To be clear, I have not read the original agreements to confirm this is the case, it's just my interpretation of #2.

I think that would have been acceptable - my reading of #2 is that if you sold phones with a fork of Android, even if that phone did not have Google branding, Google would not allow you to sell *any* phones with Google branding. That does seem very similar to the Microsoft example.

Requiring that someone cannot use Google branding on any device they manufacture or sell, if they also manufacture or sell devices without Google branding that use ancient versions of Android, is entirely illegal in the EU.

Then the rule was overly broad, since it also prevented them from selling Android phones without Google branding. I think Amazon was involved in that lawsuit after it had issues finding a manufacturer that wasn't bound by that rule.

That could include deprecated versions and any forks.

Judging only by gp's message, it also targets any would-be competitor's fork of Android.

(I see the full 11 hour deposition is also on YouTube, but I think I'll save that for another day.)

So far, being 10 minutes in, I see a little bit of what you mean, but I haven't gotten to anything "unhinged" yet. He just seems like a bit of a smug nerd who's clearly enjoying going toe-to-toe with one of the country's top lawyers.

Do you remember anything that jumped out for you from the deposition? I'd love to see more of what you're getting at.

From what I understand, AOSP is not dead, but it's definitely far behind the latest versions of Android. The default apps are not updated, the UI toolkit is behind, most of the new services used by everything in Android are the proprietary bits.

It's basically Darwin at this point, yeah, open source, but in no way shape or form if you build Darwin, do you get Mac OS.

But despite that, let's not gloss over about what MS did. If they had been successful there wouldn't have been one web, there would have been two: One for MS (ActiveX and proprietary MS extensions) and one for MacOS/Linux/Netscape/Mozilla/Opera etc. This would have been part of their "Embrace/Extend/Extinguish" strategy they were known for at the time.

Microsoft insisted that the OS needed the internet explorer executable, not only the rendering engine components. You couldn't even run windows update without it opening IE - in order to load a native ActiveX component that then performed the work. They where desperate to make everything depend on IE without a plan of how to make good use of it, which shouldn't be surprising, back then any complex use of IE would have blue screened the entire system.

> vindicating Microsoft's technical decision.

Imagine a ChromeOS based on IE5 and tell me why I shouldn't break down in hysterical laughter just thinking about it.

Not to mention BlackBerry and webOS still being contenders.

Would this not simply kill the kind of integration that Apple has between its different services? Or any of the smart assistants?

I think today's ruling reflects this, as much of it has to do with how Google handles the licensing of their proprietary Android bits.

Good on Metabo for doing it, and good on Mafell for signing up to use them. The smaller brands it's a no-brainer I guess.

Personally I'd be happy for that situation because of the big upside, but I can see why a company would not want it.

Plus, the most logical thing to do is not make a new standard, but pick an existing one. But who gets to be the golden brand whose battery system remains unchanged?

I would love it to happen but I can't see it happening for a while.

Ryobi products are low end but they have innovated plenty while maintaining compatibility. Given that TTI has access to the pro market via other brands, and Ryobi geared for homeowners, I don't see this as anything but a win for the average Ryobi customer.

  >Right, but home users will.

The charger cost about £70 and the 3 batteries I have were a similar price, each. So, for me, changing brands for a particular tool would mean an outlay of 'Price of Tool' + 'Price of Charger' + Price of n Batteries' which just isn't worth it, unless the rival company's tool was 2 or 3 times as good as the Makita offering.

I've sometimes thought that maybe Metabo, DeWalt or Milwaukee's version of a certain tool I wanted was slightly better than Makita's one. But, as I say, not twice or three times as good, to justify that kind of outlay.

So, like quite a few people commenting here, I'm kind of stuck with supporting the blue team now --even when they occasionally get outplayed by their opponents.

There's a reason Milwaukee, Makita, DeWalt, AEG, and Bosch, are wildly popular.

They're almost entirely indistinguishable. We also have some Hilti branded cordless tools, also fine.

My personal preference for home use is something like Ryobi One+ or Ozito PXC (less than half the price of the One+) because I'm actually at work all day using power and cordless tools supplied by work, I don't plan on taking my home tools to three or four hundred commercial construction sites or building 1000 houses with them.

Tool brand preference is, in my opinion, largely a sport-like

  >Lastly, based on my luddite eyes, the difference between makita, milwaukee, bosch, dewalt and ryobi batteries seem to me to only be a different keying in the plastic mating parts

I'd like to see the EU designate a common battery interface for all newly manufactured tools & batteries. That way we could buy the best tool for the job each time, instead of being locked into using whatever the Blue, Yellow, Red or Green team are fielding in that area.

The manufacturers would doubtless also produce their own adaptors to allow their existing tools & batteries to work with this new 'One Interface to Rule Them All'

All of the large format packs have pins for each cell, so charging with a standard balance charger is pretty easy. You can find plenty of schematics for homemade controllers online. Where they differ however, are the other pins. Some use a communication protocol like SMBUS. Some have dedicated pins for specific things like overcurrent or temperature. It varies highly from manufacturer to manufacturer.

AFAIK, all tool brands are moving to communication protocols for the packs.

[EDIT] Someone mentioned adapters. I don't believe there are adapters that support newer communicating packs (e.g. the OEM chargers won't work with the adapter). Older packs are all analog, so conversion is just a simple matter of rerouting the pins.

EU regulator powers operate with an honestly fairly limited scope based on the laws passed by parliament and the commission. There's no EPA like organisation with broad powers to persue companies for most forms of misbehaviour like there is in the US - that's left to the member states, with countries like Germany and Italy individually prosecuting Volkswagen executives for fraud.

The difference with GDPR and anti-trust violations is that the EU has been deliberately granted the power to exact severe fines on companies for each individual offence. If post-scandal Volkswagen had been caught falsifying emissions again and again (similiar to Google's repeated GDPR violations) they might have been hit with more and more fines of the severity that Google has.

Not that it's relevant to Google...

We have a ton of VC capital. Can we use this to price dump our way into the market or to do slightly illegal or very illegal things covered in great UI/UX/XD so that some consumers are our own side, and by the time they ban us, we're too big too fail and fines we get are lower than our profits?

Examples: Uber, Airbnb, LinkedIn, ...

Not everything in this world revolves around you.

Companies should obey the laws first and foremost. I'm not sure there's a lot of regulatory risk either; Google certainly has enough lawyers to know that what they did was illegal.

Will that “standard” USB C cable that comes with my Beats Flex headphones charge my iPhone 12 Pro Max? My Anker battery?

If iPhone users were satisfied with the least common denominator, they would be buying cheap Android phones.

Sony and headphones together with tape player ... there's a synergy there, when they can sell them together, it's a small one though. (Selling two pieces of hardware together generates more turnover with one transaction.)

With Android requiring Google to be the default search ... in comparison to the headphones there's a huge synergy here, I'd say. Collecting data (via non search software on the Android phone) and adding to it more data from search, makes all data more valuable in a very non-linear way. With the tape player I'd say it's more linear.

So for me, the search data is a quite obvious non-neutrality issue.

Because of the tying of third-parties, I don't think that this is an equivalent comparison. This is more like going into the record store (since we're going back to the 80s with our Walkman) and finding that you think the Walkman comes with garbage headphones. So you pick up a Panasonic player and the headphones you want. Then you pick up a couple of tapes that you wanted to listen to, get to the counter, and the store owner explains that those albums are on the BMG label, so he can't sell them to you. In fact, he can't sell any Sony Music group cassettes unless you own those shitty Sony headphones, because if he does, Sony Music won't let him sell any more Sony Music albums in his store.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-news-re-opens-spai...

Disclaimer: I work for Google in an unrelated product. Opinions are my own.

[1] I say sadly, less because I like the current government, and more because they seem desperate to import Bannon-esque culture war nonsense like attacking women's rights.

Guilt by association is not acceptable in a first world country. You don't go to jail if your brother commits a crime, you shouldn't go to jail if your company commits a crime. You only go to jail if you commit a crime.

The cost of going after those companies is ridiculous already, once they are proven guilty, it would be simpler if we could punish the company as a person, than to find a real person to punish. After all, companies are very happy to be persons for other legal purposes.

Companies would then have to get their things in order quickly, and win back the trust. A very effective deterrent.

Imagine Google being out of the EU market for 3 months. How many youtubers would try and publish their videos on other plateforms? That would open competitions. People would boo google everytime they suck because they would fear for themself.

It would create pain right now, but a sane pressure that would force companies to stop playing with fire because they know they can't get a bad burn.

That would be a complete detriment to one of the greatest innovations in financing: Seperation of capital and responsibility. When you buy a stock you know you can not loose more than the stocks value, so you dare to invest.

Also, would bond holders also be burdened with this? what about derivatives?

Unless you fine the company enough for it to go into bankruptcy in which case the shareholders are protected by limited liability and the creditors take the hit instead. But the bankruptcy angle is completely irrelevant to this case, none of the fines considered are close yo bankrupting Google.

If a country violates international sanctions, should I be sent to The Hauge because I have bonds tied to the bridges and roads being built by that government?

To put it another way: If a restaurant is shut down for health code violations found in the kitchen, should the valet be lectured about proper food preparation?

I was around when Project Astoria almost saw the light of day and I assume Google came back to shoot it down in a similar way (which would be really nice karma given MS patent story)

ReVanced is a WIP set of tools to patch Youtube and other apps - https://github.com/revanced

Vanced and Iceraven (Firefox with more addons enabled) are two of the main things keeping me on Android.

Now that I work in Software I get it. Most companies are just really bad at making it.

Compared to what?

Apple?

Previously, we would switch from Nokia to Sony we would lose our ringtones, our games, our apps, our photos, etc. When each phone operator had their own operating system, it was honestly terrible.

And honestly, shoehorning privacy into a conversation about choices in phones is a poor show. Feel ashamed.

> In [2014], the European Court of Auditors (ECA) carried out a further analysis of the potential savings if all meetings were held in Brussels, following a request from the Parliament. Their estimate of the cost of the monthly move is 113.800.000 euro.

(From an EJTA fact checking website, which labeled a separate 200MM euro number as "mostly false" https://eufactcheck.eu/factcheck/mostly-false-travelling-cir...)

Now that the UK is out of the Union, it would be nice for sanity to prevail and most of those translators be made redundant. Except for drafting official multi-language legal documents, the bulk of the proceedings can go on in English, and EMPs that require translation services should request them from their own countries.

It will never happen, but one can surely dream.

Yes.

But I have to recognise, they could - at least - hand out "free" train tickets to most of the Parliament staff. Not just between Brussels and Strasbourg, but everywhere in the EU.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/25/22996248/apple-sideloadin...

So yes, a manufacturer could ship a phone with a de-Googled LineageOS. But they cannot today ship a phone with Play Store, but without Chrome, etc.

Repeated violations from them should be in the significant multi-billions, much higher than this generous discount of a fine that the EU is asking for. This proves that they will do it again and won't change until the fines get higher than $10B.

sigh

I guess it's impossible to go 5 min without somebody wrecking the ecosystem. I don't understand how they can even manage to be incompatible, it's fucking Java, or more commonly these days just a wrapped PWA.

Then Apple would have to set their pricings competitively, instead of monopolistically.

I've never installed the AOSP or the oneplus specific "android" versions so i have no frame of reference, but it takes about 25 seconds to get cydia to come up on the ipad i use it on, with no other weirdness needed on the ipad itself.

And this is setting aside the costs of compliance to avoid more fines. Even if the costs are less than another fine, they're not nothing. You're looking at an entire year's profits from the EU essentially being wiped out by this fine, plus reduced profits going forward due to increased compliance costs and probably losing sales. And this is your best case scenario.

It would not take a 100 billion dollar fine to make Google leave the EU, it would only take another fine like this one.

I think that is unlikely, and I think it is likely we will see Google change the illegal licensing.

I am more than happy to see a Google exec get charged for a crime if you can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they committed that crime.

No. Why do you think that is?

> This is a multi-billion dollar fine, a $4.1B fine.

As it should be the standard and nothing less than that. Even so, this one is a 'generous' multi-billion dollar fine that won't scare them.

I am saying it needs to be much higher than that. GPT-3 cannot explain itself or its own comments, can it?