Google lost its last appeal on a $4.7B EU fine. The thread argued whether the fine ever mattered
Europe's top court upheld the roughly €4.1 billion ($4.7 billion) penalty over Android — a case that began with a 2018 Commission decision. By the time it's final, a developer noted, the world it policed has already changed.
The fine punishes deals that forced Google's apps onto Android phones via pre-installation. The US ambassador to the EU warned Europe against over-regulating its way out of the AI economy.
HN's real fight was whether antitrust even fits Google. One argument: it was built for manufacturers with prices and marginal costs, and Google has neither. A European reader called that a distinctly American way to miss the point — here, antitrust was never mainly about price.
An eight-year-old case, finally final
Per the reporting discussed on HN, Europe's top court upheld Google's fine of roughly €4.1 billion ($4.7 billion) over anti-competitive practices, dismissing Alphabet's appeal. The penalty traces to a 2018 European Commission decision finding that Google abused Android's dominance — using pre-installation deals with phone makers to give its own apps an unfair edge. A Google spokesperson said the judgment "fails to recognize our significant investment to ensure Android remains open, interoperable and free," while the US ambassador to the EU, Andrew Puzder, warned that Europe "can't over regulate" and fine companies heavily if it wants to be part of the AI economy. (CNBC's page didn't load for this edition, so the exact figures here are as quoted by readers in the thread.)
Did the fine ever matter?
The most provocative claim was that the entire framework misfits the defendant:
"There's no real way of applying this to Google. Google's users generally don't pay anything. Google doesn't have marginal costs. There is no price… Now that it's history, we can look back and learn that the [Microsoft] antitrust case just didn't matter one way or another." — a long-tenured commenter arguing antitrust was built for a different kind of company
A European reader called that a category error:
"Yours is a common misunderstanding about antitrust being about prices. That is a distinctly American view, and not useful for analyzing European antitrust decisions." — a commenter who works in open-source compliance and functional safety
And someone actually at the company explained why coverage keeps hedging even after a court has ruled:
""The court said these are X" and "it is a fact that these are X" are distinct claims, and a lot of journalistic manners is pretending you never state as fact things that could be disputed." — a Google employee, writing that the views are his own
The unglamorous verdict from a developer at a rival search engine was that the ruling "feels ancient" — the pre-install problem it targets is largely handled now by the DMA, and a fresh case today would drag on another decade. Which is the actual lesson buried in a $4.7 billion headline: when enforcement runs on an eight-year clock, the penalty arrives as history, and the market has already routed around the harm.
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