That’s walking around money for them.
Google needs to be dissolved. Plain and simple.
completely agree
Heck yeah!
Nah, kidding. Sucks that it can’t be more, as usual.
yup
As long as they make more money from nefarious actions than they pay in fines, they will continue. It’s called ‘return on investment’.
Dissolving will change nothing for them. They need to be fined yes but actual fines not slaps on the wrist like these. Fine them 1 trillion dollars and I promise you Google will shit it’s pants.
Does anyone know the process for paying these fines? Like maybe a source where you can check that the fines were actually paid? These are huge fines and I’m sure there are plenty of excuses so they can delay payment for decades.
besides corruption, is there any economical model in use as an argument to keep these monopolies from being broken up into pieces?
Capitalism itself is pretty dependent on them actually. See “too big to fail.” It all stems from the failings of capitalism in the end.
i don’t think it even qualifies as capitalism at that point.
It totally is. Pure capitalism is about profit at all moral and societal costs.
Yes of course, but “too big to fail” is not an argument to not break up monopolies (if that was the case, it needs to be nationalized). Because, in the scenario of “too big to fail”, the issue is rather the opposite; a company posing a risk to the nation if they fail to secure profit at all moral and societal cost. I mean, if a company is irreplaceable with no room to be replaced by another, it no longer plays the game of capitalism as it will be kept in operation through taxes due to a failure to be profitable.
Although this fine may not necessarily have the full effect desired, it is a step that should also be extended to other countries and not just to the EU. Although at least it has already been achieved, also with previous sanctions, that the rules of Google, Facebook & cia, in the EU are much more favorable to the user and competitors than in the US, where these companies roam freely.
Google’s failure is that it is equivalent to signing with the devil, if you want or need to use their services, undoubtedly of excellent quality for the most part and without real alternatives in many of these services. For this reason, it is important to encourage and invest in the development of services that can compete, to force Google to return to its original slogan ‘Don’t be evil’, which it has forgotten over the years.
This is like corruption money. The large monopolies pay ‘fines’, while keeping their monopolies.
Meanwhile, any successful startups can’t compete with these monopolies. They must pay the full tax rates, and eventually get bought out by the monopolies.
