European Commission fines Google €2.42B for abusing dominance - <AUTHOR> http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-17-1784_en.htm <comment><USER4> I might be in a minority here and I'll probably get down voted but this result scares me... and I used to be CTO one of those competing price comparison sites that show up lower in the results so if anyone should agree it should be me.

While it made me angry when Google put their results above ours, I never questioned that they had a right to do that. It is their website. They are not a utility. At what point does a company cross the line and become one that the EU feels can no longer promote their own product?

After all, the actual products here are the products being sold not the comparison sites. If I search for baseball bat the product is the bat not the competing search results.

What's next? Having to give equal ranking to Yahoo! search results in their search page? It sounds extreme but I would have also thought this was extreme until 2 minutes ago.

Or perhaps more accurate... having to completely do away with One Box entirely. After all, when I search for a movie it displays the actor information and movie times before it displays the link to the theater website or IMDB.

<comment><USER5> It should scare you. The EU just used their regulatory power to force the world's biggest search engine to make their user experience worse in order to benefit other companies. Before Google penalized all the vertical search sites, doing a Google search for certain kinds of products was a terrible experience; page after page of crappy information-free autogenerated sites hoping to make $$$ from ads and referral fees that were SEO-optimized to the gills, making it impossible to find actual information.

Not only that, but the specialized infoboxes at the top of Google's search results were an almost direct response to their competitor Microsoft doing exactly the same thing and promoting it at the main advantage of their search. Microsoft's comparison shopping subsidiary which they used for their search results was one of the companies complaining to the EU about this. Now that Microsoft have convinced the EU to ban Google from doing this, they can once again point to the fact that they offer this extra contextual information as a reason for using them and Google cannot compete.

<comment><USER6> There's a _clear_ difference between what Bing and Google are doing. Please don't mistake the facts:

1\. The EC is _not_ asking Google to make their user experience worse.

2\. The EC does _not_ have a problem with sponsored search results.

Google's user experience is the generic algorithm that determines what is the most relevant result. Google _deliberately_ did not subject its own comparison shopping service to that algorithm while subjecting competitors' to it. Furthermore, Google took the FIRST result position.

Why would they do this if they have the best user experience and it should come up first anyways?

Contrast with Bing, when I search for "baseball bat": The first 3 results above the fold are organic unpaid SERPs. (Nothing from Bing in the top three spots.) And their shopping ads are displayed to the right of the organic search results.

If Google would've treated these products like ads, then the EC wouldn't have had a problem. But they didn't. And they have a dominant share of the general internet search market.

Google _deliberately_ tried to exploit its market dominance to enter into another market in which it was not competitive.

There's nothing scary about this fine.

<comment><USER7> But it's Google's website. Why shouldn't they be able to promote their own products on their site?

<comment><USER8> Because it's anti competitive behavior.

<comment><USER9> I don't see AMD offerings on Intel's website either.

<comment><USER8> You are missing the point entirely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The press release is well written. It explains why Google is fined in an easy way to understand, covering most aspects; what is the problematic behavior, why it is considered as problematic, which data lead to this decision, etc, whilst not painting the company in a negative light.

Opinions on the decision will sure differ among readers, but I think the decision is in place with the majority of EU citizens' consensus.

<comment><USER11> Take the money Google made by breaking the law and give it to non-profit foundations which are dedicated to developing free/libre alternatives to Google services.

This will kill two birds with one stone--firstly it will correct the economic damage Google has caused by abusing their monopoly position. Secondly it will make it harder for them to maintain and abuse their monopoly in the future.

The software industry today is filled with companies who seek to _establish a monopoly so that they can extract monopoly rents._ This behavior almost always skirts the boundaries of legality, and it's getting worse. Companies are being created with the explicit business model of throwing huge sums of money at illegal activity in order to establish market dominance--see Uber.

Monopolies are not good for markets and this belief is already reflected in our antitrust laws. We need to give those laws some teeth and come up with creative solutions that don't just punish bad behavior, but also encourage competition.

<comment><USER12> *> Take the money [...] give it to non-profit foundations

Even better: Make Google pay them directly. I don't know if that is possible on European level, but here in Germany, fines are often paid directly from the criminal to the non-profit, which is usually chosen in a round-robin-like fashion from the local non-profits in the criminal's (or court's) region.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The thing is, personally I prefer getting integrated results from Google's other search services when I do a Google search. I like getting Google Maps results when I search for a location, I like getting Google Flights results etc. When I do a Google search I am not just using it as a simple website search. I want it to use it to search the whole Google suite of services. If they are forced to stop doing this it will make my search experience worse for me.

Random, maybe silly idea. Maybe they could start providing two search streams. One would just be a simpler website search while the other would be a more involved google services search as well as a general website search. This way search users could explicitly say that they want to see direct integrated results from the whole Google ecosystem.

<comment><USER14> > If they are forced to stop doing this it will make my search experience > worse for me.

This seems to be the whole point of the fine. Currently Google's services just so damned conveniently integrated that no one uses competitors' services, even if they are better.

The thing is, though, I am totally with you here. I don't want to use one of the other services for maps, or flights, or these snippets for information. They are just search results for me. The integration is more important for me than ... better filtering, or whatnot. I can always go to one of those sites, but there really is no need, And frankly, it would really, really suck if I had to now.

Edit: From the text:

> Google has to apply the same processes and methods to position and display > rival comparison shopping services in Google's search results pages as it > gives to its own comparison shopping service.

What does that even mean? Right now Google has a link for Maps, Images, Shopping, Videos, ... in the top bar. Do they need to change it to Maps, Images, Shooping (Google), Shopping (Idealo), Shopping (yet another service), ...? Embedding results would not work. Have a link called Shopping that does not list results, but points to more shopping sites, maybe with the search term already preappended? Meh...

<comment><USER15> Did you read the articel? Google is not allowed to put itself or products from Alphabet higher in the search results than third party products.

What kind of links they put up is googles decision. If they made a link "Shopping" next to "Maps" and "Images" everything would be fine.

The problem is search results. Consumers expect all results to be shown fairly, by not doing so Google violated it's position.

This is not about linking to products. It's about deceiving the customer.

<comment><USER16> Sure, but the question is, where the line will be drawn.

A "Shopping" link next to "Maps" and "Images" is probably OK, but it's also completely useless. I'd be surprised if more than a fraction of people doing comparison shopping actually clicked that link.

Intentionally pushing down results of competitors via algorithmic criteria is obviously bad, but say they stopped doing that. What about the inline shopping box at the top of search results? That's still putting their own service in a prominent position. Probably bad...

... but then this concern immediately applies to translations, song lyrics, unit conversions, maps, shopping hours, etc. The kind of results that as a user I _want_ to see. Will that be disallowed to? If so, this will make Google Search a _significantly worse product_.

<comment><USER5> I personally reckon that making Google Search a significantly worse product is part of the reason why this happened. One of the companies pushing for this is Ciao, a comparison shopping service owned by Microsoft and used to provide the equivalent feature for Bing search results. Microsoft clearly know how useful these kinds of contextual results are, because before Google had them they were promoting them as Bing's big advantage over Google. Now they've managed to get the EU to restrict Google's ability to compete by offering them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is a ridiculous figure, how can they come up with a figure more than 2x times the amount of the previous record (for Intel's egregious behavior) for deciding what content goes on their own platform, which wasn't previously known to be illegal?

What do they want to force Google to do now, prohibit being able to advertise on their own platform? give their competitors priority placement for free? How many rival comparison services do they need to show now? There could be hundreds popping up to take advantage of the forced exposure with scam and ad- ridden pages. Does Google have to show them all? Who decides? Will this ruling extend to all other relevant content Google shows around Search results?

Guess we'll have to see, but this ruling could force Google to provide a degraded Customer experience which I guess is one way to make their Services less appealing and allow competition to catch up.

<comment><USER18> As stated in the press release, the fine has been calculated on the basis of the value of Google's revenue from its comparison shopping service in the 13 EEA countries concerned, taking into account the "duration and gravity" of the infringement. What the commission is asking is simply equal treatment between rival comparison shopping services and its own.

<comment><USER19> When I visit rivalshoppingservice.com then I would expect to see that rival shopping service. When I visit google, I would expect to see google.

Are the rivals going to be required to show google results now or is this really not about choice but about crippling google or is it about extracting an easy multi-billion dollar payday?

When I go to the SNCF (French rail) website, are they showing me flight and bus options or only their train results?

Nobody is forcing anyone to visit google. It's a website. Perhaps if the EU really cared, they'd ask themselves why Europe hasn't produced a credible Google rival.

That settlement money ought to go directly to funding EU startups. Instead it will likely make its way into CAP agricultural subsidies. The Common Agricultural Policy is about 35% of the entire EU budget despite supporting an industry that that is just 1.6% of EU GDP. It's clear that the EU prioritizes some industries over others and then they wring their hands when American tech becomes ubiquitous.

<comment><USER20> Except that Google is not a shopping service. Using a dominant position in one market to acquire one in a different market is not allowed.

<comment><USER17> They're returning relevant information Customers are searching for. If it wasn't relevant or useful people would use a different Service they'd deem more valuable to them. A major part of Google's simplicity is they provide a single search box you can use to search for anything, I don't want to have to go to 100 different sites to search for 100 different things.

<comment><USER21> "They're returning relevant information Customers are searching for."

They were really not.

For every search you assume you will be given the more popular matches, what they were doing was purposefully bypassing their own algorithm to their advantage, giving doctored results.

There wouldn't have been any problem if they promoted their service making it clear it was not part of the search results.

EDIT: For a counterexample, google "flights price compare".

You will be shown a small form at the top from which you can use their own service.

It is clearly separated from the search results, which show the actual most popular websites for flight comparison.

<comment><USER22> > what they were doing was purposefully bypassing their own algorithm to their > advantage, giving doctored results

Where did you get this from?

<comment><USER21> "Google has systematically given prominent placement to its own comparison shopping service: when a consumer enters a query into the Google search engine in relation to which Google's comparison shopping service wants to show results, these are displayed at or near the top of the search results.

Google has demoted rival comparison shopping services in its search results: rival comparison shopping services appear in Google's search results on the basis of Google's generic search algorithms. Google has included a number of criteria in these algorithms, as a result of which rival comparison shopping services are demoted. Evidence shows that even the most highly ranked rival service appears on average only on page four of Google's search results, and others appear even further down. Google's own comparison shopping service is not subject to Google's generic search algorithms, including such demotions."

<comment><USER22> From this sentence?

> Google has included a number of criteria in these algorithms, as a result of > which rival comparison shopping services are demoted.

Sounds like a jump to conclude they were doctoring results from "they modify their ranking algorithms".

<comment><USER20> did you miss:

" Evidence shows that even the most highly ranked rival service appears on average only on page four of Google's search results, and others appear even further down. Google's own comparison shopping service is not subject to Google's generic search algorithms, including such demotions."

<comment><USER22> I didn't. "Doctoring results" sounds to me like modifying the ranking of organic results to demote those services, which is not what that sentence says either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23>
      Google's flagship product is the Google search engine,
      which provides search results to consumers,
      who pay for the service with their data.

anyone else finding the plainness of that last sentence to be staggering? ...

<comment> torrent-of-ions EU citizens should be proud to have representatives that understand this kind of technology. I wish I could say the same here in the UK.

<comment><USER24> This is part of a whole debate which you find by searching for "personal data as counter-performance". For example:

> The German Minister for Interior, Thomas de Maizière, has voiced many of the > concerns of Member States over the concept of "private ownership of data" > and the risk this might entail for consumer privacy. Minister de Maiziere > cautions, "If I can sell 'my' data, there is a danger of privacy being up > for sale. Then at some point, only the wealthy will be able to afford to opt > out, while the economically weaker are effectively forced to put 'their' > data up for sale". The DCD proposal also conflicts with the rights and > remedies detailed in the UK's Consumer Rights Act, which become invalidated > when consumers exchange personal data in return for access to digital > content. While the UK government has stated that it has "no fundamental > objection" to applying these rights to situations where consumers exchange > personal data for access to 'free' digital content, it has also said these > rights could "unduly inhibit" that "very innovative business model". Most > recently, Giovanni Buttarelli (EDPS) published an Opinion on the > Commission's proposal, warning that "individuals should not be required to > disclose personal data in 'payment' for an online service".

[https://cdt.org/blog/ec-proposal-to-pay-with-personal- data-c...](https://cdt.org/blog/ec-proposal-to-pay-with-personal-data-could- undermine-privacy-and-harm-the-online-ecosystem/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Google posted a response blog post: [https://www.blog.google/topics/google- europe/european-commis...](https://www.blog.google/topics/google- europe/european-commission-decision-shopping-google-story/)

It's mostly just fluff, but they do make a good point about the role of Amazon and eBay in product searches. I remember one of the early criticisms of the EU in this case being that they defined the "market" to exclude Amazon and eBay. Anyone know what the EUs reasoning for that is?

<comment><USER26> From Google's piece:

> When you shop online, you want to find the products you're looking for > quickly and easily. And advertisers want to promote those same products. > That's why Google shows shopping ads, connecting our users with thousands of > advertisers, large and small, in ways that are useful for both.

The problem is that when you are shopping for something, you _don 't_ want advertisers to be influencing what you see in search results. You generally want the best match to your search, not the product with the biggest advertisement budget behind it.

By upranking others, Google is benefiting themselves, and doing the consumer a disservice. This is what they should be fined for.

But they have a point about Amazon and others doing basically similar things.

<comment><USER27> > The problem is that when you are shopping for something, you don't want > advertisers to be influencing what you see in search results. You generally > want the best match to your search, not the product with the biggest > advertisement budget behind it.

So they should remove advertising from google search results altogether?

Like saying TV networks shouldn't put ads/product-placements in their shows because their viewers are only interested in the shows/content.

<comment><USER26> I think you should re-read those two sentences I quoted above. Google is conflating two issues that are conflicting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Not sure I get the logic here. Will they be fined next for showing the Google Maps embed (and street view) when you search for places nearby? What's the difference?

<comment><USER29> That's another case that's being worked on.

The preferred solution of the EU would be that there would be a standardized API between search engines and map providers, shopping providers, etc, and you could simply choose which map provider you'd want, and that'd be shown in every search engine.

This is still being discussed, of course, as no solution has been found yet, but in general the idea is based on Android's Intent system, where this concept works quite well.

<comment><USER30> That sounds horrible though. Another abomination in the making. The effort to align all those map providers is probably quite significant. Such a massive waste of efforts and engineering time.

<comment><USER16> I don't think so. Google is actually in a perfect position to do that. They could just unilaterally announce they'll support other map providers if they conform to a specified Google API, and guess what, map providers _will_ do it, forced simply by power of competition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> "Market dominance is, as such, not illegal under EU antitrust rules. However, _dominant companies have a special responsibility_ not to abuse their powerful market position by restricting competition, either in the market where they are dominant or in separate markets." (emphasis added)

I couldn't have said it better myself. That is how to do it.

</comment><comment><USER32> Google giving an advantage to its shopping service is peanuts. The way Chrome was promoted (not only through search, but other Google services as well) is the real abuse.

<comment><USER33> If that's the case then they way Microsoft promoted IE before Chrome was the work of Satan himself.

<comment><USER34> Microsoft got hit with a huge fine because of IE. The reason Safari got off the hook eludes me, maybe because Apple doesn't have a monopoly on computer OS.

<comment><USER35> That's exactly the reason. Microsoft were dominant, Apple wasn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> A maybe bigger damage is that I don't trust Google's search results for product recommendations anymore. It used to be (when product search was still new), that you could search for something, "barbecue grill", "best graphics card", and the first few results gave you a good overview of the market. Now, it is almost worthless, as the results are determined by commercial interests, not the popularity of the products. And this is not even considering the point of this fine, the highlighted "product search" results, I'm just talking about the "organic" results.

Oddly, I've found Amazon's rankings for many product categories (not for all) to be very good.

</comment><comment><USER37> The thing is, Google is not just a search engine - it's also a command line interpreter. When I type "translate goodnight to french" or "coca cola stock price" I don't want a list of web pages - I want a single, authorative answer.

<comment><USER31> Well IMO, with authority comes even _more_ responsibility than market dominance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> The stark dichotomy between the main two views expressed in the commentary is almost breathtaking.

I shouldn't be surprised that so many people support Google using their near monopoly on search to crush their subsidiary's (sibling's ?) competitors in other spheres; after all, I saw people support IBM and Microsoft when they were up to similar shenanigans.

</comment><comment><USER39> Please enlighten me: What kind of monopoly would that be? Much as I detest an awful lot of Google, I have never once been - and know of noone else who has ever been - forced to use their search against my will. In fact, I get along fine without it, as well as without their analytics and their browser and their cloud stuff, excepting of course that I am often forced to correspond with gmail addresses.

<comment><USER40> Google holding a dominant position or a monopoly on search is not by itself illegal. However, using _that_ position to gain entry in a different market (shopping, in this case) is considered anti-competitive and hence illegal.

<comment><USER39> No, I realise that. My question is _how_ are they supposed to hold a monoply or dominance, when there is _nothing_ but preference or lazyness stopping anyone from switching to a competing service?

<comment><USER41> I suggest you read the wiki article[1], it's actually very good at answering your question. The whole article is worth reading, not just the section I linked answering your specific question.

Dominance is reflected by the reality of market share, not by whether or not someone could theoretically switch search engine. In the EU they have a very dominant position (95% I think?).

It's no different from saying MS had an effective monopoly/dominance in the 2000s, even though you could theoretically install Linux.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition_law#Dominance_and_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition_law#Dominance_and_monopoly)

<comment><USER39> _It 's no different from saying MS had an effective monopoly/dominance in the 2000s, even though you could theoretically install Linux_

I not only could, I most certainly did.

The situation was different, though. Microsoft Windows had a kind of real monoply, since it was - and is - difficult to find a retail pc without the damned thing preinstalled and included in the price. No such mechanism exists concerning Google, as long as we politely keep Android out of the picture.

Mind you, my position back then was more or less the same with regard to EU vs MS as it is today, with Google taking over: I dislike both companies. I very much more intensely dislike the monolithic and terrifying EU throwing its weight around.

<comment><USER42> I very much more intensely dislike the monolithic and terrifying EU throwing its weight around.

why do you find the EU terrifying? (also, the EU is not exactly monolithic considering it is not a single entity in many areas, but that is another point entirely).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I wonder if that's payback for the US gov fining VW so hard:

[https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2017/04/21/volkswa...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2017/04/21/volkswagen- diesel-scandal-hearing/100739290/)

It's almost the same amount, US$2.8B. It's like the EU telling the US "F with our corporations and we'll F with yours".

<comment><USER44> That's a very cynical view. As an European citizen I expect my representatives not to engage in such childish schemes even if it's about considerable sums.

I think the provided explanation is clear and the punishment reasonable.

<comment><USER45> Are you sure? This is the company who initiated the lawsuit: [http://www.foundem.co.uk/](http://www.foundem.co.uk/)

By looking at the website do you think they were disadvantaged in Google search because of Google's monopoly or perhaps for MANY other reasons? I mean it doesn't even render on mobile...

<comment><USER46> I guess it's stuck in 2008 because they've made no money since then?

<comment><USER47> I doubt it. We have a price aggregator (skroutz.gr) here in Greece that people prefer because it's actually useful. The above site doesn't look like that.

<comment><USER46> It was kind of a joke in reference to the article. I also run an Australian price aggregator and it doesn't look like that: [https://pricehipster.com](https://pricehipster.com)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I beg everyone answer my question. The anti-trust laws are originated from USA. The anti-monopolies rules are much harsher in US than those of Europe. Why did not federal government pick this up? Since a lot of the companies that are disadvantaged by this Google practice are Us companies. Also I have to agree that this ruling is tough but fair. And the writing is very concise by easy to understand. it is good writing no matter you like the ruling or not.

<comment><USER49> The FTC did investigate Google for this exact same thing, and the investigators recommended action be taken.

[http://graphics.wsj.com/google-ftc-report/](http://graphics.wsj.com/google- ftc-report/)

 _" Staff concludes that Google's conduct has resulted - and will result - <USER3> real harm to consumers and to innovation in the online search and advertising markets. Google has strengthened its monopolies over search and search advertising through anticompetitive means..."_

It went nowhere though:

 _" The staff recommended bringing a lawsuit challenging certain Google practices. The Commission ultimately voted, 5-0, not to bring charges against Google."_

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I tend to agree with the underlying judgment, yet the record-breaking fine seems disproportionate to the debatable degree of wrongdoing, compared to the Intel case, where the (obviously reprehensible) extortion of distributors etc. only led to a fine of about €1.06B.

<comment><USER51> I'd say the problem isn't so much that Google's fine is too high, but that Intel's fine was too low.

<comment><USER52> They are both really low.

<comment><USER46> Apparently both are less than a third of the maximum penalty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> What is annoying about this all, is that the EU picks on tech companies a lot. They seem to do absolutely NOTHING about the financial houses, that got away with an awful lot during the greatest financial crisis the world has ever seen, as an example.

It would be much better for consumers if the EU applied their fines to more "dangerous to society" type outfits, that can actually do and have done immense damage to economies not just in the EU, but the US and rest of the world.

The EU should apply consumer concern to the banking/finance sector in equal measure as they do with Tech firms. After all, Google cannot crash a society, But the Banking/financial sector can and has done.

<comment><USER42> the problem with fining financial structures is that the eurozone at the moment has no common fiscal policy and no framework to do these kind of financial crimes efficiently.

Although there is far more support to integrate more fiscal policy across the eurozone (as expressed by both macron, merkel and some minor other EU nations), the legislation simply isn't their yet.

<comment><USER53> You are right, But I imagine thats by lobbyist design. If there was the will to investigate, it would happen easily.

Its odd how Tech which changes my browser search gets heavy regulation EU wide, but not fiscal items, where a currency is shared EU wide.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Capitalism is like a competition that when you win you don't ever get to play again.

<comment><USER55> It's more like a game where others should have the chance to win at one point, just like you did.

<comment><USER56> Europeans could always use one of the other (European?) search engines if so they wished. [http://searchengineland.com/alternatives-to-google-in- europe...](http://searchengineland.com/alternatives-to-google-in-europe-50425)

<comment><USER57> Or Google could follow the rules of the countries in which they operate.

<comment><USER47> Please quote the rule that Google broke. In all 28 EU countries.

<comment><USER57> It's in the headline.

 _Antitrust: Commission fines Google €2.42 billion for abusing dominance as search engine by giving illegal advantage to own comparison shopping service_

Antitrust rules. The EU decided they broke them. Whether you think they did or didn't is irrelevant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> I wonder how many competitors and established providers were driven out of the market because of Google's practice.

This fine isn't nearly enough, as Google will have earned much more than that and stands to earn a lot more in the future, simply because they used their overwhelming market share to kill off competitors. They'll just do it again and again because in the long term it profits them way more than playing fair.

</comment><comment><USER59> It might be very hard for business minded rich hacker news crowd to swallow but i think many EU citizens believe in regulations. It is not like US.

On one hand google can do whatever they want because its their service and they don't force anyone to go there.

On the other hand they have big monopoly so people can't really go anywhere else (they don't know better) - they are not really paying taxes in most of the EU countries and many times don't even comply with local laws because EU is just one big thing for them - not individual states.

Let's not forget it is Google who is playing on EU ballpark - not the other way around.

By the way - does anyone still believe that Google / Facebook or even the Internet are not utility? It seems it a lot like water/electricity/roads but for information.

</comment><comment><USER60> What would Google have to do to ignore this fine? If they cut any physical presence in the EU, would the EC have any way to enforce this fine?

Put another way, if the EU tried to take money from some random e.g. American or Japanese company without a physical presence in the EU, what channels could the EU use to twist their arm across national boundaries?

Somewhat related, there could be good money in providing an explicitly non- hostile legal environment for companies, where they won't get in trouble for e.g. promoting their own services or offering services for free [1].

[1]: [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/feb/03/google- fi...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/feb/03/google-fined-france- maps-free)

<comment><USER61> Google could remove any presence they had in the EU, at huge expense (closing Google Dublin, abandoning all EU revenue); but that would also remove their ability to use Ireland and the Netherlands as tax havens. They'd have to submit to the US tax system instead.

<comment> wav-part Being exposed to EC insanity makes Ireland, Netherland makes less appealing now. However there are many more to choose from eg Singapore.

> _abandoning all EU revenue_

How ? A corp does not have to exist in EU to recieve payments from EU.

> _They 'd have to submit to the US tax system instead._

For such tax structring to work, Google just need one non-US IP holding jurisdiction.

So they can cut off physical/legal tie from EU, and they should.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> This is going to sound a bit conspiracy theory but here goes...

I was looking at the highlights of the EU competition commission[0]. Is it just me or is there a theme (with a few exceptions) that runs something like:

       + Large US company XXX gets anti-trust fine.
       + EU company gets state aid approved.
       + rinse and repeat

Maybe it's just a coincidence but I wonder what the P&L for the Competition Commission looks like given that fines go to the EU not to the aggrieved parties.

As an EU citizen, it's nice that the Commission is working hard to reduce my tax bill but I do wonder if this is entirely neutral.

[0] [http://ec.europa.eu/competition/news_en.html](http://ec.europa.eu/competition/news_en.html)

<comment><USER63> Considering how much tax dodging the US companies engage in, I'm not sure that would be unfair if it was true.

<comment><USER59> Exactly.

Many opinions here are the "market will solve everything" american way. But what many people fail to mention is how american corps avoid taxes. In my country fb and google are main online services with milions customers yet they pay no taxes.

Its amazing what you can do when you are 2big2fail

<comment><USER64> > "market will solve everything" american way

This got us 2008 financial crisis, deregulations were the main reason. You need to add greed to every equation you make and then you get different results.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Promoting your own product above competitors' is ok unless you're big. Ok, I get it. But I don't agree with it.

<comment><USER66> Controversial way to look at this, but surprisingly close to the truth: markets exist for the people. Companies have only one purpose: to serve the people. Their profits are merely incidental. Any type of regulation (or lack thereof) can be traced back to this rule.

Freedoms exist only to let companies thrive insofar as that then lets them sell goods that benefit the people. Once that stops, the freedoms stop.

I'm being slightly dry cut, but this is a good rule of thumb when looking at society. It's easy to forget about the bigger picture and think that companies have any type of inherent right to exist. They don't. They're here for us. Of course, theory vs practice, yada yada. but again: rule of thumb for regulations.

<comment><USER67> > Companies have only one purpose: to serve the people.

That seems completely backwards. Governments have only one purpose—to serve the people.

Companies have only one purpose—to serve its shareholders. Of course, purely pursuing this purpose can lead to perverse outcomes so we have regulation to keep it in check.

> Companies [don't] have any type of inherent right to exist

Huh? In so far as individuals have a right to engage in trade and commerce, and in so far as they have a right to engage in this in coordination with other individuals, companies do have a right to exist.

<comment><USER68> >companies do have a right to exist.

I hate to split hairs, but no, they don't. Companies are just an arbitrary legal entity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> It's just a covert trade war with the US. The US fines VW, then the EU fines Google and Facebook and maybe Apple too. I don't like Google's practices or their ad network but this is just about taxes and clawing back some money after Google used their Ireland subsidiary and banks in the Caymans to avoid paying some taxes in the EU. In the UK they got a slap on the back last year - some 130M pounds in back taxes.

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/22/google- ag...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/22/google-agrees-to- pay-hmrc-130m-in-back-taxes)

</comment><comment><USER70> I wish they would add an additional 1 billion fine for AMP.

<comment><USER71> From what I read, AMP is a subset of HTML to make pages load faster and deliver ads more efficiently (which might appeal to content creators).

I assume that Google is attempting to make devs start using a proprietary technology instead of the well-established HTML standard, or:

\- somehow lock everyone in with the format

\- force people to switch to Chrome since it would run those pages better

\- force other browsers to implement the technology (until they sneak in a patented technology once AMP is popular?)

Where can I read a good article about why AMP is bad?

<comment><USER72> This might be worth reading: [https://www.alexkras.com/i-decided-to-disable- amp-on-my-site...](https://www.alexkras.com/i-decided-to-disable-amp-on-my- site/) (on HN yesterday: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14635013](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14635013))

<comment><USER73> Most importantly, it walls off a lion share of few remaining competing ad publishing platforms

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> If they do not comply within 90 days, they can be fined with 5% of the daily average revenue of Alphabet, Inc.

For FY16, they had a revenue of approx. $90.27b, that leaves a fine of approx. $12.3m.

*edit: forgot to divide by 365 (days). I apologise.

<comment><USER75> Meaning that the fine is about half of what they make in a day. A slap on the wrist.

<comment><USER76> The fine is 5% of daily Alphabet revenues, _per day_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> This was rumored to be coming for some time. The most interesting part to me: "Vestager said the EU might also need to take a closer look at Google's behavior concerning maps, travel and restaurant reviews."

<comment><USER78> So we'll just have a worse search experience here. Thanks EU..

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> The EU are verging on gangsterism, extorting businesses for increasingly specious violations and terms. Of course Google favour their affiliates on THEIR web services, their property.

<comment><USER80> I have absolutely no framework for understanding this attitude.

I've got to assume you're aware of things like unfair competition, antitrust laws, market distortions and so on. The idea is that a disproportionately influential market participant can cause the market to become less free by virtue of inhibiting competition – competition being a vital part of a free market.

Rules against abusing a dominant market position are there specifically to try and prevent abuse from happening.

I could understand the reasonableness of arguing about the specifics of Google's market dominance or the degree to which this activity was a problem. But "increasingly specious violations and terms" and "absolutely sickening" seem to suggest you haven't really considered the validity of such rules.

<comment><USER79> Unless I've misunderstood what the fine was for. Fining a private business €2.4bn for promoting its own affiliates over other networks, how is that in any way an abnormal business practice? I'm not trying to be controversial, I just don't understand how that warrants such a hefty fine.

<comment><USER80> It's because there are additional regulatory requirements on businesses that have disproportionate market influence.

Promoting your own services in general is fine. But when a huge, huge majority of the market uses your service for discovery, your decision to promote your own services over competitors' damages competition in the market — users end up with less choice in practice, even though they could theoretically switch to another service.

Those rules exist to try and prevent this sort of abuse happening.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> Who receives the fine, and is it disbursed in some way to the citizens of EU member states?

<comment><USER62> According to this [0], which was the press release for Intel's fine, it gets taken off the EU central budget so the member states pay less net. The EU budget is ~145bn EUR I believe.

[0] [http://europa.eu/rapid/press- release_MEMO-09-235_en.htm?loca...](http://europa.eu/rapid/press- release_MEMO-09-235_en.htm?locale=en)

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> Google's dominance is so complete that for years even their top browser competitor, Firefox, came preset to use an omnibox with Google as the default search engine, meaning that everything one typed into the browser was sent to Google, even if not actually a Google search.

This integration with Google is pervasive in Firefox; there are dozens of settings built into the browser that send information to various Google services. Yes, it's possible to change all of them, but probably less than 0.001% of users will do that. This is why it's not possible to take Firefox's claim that they are pro-privacy seriously.

<comment><USER83> Correct me if I'm wrong, but Firefox doesn't have a proper omnibox. It has an explicitly split search and URL field.

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> Why is this story being flagged so much? It's the biggest news of the day!

</comment><comment><USER85> I assume Google only needs to show pages complying with this order for requests originating from the EU, so the rest of us shouldn't see any difference from the European Protectorates' order.

<comment><USER46> Except maybe an international precedent will be scary enough for Google not to risk it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> Visting google is 100% voloutary and there are alternatives. The EU should not interfere, its unnecessary and I think its an abuse of power from their side.

<comment><USER87> > Using Internet Explorer is 100% voloutary and there are alternatives. The US > government should not interfere, its unnecessary and I think its an abuse of > power from their side.

<comment><USER88> Hopefully you realize that a lot of people (in the US and elsewhere) actually felt that way, and that simply posting this does not constitute a very thoughtful rebuttal.

The application of antitrust law (in the US and elsewhere) tends to be rather controversial. Which is why it's interesting...

<comment><USER87> I know, my implicit argument is that this specific argument isn't really valid because these circumstances have happened before and I don't believe the decision against Microsoft is controversial in 2017. I do believe that something like Google, while obviously having alternatives, is often _the_ place people search, so it is in many ways a monopoly and should be heavily scrutinized to ensure it's not using its position for its own gain at the expense of its competitors. I don't know anyone who really uses Bing, and I only use DuckDuckGo because I don't prefer to be in the Google ecosystem, but I am not most people.

<comment><USER88> > I don't believe the decision against Microsoft is controversial in 2017.

Well, in one sense that's obviously true: it's no longer a source of controversy. On the other hand, if there is a reason you believe the people who argued against the Microsoft antitrust action - or aspects thereof - <USER3> the late nineties would retract their opposition today, I wonder what it is. More to the point, I wonder if you have read any legal scholarship or punditry to the effect of "I was wrong, the Microsoft antitrust case was correctly decided." I don't recall ever seeing anything like that, and I'm interested in this stuff.

(plenty of us thought bundling IE was not an abuse of monopoly power twenty years ago, and still feel that way today)

<comment><USER67> Add my name to the list of people that aren't entirely convinced that bundling IE was a abuse of monopoly power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER89> This is like forcing itunes to show movie results from prime video.

<comment><USER90> No. The key difference is that iTunes owns the rights to the contest it promotes via some kind of author-distributor agreement, so all the contest is 'theirs'. Google search, on the other hand, crawls the whole web, but put results by Google Shopping on top and punishes others, that have nothing to do with Google nor gave them an explicit permission to use _their_ content. This creates an illusion that Google Shopping products are somehow better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> Let's say Spotify began including a music recognition feature similar to Shazam. That would be really useful! Would this decision force Spotify to not include the feature because they have a monopoly on music streaming and it would force Shazam out of business? That just seems plain wrong.

<comment><USER35> Does Spotify have a _dominant_ market position? They're big, for sure, but I would hardly call them "dominant".

</comment></comment><comment><USER92> My point of view? Good or bad, there is more to come: [https://medium.com/@soufron/eu-commission-fines- google-2-42-...](https://medium.com/@soufron/eu-commission-fines- google-2-42-billion-and-there-might-be-more-to-come-664999fd6277)

</comment><comment><USER93> Does anyone know where the €2.42B will be used?

Will it be used to compensate the rival companies? Will it be used to compensate European consumers? (And most importantly, it denied European consumers a genuine choice of services and the full benefits of innovation)

<comment><USER94> > Fines are paid into the Community budget and therefore help to finance the > European Union and reduce the tax burden on individuals.

[https://twitter.com/EU_Commission/status/879647936686305281](https://twitter.com/EU_Commission/status/879647936686305281)

</comment></comment><comment><USER95> I think this makes sense.

The EU has to defend its producers as much as it defends its consumers.

I wouldn't say that the EU is doing this at the expense of its consumers because I don't think that consumers actually get a better deal because this feature of Google.

Google's initiative only serves to narrow down the options for consumers and funnel them to where Google wants them to go.

Google's business is to steal people's free will and sell it to corporations.

To be fair, I don't think it's much different from what all the other corporations are doing. All advertising ought to be taxed.

</comment><comment><USER96> Whether it is fair or not, I can't help but think it has something to do with the huge penalties European banks were sentenced to pay to the US treasury department in the last few years...

</comment><comment><USER97> The larger existential question that this should raise for most people is this:

Do you have more power to improve your life over the long term in your role as an individual consumer or an individual voter?

If you take the stance that the government is looking out for your interests better than Google is, then by default you must be arguing one of two things:

1\. Your act of voting (or political action) is positively correlated to your desires.

or

2\. The (collective) Government knows what's better for you than Google could and is implementing that to your benefit.

I find either argument unsubstantiated.

<comment><USER98> I don't see any evidence that my purchasing actions are positivity correlated to my desires either.

<comment><USER97> Just so I interpret this correctly, are you saying that you purchase things you don't want?

<comment><USER98> What I mean is I don't see my buying habits having any larger of an impact on the behavior of corporations than my voting habits do on the behavior of the government. The libertarian conviction that businesses will change their behavior to attract my dollars never seemed to have any empirical footing to me.

<comment><USER97> I think the empirical footing is simply seeing how companies change their businesses to adjust to consumer demands. All of the major players have shown time and time again that they adjust their products based on user behavior. The entire Lean method and deploy-measure-iterate-deploy cycle, is predicated on a feedback loop between users and products.

<comment><USER98> In your original post, you said:

> If you take the stance that the government is looking out for your interests > better than Google is...

making a clear implicit counterclaim that Google is looking out for my interests better than the government. But then you say this:

> The entire Lean method and deploy-measure-iterate-deploy cycle, is > predicated on a feedback loop between users and products.

As someone who has done a lot of A/B testing over the course of their career, I can say with authority that this argument is completely bogus, to the point that I'm having trouble believing you're making it in good faith. A/B testing rarely has anything to do with matching the product to customer's stated preferences or looking out for their best interests. It's almost always about exploiting various quirks of psychology to increase engagement or spending, in the manner of casinos.

In fact, I'm willing to wager that A/B testing, as it's done today, probably anti-optimizes the product from the perspective of the user's (or society's) best interests (best example: Facebook and the social bubble effect, and how outrage-inducting fake news gets more clicks and engagement than nuanced real stuff)

Contrast this with the history of how well companies respond to consumer's stated preferences. A clear majority of people, when polled, say they want less corporate welfare, companies that treat the environment better, reasonable labor protections, etc.. None of these have happened to any significant degree, unless their hand was forced by (bitterly opposed) regulation.

Now, this is mostly people's own fault, because their spending habits do not match their stated preferences, and businesses follow revealed preference. But that's been my point all along: businesses cannot be trusted satisfy stated preferences. And I'm the rare consumer who _does_ try to put my money where my mouth is, and my preferences still never translate into large-scale change. That's what I mean when I say there's no empirical footing for the claim that businesses can be trusted to look out for my interests.

<comment><USER97> _A /B testing rarely has anything to do with matching the product to customer's stated preferences or looking out for their best interests._

Bull, it's explicitly about figuring out what people want to do. You can argue all day long that this can be exploited, but in the end you aren't going to take an action you don't want to without coercion. If I show you a delivery donut ad a 1AM, because you've proven 90% more likely to impulse buy a donut at 1AM and then you do it, how is that not directly correlating to your interests? Conversely if I show you a gym ad at 8AM on Tuesday because I know that's when you get out of the meeting with the fit [insert gender] person at work you've always wanted to ask out on a date, how is that not directly in your interests?

 _businesses follow revealed preference_

Yes exactly, stated preferences are worthless. Revealed preferences are priceless. The amount of people who say one thing and do another approaches 100%.

 _That 's what I mean when I say there's no empirical footing for the claim that businesses can be trusted to look out for my interests._

You decide what your interests are by your actions. If I see your actions and then give you more of those, by definition I am looking out for your interests.

I think what you are trying to say is:

"People make terrible decisions and it's up to the government to prevent companies from letting you make those terrible decisions."

In which case, you're implicitly arguing that people make better voting decisions than purchasing decisions and that voting decisions better reflect their _true_ preferences. A silly idea if there ever was one. I don't think this needs a reference in 2017.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER99> As someone who is cautious about the prospect of Amazon and other large retailers completely dominating the e-commerce space, this ruling worries me a bit.

As things stand, the Google Shopping results allow smaller, independent e-commerce stores to reach the top of Google's search results.

Take this functionality away, and we risk the top search results being a combination of Amazon + other large retailers for the majority of e-commerce related searches.

</comment><comment><USER100> To avoid market domination, companies should pay a percentage X of their profit as taxes. X is the average market share of the company in the last five years.

</comment><comment><USER101> Maybe it's time Google enters politics, gains control of the US army somehow, and then threatens to invade Europe if they ever bother them again.

<comment><USER102> _" Maybe it's time Google enters politics..."_

I think we're long past that point: [https://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/googles-remarkably- close...](https://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/googles-remarkably-close- relationship-with-the-obama-white-house-in-two-charts/)

<comment><USER101> Great. Just two more steps then :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER103> "As a result, Google's comparison shopping service is much more visible to consumers in Google's search results."

Well, that makes sense.

</comment><comment><USER104> I wish this would actually do something, though I am happy that another verdict has been passed.

(cue "the market will regulate itself")

</comment><comment><USER105> what's stopping google from shutting up shop in the EU. would they have to block EU access?

how much revenue do they make from EU clients?

<comment><USER106> Business is what is stopping Google from not servicing Europe. Google makes huge part of its profit on search in Europe and pays almost no tax in Europe.

If Google stopped servicing Europe, one or more European competitors would emerge in days or weeks and Google's dominance would be threatened worldwide within months. It would be a completely suicidal move.

<comment><USER107> Yeah, it seems "search" isn't as untouchable as it used to be. Qwant, for instance, may not be a 100% there but it is quite good.

[https://www.qwant.com/](https://www.qwant.com/)

<comment><USER108> What are you taking about? Any Google Search competitor needs to be seriously better than google in order to stand a chance, 'not 100% there' is equivalent to not there at all.

Moreover Qwant is just bing search results repackaged.

<comment><USER107> > Moreover Qwant is just bing search results repackaged.

Not in France and Germany

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant#Criticism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant#Criticism)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER109> while i disagree with EU and i think that goole has full right of sort things inthe way it wants, i also recognize that the "don't be evil" motto are just bullshits

google has the bad habit to sell itself as the saviour, while it is just making its own interests like anyone else... do not hide google...

</comment><comment><USER110> Just once, I want a company being fined to just shut off service to the countries trying to fine them....

<comment><USER111> It's not a 100% match, but some years back Spain came up with a system where Google News would be required to pay money to the news sites they linked to. Google responded by simply turning off Google News in Spain, which immediately cost Spanish news sites to lose a sizable percentage of traffic and millions of dollars in revenue: [https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/07/new-study- shows-...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/07/new-study-shows-spains- google-tax-has-been-a-disaster-for-publishers/)

<comment><USER110> awesome.... doesn't appear they did anything to rectify the service disconnect, nor any of the other Spanish site that shutdown as a result.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER112> Seems like a lot of non-lawyers are learning how competition law works and very upset that it also applies to tech. This thread, unfortunately, contains a very low-level discussion regarding what's going on because it is premised upon whether or not competition law has merit in the first place, rather than whether or not it should apply in this specific instance. This is understandable, because most people here don't actually understand the competition framework or how its various moving parts work, either in principle or in practice.

Google has enough lawyers to know that its internal policy was at risk of triggering competition oversight. If it didn't, it has a horrendously inept legal and regulatory risk compliance structure in place.

As a point, in competition cases, companies will generally try to bite off more than they know the regulators will allow, then use that action to shift the goalposts to negotiate better boundaries for their practices or acquisitions than they would have otherwise obtained.[1]

This is what Google has done. Only most people don't see it because their main competitive advantage hasn't' been in easily analysed assets like high-margin factories or efficient logistics operations. Our language of business is not well structured for discussing the competitive advantage Google has acquired by repeatedly leveraging their search engine into other markets. So we ignore it.

Contrary to what people are saying, it is very clear where the 'line' was crossed from the competition perspective. Google has crossed that line multiple times in the past and gotten away free. It is more shocking, from a competition perspective, that they haven't been hit in the past.

___

[1] To explain the footnoted paragraph further: companies will offer to buy competitors that would bring it well past the market dominance high-water mark (different countries' legislation use different terminology to denote this point, but as a rule of thumb when you hit 40-50% of a given market, competition concerns arise). Companies then apply for regulator blessing for the entire acquisition knowing they won't get it. The hope is that the regulator will allow them to try to and keep all of the high-margin, high- value 'crown jewels' and make a show of disposing of underperforming assets. Doing this allows regulators the ability to say they exercised effective oversight, while the company is able to point to their balance sheet's performance over their competitors. Obtaining this advantage then allows them to raise at lower rates and fund activities to buy market share then rely on organic growth (which regulators don't take action against) to crush their opponents. This is a very standard market consolidation playbook for a player in the market.

</comment><comment><USER53> If they like google, they will love Amazon in the next few years!

</comment><comment><USER113> Funny fact below the article is that 2 contacts - that are in fact British citizens. Ricardo CARDOSO (+32 2 298 01 00) [https://www.linkedin.com/in/ricardocardosodeandrade/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ricardocardosodeandrade/) Yizhou REN (+32 2 299 48 89) [https://www.linkedin.com/in/yizhou- ren-a2950616/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/yizhou-ren-a2950616/)

Both graduated from same school and both have financial sector background. Both were working in big UK corporations before their career in EU commission.

<comment><USER114> They may have studied in the LSE but Yizhou Ren is from Germany, apparently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER115> Google helps push big government power and their ability to unilaterally interfere in markets. The fact it was used against them is poetic.

</comment><comment><USER116> As usual, an anti-trust regulation puts on display the shortcomings of both capitalism and socialism.

Stifling competition is bad, and it's bad that Google did it.

Trying to meddle in someone's private property and stifling innovation, like the EU just did, is also bad.

And ultimately some win (competitor companies) and some lose (the people who preferred the Google results, even if out of convenience).

I see it as a showcase of how we, and thus our economic models, are flawed and will always be.

</comment><comment><USER69> It's just a covert trade war with the US. The US fines VW, then the EU fines Google and Facebook and maybe Apple too. I don't like Google's practices or their ad network but this is just about taxes and clawing back some money after Google used Ireland and the Caymans to avoid paying some taxes in the EU. In the UK they got a slap on the back last year - some 300M in back taxes.

<comment><USER117> * The US fined VW fair and square. VW has a large North American business anyway - there is no significant US/EU "trade war". Besides, American car manufacturers like GM are also implicated: [https://electrek.co/2017/05/25/gm-dieselgate-scandal/](https://electrek.co/2017/05/25/gm-dieselgate-scandal/)

* Ireland _is in the EU_ and contributes towards the EU's coffers.

* The EU is also going after VW ( [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/eu-sues-germ...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/eu-sues-germany-and-britain-over-volkswagen-emissions-scandal-a7462936.html) ), but the responsibility in this case lies with individual member-state governments, rather than any single EU organ, and there is evidence that VW carefully gamed the situation so their defeat-devices were technically legal in the EU ( [https://www.ft.com/content/0b9bf1d2-e486-11e6-9645-c9357a758...](https://www.ft.com/content/0b9bf1d2-e486-11e6-9645-c9357a75844a?mhq5j=e1) )

<comment><USER69> While I agree with all of your points, we have yet to see GM being fined in the US. Otherwise VW is probably the worst offender and still getting a pat on the back in the EU. The EU _plans_ to punish VW since 2015. Rather than do that, they went after individual member states (backed by taxpayers) for failing to punish VW.

Ireland gave some big corps special tax deals as it's the case with Apple. It's also used by big corps to pass earnings through as it had lower corporate taxes compared to other member states. This is an Irish feature and a flaw in the tax policies of other EU states, which the EU tried to fix with transfer taxes.

What I am saying is that the EU is failing to punish VW while being _maybe a little too harsh_ on US corps. I think we can all agree VW is a much worse offender than Google: selling cars that poison the air and lie about it vs. a few search results clearly labelled as sponsored ads up on the first page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER118> This is a) wayyyy too big of a fine

And b) not motivated by customer protection but by greed alone.

This was not a good thing.

</comment><comment><USER119> That money could have gone to continue Firefox OS :(

</comment><comment><USER120> Does it hurt them at all?

<comment><USER121> Not the money part of it. Not sure about legal/strategic implications down the road.

<comment><USER122> They have 90 days to "stop the abusive practices", basically meaning find a way to redesign their website - this is what they really care about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER123> Why so low? (Not sarcasm)

<comment><USER124> This case was only about Froogle/Google Product Search/Google Shopping. Separate cases about Android and AdSense are still ongoing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER125> EU Just create your own search engine ! Height of stupidity .

Glad that Britain is exiting EU .

</comment><comment><USER126> I kind of want google to shut off all services for a week in EU countries. No search, images, maps, gmail, or android services. I wonder how quickly the eu will sober up.

<comment><USER127> Bing and ddg would fill 90% of that void in two days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER128> Unjust enrichment of disgusting bureaucrats. In this case, google did nothing wrong other than display what they want on their own site, and for that they have to pay their hard earned money to an undemocratic authoritarian commission. No thanks.

<comment><USER40> Yeah, no. The fine is not paid to any commission, it goes to the EU budget and is taken off from the amount member states (hence, citizens) have to pay for that year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Someone said once something which really describes this well:

The EU hasn't contributed ANYTHING to the internet, but they are the ones who want to regulate it the most. :(

<comment><USER129> > The EU hasn't contributed ANYTHING to the internet

Of top of my head:

1\. WWW was created in CERN, which is funded mostly by EU countries [1]

2\. Linux which accounts for more than 2/3 of web servers was created in Sweden.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN#Member_states_and_budget](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN#Member_states_and_budget)

<comment><USER130> How could you get the country where Linux comes from wrong? (unless that's the joke)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER131> This is despicable. Google is a private company who cannot force anyone to use its services. It is successful because consumers and advertisers have chosen to use its services because it makes their lives better. Google's investors risked and are risking their own money to build the company in hopes of earning a return by providing better services than other companies. Now come government bureaucrats, moral pygmies who live off of taxes coerced from the citizenry, who have none of their own money at risk, who have no expertise, presuming to tell Google that they are harming the consumers who are choosing to use its services. These are despicable little parasites who are doing their best to extract money from companies who are driving civilization forward. See also [https://mises.org/library/abolish-antitrust- laws](https://mises.org/library/abolish-antitrust-laws) for a more detailed explanation of why antitrust is bad.

<comment><USER57> I feel like you have totally missed the point.</comment></comment>


The BORING Highschool Science Fair NEEDS an UPDATE - <AUTHOR>

Everyone submit projects that they don't give a sh*t about. All these projects are meant for 60 year olds to adore and need the intelligence of a toddler to create.
But this year, my group and I have decided to give the BORING science fair a much needed technological update. We want to create a computer program that analyzes text and can tell you the author of the text without matching it to another source but by identifying patterns such certain words and frequecy of words.
So we would like to ask the help of the programming community of Hacker News, as we only have learned the basics in Javascript.
Instead of just moving on to another submission, take action and give back to the community that has supported you for so long.
Thank You, -A <comment><AUTHOR> Please I am looking for assistance not someone to do the whole project. If you would like to help please leave a comment :)</comment>


MobileCoin has raised $30M for private mobile payments - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/24/mobilecoin-moxie-marlinspike-binance-labs/ <comment><USER2> I was talking to Moxie's cofounder, Joshua Goldbard, the other month about this. They strongly depend upon secure enclaves to achieve it.

It seems like a rather clever use of DMCA related technology, potentially backfiring in the DMCA's face if it is extended to other use cases.

However, using secure enclaves seems like chasing a fading rainbow. The tech doesn't work without trusting the enclave, yet if we trust it, we're re- centralized our trust in chip makers like Intel.

Or worse, if it works extraordinarily well, I'm afraid DMCA related gangs will figure out how to lawyer those use cases out of existence in the same way they lawyer-ed in the tech to begin with.

I'm glad Moxie & co. are trying though, somebody has to! I have been previously very skeptical about the claims made by Signal, though, but as long as the enclave works, then they seem to hold true.

<comment><AUTHOR> For what it's worth, we also trust the NSA to have written and verified our most important cryptographic hash functions, leading to the first rule of crypto -- never roll your own novel hash function.

I see this as the start of a community effort to verify Intel SGX. I imagine that the process of rolling out a consumer facing high stakes product on SGX involves external verification of SGX beyond what it's gone through before.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Can someone explain why the average user would prefer this over using venmo?

<comment><AUTHOR> Pessimistically, they won't.

Optimistically, they solve consumer micropayments by allowing the unbanked to send and store money via WhatsApp.

<comment><USER3> Ok, that makes a lot of sense for the unbanked. I personally don't know many people who are unbanked but maybe that number will grow in the future? I'm just trying to think about explaining this to some friends and why they should do this. Totally anonymous/private transactions between parties not having to use a bank?

<comment><USER4> From what I understand, the unbanked are really more of a thing in the developing world. The same crowd that'd be receiving micro loans were they looking to start small business in say rural Myanmar

<comment><USER5> Actually, I believe about 7-8% of the US is also unbanked. But that might be a specific to US (compared to other Western nations).

<comment><AUTHOR> I lost a bank account last year and was unbanked for a little while. I really hate my customer service interactions with banks and would be quite happy if I could unbank myself.

Life pro tip:

If your Charles Schwab broker emails and says that they're wondering why your retirement savings are nothing but medical marijuana penny stocks and if you'd like to come in to talk about healthy portfolio management strategies, you should go into the local office and not ignore that email.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Read about this one on Wired awhile back. Nice to see it making progress. Would love to see a succinct description of how this compares to / is better than the slew of other privacy coins...? Also, is there a first real use case in mind that doesn't involve a big established messaging app adopting it for payments? (that seems hard/complicated/requires a different skillset than building the software). In any event, congrats to the team. Smells like one of the better projects out there!

<comment><AUTHOR> The main difference is that MobileCoin trusts Intel's SGX to create a platform that should be able to scale quickly on mobile. It also has a solution to allow for private key recovery in case you lose your phone.

Zcash is more provably secure as it doesn't require trusting Intel's SGX but it's untenable on mobile right now as it's too computationally intensive. Monero and Dash are effectively anonymous for small transfers but for very large movements of money, the deep state can crack their tumbler algorithms. They provide good enough rather than verifiable anonymity.

As CEO of the Signal Foundation, Moxie is in a unique position to encourage Signal protocol chat services to adopt something like MobileCoin. I would imagine that progression would go Signal -> WhatsApp, and that Signal would only reject MobileCoin if Moxie himself rejected MobileCoin. I think there isn't really a first use case other than an existing Signal protocol service adopting it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't understand - was this a traditional fund raise, or an ICO? I had thought ICO at first, since it's a crypto currency, but the article doesn't come right out and say it.

If it's an ICO - how does that work, exactly? People buy some amount of the coin at a valuation, and then they'll be able to use it later once the actual application comes out?

</comment><comment><USER8> It makes a lot of sense for this coin to be on Stellar network. It is fast and cheap, and they can actually create their own coin whenever they like and treat current ones as tokens. I think this is smart move and much better then creating on Ethereum because of speed and price that goes along with it and often is not mentioned.

My 2c. Or 2 satoshis

<comment><AUTHOR> The white paper says it uses the Stellar consensus protocol but doesn't specify that the coin is on the Stellar network.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The idea seems exactly like Electroneum.

<comment><USER10> Or Aeon. Or Phoneum. Or Telcoin. Or Status.im. Or a dozen other coins with near identical goals.

<comment><USER11> Aeon – Is pretty much like any cryptocurrency in general. They are trying to act like Monero but fast payments and multiple transactions like Litecoin. So the only I thing I see similar about Aeon and Telcoin is that they are on a mobile friendly. (Pretty much has to be for major adoption)

Status – Is an Ethereum-sending app, where you can send Ethereum and messages back and forth. Therefore, I would compare this more to PayPal, than Telcoin. Team is somewhat lackluster. In addition, this is about sending crypto between people (mainly Ethereum) and relates to Telcoin because it is on a mobile phone.

Phoneum - is a decentralized cryptocurrency that operates on mobile devices via app only, empowered by blockchain technology. The app also comes with a built in miner. I honestly could not find too much and it is not listed on CoinMarketCap. If I had to compare this to another crypto, it would be Electroneum, not Telcoin. They are literally doing the same thing and have a patent pending on the mobile miner. Telcoin – is a cryptocurrency designed to facilitate digital asset exchange with telecom channels provided by operators worldwide. They are trying to simplify it to where anyone, with any type of phone can send money, through a simple text.

These are all short examples and don't give them full justice but the only thing they all have in common is that they are all cryptocurrencies and that they can be used with a phone. Telcoin is the only one that has shown great progress by partnering with big names like Wipro and GSMA. This shows that they are in the same realm with Telecom providers and are willing to comply with all the standards and regulations. I personally believe that this is a sleeper project and whenever it takes off, it is going to fly. Look at the team/advisors and tell me they are not bound for some success within the telecom industry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Mobilecoin is a token powered by a stellar smart contract. I don't care if Moxie or god himself is the lead of the project, because it's incredibly limited in scope (actually stellar advertises that as a feature of their smart contract platform) I doubt it will succeed. And no, a fancy mobile UI is not worth $30mil.

Before someone replies with a quote from the whitepaper about what it /will/ do, don't bother. Until it's released I doubt any and all claims from the team. Because it's no different from any other high profile raise for a cryptocurrency and every single one so far has failed to deliver.

<comment><USER13> > I don't care if Moxie or god himself is the lead of the project

> Until it's released I doubt any and all claims from the team.

It's fine for you to have your opinion, but understand that you aren't meaningfully contributing to the conversation with statements like the ones above. Other people, obviously, will have different viewpoints, and it's best that we can talk on the merits of the arguments.

<comment><USER14> It is absolutely contributing to the discussion.

The merits to be discussed are "its not done yet, and anything that doesn't work NOW in crypto probably won't work ever".

If someone wants me to belive their claims they should build something, get it working, and THEN sell it. None of this pre sale IOU stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> You're not going to beat out Venmo, Apple Pay, and other established platforms.

Can this blockchain currency nonsense end already? People need to stop trying to force a given tech to do something specific all the time. It's literally the definition of "trying too hard".

<comment><AUTHOR> Consumer micropayments is one of the most basic possible applications of this technology and that it hasn't been implemented yet is sad. I'm not a fan of the customer experience of Venmo and Paypal and Apple Pay that require me to have a bank account or a credit card. They work in the first world for transfers over a certain minimum but there is really clearly room to innovate still.

Do you see a future where blockchain technology exists but consumers don't use cryptocurrency? I do also. Who is to say that WhatsApps's implementation of Mobilecoin has to use their own proprietary cryptocurrency instead of letting users denominate transfers in local fiat currency?

<comment><USER16> There are plenty of alternatives in developing countries. (I live in one such country and no one here uses any of the things you listed.) None of them are based on the block chain. They don't require bank accounts or credit cards. They don't work just for "certain amounts".

If those things don't exist in America it is because the market for them in America doesn't exist.</comment></comment></comment>


Monopoly Board Game-Alan Turing Edition - <AUTHOR> http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/shop/view_product.rhtm/139574/668529/detail.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Boing Boing has a better picture of the board: [http://boingboing.net/2012/09/08/alan-turing-memorial- monopo...](http://boingboing.net/2012/09/08/alan-turing-memorial- monopoly.html)</comment>


Show HN: Correly – Interactive Video Demos - <AUTHOR> http://www.correly.com <comment><AUTHOR> At Correly, we want to build connections online that feel like you're meeting in person. That is why we're creating a slack community to connect people working in software sales [http://bit.ly/2FvjIzg](http://bit.ly/2FvjIzg)

It's called "Sell me this pen". By joining, you can find new techniques, great best articles, make connections, hire candidates or even find a job. Just fill in the form and we'll send an invite.

Note: This community is not going to be used to sell anyone on Correly

</comment><comment><USER2> You really need to fix your homepage loading time, it's been more than 20 seconds and 4 retries and still it's loading.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just ran an audit on the website to double check this and you're right. Current loading time on 3G is ~20 seconds. We're going to take a look at this as soon as possible. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Are you looking at applications outside of sales demos? Might be useful for customer success, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey.. we're open to hearing about other applications for the product but right now we are focused on making sales demo's more engaging. If you and your team are using it for a different purpose, please let us know at firstname.lastname@example.com!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Would help to have the demo on the homepage. Or a video.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great idea! If you're interested in a demo. Shot us an email to email@example.com and we can show you how it works!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you like working with bigger or smaller complexity? - <AUTHOR>

Big Complexity: Large API with encyclopedic size manuals (see Java API) Small Complexity: Code written in a few lines that does everything (see Algorithms) <comment><USER2> I prefer the small or medium-sized complexity. For really large systems, even the high-level architecture is too big to fit into one person's brain (which is one of the reasons why most of the large software projects are more or less a failure).</comment>


PURE Plagiarism of my personal Website V2 - <AUTHOR> http://www.skct.edu.in:8083/t12/connect/home.html

<comment><AUTHOR> they deserve a serious shitstorm <https://www.facebook.com/pages/Tacheyons-12/169212509844277>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> and another one copied my site <http://attackemart.in></comment>


The world's longest flight, from Doha to Auckland (16h35m) - <AUTHOR> https://www.flightera.net/flight/Qatar+Airways/QR920 <comment><USER2> I took it last year !

It's quite long indeed, but frankly with all the modern comfort (food, drinks, a ton of films to watch) it's actually pleasing.

Also, if you go visit New Zealand, on your way back you will most certainly want to watch "The Lord of the Rings" so you already have 10h of the flight covered :)

<comment><USER3> Did you fly economy? Can't imagine sitting in a narrow seat for more than 16 hours.

Would imagine the flight to be fun in Business class though.

<comment><USER2> Yeah economy. It must be much better in business of course, but even in economy I found it less unpleasant than expected.</comment></comment></comment>


How the pantheon has lasted 2000 years without steel in its concrete - <AUTHOR> http://www.romanconcrete.com/docs/chapt01/chapt01.htm

<comment><USER2> The Pantheon is awesome, but one shouldn't think, "They don't make 'em like they used to."

Almost all structures built 2,000 years ago do not exist today. The ones that do exist are all marvelous feats of engineering because if they weren't, they wouldn't have stuck around for 2,000 years. I guess it's an example of <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias>

OK, back to gawking at the Pantheon. It's absolutely stunning that people could build such a dome using 5,000 tons of concrete, no steel, and no power tools.

<comment><USER3> For this to be the case you would have to assume that the main reason that a 2,000 year old building is not around is because it fell down due to structural flaws. I think in Rome and Athens there is a lot of evidence that people knocked their houses down to build something fancier, or they were destroyed during war or civil unrest.

So it's not a simple case of survivorship bias, though undoubtedly that is one factor.

<comment><USER4> No, you wouldn't have to assume that. All the alternative factors you mention can tear down a sound building, but none of them can help an unsound one survive 2000 years.

A building that lasts that long is robust almost by definition. So, as long as any buildings do survive, we have fertile soil for survivorship bias.

<comment><USER3> I don't think you are applying the statistical notion of survivorship bias completely accurately.

The original comment questioned the accuracy of the statement "they don't build them like they used to", which I took to refer to building standards 2000 years ago.

Consider the following two scenarios:

A. 2000 years ago, all buildings were shoddily engineered except the Pantheon.

B. 2000 years ago, 90% of buildings were well engineered, of which the Pantheon is one example. The rest were deliberately torn down for one reason or other.

Survivorship bias does not allow you in itself to distinguish between A and B, which is the interesting question. It just allows you to disprove C:

C. Since the Patheon still stands, all buildings 2000 years ago must have been brilliantly engineered.

Which nobody is arguing for, I don't think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's a dome - domes are in compression - in compression you don't need rebar

<comment><USER6> No, they are not. Or, rather, they are only if they follow a(n inverted) chain line (i.e. exp(x)+exp(-x)), but the lower parts of the half spheres favored in architecture are steeper than that, so there is massive tensile stress there. This is, by the way, the genius in Wren's consruction of St. Pauls in London: he hid a chain line dome that carries most of the load between the visible outer and inner half spheres.

<comment><USER7> > This is, by the way, the genius in Wren's consruction of St. Pauls in > London: he hid a chain line dome that carries most of the load between the > visible outer and inner half spheres.

I think that's the wrong way around. The inner and outer dome follow catenary curves (they only need to support their own weight), and between them is a cone shape, supporting the heavy ornament on the roof. A 'chain line dome' is not a good way of supporting a heavy load on the roof (just imagine how the shape of the chain changes as you hang a weight in the middle of it).

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Paul%27s_Cathedral#Structura...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Paul%27s_Cathedral#Structural_engineering) , third paragraph.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I read* that most of the temples of Rome actually did survive for centuries after the western empire fell, until some Eastern emperor decided to remove all the steel brackets to melt down. The buildings then only stayed up until the next earthquake.

* in a tour guide, so not exactly an impeccable source.

</comment><comment><USER9> Thank you very much for this link. This is a very interesting read.

</comment><comment><USER10> tl;dr from the pros please! My ferret-like attention span defeated me on this one.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm going to spend some hard-earned karma by saying this, but here goes:

 _Welcome to Digg/Reddit_

<comment><USER12> Not quite... when digg/reddit get it it'll be cut & pasted onto someone else's blog with ads all around it.

<comment><USER13> Are you reading this Jacques? Lol ;0)</comment></comment></comment>


Why Nobody Cares About Your Banner Ads - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/shit-sean-says/why-nobody-cares-about-your-banner-ad-b2299ff0e23d#.ch9tmkaff <comment><USER2> I think everyone who use AdBlock _._ agrees. And everyone who has banners agrees too, thats why almost every site these days try to force you to click a full screen popup to try to see if you are a real user, and at least get a single click from you.

Personally I use an ad blocker, _however_ I wouldn't mind seeing more of well made content/advertisement as some websites are trying on. One good example is [0]: I actually _read_ that article, and I knew it was likely "sponsored content", but there was still interesting information in there.

Of course that probably can't be scaled to every topic, but at least some people are trying to make an effort...

[0]: [http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-the-sound-that- defined-...](http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-the-sound-that- defined-80s-music-still-lives-on-today)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the read. I definitely agree, and that's where I was going near the end of my article / rant. People don't care if something is sponsored as long as it's what they want to read about. If you're trying to force something down a user's throat, they're not going to respond well to it. It seems like common sense, but apparently we're in the minority of the subject.</comment></comment>


Dropbox Has Jumped the Memory Shark - <AUTHOR> https://blog.josephscott.org/2019/11/26/dropbox-has-jumped-the-memory-shark/ <comment><USER2> For comparison, OneDrive on MacOS is sitting at 85mb for me.

</comment><comment><USER3> Use syncthing - open source, free, low resource usage, etc.

<comment><USER4> Interesting, but no iOS client or WebDAV support. That would prevent me from using it.

Most developer/engineer types have a private server and that's a great place to install Nextcloud. Nextcloud has cross platform clients, supports strong authenticators (U2F), and open protocols like WebDAV. I even use it to sync org-mode files across many devices with great success.

<comment><USER5> The lack of (fully working[1]) iOS client is a giant glaring hole in the SyncThing ecosystem. Which is a shame because it works really well across my various machines and servers.

[1] fsync() seems to have been abandoned but still partially works on my phone - only local networks and you have to manually add folders by ID.

<comment><USER6> Nextcloud has a pretty sweet iOS app that integrates your files stored there with the iOS 'files' apis.

[https://nextcloud.com/blog/nextcloud-releases-deep-ios- integ...](https://nextcloud.com/blog/nextcloud-releases-deep-ios-integration/)

(And/or you can use any WebDAV client)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like applications to be efficient as well, but come on, surely this memory consumption is broadly pretty reasonable? A few hundred MB?

Also, what is your memory there for, if not to be used? Is Dropbox good at releasing or allowing memory it no longer needs to be released, paged out, or processes killed if there is pressure from other applications in the system? If so, what's the problem with Dropbox using the memory until then?

<comment><USER8> I used to run Windows 3.11 on 4MB RAM (it struggled to run Word 6.0 without insane paging, I was poor) and Windows 95 on 64MB of RAM (4 x 16MB on a 486 DX2 66).

How is this memory usage by Dropbox reasonable? It seems to be another example of insane bloated memory usage which is not only the trend but the fashion these days.

Remember, allocation is the enemy of speed. More CPU cycles, more allocations, more power consumed, shorter battery life on mobile devices (laptops), more charging of devices, more fossil fuels burned.

<comment><USER7> > How is this memory usage by Dropbox reasonable?

It wouldn't be reasonable on a 4 MB system, but this isn't a 4 MB system, so how's that relevant to anything?

Why do you have 16 GB of RAM or whatever in your laptop if not for applications to use?

> allocation is the enemy of speed

But the complaint wasn't the volume of allocation - it was the size of the working set.

Does reducing that working set perhaps consume more power than allowing it to sit at the current level? For example an in-memory cache of something could save power.

I think it's very naive and simplistic to just complain about memory consumption in isolation. The memory is there as a tool to be used.

<comment><USER9> I have 16GB of RAM on my work computer so my compiler can process hundreds of MB worth of source files into a fully functional program in less than 5 seconds. I have it on my home computer so I can run a fully simulated 3D world inside a videogame at 60FPS. I don't have it so some coder somewhere doesn't have to add lazy-loading to their file-syncing app.

<comment><USER10> Yes. Dropbox built its reputation on being a reliable, set-it-and-forget-it background service that kept your files synchronized. Applications that occupy user attention and serve the explicit purpose of the user may make a variety of dubious cases for reckless memory consumption, but it's a lot harder to justify for something that's supposed to be invisible.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Scientists just broke a fusion world record – it lifts the bar for clean energy - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencealert.com/new-fusion-world-record-lifts-the-bar-for-clean-energy-potential?perpetual=yes&limitstart=1 <comment><USER2> Measurable progress is great, but it would have been helpful to have some indication of what pressures are needed to produce a useful fusion reactor. Three atmospheres? Three hundred? Are we approaching a break-even point, or is it still incredibly far away?</comment>


Ask HN: would you pay for an email service? - <AUTHOR>

Right now, almost all email services are from providers who use email as bait to get users to use other services. If there was a service with no other goal except to give you the best email experience, provide support and keep your data safe and not use it for marketing purposes, would you pay for this service? <comment><USER2> Yes. 2 million users already pay Rackspace Mail (formerly MailTrust) for that. I pay $10/mo for ten 25GB mailboxes there with a 100% uptime SLA, 24/7/365 phone/email/chat support and configurable backups.

<http://www.rackspace.com/email-hosting/>

<comment><USER3> How is the spam filtering? That's what drove me to gmail.

<comment><USER2> I never see spam in my mailboxes. It's first-class. The only false positives I've had were occasional HARO (Help-A-Reporter-Out) mails. With all the ads PRWeb injects into what's already a list of links, it probably should be called spam these days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yes I would pay for email, but I think its a very hard industry for startups. The industry is consolidating around certain players and their economies of scale make it extremely difficult to compete. Owning and maintaining infrastructure and email systems is high consequence, technically difficult and expensive. Even well known email providers that you've heard of actually white label bigger, more sophisticated providers infrastructure/mail system.

However, that shouldn't stop you from trying. It's really easy and cheap to validate your idea. Sign up as a reseller at Rackspace, Intermedia, Apptix, etc. Now go get customers- direct customers are good, but channel is king in email hosting space. You want to build a partner channel of IT consultants that go into small businesses and do managed services. They're already providing IT, selling your email is an easy upsell and extra revenue for them.

If you can get a ton of resellers/consultants, spending money on your own infrastructure becomes slightly less risky.

</comment><comment><USER5> I pay for mail service at The WELL, an account with Pobox (I back up my Gmail there) and for SaneBox to try to keep the Gmail Inbox smart. I'd like to move the power away from Gmail (actually Google Apps) and to something I can control.

<comment><AUTHOR> When you say "Google Apps", do you mean both email and other services like Google Drive because you're using a personal domain?

<comment><USER5> Right. I don't really use most of those things, but they're there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Email service - internet's oldest profession.

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't like the idea of monolithic email products. I wish I had the option to purchase the following items a la carte:

* A polished email client with consistently designed mobile, desktop, console, and web apps.

* Spam filtering and email classification [1]

* Sending/receiving

* Archive/backup

[1] Especially this.

<comment><USER2> I.e. Gmail (web and app clients), polling Rackspace Mail (sending/receiving), sitting behind Barracuda Email Security Service (spam filtering & anti- malware), synced to GMVault (archive/backup)? The only problem is the limited number of options for some of those pieces. SMTP/POP/IMAP enable all the the mixing and matching you want.

<comment><USER7> Thanks, I've been looking for something like Barracuda.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If the email service has anti-spam filters as powerful as Gmail and the UI/UX is as clean as Outlook, then yes.

</comment><comment><USER9> No, I think it would be pretty hard to convince me to pay for a service when Gmail is already so easy to use.

</comment><comment><USER10> Yes. I already pay for such a service from POBox.com (and have since 2002), as an example of just such a service provider. (I host my own email, too, but I like having this address as a more formal personal email address that isn't connected to any of my personal domain names, blog, etc.)

<comment><USER11> They are not clear on how they host email and IMAP is offered in the top most tiered type of account.

BTW, their interface is most famous out there, I guess. AtMail right?

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure what you mean re: "how they host email". IMAP is a higher-tier feature. I'm using them for SMTP forwarding to my self-hosted IMAP server, so not having IMAP from them has never been an issue.

They have AtMail and Roundcube available if you elect to use them for email storage. I've used neither with them, though I do want to spin up a Roundcube installation for myself when I can find some time to tinker with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If it did the same as GMail does and GMail didn't exist, I would. It's just so convenient.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm happy with Gmail. I don't think you could ever convince me to switch.

</comment><comment><USER14> fastmail.fm

there are many others

<comment><USER15> I've never used Fastmail, but didn't they lose a lot of customers with a hastily designed "user interface" upgrade that dropped lots of features recently?

<comment><USER14> Their new(er) UI was in beta for awhile, and I believe is now the default.

You can use the classic if you want. I don't know if they lost any users over the issue, but it would have been unnecessary since using the beta was a choice, and you can use classic now.

I use the newer web interface at work.

At home I use Thunderbird, connecting to fastmail through imap and smtp.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Yes, if they have these:

1\. Awesome webmail and IMAP

2\. Calendar

3\. Task

4\. Chat with logs

5\. Privacy without any ifs/buts

6\. Speed

7\. Easy data takeout</comment>


Most Popular Programming Languages 1965 – 2019 [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Og847HVwRSI <comment><USER2> Wow. Did not realize Python took over recently.

<comment><USER3> The TIOBE and Redmonk pages both show Python in 3rd.

Fun video but I think it would have been more reasonable if they'd bucketed languages into popularity bands. Claiming to know "popularity" of languages to two decimal places for the last 50 years is non-credible.

[0] [https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/](https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/) [1] [https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2019/07/18/language- rankings-6-1...](https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2019/07/18/language- rankings-6-19/)</comment></comment>