EU already hit Amazon in 2018 and Amazon settled in 2022 to stop pushing their own products above competitors using unfair tactics.

(those rules only only apply to online shoppers inside EU)

In the settlement Amazon is put into a probation for 5 years.

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_22_...

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With respect to the marketplace seller data, Amazon commits to refrain from using non-public data relating to, or derived from, the activities of independent sellers on its marketplace, for its retail business that competes with those sellers. This would apply to both Amazon's automated tools and employees that could cross-use the data from Amazon Marketplace, for the purposes of retail decisions. The relevant data would cover both individual and aggregate data, such as sales terms, revenues, shipments, inventory related information, consumer visit data or seller performance on the platform. Amazon commits not to use such data for the purposes of selling branded goods as well as its private label products.

In relation to the Buy Box Amazon commits:

- to apply equal treatment to all sellers when ranking their offers for the purposes of the selection of the winner of the Buy Box;

- and in addition, to display a second competing offer to the Buy Box winner if there is a second offer that is sufficiently differentiated from the first one on price and/or delivery. Both offers will display the same descriptive information and provide for the same purchasing experience. This will enhance consumer choice.

Lastly, regarding Prime Amazon commits:

- to set non-discriminatory conditions and criteria for the qualification of marketplace sellers and offers to Prime;

- to allow Prime sellers to freely choose any carrier for their logistics and delivery services and negotiate terms directly with the carrier of their choice;

- not to use any information obtained through Prime about the terms and performance of third-party carriers, for its own logistics services. This is to ensure that carriers' data is not flowing directly to Amazon's competing logistics services.

The commitments would remain in force for five years. Their implementation would be monitored by a monitoring trustee who would report regularly to the Commission.

How about non-online stores? In the US many major chain stores have their own brands. For example in grocery stores Safeway has their Signature Select brand, and Walmart has Great Value. In electronics Best Buy has Insignia, and Walmart has Onn.

Do major EU retailers do the same?

Might be a distinction here because Google doesn't actually sell the products whereas Amazon is the actual retailer. Google is promoting their link to the product -- potentially even over the exact same retailer's direct link -- to take a cut.

This is a single fine for a single company

Why not both?

The weirdest corporate training I’ve ever taken, besides a certain very old tech company using pictures of monkeys in their anti discrimination training , pointing out you can’t technically age discriminate against a 45 year old and in their harassment training announced that flirty bisexual people can’t sexually harass you… sorry what was a saying?

Oh. It was Boeing saying that while bribery is generally VERY BAD, there are geopolitical situations where not only is it acceptable but we need to report it through proper channels so we can get a tax write off as a cost of doing business.

wat.

The law here isn't some neutral concept of justice, but rather a regulation tailor-made by unelected officials to target large US companies.

On the contrary. Google have the best lawyers. And they did the math and came up that the profits from several years of now following the laws makes up for any potential fines for breaking it.

You know that scene from Fight Club when on the plane, Edward Norton's character explains to his seat mate that he works for a very large car company where they have mechanical issues that kill people all the time, and his job is to do the math and only issue a recall if the cost of the lawsuits is greater than the cost of the recall. Google, Apple, et-al have the same thought process for following the law.

spell check alert. you misspelled "lobbying"

I think you were trying to say:

> Not every country has a legitimate lobbying scheme as part of its political system.

You know what helps paying the fines? Breaking the law.

It's easy to lose track of the number of times Google has been convicted of breaking the law.

The articles and discussions are combined. There are already a number of threads. It's a dupe.

Powerful entities influence the world. The difference is that the government (in the EU) is ostensibly democratic and private companies are unaccountable optimization engines.

I guess I agree with both being a problem. Maybe the way I would put it is that once a company becomes large enough it is a lot like a government. For example, if a a few tech companies ban your speech, you effectively don’t have a useful freedom of expression. Being able to yell on a street corner is not a good substitute if you are censored online.

The question is not the monopoly by itself, it's to conquer other market by abusing it's power. If you own search and mobile os, without régulation, what could you prevent to own mobile service, then fiber, then delivery then car, then train, then whatever ?

Google was better for the five minutes that pagerank lasted. The only thing it's maintained since is being no worse than the competitors, while being the default. In order to become and remain the default they use the profit they make from their old purchase of doubleclick, since ads are what make Google money, in order to bribe and buy competitors.

There's no part of this that is good. Other than as a huge monopoly, they can afford to be huge on R&D, just like Bell. They still fail to make money on anything but ads, though, so it's not turning out as well as Bell.

There are network effects and other feedback loops that make competition not possible. For example, by simply having fewer users, you get less information to train your algorithms. But in Google‘s case, they also have the network effect of running an advertising platform. This platform is hard to compete against in itself. And it provides funding that would otherwise potentially go to other players so that they can invest in search quality. Just a thought. I have not thought deeply about this so I would welcome other opinions.

The best result for the consumer would obviously be the best maps integrated into the best search. That may end up apple maps or here wego with google search.

It'd be perfectly fine for Google to allow choosing your own maps provider, or just using geo:// URIs so whichever maps app you've got installed handles location links.

Through laws and treaties we've given the EU the duty to enforce this.

Yes anybody could use Bing, but they won't. That leads to big revenues for Google. Question now is, what Google does with those revenues. Do they invest in other markets where they otherwise can't compete to drive competitors out of the market? - Then they abuse the power they got.

Yes, it's so much better that they pay Apple billions each year to make it the default search engine.