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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 .
Thank you, Mr. Putin, we already know what you think.
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
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.
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
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
And he will continue to attempt and fail to bring jobs back from outside the country
Fixed that for you.
you think our president has nothing better to do all day besides posting useless comments on the internet? Oh.... wait....
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