Google has to follow European laws to sell anything or provide any services in Europe, even if it has no European entity. The EU would block payments otherwise.
Americans, Canadians and everyone else should get better laws enacted. EU legislation is to protect EU citizens, and the wellbeing and privacy of citizens that are not from a Member State are not a concern beyond sanctioning crimes against humanity. Case in point, it is perfectly legal for US government agencies to pay EU companies to spy on US citizens in ways it would be illegal for the US government to do, while it would not be legal in the inverse.
My simple point however is that a big Google is probably more (not less) likely to be compliant with GDPR. Breaking up one big badly behaving company may have the unintended consequence of creating a multitude of small, even worse behaving companies.
Don’t be so sure, for example, that if the (likely) two dozen or so employees working full time on Google Photos were their own business, with a need to show a profit, that they wouldn’t just sell that data immediately. There would be no nexus outside of Mountian View for foreign regulators to even intervene with then; it would be a small business.
That’s the point, the EU will absolutely go after the Mountain View nexus just the same as it went to get fines from Swiss banks for example.
The US is generally compliant with it, but even if it’s a no-so-friendly country, EU authorities recover money all the time for fines not paid by Arabs for example by incassoing it through SWIFT, as in for example the Dutch Centraal Justitieel Incassobureau has full rights to take money out of SWIFT connected bank accounts unilaterally, and that includes US banks and even most Arabic ones.
It usually never comes to that as US courts do enforce EU fines just as EU courts do help the US recover their stuff.
But stepping back, are you just making the argument that vertically integrated monopolies shouldn’t be broken up as small companies don’t have to or won’t follow the law?
I think you underestimate how many small, long tail businesses are non-compliant with GDPR. For that matter, there are probably quite a few in Europe.
Big companies can’t afford the liability of GDPR non-compliance. Small ones, like those created by breaking up Google, will treat compliance as a “nice to have.”
I’m not necessarily arguing that, I’m just arguing that breaking up Google may cause other problems, especially if it results in lots of small businesses with little revenue but a wealth of consumer data.
If you break them up, make sure you’re breaking them up into viable businesses.
For example, instead of requiring Google to sell of its whole ad tech business, require it to spin off competitors. Then put a cap on the percentage of marketshare any ad tech business can have.
Yes, but there is two dimensions to the problem, one is the excessive market share Google has on some markets, the other is the vertical integration transferring that excessive market share to other unrelated markets.
Take for example Google Maps. You could argue that it competes with Apple Maps and Bing Maps, but that’s just saying that if you want to be in the online mapping business, you also have to own a leading operating system. You’re right, if you break Maps off Google, it will most likely not be competitive with Apple or Bing, but does that mean that we’ll never have real open competition on this space? And there is a lot of other markets like this that have an oligopoly at best cornering the market. Online document editing. Email providers. Browsers. Google Chrome specifically is shaping the whole Internet in Google’s image, against ordinary people.
Is there really no way to reestablish free markets on these sectors?
Google has to follow European laws to sell anything or provide any services in Europe, even if it has no European entity. The EU would block payments otherwise.
Americans, Canadians and everyone else should get better laws enacted. EU legislation is to protect EU citizens, and the wellbeing and privacy of citizens that are not from a Member State are not a concern beyond sanctioning crimes against humanity. Case in point, it is perfectly legal for US government agencies to pay EU companies to spy on US citizens in ways it would be illegal for the US government to do, while it would not be legal in the inverse.
Better laws are indeed needed.
My simple point however is that a big Google is probably more (not less) likely to be compliant with GDPR. Breaking up one big badly behaving company may have the unintended consequence of creating a multitude of small, even worse behaving companies.
Don’t be so sure, for example, that if the (likely) two dozen or so employees working full time on Google Photos were their own business, with a need to show a profit, that they wouldn’t just sell that data immediately. There would be no nexus outside of Mountian View for foreign regulators to even intervene with then; it would be a small business.
That’s the point, the EU will absolutely go after the Mountain View nexus just the same as it went to get fines from Swiss banks for example.
The US is generally compliant with it, but even if it’s a no-so-friendly country, EU authorities recover money all the time for fines not paid by Arabs for example by incassoing it through SWIFT, as in for example the Dutch Centraal Justitieel Incassobureau has full rights to take money out of SWIFT connected bank accounts unilaterally, and that includes US banks and even most Arabic ones.
It usually never comes to that as US courts do enforce EU fines just as EU courts do help the US recover their stuff.
But stepping back, are you just making the argument that vertically integrated monopolies shouldn’t be broken up as small companies don’t have to or won’t follow the law?
I think you underestimate how many small, long tail businesses are non-compliant with GDPR. For that matter, there are probably quite a few in Europe.
Big companies can’t afford the liability of GDPR non-compliance. Small ones, like those created by breaking up Google, will treat compliance as a “nice to have.”
You’re still arguing that monopolies are good, since they at least obey laws. That’s a weird thing to say.
I’m not necessarily arguing that, I’m just arguing that breaking up Google may cause other problems, especially if it results in lots of small businesses with little revenue but a wealth of consumer data.
Yeah, but what then is the alternative? Don’t break up monopolies if they have a lot of customer data?
If you break them up, make sure you’re breaking them up into viable businesses.
For example, instead of requiring Google to sell of its whole ad tech business, require it to spin off competitors. Then put a cap on the percentage of marketshare any ad tech business can have.
Yes, but there is two dimensions to the problem, one is the excessive market share Google has on some markets, the other is the vertical integration transferring that excessive market share to other unrelated markets.
Take for example Google Maps. You could argue that it competes with Apple Maps and Bing Maps, but that’s just saying that if you want to be in the online mapping business, you also have to own a leading operating system. You’re right, if you break Maps off Google, it will most likely not be competitive with Apple or Bing, but does that mean that we’ll never have real open competition on this space? And there is a lot of other markets like this that have an oligopoly at best cornering the market. Online document editing. Email providers. Browsers. Google Chrome specifically is shaping the whole Internet in Google’s image, against ordinary people.
Is there really no way to reestablish free markets on these sectors?