Note the difference between "flow" and "revenue". Two completely different things. The reason why most of google's money flow goes through EU is various tax break arrangements. As a result, if it were to get kicked out, not only would it lose the market, it would lose lucrative tax deals.
I have no idea where Google is hiding money. But I'm sure there are plenty of African and Latin American countries that would happy to play the role of illicit bank.
Suggesting that EU is "losing" here sounds a lot like "oh EU is losing to microsoft, what can it do?" back in the days of browser monopoly fight. Until EU decided to actually take action and suddenly "oh EU is losing" whine changed to "oh evil EU is oppressing this nice US company" tune here on slashdot
What are you talking about? Microsoft managed to hold the line on browsers for almost a decade and thereby prevent the transition to web based applications. They finally lost share to Safari, Firefox, Chrome... as those browsers advanced. The evidence for that being the transition happened in the USA as well as the EU. There is no evidence that the EU was able to effectuate an early switch.
The more appropriate question is whether their prevention of competitors DRM Schemes on the iPod drove up prices of either the music itself or the iPod devices upon which said digitally purchased tracks could be obtained.
That's a hard question to answer in a suit against Apple. Certainly the RIAA wanted Apple to be nothing but a device manufacturer allowing a host of other formats and selling agents. At the same time the other ones available like Real they didn't want. So it is hard to find a monopolistic act where Apple wasn't under contract. That's a much better question for an anti-trust suit against the RIAA.
FWIW I've bought software before where the contract has both a license agreement and a limited patent license when the software is designed to throw me into violation of their patents. I've never heard of a company arguing they can sell the one and not the other while claiming both however.
That's not true. In all contract law there is a concept called "the form of the contract" which means contracts are interpreted inside of a context and that context is included in the contract unless explicitly excluded. For example if X signs a service contract with Y which lists the services by X and payments by Y but never says that X will perform the services or that Y will deliver those payments it is assumed from the form. On the other hand an insurance list is just a list.
Either side could call Stallman as a witness. I can't imagine that some percentage of the plethora of materials explaining what a derived work is and what is meant that has been written by open source advocates over the past 3 decades won't make its way into evidence.
well as overwhelming majority of google's money flow is in Europe
Google's revenues don't come majority from Europe. Europe is about 20%. That's smaller BTW than the 27% that Google had in China when they started fighting with the Chinese government. They halved their Chinese revenue but didn't have to impose censorship. And that required the Chinese government funding a major non-Google competitor in China. I think the Spanish government would have a harder time for a variety of reasons.
All of these have vested interest in google staying in Europe.
That's right. In terms of the monopolist position that may not be possible. Google may simply decide they would rather go offshore than agree to European governments breaking them up. This is a company with a track record of doing exactly that with China. And as you can see Spain is getting ready to cave. The EU governments are losing. "We will shift the news Spanish citizens consume away from news produced in Spain" was a fairly credible counter threat.
Now obviously if the governments are concerned enough they can win a war against Google. But given that Google has a monopoly in Europe because their citizenry likes Google, backlash wouldn't be shocking.
Companies win fights against governments all the time. Ask Latin America about American Fruit Co. if you want a really extreme example. The USA governments has had problems with OPEC (a cartel but close enough) for 4 decades. ___
As for climate denialism I'm not sure how that contradicts global culture. That seems to support it, showing people gathering not by geography but by political / idealogical affiliation.
Yes. And likely grow. But more importantly the old media that decides they want to transform may have to move their internet operations including financially out of Spain.
You are confusing the American people with American business. American business benefits from goods sold abroad but doesn't like the price suppression domestically from foreign competition.
The American people's welfare has become only loosely correlated with American business. Sales abroad which are mainly services do very little for them because the labor is often offshored.
As far as Smoot-Hawley major disruption handled badly is a bad thing. Though frankly other policies were far more destructive than the drop in trade as the post WWII economy which was low trade demonstrated. Moreover at the time the USA was a manufacturing economy running large trade surpluses. That's not remotely the situation today nor what anyone is suggesting.
Absolutely. I was talking the cell phone market in terms of profit share. Rich people don't spend that much more on food than poor people. I'm not sure it is worth segmenting. Apparel spending is falling across all income brackets, but assuming that's transition then we can track it. Women spend most of the money on clothing and the rule of thumb for them was 5%. That holds up to about $120k and then mostly levels out. Men however are nowhere near as lucrative when it comes to clothes. So even here you want to segment a bit by sex. Some things like rent and tobacco correlate negatively with income.
Electronics though (Best Buy) oh heck yeah income matters. Spending on electronic devices doubles for every 50% increase in income. That doesn't level out until you get over $200k / year in income.
So they were punished for seeing the writing on the wall and these days everybody does it without any problem even though the situation is the same
The situation isn't the same. Netscape went bankrupt. Browsers became a free product. The market for browsers died.
on systems like iOS you cant even install a different browser, the most you can do is a skin of the built in browser.
Well first off there are two engines the one Safari uses and the one the rest use. Moreover products like Opera really do use a different engine. Apple has wanted a high security engine for iOS from a 3rd party: Trident but so far Microsoft has said no. Maxathon does use a different engine without objection from Apple because they handle the security off device. The only engine that's missing that you can blame Apple for is Gecko. I'd say it is more nuanced.
They were, we already know this. You could remove IE but the trident engine would remain for use by the operating system, just the same way it works with WebKit on iOS and the browser components in Android.
I agree. Microsoft however said in court that OEMs couldn't change the default browser because of this. I believe they were lying and agree with what you wrote above. But that's what they testified to.
No it was a key element of the EU antitrust case.
I get that. I'm saying I don't think the case attacked the right issue.
Dude it isn't moronic. The market segmentation has a lot to do with the profits on handset sales, the profits on cellular contracts, the profits from software, the profits on advertising. The top 11% of customers are worth more than the remaining 89% by a lot. Heck the top 3% may be worth more than the bottom 97%.
You can desegment the "transportation facilitation devices" and list shoes, bicycles, cars and airplanes in one big pile. But that doesn't change the fact a single airplane sale is worth many many sales of shoes.
It is illegal in Spain to not collect the fee. That's how the Spanish law differs from the German law. On the other hand the possibility of Spanish internet news moving abroad is very high. The first wave of bankruptcy would be the secondary Spanish news sites which depend on Google to drive traffic. So they are going to be highly motivated to sell their content to a Mexican newspaper with a Spanish news section...
Microsoft has more serious problems related to Azure and USA warrants. And for that matter more serious monopoly problems as they integrate their web services with Windows. Their interests are served by Google winning this fight not by them losing. The problem the EU regulators have is they don't like the internet being under the control of non-European companies. That's a problem equally with Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook, Verizon, LinkedIn, AT&T, CISCO... They aren't going to stab each other in the back on this.
Corporations pick fights with governments all the time. Ultimately governments can push companies out of their county. But they can't tell companies to sell at terms they would rather not be involved with.
The point of that sentence was about how popular Android is in Europe and that the raw numbers for USA vs. Europe didn't tell the whole story because it internixed high with low end. The exact opposite of how you read it. Now perhaps you might want to check your paranoia levels a bit.
Instead, they would likely prefer to negotiate with google on the issue.
Who is they? The Spanish Government didn't invite Google to the table to negotiate. That's the point.
I suspect they get to pull this once, maybe twice, after which EU will offer them a choice. Work with EU regulators and withing EU law or leave world's single biggest market.
And do what? Let's say Europe implements that then what? What European phone operating system do they put on devices the next month that doesn't involve Google? How do they get their citizens to pick a different search engine? How do they get a different email solution?
I'm not saying Europe doesn't have the resources to replace Google, but it is an investment of billions to replace that infrastructure. And whatever the replacement is would face many of the same issues that Google does. Europeans could of course build a mostly separate internet for themselves with a separate set of incentives, and I think that would be a good thing. Either buy the product or don't buy the product, vote with your dollars. What isn't acceptable in this case as much as the Microsoft case is for Europe to demand that American companies reorganize in a way that requires the globe be subject to European law.
At which point any google exec that would push for leaving will have an unfortunate fatal car accident arranged by major stake holders and Google will negotiate.
I think you mean shareholders. The stakeholders for Google who aren't shareholders would be groups like American people and Google employees they would fully back that sort of plan. In any case Google has already done something similar with another world's largest market China.
European regulators need to realize that global trade means importing culture not just goods. Buy American products means bring American business practices into your country. You want less trade that's something American might support. Americans mostly hate the wage suppression from free trade.
Democracy means (at least in theory) that demos, the people get to decide what is best for their country. And right now, a lot of people across Europe are not fond of Google's obvious disregard of them as unimportant enough to not even be negotiated with.
The problem is that European democracies aren't representing the people. Google is more popular in Europe than it is the United States. For example for search Google is down to 68% while in Europe it is still over 90%. Android in the USA has about 25% share among the top 50% incomewise. In Europe the numbers are often as high as 80%. Both countries are similar for the bottom 50% economically. So I don't think it is accurate to say the people of Europe object.
Now what is accurate to say is that the government objects. Google is a major dispenser of technology and news and is simply proving unwilling to cave with European governments on a host of issues. I would call what Google is doing negotiating. What you might mean is pleading where a company goes to a government and says, "pretty please can you change the law to X". Google is negotiating not pleading because ultimately Google understands from its experience with China where pleading leads.
Except that at the time no other operating system used browser components in itself. Sure 10 years later it became the norm but at the time it wasn't. Moreover there was no reason that Microsoft couldn't have made the browser components separate from the web browser.
Though IMHO the real problem with Microsoft was their ability to charge OEMs different prices for licenses not bundling browsers.
Generally when governments legislate in good faith they bring major stakeholders in. The Spanish government shouldn't be regulating search without having Google at the table unless your goal is to move Spain away from Google.
That being said I think walking like this is the right thing to do. Spain (and Europe in general) needs to start working with USA companies whom their people use for services but who do not want to be part of the European regulatory regime. They need to decide, what their policy on how international they want the internet to be. Right now they want the entire continuum: a) their people to have full easy access to the global internet everything b) The internet their people has access to run under European law
They need to pick a point on the continuum understanding that (a) and (b) are opposites.
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I have no idea where Google is hiding money. But I'm sure there are plenty of African and Latin American countries that would happy to play the role of illicit bank.
What are you talking about? Microsoft managed to hold the line on browsers for almost a decade and thereby prevent the transition to web based applications. They finally lost share to Safari, Firefox, Chrome... as those browsers advanced. The evidence for that being the transition happened in the USA as well as the EU. There is no evidence that the EU was able to effectuate an early switch.
Well yes actually. That's what they are being sued for. I know it sounds ridiculous but that is the plaintiff's claim.
That's a hard question to answer in a suit against Apple. Certainly the RIAA wanted Apple to be nothing but a device manufacturer allowing a host of other formats and selling agents. At the same time the other ones available like Real they didn't want. So it is hard to find a monopolistic act where Apple wasn't under contract. That's a much better question for an anti-trust suit against the RIAA.
These two questions:
A) Is DRM a bad thing?
B) Did Apple's DRM raise the price of iPods?
are two very different questions. If is very easy to see how someone could answer the questions differently. The court was asked to decide B not A.
FWIW I've bought software before where the contract has both a license agreement and a limited patent license when the software is designed to throw me into violation of their patents. I've never heard of a company arguing they can sell the one and not the other while claiming both however.
That's not true. In all contract law there is a concept called "the form of the contract" which means contracts are interpreted inside of a context and that context is included in the contract unless explicitly excluded. For example if X signs a service contract with Y which lists the services by X and payments by Y but never says that X will perform the services or that Y will deliver those payments it is assumed from the form. On the other hand an insurance list is just a list.
Either side could call Stallman as a witness. I can't imagine that some percentage of the plethora of materials explaining what a derived work is and what is meant that has been written by open source advocates over the past 3 decades won't make its way into evidence.
I'm not assuming in the case of cellular we have good data on spends and profits.
Google's revenues don't come majority from Europe. Europe is about 20%. That's smaller BTW than the 27% that Google had in China when they started fighting with the Chinese government. They halved their Chinese revenue but didn't have to impose censorship. And that required the Chinese government funding a major non-Google competitor in China. I think the Spanish government would have a harder time for a variety of reasons.
That's right. In terms of the monopolist position that may not be possible. Google may simply decide they would rather go offshore than agree to European governments breaking them up. This is a company with a track record of doing exactly that with China. And as you can see Spain is getting ready to cave. The EU governments are losing. "We will shift the news Spanish citizens consume away from news produced in Spain" was a fairly credible counter threat.
Now obviously if the governments are concerned enough they can win a war against Google. But given that Google has a monopoly in Europe because their citizenry likes Google, backlash wouldn't be shocking.
Companies win fights against governments all the time. Ask Latin America about American Fruit Co. if you want a really extreme example. The USA governments has had problems with OPEC (a cartel but close enough) for 4 decades.
___
As for climate denialism I'm not sure how that contradicts global culture. That seems to support it, showing people gathering not by geography but by political / idealogical affiliation.
Yes. And likely grow. But more importantly the old media that decides they want to transform may have to move their internet operations including financially out of Spain.
No like them actually caring and voting for the minority party in the next election.
You are confusing the American people with American business. American business benefits from goods sold abroad but doesn't like the price suppression domestically from foreign competition.
The American people's welfare has become only loosely correlated with American business. Sales abroad which are mainly services do very little for them because the labor is often offshored.
As far as Smoot-Hawley major disruption handled badly is a bad thing. Though frankly other policies were far more destructive than the drop in trade as the post WWII economy which was low trade demonstrated. Moreover at the time the USA was a manufacturing economy running large trade surpluses. That's not remotely the situation today nor what anyone is suggesting.
I put this together from several sources. But some good general articles
http://www.clevelandfed.org/re...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
http://www.bls.gov/cex/2010/st...
http://visualeconomics.creditl...
You can Google and find a ton on this.
Absolutely. I was talking the cell phone market in terms of profit share. Rich people don't spend that much more on food than poor people. I'm not sure it is worth segmenting. Apparel spending is falling across all income brackets, but assuming that's transition then we can track it. Women spend most of the money on clothing and the rule of thumb for them was 5%. That holds up to about $120k and then mostly levels out. Men however are nowhere near as lucrative when it comes to clothes. So even here you want to segment a bit by sex. Some things like rent and tobacco correlate negatively with income.
Electronics though (Best Buy) oh heck yeah income matters. Spending on electronic devices doubles for every 50% increase in income. That doesn't level out until you get over $200k / year in income.
That's a tough law to enforce and likely to provoke a heck of a lot of backlash.
The situation isn't the same. Netscape went bankrupt. Browsers became a free product. The market for browsers died.
Well first off there are two engines the one Safari uses and the one the rest use. Moreover products like Opera really do use a different engine. Apple has wanted a high security engine for iOS from a 3rd party: Trident but so far Microsoft has said no. Maxathon does use a different engine without objection from Apple because they handle the security off device. The only engine that's missing that you can blame Apple for is Gecko. I'd say it is more nuanced.
I agree. Microsoft however said in court that OEMs couldn't change the default browser because of this. I believe they were lying and agree with what you wrote above. But that's what they testified to.
I get that. I'm saying I don't think the case attacked the right issue.
Dude it isn't moronic. The market segmentation has a lot to do with the profits on handset sales, the profits on cellular contracts, the profits from software, the profits on advertising. The top 11% of customers are worth more than the remaining 89% by a lot. Heck the top 3% may be worth more than the bottom 97%.
You can desegment the "transportation facilitation devices" and list shoes, bicycles, cars and airplanes in one big pile. But that doesn't change the fact a single airplane sale is worth many many sales of shoes.
That's easy, heck Lycos still exists. The question is how do they get their population to use it?
It is illegal in Spain to not collect the fee. That's how the Spanish law differs from the German law. On the other hand the possibility of Spanish internet news moving abroad is very high. The first wave of bankruptcy would be the secondary Spanish news sites which depend on Google to drive traffic. So they are going to be highly motivated to sell their content to a Mexican newspaper with a Spanish news section...
Microsoft has more serious problems related to Azure and USA warrants. And for that matter more serious monopoly problems as they integrate their web services with Windows. Their interests are served by Google winning this fight not by them losing. The problem the EU regulators have is they don't like the internet being under the control of non-European companies. That's a problem equally with Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook, Verizon, LinkedIn, AT&T, CISCO... They aren't going to stab each other in the back on this.
Corporations pick fights with governments all the time. Ultimately governments can push companies out of their county. But they can't tell companies to sell at terms they would rather not be involved with.
The point of that sentence was about how popular Android is in Europe and that the raw numbers for USA vs. Europe didn't tell the whole story because it internixed high with low end. The exact opposite of how you read it. Now perhaps you might want to check your paranoia levels a bit.
Who is they? The Spanish Government didn't invite Google to the table to negotiate. That's the point.
And do what? Let's say Europe implements that then what? What European phone operating system do they put on devices the next month that doesn't involve Google? How do they get their citizens to pick a different search engine? How do they get a different email solution?
I'm not saying Europe doesn't have the resources to replace Google, but it is an investment of billions to replace that infrastructure. And whatever the replacement is would face many of the same issues that Google does. Europeans could of course build a mostly separate internet for themselves with a separate set of incentives, and I think that would be a good thing. Either buy the product or don't buy the product, vote with your dollars. What isn't acceptable in this case as much as the Microsoft case is for Europe to demand that American companies reorganize in a way that requires the globe be subject to European law.
I think you mean shareholders. The stakeholders for Google who aren't shareholders would be groups like American people and Google employees they would fully back that sort of plan. In any case Google has already done something similar with another world's largest market China.
European regulators need to realize that global trade means importing culture not just goods. Buy American products means bring American business practices into your country. You want less trade that's something American might support. Americans mostly hate the wage suppression from free trade.
The problem is that European democracies aren't representing the people. Google is more popular in Europe than it is the United States. For example for search Google is down to 68% while in Europe it is still over 90%. Android in the USA has about 25% share among the top 50% incomewise. In Europe the numbers are often as high as 80%. Both countries are similar for the bottom 50% economically. So I don't think it is accurate to say the people of Europe object.
Now what is accurate to say is that the government objects. Google is a major dispenser of technology and news and is simply proving unwilling to cave with European governments on a host of issues. I would call what Google is doing negotiating. What you might mean is pleading where a company goes to a government and says, "pretty please can you change the law to X". Google is negotiating not pleading because ultimately Google understands from its experience with China where pleading leads.
Except that at the time no other operating system used browser components in itself. Sure 10 years later it became the norm but at the time it wasn't. Moreover there was no reason that Microsoft couldn't have made the browser components separate from the web browser.
Though IMHO the real problem with Microsoft was their ability to charge OEMs different prices for licenses not bundling browsers.
Generally when governments legislate in good faith they bring major stakeholders in. The Spanish government shouldn't be regulating search without having Google at the table unless your goal is to move Spain away from Google.
That being said I think walking like this is the right thing to do. Spain (and Europe in general) needs to start working with USA companies whom their people use for services but who do not want to be part of the European regulatory regime. They need to decide, what their policy on how international they want the internet to be. Right now they want the entire continuum:
a) their people to have full easy access to the global internet everything
b) The internet their people has access to run under European law
They need to pick a point on the continuum understanding that (a) and (b) are opposites.