Not long ago Walmart got fined by the CCP for poor food practices. Instead of saying “we disagree with the judgement” they licked the boot and said they look forward working with the government to resolve the situation. Point is, corporations should be afraid of the government, clearly Google is not afraid of the EU and as a result I expect similar behavior from them in the future.
Which fine incident do you refer to? There’s seems to be more then one against Walmart.
You must give us your pocket change for using your monopoly power to make trillions by abusing the market.
Right? Forcing them to keep Android open would be far more effective than this fine.
Chump change. Market cap: $4.4T. The cost of doing business is just scaling while normal people money is not.
Wait, Google is actually facing consequences. Am I dreaming?
No, they are just getting a slap on the wrist.
It just sounds like a lot because we’re poor peasants who think a thousand dollars is a life changing amount of money.
To company like google, 4 billion dollars is pocket change. a small evil tax compared to what they’ve made doing the evil.
It’d be like you setting up an illegal hotdog stand, making 2000 dollars selling hotdogs all day, then the government coming by and fining you 20 bucks for it, but not before getting a free hotdog with a wink wink nudge nudge.
They’ll probably appeal and do bullshit to negotiate it down and defer the payment.
So, a consequence, but one absolutely built into the budget of the things they’re being fined for.
Edit: oh wait i misread. This is actually something they already appealed and negotiated down already. The original judgement was years ago.
Yes, that was already the appeal and Google lost in court. There is no regress to that. Google has to pay that fine.
I farted a few minutes ago. Google knows this and was able to monetize the sale of that data. My flatulence paid that fine.
These are not consequences. This is zero-calorie consequences.
Not zero calorie. They made more off your data and that shitty fine was a small cost of doing business.
Fun fact: I haven’t farted in hours. The misdirect both proves my point and devalues their product. Hilarious blip in the data.
Also, excuse to increase Taco Bell intake.
Dude, have you seen Taco Bell prices lately? Who the fuck has Taco Bell money these days?
Shut up. I need my cat food and cheese.
Not really. They’ve made probably a few hundred billion from what they’ve done to be fined $5bil. Just a cost of business expense at this level.
significant investment to ensure Android remains open.
Unless you want to install apps not from the google app store. Or develop apps not for the google app store. Or use a Captcha without having google services. Or use your bank website without google services. or use the internet without chrome. or… shit, sorry, I don’t have time to list all the ways google wants the exact opposite of anything anywhere remaining “open” unless by “open” they mean “open to google’s exploitation”.
And once again, Apple gets a pass for doing the same thing, only worse.
Apple don’t do anything remotely similar. Apple don’t let other manufacturers use iOS. What are you even talking about?
Right. Google gives away AOSP to any manufacturer. Apple doesn’t let ANYONE else use their OS. Yet Google is the one who gets in trouble for being “restrictive”.
I’m not upset that Google is getting called it for this, they are not innocent. I just want Apple to be held to the same standard.
You don’t understand what you’re talking about.
Google gave their OS away to everyone to use, but then forced everyone that did to include all of their products and services and make them non-removable. That’s the part that is anti-competitive and abusive.
Apple don’t let anyone use their OS. They aren’t required to. As such, they’re not forcing other companies to include Apple services if they want to use iOS.
Understand?
How can one be considered abusive and the other not, if companies are free to choose not to use android, just like companies can’t use Apple’s OS? Both have the same result, the company not using the OS. Google’s position is more permissive than Apples, yet Apple’s isn’t considered abusive.
One is abusing their market position, the other isn’t.
Android is basically the only choice for phone OS’s, and they are abusing that fact by forcing their services on every phone.
I still strongly disagree. “No, you can’t use this at all” is more abusive than “ok, we’ll let you use this if you agree to something else”. If you didn’t agree with the terms, you are no worse off than the other choice. Android is the “only choice” exactly because Apple won’t share.
You’re wrong then.
The issue only exists because Google are letting others use their operating system, but are abusing their market position where they own 90% of the market, to force their services which makes other products unable to compete. Samsung for example have their own messaging app, but aren’t allowed to not have Google’s messaging app installed. They have their own calendar app, but Google forced them to have Google calendar.
That is abusing their market position and is textbook anti-competitive behaviour.
Apple made their own product, for themselves and no one else. That’s not abusing anything.
Europe sucks ass and makes everything worse and more expensive. Now Google will have to show every human 3200 additional ads to make up for that money lost. And if anyone wants to tell me Europe doesn’t suck ass, tell me about the people you’re killing by banning AC and about how you can be locked up for certain types of speech or if you try to defend yourself against an attacker. I’ve lived there twice, never going back. Yes Europe likes Apple more than Google and they targeted them intentionally because they love collecting huge fines/revenue from things they are biased against. But ultimately they’re only making Google worse, not making anyone’s experiences better.
Apple is not required to share their OS with anyone. Nor is Google.
The problem is: Google shared it voluntarily, because they knew a lot of people and companies would contribute to its development for free. It was a calculated business move that happened to create an open mobile OS.
Now that Android has been polished by the community and has a gigantic market share, Google is trying to use that to eliminate any competition, and to close the OS down. It’s trying to rewrite the entire agreement, while keeping all of the benefits it received over the years, and giving nothing back. Essentially a bait and switch scheme.
If Android was never open to begin with - this wouldn’t be an issue. But then Android would still be stuck in 2016, and nobody would be using it.
iOS uses freeBSD and OpenBSD components. Isn’t that the same thing?
It’s a closed source derivative. BSD license allows it.
They’ve never said their OS is free and open to everyone. It’s never been a community project.
Not really. They are independent, pre-existing open source projects. Anyone may use the code in their own projects, within the licenses’ rules.
Whereas Google basically started the entire project, benefitted from unpaid contributions, and now wants to close it, after creating a near monopoly, in huge part thanks to it being open.
Apple isn’t closing or restricting BSD-related projects, because they aren’t theirs, and they existed before Apple included them in its own software.
I have mixed feelings about mega corporations using open source code for free, but the licenses allow it and the developers don’t mind, so it’s not my place to make a fuss.
AOSP has become unusable over the years because Google bundles more and more core functions with its proprietary Google Play Services.
Source: I’ve been around long enough to remember independent devs making versions such as Gingerbread or Marshmallow usable.
Lineage, graphene, calyx are pretty good tho. Much better than the android that comes with today’s stock phones.
And yet most people install gApps. Because Android without Google Play Services doesn’t do everything you expect of your phone. This is intentional design to sell you on an “open” ecosystem that doesn’t work without Google.
Is MicroG not a viable alternative? How about apps utilizing unified push notifications if Google play services is a concern?
All of them exist as long as Google wants. We should hammer this point into our heads.
In Apple products it’s a feature tho. Like it’s literally why people buy into it. Why would anyone fine them for that?
The feature is to offer a default that most users like. Not allowing users to change the default is an anti-feature.
Take a correction for Lemmy being hell bent on software freedom and openess. With which I overall agree, but lemmy is not reflective of majority of users.
Now lets use part of that money, to fund the development of open alternatives and interoperable protocols / standards. We cannot break a duopoly, if there aren’t any alternatives, otherwise it will keep being a duopoly.
i can’t stand microshaft, but at least windows phone was competition.
Get on with the times, it’s microslop now.
I got a Nokia Lumia at the time and the OS quality was surprisingly good. It felt much more well thought end to end than my Android is currently. But it was a mistake to force a convergence with the desktop OS.
they were around when i was in IT, and I had to support them. they seemed pretty good, apart from the microslop.
My favourite MS thing was having a funeral for the iphone. Within a couple of years, they were having a funeral for the windows phone.
4 billion can go a very long way.
Believe it or not, straight to data centers
Datacenters are not inherently bad…
They aren’t inherently bad, but they are bad when not used and built in the public interest on a planet with runaway greenhouse gas emissions and collapsing ecology.
If someone ever brings up one of those data centers, we can talk about their good aspects. There definitely are plenty, but I don’t think the poster was talking about those.
So what you’re saying is… they’re inherently bad.
We are talking about developing alternatives to US services, which, surprise, will need datacenters to run. You don’t provide email to 700 million people from an old laptop in a basement.
Those are among the plenty that are in the public interest. The whole Information Age would be practically impossible without them. In fact, distributing them would probably make them less efficient.
LLM data centers are the ones that are all the rage lately, and the ones most often being designed using environmentally irresponsible and wasteful technologies, then lobbying for extremely favorable utility rates, foisting the costs on the locals. They’re so far at the forefront of the media that many people think these are the only kind there are.
100% agree
Not in government it doesn’t.
about 0.11% of Google (Alphabet)'s total worth.
the price of doing business
The question is how much money did they make by using Android to block rivals. If using Android helped them make 1bn extra then this fine costs them 3bn and it doesn’t make sense from them to keep doing it. If they made 100bn than obviously they will continue.
I mean, with it they’ve managed to build a walled garden that includes the majority of every phone in the world.
We can probably assume trillions.
It’s all hypothetical. You can’t know if any of the rivals had any chance at gaining significant share of the market. I was using Blackberry when it was still perfectly fine OS, supported by all the important apps (but before everything was an app) and I didn’t know anyone else using it. I think that yes, the deals they made stopped most of the phone manufactures from offering alternative OSes like Geko OS or Lineage OS (before it was called like that) but we can only guess if any of them had any chance of becoming anything else than niche curiosity like Graphene OS today. So you can only really compare this fine with what they are doing now to block Graphene or AOSP. I don’t know if this fine is big enough but I doubt they made trillions thanks to those practices.
pretty much. these fines are just cost of doing business. I’m sure they made MUCH more than the fine by doing what they did.
Total Worth doesn’t matter. What matters is revenue and profit and that is the basis for the fine.
When it comes to something punitive like a fine, fine versus worth is literally the only thing that matters. If the fine isn’t big enough, it’s more like a fee for doing business. They just added to the bottom line and keep rolling.
It really is not. Companies operate on creating profit. Activities are judged on their ROI. Worth is not relevant for the ROI.
I think worth and cash flow are too loosely correlated for that to work how youre intending. I’m all for punitive fines for corporate malfeasance, but if they’re based on worth only, a company could easily become insolvent even from fines that aren’t intended to be fatal to them.
If it is based off their cash flow instead and potentially distributed over a period of time, it can do multiple good things at once: force the company to literally pay for the harms it caused, damage their operations enough to financially discourage the behavior, and keep corporate behavior in line through examples without frequently disrupting markets by unduly bankrupting companies.
If a company does end up doing something so bad that it is unforgivable and irreparable, and it’s deemed worthy of destroying them or punishing those responsible directly, I can see the reasoning for that, too. But, I think it would work best if the punishments are dialed in to have the desired result as often as possible. Allowing the possibility of offenders correcting course seems better for everyone while still allowing any victims to get justice.
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I was going to say “Finally, a fine with some substance!” but you took the wind out of my sails…
The fine is not the largest ever imposed on Google, however.
In October 2024 a charge was brought against the firm by a Russian court for restricting Russian state media channels on YouTube.
The fine was for two undecillion roubles - more than the world’s total GDP.
Do Google actually ever end up paying these fines? If so, over what period and how much have they paid so far?
Need another one now for all the removal of side loading, that is another big antitrust issue. Best make the fine actually worth something this time.
The EU can spin that into a serious concern about safety and “won’t somebody please think of the children?”
Google’s behavior in this debacle has been utterly shameful. They got caught with their dick in the pie and have spent 8 fucking years arguing that it was for the good of society.
Just so I can do the calculations, approximately how long is a pie fucking year?
While continuing to thrust harder.
have spent 8 fucking years arguing
Part of the plan.
👍🏽great stuff. BTW, stop using google products, there are enough good alternatives.
Is there a good alternative for maps?
CoMaps fulfills most of my needs
It depends on what you use Google Maps for. For straight-up navigation, CoMaps is good. And I mean it’s good at the navigation itself for the most part. Although sometimes when you enter in an address it thinks you’re referring to the entire street. But most of my favorite restaurants and a lot of locations that have been open for a while aren’t on it, which I’ve been happy to add. Locations that have been closed for a while are still on it, which I’ve been happy to delete.
But if you use Google Maps for discovering places or looking at pictures or seeing reviews of businesses, or if you do a lot of multi-stop trips, comaps doesn’t have those features even in the littlest, tiniest bit, and in that sense there is legitimately no (Foss) competitor. For instance, if you’re out and about on a vacation and you’re trying to find a restaurant, nope, comaps is useless for that. If you’re trying to plan a trip by seeing what’s around somewhere, nope, useless for that too.
It really just focuses on navigation itself, and it does a pretty good job of that. I use it to get around when I drive.
I really want CoMaps to be a valid choice. Its maps look are absolutely great, like Ordnance Survey Maps. But I don’t normally use it for the reason I experienced again just today. I use Android Auto in the car with my GrapheneOS phone, but my phone SIM reader failed the other day, so this phone has no internet. Google Maps refused to work without internet. So I just used CoMaps again today. This is in the UK, and lack of traffic info matters. It does routes down the little country roads that are technically 60mph, but you literally can not drive that fast down them. Even with a death wish. But it plans them in assuming that speed. This results in bad routes and inaccurate times. (Though I do enjoy country roads, when used well.)
Yeah, this is a misunderstanding of speed limits by the app developer. In the UK, as far as I remember, these national speed limit roads have just never had a speed limit put on them. Things like accidents, petitions, zoning etc. is how everywhere else has gradually added speed limits.
So although you could say “well, national speed limit on a single carriageway is 60mph” by default, that has almost nothing to do with how fast people are able drive on them. To work that out, you’d probably have to do some Waze-type stuff.
I’ve very sympathetic to the developers. It’s a stupidly hard problem to know what speed is likely, at what time of day, on these roads. Far far easier to just have the data of what people are actually doing on these roads. That’s what Google do.
Though if you can detect country road, you could safely assume half the speed advertised.
It’s also cultural. Country roads in my country are 90 km/h and unless it’s dangerous, that’s what you would do on them. Which means speed is lower than posted in tight spots and curves, but not normal roads.
That’s pretty much the UK really. Only you are very rarely able to get close to the 60mph limit at all, let alone safely.
The are more dangerous by statistics. Some random links:
- https://www.nfumutual.co.uk/globalassets/campaigns/rural-road-safety/rural-road-safety-report-2024.pdf
- https://roadsafetygb.org.uk/news/rural-roads-are-becoming-more-deadly-again/
- https://www.simplyquote.co.uk/insights/where-do-most-car-accidents-happen-in-the-uk/
I love these roads and the British countryside, but it is definitely an eyes wide open environment. Certainly can be a shortcut, but often SatNavs without traffic info, use them when they really shouldn’t. You used to often see signs telling people to ignore their SatNavs and not take this road, but it’s less of a thing now as everyone just uses Google Maps. Basically, I want that traffic info as public access for all SatNavs. Not locked away.
On the plus side, it worked without internet!
So you’re saying that you can’t drive this speed limit on those roads because of the amount of traffic, right? not because of some sort of geographic feature or shape of the roads?
Yeah…hard to imagine much of a way to get traffic updates in comaps, or any OSM project honestly. It seems like it would have to be a separately maintained service. And either way, I’m guessing the number of users that would buy into something like that just wouldn’t be enough to get meaningful data most of the time. Especially since it pretty much relies on tracking people’s locations, which I feel like is counter to the purpose of most people’s reason for getting into those services.
Oh it’s not traffic. They are often quite empty. British country roads are narrow and often stone wall lined, or tree lined, or embankment lined, or all three. They are winding and can be quite steep. Corners can be almost back on themselves. Often there are bits down to a single lane for both directions, with passing points for someone to wait for the other direction to pass. If you encounter someone who can’t reverse, you might have to reverse quite a way.
I think they do mean that the layout of the road means you can’t drive at the speed limit. In the UK we have quite a lot of rural roads that are technically legally 60mph limit roads, but they are in reality very narrow, windy roads that you couldn’t safely drive on at 60mph. I guess CoMaps goes by speed limit for estimates so it measures these roads as if they are 60mph but in reality you may only be able to go 20mph without dying
I’m pretty sure there are appropriate tags to mark that in osm. comaps should be using them if the roads are properly tagged
HERE WeGo (aka HERE Maps) is not FOSS, but has traffic, satellite view, offline mode, etc. Some POI might be outdated (due to it being not Google)
Here is trash and not open
No, everything I have tried is worse in significant ways. Let me know if you find a genuine alternative.
Comaps is actually not bad. It’s limited in info to what’s on OSM, but good news is you can help by updating the spots you frequent!
Doesn’t have satellite view or bus/tram navigation
map apps solve the first by using outside satellite imagery services. but it has bus/tram line data, so if the app supports it then it should work. not comaps but osmand supports it
Osmand seems more promising but you can only search for public transport leaving right now, not in two hours or the next day
yeah, osm does not have schedule data, but it wouldn’t be feasible to keep that info in osm, because it changes constantly.
instead bus schedules are supposed to be in GTFS datasets, normally published by the transport company. there are already services like transitous and motis, that aggregate and sanitize these sources for consumption by apps. comaps has plens for adding support, but it’s going slowly.
https://github.com/motis-project/motis
Europe has relatively good coverage with these services, but as I see it the end user apps are still not ready. also, transport providers often don’t publish realtime data, even if they are collecting it for themselves.
It also plans routes longer than Google maps, and 90% of the places you want to go don’t come up in search.
Yes.
I have only one of their services that I do not see replaced any time soon. YouTube. What they do there is impressive, and very, very hard to replicate.
Not a fan of YouTube, don’t get me wrong. But I see nothing comparable out there (maybe AWS, but they just run some infrastructure orchestration).
Google will kill YouTube long before anybody else is able to pull off the same stunt.
Or is there a service comparable for video streaming?
Nebula.tv is great, but won’t replace all of YouTube.
Been using Newpipe/Pipepipe for the longest time, but Google has been screwing with the Youtube API so the Newpipe Extractor hasn’t been working properly for the last two updates. Can’t keep a video playing in the background for long, can’t download OPUS audio files, playlist albums from YouTube Music are still iffy.
Genuinely about to switch to Nebula or Peertube. Fuck Google, I hope Pichai dies.
Those are just YouTube clients, though. The 1st-party YouTube client apps are pretty widely regarded as crappy, but they are far from the main problem. The YouTube content and its distribution are almost totally unmatched and almost certainly operate at a loss. Google is uniquely willing and able to operate it that way because it adds more value to their other business units than it costs them.
Such as iOS?
Lineage OS and Graphene OS.
If you can. The problem there is Play Integrity API, which is used as an anti-competition measure.
Revolut was the only app I had issues with on Graphene OS. I obviously closed Revolut account and continue using Graphene.
I use Revolut with no issue on GrapheneOS. Maybe things changed.
Interesting, looks like they fixed it last year: https://github.com/PrivSec-dev/banking-apps-compat-report/issues/90
For sure thanks to people like me who complained and closed their account :)
Sure, but I’m not interested in that ecosystem at all. My desktop and my tablet don’t run proprietary software. My phone runs a few apps which rely on sandboxed Play, but honestly, I don’t need them badly so I could stop tomorrow.
Both of those are soft forks of Android, meaning they still exist at the whim of Google.
The only real alternatives are Sailfish (proprietary userland, relies on Halium for its devices to run, which means the devices have a limited lifespan as they rely on a specific version of the Linux kernel that will eventually stop being supported), UBPorts, Droidian, etc. (also relies on Halium, but the userland is open sourcs), and mainline Linux distros like PostmarketOS (has one device that is fully functional, but is extremely slow, but device support is slowly improving over time).
All of those alternatives also support an Android compatibility layer, presuming you don’t rely on device attestation DRM like Play Integrity.
If I can’t have hardware that supports open source Android forks, then it means that I won’t buy it. I can work around with dumbphones, MiFi routers with tethered Linux or BSD portables. I will not use a proprietary system outside of work, full stop.
If i remember correctly, GNU is working on a Librephone, the progress is slow tho
the progress is slow tho
Just about what we should expect from the same FSF that has been developing GNU Hurd for more than 30 years now?
The FSF isn’t really putting much effort in Hurd because they already have the Linux kernel, Stallman also said that it’s not crucial to finish Hurd
Btw, if they will even finish Hurd, i hope that they also add some standards to avoid the incredible mess that is the world of Linux distribution today, we have many packages formats that are not interoperable and other stuff
Yeah don’t use android. Use android. And android but only for google’s phones. That’ll learn 'em.
Google makes a good, open, affordable phone with 7 years of support. They suck but their phone is not the problem here.
Use whatever nonproprietary open/libre systems that are out there. Right now, for mobile smartdevices that’s Lineage OS and Graphene OS. If you want GOS, that’s currently limited to Pixels. I’m not giving a shit about proprietary vendors, it’s a freedom thing. If I can buy open hardware, I will.
Snack money.
Pay who?
European Commission of course. They are the only ones left in the world trying to rein in the tech giants.
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I’d go further, I think in an ideal world all the countries of the world would be funding these projects and holding these huge tech companies to task.
I’m not defending Google, but who should it pay? Its rivals? If not, then this is just extortion.
Fines are usually paid to a government whose citizens have suffered. The government can then use the money for the benefit of citizens… Given of course that the government is generally inclined to such a thing.
The EU is rather special in this regard. While the EU enacts those fines, none of those fines end up in the EU budget but will be handed down to the member states, who in turn have no say on the application of these fines.
