The European Commission - which is composed of people living on money that were taken away from the EU citizens, regardless of whether they agree with it or not – has imposed an astonishing fine of 4.34 billion EUR on Google, which is a firm that earns money from voluntarily payments of its customers. Unfortunately, we live in a world where a bunch of parasites, who cannot earn a living by providing services for which people voluntarily pay only when they want to, fines a firm which not only can do it, but also has to make much more money, because they partially finance these parasites and also other similar institutions.
What was the official reason for this ”robbery”, when simply one subject from the position of power steals from the other? On the one hand, Google allowed itself to set the conditions, under which phone manufacturers can use Google Play app. Oh, what a brazenness it is from them to determine the conditions under which they will provide their services! What were the conditions? If the manufacturer wanted to sell his phone with the Google Play app, he had also to install an official version of Android, Google search engine, and Chrome browser. It’s like when a car manufacturer installs his engines to his cars, not engines of his rival; or like when a song writer and singer in one person sings his own songs, not someone else’s. Another misconduct of Google is that it pays the operators and manufacturers to pre-install the Google search engine. By this logic, we should punish everyone who earns by advertisement, when he buys a place where he can place the ads; because that’s exactly what Google does: It buys place from the operators and manufacturers where it can display ads and make money from that.
None of the above Google practices harm customers; if they were unhappy with it, they would simply go to the competition. Paradoxically, the fact that the customers don’t do that is used as an argumentation for fining – a huge market dominance. Yes, that’s right; when you are so good that people want to use your services far more than the services of rivals, you have to be punished for that. We are fining those who do their job very well; and by subsidies we reward those who are doing job so miserably that they cannot earn a living from voluntarily payments.
An interesting question is also… Why should the money get the EU? If Google harm the customers – that wasn’t even the case – they should rather compensate them, am I right? And if they worsened the position of their rivals (and that is what they did, but that is what competition is about and it is the basis of a healthy economy), should not that money go to those competitors? The European Union has nothing to do with the whole thing. The only reason why this is happening is simply because the EU has enough power to get that money from Google. The generous words of how the states or the EU protect the weak and without them, there would be only the laws of the jungle and the stronger ones would defeat the weak are just trying to cover the simple reality that the stronger with political power already defeats the weak: the European Commission point at a firm with enough money, and - under some pretext – they take some of the money away from this firm; simply because it’s possible, tempting, and people will not say a word against it. After all, Google has a ton of money.
Česky: https://www.mises.cz/clanky/evropska-komise-podojila-google-2267.aspx
Author: Urza
Who is him?
Urza is Czech anarcho-capitalist author, he has written about thousand of libertarian texts on the web and printed media and also the first Czech book on anarcho-capitalism. He lectures at schools and conferences, made a number of videos and is often invited to many discussions.