Forum. The year 2018 to celebrate the genius of innovation in digital technologies : 20 years of the iMac, the ipo of Amazon, or the creation of Google. But 2018 also illustrates the bizarre obsession of the european Union (EU) to regulate the Internet giants.
Just a few weeks after the entry into force of the Regulation on general data protection (RGDP), Google was fined a record 4.3 billion euros for abuse of dominant position. This time, it is the free distribution of the Android platform to the manufacturers of smart phones such as Samsung, which is put on the index. According to the Commission, Google would use this strategy, as it considers abusive, such as a Trojan horse to impose on all its search engine.
In the public opinion, we can expect a chorus of praise. Since the election of a president Trump and the Brexit, a rumble hostile deaf against the giants of the Internet : the people demands punishment. Regardless of his concerns, of Cambridge Analytica “fake news,” are political and not economic ; as soon as a target is designated guilty by the court, populist, everything is good for the pillory.
And yet, this case falls within the paradox of the intellectual in several respects. The first contradiction appears when the Commission decrees that Android, open ecosystem, dominates only one market in which Apple would not exert any competitive constraint. The firm at the apple does not deliver its iOS system, vertically integrated and closed to other phone manufacturers like Samsung or Xiaomi (there is nothing that prohibits him yet), Google, and Apple are not competitors !
Analysis economically counter-productive
Google is therefore inevitably in a dominant position in its own market. This conclusion of the Commission is confusing : she seems to lose interest in the context…
