Google fined €100M by Italian antitrust over Google Play abuse of dominance
The way antitrust is working in recent years is kind of ridiculous. Google in Europe is becoming a rich case study in antitrust meh.<p>You find that adwords engages in a blatant &quot;monopolistic abuse&quot; in some specific sense. In the Adwords EU case for example, Google was both monopsonising (google search) and monopolising search advertising. But, the actual violations are specific, like exclusivity requirements and other technical infractions buried in their take-it-or-leave-it contracts with &quot;partners.^&quot;<p>Google get a fine. They deny culpability. They pay a fine and move on. Whether it&#x27;s 100m or 2bn doesn&#x27;t really matter. Google are demonstrably willing to pay far more (eg acquisition, browser kickbacks, etc.) to maintain a monopolistic position. Besides minor tweaks, there&#x27;s no reason for them to change.<p>What&#x27;s the point? Antitrust can&#x27;t be useful as a violation-fine paradigm. These cases&#x2F;fines don&#x27;t affect the monopoly or free the market in any useful sense.<p>IMO, we need some way to declare a company &quot;Big&quot; and apply special rules to them. If those rules are onerous, that might create some organic pressure to split and&#x2F;or help smaller incumbents  compete.<p>There is no point to antitrust if its totally reactive, handing out fines for moving violations. The point of antitrust is trust-busting, to affect market structure. The point if to have a competitive market.<p>All the 1990s stuff is playing out. Just like the MSFT case, we see that operating systems, browsers (now app stores) are monopoly prone and that it&#x27;s a big deal. On the other side, the 90s &quot;portal&quot; concept is fully realized now. In the digital economy, controlling the windows of consumption is everything. None of the costs, all of the profit... literally all in a lot of cases.<p>^Newspapers didn&#x27;t have the advantage search partners had in their monopoly claim, because Google doesn&#x27;t have agreements with them. No contract, no abusive clauses. The take it or leave it offer is &quot;<i>give us your content for free, or go away.</i>&quot; Formally, Google isn&#x27;t even doing business with them.