When it comes to something punitive like a fine, fine versus worth is literally the only thing that matters. If the fine isn’t big enough, it’s more like a fee for doing business. They just added to the bottom line and keep rolling.
I think worth and cash flow are too loosely correlated for that to work how youre intending. I’m all for punitive fines for corporate malfeasance, but if they’re based on worth only, a company could easily become insolvent even from fines that aren’t intended to be fatal to them.
If it is based off their cash flow instead and potentially distributed over a period of time, it can do multiple good things at once: force the company to literally pay for the harms it caused, damage their operations enough to financially discourage the behavior, and keep corporate behavior in line through examples without frequently disrupting markets by unduly bankrupting companies.
If a company does end up doing something so bad that it is unforgivable and irreparable, and it’s deemed worthy of destroying them or punishing those responsible directly, I can see the reasoning for that, too. But, I think it would work best if the punishments are dialed in to have the desired result as often as possible. Allowing the possibility of offenders correcting course seems better for everyone while still allowing any victims to get justice.
The question is how much money did they make by using Android to block rivals. If using Android helped them make 1bn extra then this fine costs them 3bn and it doesn’t make sense from them to keep doing it. If they made 100bn than obviously they will continue.
It’s all hypothetical. You can’t know if any of the rivals had any chance at gaining significant share of the market. I was using Blackberry when it was still perfectly fine OS, supported by all the important apps (but before everything was an app) and I didn’t know anyone else using it. I think that yes, the deals they made stopped most of the phone manufactures from offering alternative OSes like Geko OS or Lineage OS (before it was called like that) but we can only guess if any of them had any chance of becoming anything else than niche curiosity like Graphene OS today. So you can only really compare this fine with what they are doing now to block Graphene or AOSP. I don’t know if this fine is big enough but I doubt they made trillions thanks to those practices.
about 0.11% of Google (Alphabet)'s total worth.
I was going to say “Finally, a fine with some substance!” but you took the wind out of my sails…
Total Worth doesn’t matter. What matters is revenue and profit and that is the basis for the fine.
deleted by creator
When it comes to something punitive like a fine, fine versus worth is literally the only thing that matters. If the fine isn’t big enough, it’s more like a fee for doing business. They just added to the bottom line and keep rolling.
I think worth and cash flow are too loosely correlated for that to work how youre intending. I’m all for punitive fines for corporate malfeasance, but if they’re based on worth only, a company could easily become insolvent even from fines that aren’t intended to be fatal to them.
If it is based off their cash flow instead and potentially distributed over a period of time, it can do multiple good things at once: force the company to literally pay for the harms it caused, damage their operations enough to financially discourage the behavior, and keep corporate behavior in line through examples without frequently disrupting markets by unduly bankrupting companies.
If a company does end up doing something so bad that it is unforgivable and irreparable, and it’s deemed worthy of destroying them or punishing those responsible directly, I can see the reasoning for that, too. But, I think it would work best if the punishments are dialed in to have the desired result as often as possible. Allowing the possibility of offenders correcting course seems better for everyone while still allowing any victims to get justice.
The question is how much money did they make by using Android to block rivals. If using Android helped them make 1bn extra then this fine costs them 3bn and it doesn’t make sense from them to keep doing it. If they made 100bn than obviously they will continue.
pretty much. these fines are just cost of doing business. I’m sure they made MUCH more than the fine by doing what they did.
I mean, with it they’ve managed to build a walled garden that includes the majority of every phone in the world.
We can probably assume trillions.
It’s all hypothetical. You can’t know if any of the rivals had any chance at gaining significant share of the market. I was using Blackberry when it was still perfectly fine OS, supported by all the important apps (but before everything was an app) and I didn’t know anyone else using it. I think that yes, the deals they made stopped most of the phone manufactures from offering alternative OSes like Geko OS or Lineage OS (before it was called like that) but we can only guess if any of them had any chance of becoming anything else than niche curiosity like Graphene OS today. So you can only really compare this fine with what they are doing now to block Graphene or AOSP. I don’t know if this fine is big enough but I doubt they made trillions thanks to those practices.
the price of doing business