Ask Paul: July 24 ⭐

Ask Paul: July 24
Happy Friday! This is an incredible grab bag of reader questions and the ideal way to kick off the weekend a bit early so I can get in a little Halo: Campaign Evolved. :)
"Samsung made it way easier to open up its Galaxy Z Fold 8 foldables"

"Way" easier? No way!
🌩️ It's fine, everything's fine
justme asks

You’ve recently written about the EU fining Google 890 Million euros for favouring its own services in search results and for the way it restricts app developers, with potential additional fines should Google refuse to comply with EU rules. To most corporate entities not in Big Tech, thats a ton of money. Google, of course, may appeal the decision, if only to get the amount reduced. But this is a company that made a net profit of $28 billion on revenues of something like $112 billion...in a quarter. 890 million euros is approximately $1 billion USD. They could pay the fine without so much as the blink of an eye. If the goal of the fines is to punish bad behavior and encourage compliance with the law, is this level of fine enough given the eye-watering sums of money Big Tech has? Is there ANY level of fine or legislation that would be effective at curbing the behavior of Big Tech? More consequential may be the follow-on – come into compliance or face a periodic penalty of up to 5% of worldwide turnover (per Euuronews) Yet even this applies only to the EU, which Google could leave if they so chose. So what do we do?

I'm a little surprised how much attention this event received. It's just one of several fines the EU has assessed Google in the past year, and this particular compliance concern is early in the process, so to speak. Plus, Google can still appeal, and why wouldn't it? I didn't put this in my article, but the Commission also noted a couple of things suggesting that this won't escalate. Google did make some changes tied to search shopping, hotels, and flights, for example, and to shopping ads and content-related services as a result of dialog between the Commission and the company. So it's clear that Google is working to address issues. Not sure what happened with Search/Play Store, but they clearly didn't meet whatever bar there.

Anyway, any time there's a big fine like this, there's some conversation around why the company doesn't just abandon the market. But that's never going to happen. Big Tech is tripping over itself to expand in China and other places that are far more problematic, and the EU's laws are reasonable and not unlike most of the world. It's a big market, and it's not just revenues to lose but also the death spiral that could happen to their stock price. (And it's worse right now because Google is in the middle of a massive AI buildout and it can't afford that kind of problem.) So you work within whatever the confines are to you as the abusive business. Which we should remember is the real problem here, not whatever government or laws.

The language around worldwide turnover is...