And so, the massive fines of the European Union in Apple and Meta made sure that the competence would reign and monolithic technological companies that structure our lives would never have so much power.
Or maybe not.
Do you remember when the United States government went after Microsoft for having a Windows and Office monopoly and now they don’t do it anymore?
No?
Remember when the EU approved all those laws that force the sites to ask if they could configure cookies, and now nobody tracks on the web?
No?
How about when the EU approved Law AI to safeguard against the dangerous development of artificial intelligence, so we no longer have to worry about falsifications or systemic risk?
The regulation of technology has never been easy, and its history is predominantly one of the failures.
For every Bell telephone rupture, there are innumerable acts and cases that have been, in the best, useless and in the worst, counterproductive cases.
If the Federal Aviation Administration cannot monitor Boeing security procedures well enough to avoid severe errors even after multiple accidents, what is the hood of the probability that excessive government the best way to correct the monopoly power of monopoly power for monopoly power of monopoly monopoly power?
On the other hand, we or we get band bands, which are the fines of Wednesday 500 million euros on the Apple store and 200 million euros in the collection of finishing data.
These companies are so absurdly huge that equally proportionate fines will not make a dent in their results.
If target can spend $ 46 billion in your strategy to “bet the company” and have nothing to show, it is 200 million euros that induce some real change?
In the last 10 years, Google has measured more than $ 8 billion in three separated EU cases, some of which are still pending.
Only last year, the EU cared about the company $ 2.4 billion to favor its comparative purchasing services.
But with annual revenues or $ 350 billion, those fines are, in Sausage, a lower drag in Google’s plans.
Without a doubt, all companies will make lower adjustments to appease regulators and prevent the sausage of future fines, but it is difficult to point out any of these changes as deeply significant.
Like these cookies notifications, which inevitably make most users accept all cookies anyway, the changes are frequently facades.
If the fines are ineffective, structural remedies such as ruptures, such as antimonopoly demands of the United States Department of Justice against Google are looking closer to Pandora’s box.
The key questions are two: first, what is the problem to address and, second, the best way to address it?
For all these cases, the documentation of anticompetitive and monopolistic behavior, and for all fines and level remedies in these companies, none of these questions has a simple or degree answer.
Monopolies cause problems, without a doubt, but social complaints about these companies are related to both their influence and their monopolistic behavior.
A world in which Bing and Google have an equal participation of the search, or in which Chrome searches are no longer predetermined to Google, probably foster more competition; But today’s search is much less important than a decade ago.
“Fostering innovation” can be a decent objective, but with the speed of the evolution of the world online, antimonopoly regulators are not better than Mark Zuckerberg to predict where the competition really will be really count.
It is the nature of a government to be behind, always fighting in the last battle.
So, although recent Slak-Downs of technnetic giants may feel satisfactory for those frustrated with the inflated prices of Apple and aggressive finishing surveillance, they are not a recognition of the erosion of privacy and the choice of the consumer that has been operating.
Until some players, governmental and corporate, they join in good faith to discover how a better digital world should be, regulation will remain foam in the ocean.
David B. Auerbach is a software engineer and author of “Meganets: how digital forces beyond our control commander our daily lives and internal realities.”
