IMHO, antitrust fines/penalties should change from amount of money to some other type of penalty, like temporary market exclusion/block or something, otherwise companies like Google and others can simply use its cash (that's was also made due to the unfair advantage), pay the fine and move on to the next market dominance.
They will always have cash to pay, even if the fines are higher and higher. They kind of expect for this in their long term strategic planning.
This is the initial fine. Now they have 90 days to comply, otherwise they will get penalties (up to 5% worldwide turnover of Alphabet) until they do. From the link:
> Google must now bring the conduct effectively to an end within 90 days or face penalty payments of up to 5% of the average daily worldwide turnover of Alphabet, Google's parent company.
5% of your worldwide revenue (not benefits) for lack on compliance on one issue? With others pending? I do think this is not something you can ignore very long.
I reckon companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, $bigCorp, probably calculate the ROI of the venture before executing it. So for example in this case, I wouldn't be surprised if Google calculated a high chance of pocketing $5b and expected (lobbied) to be fined much, much less, leaving them with a big profit anywhere. And if they don't get caught or fined: win.
Last I heard, Google didn't actually require Google Search to be the default on Android phones. For a while Microsoft was paying some manufacturers to make Bing the default, and in some cases even requiring them to stop users from changing it.
That's hefty. But this does affect all major iPhone markets, not the EU alone. So they probably (maybe. I guess.) only put a fraction of that on the bill.
Good point. But I think if Google/Alphabet does not comply, the commission could fine them again. But that's difficult to judge now... All we consumers can do is wait for Google's next move and where it leads from there.
But generally, this is a step in the right direction. As much as I am a fan of early Google and the great services they offer, a big part of me doesn't like the privacy-nightmare conglomerate they became.
Yeah I agree. This is a particularly interesting situation because I love part of google while simultaneously am afraid of parts of it as well.
I would be sad if google was beaten out of existence (seems unlikely I know) even though my permissions are probably being abused by google and their effect on me all in all may not be great. However, it makes me happy to see that the EU is working on making google better.
Surely you just believe that the fine is not high enough, not that it is ineffective in principle? There exists a number X which is the amount that google could be fined where they are ambivalent between that fine and a ban from the market for some period of time which is what you had in mind. Thus, a fine would be equally effective at X. So I don't see why you think fines are fundamentally ineffective?
Sure, there exists some amount X, but you can hardly remedy a complete temporay ban with money.
Because it means that users have to look at alternatives. They might find that they prefer them in the long run, and it might even just incentivize competition to keep going. And this is especially damaging in monopoly-like situations, as many users don't even know of competing products.
But how would you do something like that with companies like Google? So many organisations probably rely on GCP, GMail etc that you couldn't stop them from operating without stutting huge numbers of businesses too.
Backblaze B2 is awesome and the future looks very promising. Their team is also very open to new ideas and projects.
We have few PB of data there and never had any problem.
I honestly don't see any reason for anyone to use AWS or Google Cloud for object storage, except for the outbound network transfer issue from these providers.
Yev from Backblaze here -> we actually have datacenters in California and Arizona so they aren't too close together! That said, we're also working on multi-region support so that you could move data between regions (no ETA on that yet). Hoping to get more datacenters online in the coming year!
But you're correct - we do recommend diversification, having data in multiple locations is always a best practice, and if you can have it in different vedors, all the better!
We're still working on the spec so hard to say, though even if we did make you pay for it you could store it in 4 regions before hitting S3 pricing :) That said, we try to be fair in most things we do.
Meh, for true redundancy you need separate vendors with different hardware and software infrastructure. Erasure coding and bitrot guard hit the 5 9s I need.
SlicingDice founder here. We built SlicingDice exactly for this kind of necessity, very fast user segmentation. Actually, we just developed it because we didn't find any other solution that could support our needs.
