained a monopoly status Google Maps wouldn’t have been in its current sorry state.
My assessment is that EU is doing too little too late, the fine should have been something like 20B and used towards creating a non-profit, open and extendable map service ideally with the people who already do great mapping tech that don't show up in Google search results at the top.
EU is too vanilla, too unopinionated towards the tech, they go over the problem after the damage is done, take the money for themselves and force a non-solution that doesn't fix the problem and often makes it worse because they leave the implementation to the convicts who make sure to make it maliciously compliant.
by mrtksn - Why are you blaming the EU and not Google's malicious compliance? They could simply ask you which map provider you'd like to use.by dns_snek
- What drives you nuts is Google's malicious compliance and your ignorance: what EU forbidden is defaulting to it in a way that they can't be decoupled. What Google was allowed to do was adding a option to enable it.
They didn't. That's specifically to piss you off on EU.
by cromka