That’s the next antitrust trial for Alphabet. I hope Ribera squeezes them to the bone.
Let’s hope so, yet I don’t think this will happen.
The current oversight processes are absolutely useless against these billion-dollar companies. Even the fines against Meta and Apple under the Digital Markets Act (DMA) in April 2025 were surprisingly low. Remember, fines can be up to 10% of the company’s total worldwide annual revenue. While fines of €200 million or €500 million, respectively, sound a lot, it could have been in the billions.
The fines go up every time they get fined. Iirc the next fine will be in the billions.
Still works when the app is downloaded via the F-Droid store: https://f-droid.org/ (Source: https://www.heise.de/news/Nextcloud-Entwickler-Google-beschneidet-unsere-Android-App-10382052.html)
Or from their GitHub, be it manually or via Obtainium.
I don’t know if they can sue them, but I hope they can get other companies to join. Fighting google in court is a monumental undertaking for a company. But if they can get the EU consumer protection to sue for them, that would be amazing too.
They already do, but it takes ages.
The issue is that small companies — like ours — have pretty much no recourse. Legal actions are too expensive, and a complaint to the EU takes too long. Together with about 40 other businesses and organizations, we filed a complaint about similar anti-competitive behavior in 2021. We are now four years in, and nothing has happened. What do you think happens to a company that releases no updates to its app in four years?
So we need consumer complaints too. Pressure has to come from the public. If you see something wrong with a product or company, monopolistic behavior, send in a report to the consumer protection agency of your country.
The horrendous Google took Organic Maps down too previously.
