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Trump Slams EU Over $5 Billion Fine on Google (reuters.com)
U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday criticized the European Union and said the bloc was taking advantage of the United States, pointing to the record $5 billion fine European antitrust regulators imposed on Google. From a report: European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker is scheduled to meet with Trump at the White House next Wednesday to discuss trade and other issues. "I told you so! The European Union just slapped a Five Billion Dollar fine on one of our great companies, Google. They truly have taken advantage of the U.S., but not for long!" Trump said in a post on Twitter .
Trump posted something on Twitter? Well that's worth an entire post.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Thank you, Mr. Putin, we already know what you think.
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
Awesome, I'm all for paying for Android if I get an option NOT to install Google Play Services and other crapware.
Nobody in the EU is saying that Google charging for Android is a bad thing. They are saying that illegal trade practices like forcing certain services and applications upon vendors of smartphones, is a bad thing.
If Google must charge for Android in order not to do that, then charge for Android.
Also, enough posts about trump making asinine comments, it stopped being funny in 2016. I am outside US, I am sick of comment section filled with right vs left.
The EU problem is that Google is using contracts to enforce provisions with free software. The solution is for Google to charge a license fee and then use contracts to enforce provisions on licensed software. This might work out better for Android users as it would also fix OS fragmentaton by preventing carriers from selling new phones with an obsolete version of Android.
Goodbye, Slashdot!
Yeah Google are such patriots they moved their whole operations to Ireland to avoid contributing anything to the USA, combined with their little Luxembourg sandwiches meaning Trumps secretary probably contributes more, hence your infrastructure is crumbling around you while certain individuals make out like the bandits they are
LOL MAGA
Google can still give one version with crap apps away for free and a license for a crap-free version. I'd gladly pay extra for more choice. The problem is that Google tried to force the shit version on everyone.
"What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." Ralph Waldo Emerson
US 320 milion people, EU 500 million people US GDP 20 trillion USD, EU 20 trillion Tell me again why should EU play nice?
Credit unions are required to charge an opening fee of some sort. You have to buy in.
He thinks his sanctions are going to really hurt the economies of their targets and force them to come to the negotiating table and agree to new trade agreements with terms much more favorable to the U.S than currently existing agreements. What he's referring to here is obviously the future after the EU bows to his sanctions and agrees to new trade agreements that prevent them from levying sanctions against american companies for breaking their laws.
Only problem with this "brilliant" plan is that the European leadership knows exactly what the purpose behind the sanctions is and in the case of Junker and Macron have even publicly stated that they can see this and won't come to the negotiating table while the sanctions are still in place.
As for why he's using sanctions in particular is that it's about the trade deficit he's obsessed with he knows that sanctions against countries and blocks that the U.S has a trade deficit with will be more effective than any return sanctions they may impose on him instead. This is the only part of it that makes any kind of sense, but it's kind of negated by the fact that the targets can retaliate trough alternative means like refusing to recognize U.S physical or intellectual property rights, which then swings the balance in their favor.
"Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it."
The EU has to regulate their markets in a way that suits their needs. There's no universal principle which dictates how to regulate a capitalist economy. There's no "one size fits all" solution.
Most US Presidents can hardly manage their own economy. I hardly think they are qualified (or have sufficient information) to make a call for a foreign economy.
If Google was found in violation in the EU- it's their call. Google can negotiate.
Trump, might be considered to be defending one of our companies. Though the action is only impressive if the observer is totally clueless.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
The real smoking gun for Google is that they forbid phone makers from releasing *any* android phone that is not on their Google Play platform. If a company wanted any Google Play supported phone, they *all* had to be Google Play phones. That's a big no no and obvious abuse of Monopoly power.
However.... just like the time Microsoft was forced to stop dictating what software is pre-installed on PC's, government regulation here is just going to make things worse for consumers. For all it's faults and obscene privacy invasion, Google is a relatively benign overlord. If they loose the ability to dictate how phones are pre-configured, the end result will not be a utopia of phone carefully pre-configured to protect end-user privacy. It will be phone makers selling out and pre-configuring phones with malicious advertisement hijacking search engines, and app repositories stuffed with even more malware than Google's Play store.
It's been said many times that the USA concentrates on price when litigating anti-trust cases—did prices go up because of monopoly pressure? If yes, then that constitutes damage to the consumer, and that warrants some sort of penalty or correction.
By contrast, the EU focuses on competition. Does it look like a dominant player is using their power to quash competitors and thereby harm the consumer on the much longer term by denying them access to services or products that might be better?
I think it's clear that this bundling represents a long-term disservice to customers. Maybe Google will have to charge a (small) licensing fee, but that makes it possible for manufacturers to take on other services and give the market some competition. It may change nothing at all, and Google will always be pre-installed because they're the one with the best search (and search is a virtuous cycle—even if Google and Bing started at exactly the same place, but Google started with 50.1% market share, Google would eventually pull ahead because delivering search results and seeing which ones are chosen is valuable data that leads to better searches in the future, which brings in more users, and so on).
Anyway, the EU has its own criteria, and their own laws, and they'll enforce them.
If Google doesn't like the EU's consumer protection laws they're completely free not to do business in the EU, similarly to how any company can refuse to do business anywhere if they don't like the local laws. However they still decided to do business in EU with Android and continued to do so after the EU warned them back in 2011 that their forced bundling was against EU laws.
To put it simply: If you don't like the laws in a particular market, there's nothing that forces you to do business in said market and if you still decide to do business in that market while breaking those laws you've got nobody to blame but yourself if you get in trouble because of it.
"Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it."
>So they can continue this practice indefinitely and just pay the tax if they want.
That's pretty much standard for corporations, regardless. Fines are pretty much the only punishments applicable to corporations, short of dissolving their charter or banning them from doing business.
So, corporation breaks law, corporation gets fined, corporation pays fine and continues breaking the law because paying the fine is more profitable than obeying the law - that's how it's been done the world over for decades - Microsoft was notorious for that. The EU seems to have taken the lead however in establishing future fines as well, so that the company doesn't have to be re-sued for continuing to break the law, they just automatically get continuing fines so long as they're not in compliance, which increases their cost and decreases costs on the legal system.
I would like to see it go a step further myself. Say a 10% increase for every month they continue to break the law. Make sure their bean counters can see the oncoming storm of exponential growth looming in the future, so that they have serious incentive to set things right, rather than just regarding it as an overhead cost of doing business.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
"One of our great companies"
Yep, one that played a key role in turning us into a surveillance society, where your children and especially grand children will grow up knowing nothing but mass surveillance and think "privacy" only applies to other individuals (not corporations) -- as they were taught by their masters.
Hey idiot, do you understand that Google are the ones who are taking advantage of everybody on the fucking planet, including your own stupid ass?
I am sort of on the fence on this one but I do believe some of the practices of Google have to change. EU anti-trust laws are there to protect competition - which is slightly different than the US. And in the EU Google is dominant in Android AND search. If you sell an "Android Phone" you are contractually unable to sell a competing phone distribution. You are required to install all the google apps and the play store. Even without all the apps installed, and 'play store' Google still makes a considerable amount of money from the app (they don't pay Apple 3 billion dollars a year to be the default search engine for nothing). Basically, they are doing EXACTLY what Microsoft -- and got whacked by the US government for back when they were dominant in everything. When you are not dominant you can get away with that, when you are - you have to make adjustments. Google can make rather minor changes to comply with the ruling and they will still be dominant.
Post WW2, where they turned up late, the US has preferred fighting wars against small countries who can't fight back like Panama or Grenada. Anything bigger and it tends to get its ass whipped, eg. Korea, Vietnam, Somalia, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, okay, even small countries can whip the US of A's ass. All those tax dollars spent on weapons and they still can't win. Sad!
I bet you have never held an original thought in your life. Waiting for someone to tell you into what to think?
Thank you, Mr. Trump, we already know what you think.
I love Google, but what they did was textbook abuse of a monopoly. They established a monopoly, and then used that monopoly to force their other products onto consumers and companies. That's just a textbook version of abusing your monopoly power. Then they also made the mistake of not just doing that, but forcing major corporations with massive lobbying power like Samsung to ship their products. EU regulates competition tightly, and enforces this against EU companies just as fiercefully as against US companies. Google could have seen this one coming from miles. They probably just thought this type of fine and ruling was a fair price to pay for it.
That's funny. I don't think I've ever paid a fee at any of several credit unions. There might be a minimum deposit, but it's refundable if you leave.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
Yeah. That really saved Microsoft from being fined.
Oh Wait... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
EU has always been tough on companies. They do the same to EU companies. It is just that the US companies somehow like to do this much more in public than the EU companies who like to keep this behind closed doors.
In July 2016, the Commission fined MAN, Volvo/Renault, Daimler, Iveco, and DAF a total of 2.93 billion euros for forming a cartel and colluding on truck prices for 14 years
In November 2008, several car glass producers were hit with a cartel fine for illegal market sharing and exchanging commercially sensitive information.
French firm Saint-Gobain received the largest fine of 880 million euros, while U.K. firm Pilkington was hit with a fine of 357 million euros. Japanese company Asahi's fine was reduced by 50 percent to 113.5 million due to leniency, while Blegium's Soliver received a fine of just 4.4 million euros.
Spanish telecom Telfonica received a fine of 151 million euros in July 2007 for setting unfair prices for five years in the Spanish broadband market, according to the Commission.
French drugs giant Servier, Teva and five other drug companies were fined â427.7 million in July 2014 for colluding to delay the introduction of a generic version of perindopril, a popular blood pressure treatment.
And there are more.
That said, the fines are also based on the companies revenue and as the US ones are generally bigger, they get the bigger fines.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The problem here is Samsung, not Google. Android has had the ability to use the SD card as extended storage, rather than a separate drive, since version 7 (maybe 6, can't remember the exact version); Samsung purposely disabled the feature claiming (wrongly, I use it) that it leads to performance issues.
Google implemented exactly what you want. They just didn't force Samsung to not disable the feature.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
The thing is that fines will get higher as they go on. A fine is not a 'get out of jail' card. It does not mean they can continue doing what they do.
First there is a fine, then there is a higher fine and there also is the abilityto take away the licence to do business.
This has nothing to do with milking companies. This is about punishment and hurting them in the wallet. And they have the power to say "all you (European) bank accounts are now below to us."
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
thats not google sucking thats the app devs not enabling sd card support.
The US Military has been primed for Full Scale War, Where everyone in the border is a target.
The problem is politically most of us don't fall for the propaganda of the Evil Enemy. But a bunch of innocent people caught in a tough situation between bad leaders. So we can't just bomb a country capital plant a flag and declare victory. We need to win hearts and minds. This is why we havn't been winning small wars. Because post WWII We learned that we cant just go killing everything just to win. Because you can Win the War but fail the Objective.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
You are giving el Presidente Tweetie too much credit. In his mind, the R voters don't like free trade agreements (they haven't yet lost jobs by losing those) and he can understand one number...at a time. The Big Number he's capable of understanding is the trade deficit number, but only as a number. He gets nothing else about trade because he has a mercantilism view of trade. He also knows that he can use that number in tweets and those go well with big stupid numbers and Fox...well they would seeing as they are essentially a mouth-organ for sound bites that his base likes.
Couple that with his distorted view to bargaining between nations which he figures should be just like bargaining for investment dollars. He bargained by promoting a dream that made the foolish banks and others bet money on him. His 4-6 bankruptcies showed how foolish that is. However, governments do not work like that, at least mature European governments and some Asian governments. They see trade as being something much more complicated, which it is.
When Trump doesn't get people or governments to give what he wants, he acts like the 15 year he is. He resorts to threats. It's worked for him before when he was holding other peoples money and they wanted to withdraw it. He threatens them with a loss. He doesn't really have a loss to threaten anyone with here except his trade deficit number. But since he never understood what that number represented beyond just a number, he ascribes to it all sorts of magical properties which translates in his mind of governments giving him what he wants.
They don't though - they're no more a US company that any other international corporation. They have offices and data centers all over the world, and the always popular Irish tax-dodging offices to hide their profits.
If they don't want to comply with EU law, they're quite welcome to simply not do business in the EU - geoblocking is quite simple, and the EU can block them as well. But that would means giving up all the profit from selling ads targeting Europeans.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
> Credit unions are required to charge an opening fee of some sort.
That's not a *fee*. That's buying shares in the Union. When you close your account you have to sell the shares and you get money back for it. In my case when I joined a credit union I paid I think it was around $20 to purchase those shares. Through the last 20+ years with dividends and the share price rise, splits, new issues, etc, my credit union shares are now worth just over $300. Makes me wish I could have bought more as an investment!
In this day and age, 8GB *is* nothing for a phone. That barely holds the OS. I have a 16GB Android tablet and the damn thing only had 6GB free after the OS and the non-removable apps when it came out of the package. These days for an Android device 32GB is what I would consider bare minimum if you intend to use it for anything other than phone calls and texts.
It's the same situation in a different jurisdiction. Because of all the trade treaties and agreements, many world governments are, for all intents and purpose, entangled to the point that we might as well have a "world government"... there is significant reciprocity between the jurisdictions that mutually benefit both (or at least benefit the ownership class in both areas). The real question here isn't why Trump is so angry at the EU, but why the US DOJ and FTC aren't aggressively pursuing the same type of case against Google.
I do not have a signature
Did anybody ever tell you that you're a fucking moron?
This $5B is simple a "protection racket", just like the mob.
No. Google (much as I admire their products) broke the EU law. Maybe you could read up on the complaint, it's pretty clear. (The EU - unlike the US - has a history of not being a complete pushover to corporate interests.)
I'd agree that nothing the EU can do will "attack the base" of Trump. By definition his base believe what he says, so I don't think anything is going to change that.
FWIW, I believe that the Google fine is NOT politically motivated, so maybe I'm irrational too.
Trumps actions isn't going to help. It will just strengthen the EU Resolve to enforce it.
Sometimes trumps twitters are entertaining. Sometimes he is is own worse enemy. Maybe we should fit trump with a shock collar and get the remote to his secret service goons.
"Sir are you on twitter?"
"No...."
Burrrzaaapppp
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
And he will continue to attempt and fail to bring jobs back from outside the country
Fixed that for you.
... because International trade is not a zero sum game, trade barriers harm American interests. Then I don't expect his base to understand that, but they will understand the mass unemployment that is coming their way as a result of his and your ignorance of Economics 101.
While the targets, such as the EU, Japan, the rest world with trade more with each other.
EU signs its biggest free trade deal with Japan
I don't think you're right.
Base level phones these days generally come with 2G of RAM, and usually more. That's more than enough for the most memory intensive mobile apps. But even if it wasn't, the usual response of Android is to kill idle apps, not "page" them, largely because there are major technical problems with that. This isn't hypothetical, it's been true on every device I have. If I load a large number of apps, eventually trying to go to an app loaded much earlier in the day results in the app being loaded from scratch, revealing that it was terminated.
But on top that, the entire concept of paging is complex given how Android works.
In a normal operating system, paging is done in two ways: read only data from executables (including stored libraries) is paged in directly from the file system, and the application's working storage may be paged to and from a swapfile. Both are, for practical purposes, not relevant in Android. Android's "executables" are APK files, zip'd files of non-native bytecode. And swapfiles (or swap disks) would be a disaster in a flash storage environment because they're constantly being written to.
So, in practice, what you're left with is time taken to load an app. And quite honestly, I'm not seeing any practical difference between apps loaded from SD card, and from internal storage. I don't doubt it's technically slower, but it's not slow enough to be an issue.
And it certainly isn't slow enough for Samsung to be justified in disabling the feature.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
wheres the fine for apple who is way more closed off then android.
Apple isn't preventing other companies from manufacturing potentially competing products. From a consumer point of view, Apple's behavior isn't any better than Google's, but legally there's a difference, since Apple isn't using their monopoly position to force behavior from other companies.
I think they will realize that he isn't putting America first when their jobs get shipped overseas because of retaliatory tariffs, or even his own tariffs on the components that go into their products.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
No, it does not. This is what we've been mostly doing over the last 30 years when our workers' wages have stagnated for the last 30 years. This way of doing things has seen the near-collapse of our manufacturing base, with widespread underemployment and unemployment and Trump is putting a stop to it.
Nicely done getting all worked up about the first half of a sentence while ignoring the critical second half! The near-collapse of our manufacturing base is because it's cheaper to make things in other countries. Correct. But you ignored the second half of that very sentence which said,
...and spend the resources we'd have normally spent making it on something we can do more efficiently.
That's the missing part. We haven't done that. What "we've" done is pocket the money we saved and failed to reinvest it back into another product or service. You know, those things created by people doing a thing we call a job.
Just because the US has failed on this doesn't mean it's not the right thing to do.
Isolationist trade policies make just about everything cost more while everyone else willing to trade globally gets cheaper goods and services, and a higher quality of life. The issue isn't in the global market. It's in the the social and political systems that deny the full benefit of the global market from a subset of the population.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
you think our president has nothing better to do all day besides posting useless comments on the internet? Oh.... wait....
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Obama and the Dems were wrong about Russia in 2012 and since then we've seen Russia shoot down MH-17, attack Ukraine, take over Crimea, threaten Europe and attempt to assassinate people in Britain just for starters.
Why is Russia suddenly considered trustworthy now?
And Obama didn't do enough to combat Russia back in 2016.
Why does that justify ignoring it now?
And why is Trump trying to scare people into thinking nuclear war is the only alternative to playing into Putin's hands?
However, governments do not work like that,
See what Trump said when he was told a country is not a golf course.
At one point, Mr. Trump even compared his renovation of Trump Turnberry to how he is hoping to overhaul the United States. When a reporter pointed out — correctly — that a country is hardly a golf course, Mr. Trump replied: “No it’s not, but you’ll be amazed how similar it is. It’s a place that has to be fixed.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/0...
God help us if he fixes the US like he "fixed" Turnberry, which has been losing money ever since he bought it.
They *do* give a version away for free, as in beer and libre, and it comes with all the choice you want - it's called AOSP. Fully open-source, comes with zero Google spyware, has a suite of basic apps you can ignore or replace, you can take your pick of app stores (e.g F-Droid) or just sideload. And it happily runs the vast majority of Android apps - everything that doesn't specifically require a Google service. Best of all, there is a thriving community creating many dozens of variants that can be easily installed on most popular phones, or at least those that don't lock their bootloader too tightly. You can even add back in the Google services if that's what you want, and get both worlds.
As a user, you can choose not only your hardware, but your OS variant too. Nothing is forced on you. As a company, all Google requires is you make a choice between Google Android with their services, or AOSP Android - and a number of companies have freely chosen the latter, including Amazon, B&N, and most Chinese phone vendors.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Google isn't an American company anymore. In order to facilitate tax dodging they made themselves an Irish company.
Hahahahahahahaha! Good one! The United States exports hardly anything. Financial paper, yes. Idea monopolies, yes. Extracted natural resources, yes. Actual products - hell no. We can't lose a "trade war". Because we're already down & out. The economy in the manufacturing states has been in a state of total collapse longer than I've been alive. There is *nowhere* to go but up. I didn't vote in the last election, because I didn't like either of them. But after watching him for 2 years, President Trump has my vote in 2020. He's definitely not perfect. But at least he's on our side.
And there's nothing they can do to "attack the base" that is going to work short of somehow getting him to NOT put America first, and start cooperating with the globalists to F the USA and move jobs out of the country again, put everyone back on welfare that was before, etc. Not going to happen.
You know he has a lot of his own factories outside of the USA right? Guess it's a "Do what I say and not what I do" situation here.
Also what about the times where he threw American intelligence under the bus in favor of appeasing Putin? Guess it's a "good guys on both sides" situation here.
Globalists to F the USA? Alex Jones, is that you?! Yo whatup dawg. I'm right down the street from you!
Donald doesn't care, he's got all the money he needs so they cannot bribe him.
So much money that they are still working on his tax return.
And he will continue to attempt to bring jobs back from outside the country, advocate for US companies that are getting raped by Mafia-like organizations like the EU, and so forth.
LOL unless you're Amazon, Harley or somebody who gets on his bad side. Let me guess, he isn't going to start with his companies though.
This $5B is simple a "protection racket", just like the mob.
If there is anybody who knows about mob mentality, it's Trump who employed Roy Cohn who ACTUALLY represented mafia members.
What I find "funny" about this last statement is how when poor Mexicans seeking asylum are crossing the border, they're enemy #1 and separating families is "just part of doing business" because they "broke the law". When Google breaks the law, you make up excuses instead of using previous rhetoric about "breaking the law". If that's not hypocrisy, I don't know what is. Turns out, if you break the law, you get punished.
"I'd agree that nothing the EU can do will "attack the base" of Trump. By definition his base believe what he says, so I don't think anything is going to change that."
We don't necessarily believe what he says, we just don't give a shit about the trivialities. The stuff he says that aren't right are trivial - the size of his crowds on inauguration day, for instance. If that's wrong, does anybody bleed? Does anyone lose money? Nope, its just an inaccurate statement. What he says that counts is accurate. He tells us he's going to (try to) build a wall, he's struggling mightily to do it and will probably succeed. He tells us he's going to bring jobs back from overseas, well he's doing it. He tells us he's going to cut taxes, he did it. Find me a politician that fulfills as many of his campaign promises as Trump. I don't think there are any. That is why we didn't vote for any of the other 17 Republican primary candidates - we knew that they would _all_ tell us what we wanted to hear, and the go to Washington and do exactly what the Koch Bros or the other campaign donors wanted, and not necessarily what is good for America. Trump says he's going to get control of the southern border, well he's doing it. The important stuff he tells the truth about, and you can take it to the bank.
What you don't seem to realize that those losing good manufacturing jobs _are_ getting different jobs, but the "different" jobs pay a fraction of what they were making. That is the scenario when good-paying manufacturing jobs leave the country, and those that were doing those jobs get puke retail jobs at minimum wage, or slightly above it. Trump is trying to put a stop to that. Some retail jobs may go away, but manufacturing jobs will replace them. That is a good thing. We need manufacturing jobs. Some people are good with their hands, want to work with their hands, and don't want to be feeding a bunch of computerized machines urine samples in some med lab after 2 years of training. They want to turn wrenches, install machines with 50 hp motors to stamp car bodies or build something else, and don't want to be cooped up in a lab. Those people are not happy in labs, and many are doing everything they can, which is considerable to stay out of labs. They're home watching soap operas while a spouse is making the minimum wage at Walmart, they are near-starving, and are not contributing to a consumer-driven recovery. Until Trump. They're going back to work again, while Trump jawbones (remember jawboning? You have to be pretty ancient like me - that is what the press called JFK's tongue-lashings of the steel industry when they weren't doing what he thought was good for America) Harley Davidson for attempting to make bikes in Europe, I think it is, or maybe China. Trump thinks the bikes should be made in Wisconsin and shipped to Europe and China, but Europe has huge tariffs. We don't tariff the stuff we get from them anywhere close to what they tariff our stuff. That is what has Trump pissed off, and trying to raise our tariffs to match theirs. That's simply fair. They can have 25% tariffs but ours can only be 2.5%? No, no, no. Ours are going up. F them. The era of doormat USA is over. We're fighting back.