> pretty good track record when it comes to consumer rights
Are you sure EU has "pretty good track record" with these fines of Google, FB, et al.? If anything, I'd say the EU puts a mild theatre every now and then, and gives the US giants a free pass otherwise.
>Are you sure EU has "pretty good track record" with these fines of Google, FB, et al.?
I wasn't specifically referring to the Google [and other] anti-trust measures. I was thinking of things along the lines of abolishing roaming charges for mobile phone use, the right to open a bank account in any EU country, the right to work and reside in any EU country, the introduction of the Euro [which I know a lot of people are ambivalent about, but it did get rid of currency conversion charges]. All of which I consider to be 'consumer friendly' actions.
I'm also a European. But unfortunately resident in UK. So all those benefits and more are now lost to me. Still. At least we showed Johnny Foreigner who's boss, eh?
Probably because I work in tech in the US, but that has not been my view.
What was the fine that the EU put on VW for intentionally cheating on emissions standards? And how does that compare with the many fines Google has gotten?
Volkswagen has definitely been fined less than Google - they were fined about a billion. The difference is though that the EU wasn't really prepared for the Volkswagen fraud - there was no standing law setting enormous fines for companies engaged in an emissions fraud of that scale like there is for GDPR violations. Since the scandal they brought in legislation to prevent it in the future, including fines of up to €30,000 per car sold violating the emissions guidelines.
EU regulator powers operate with an honestly fairly limited scope based on the laws passed by parliament and the commission. There's no EPA like organisation with broad powers to persue companies for most forms of misbehaviour like there is in the US - that's left to the member states, with countries like Germany and Italy individually prosecuting Volkswagen executives for fraud.
The difference with GDPR and anti-trust violations is that the EU has been deliberately granted the power to exact severe fines on companies for each individual offence. If post-scandal Volkswagen had been caught falsifying emissions again and again (similiar to Google's repeated GDPR violations) they might have been hit with more and more fines of the severity that Google has.
Couldn't they have prosecuted VW on the basis of "competition"?
Like VW had an unfair advantage over other (non-EU) car companies because they didn't meet the standards.
The reality is that they didn't want to hurt VW that much because it is an important EU company. Same reason the US fined the crap out of them -- but would have been lenient on Ford in the same circumstances.
This is normal stuff. I was just responding to the idea that the EU was "too soft" on US tech companies.
You have a point, though one must not forget who runs the world. Spoiler alert: it's not the EU. The bigger theater is forcing the big US bois to invest here (building data centers) by playing the privacy card.
The standard business practice of many US tech companies is to go:
We have a ton of VC capital. Can we use this to price dump our way into the market or to do slightly illegal or very illegal things covered in great UI/UX/XD so that some consumers are our own side, and by the time they ban us, we're too big too fail and fines we get are lower than our profits?
> Big fines are a start, but a better approach is taxation, since that takes away the regulatory risk for the companies.
Companies should obey the laws first and foremost. I'm not sure there's a lot of regulatory risk either; Google certainly has enough lawyers to know that what they did was illegal.
There is no reason to think Google is not aware of EU laws.
One such law for example forbids fake reviews.
Google creates profiles for small businesses, invites everyone to anonymously say whatever they want about business and rate it.
Then they list advertisement from competitors next to it.
Their solution for the public shaming contest is that you should send more <s>customers</s> people to google to review your business and of course purchase adds.
The law says that if you want to do reviews of any kind you must be able to prove the review is from someone who purchased a product or service. The fines are in % of global revenue. Google could have some legal talking point if they allowed business to disable it.
Huh? The EU tech sector would absolutely love the US giants pulling out (phrasing) of Europe. Who wants to fight all these behemoths that pay almost no taxes here because they "invest" so much
Let's imagine for a second that someone really wanted FB out of Europe. FB would fight tooth and nail to stay - because losing the European market would be a huge blow to them. Practically every European business at least tried using FB ads, some have permanent campaigns. There is no way FB would ever leave Europe. They will fight, they will pay, they will protest, but the chances of them leaving are exactly zero.
Are you sure EU has "pretty good track record" with these fines of Google, FB, et al.? If anything, I'd say the EU puts a mild theatre every now and then, and gives the US giants a free pass otherwise.