[citation][nom]sailfish[/nom]Since all I ever read about in Tom's, The Register, Ars Technica, &c are cases where the EU is fining US companies in the order of 100s of millions of dollars is it any wonder why our impression may be what it is?
To help broaden our field of view on these matter, it would be helpful if you could supply us some links where the EU has taken similarly large fine actions actions with European countries?[/citation]
They fined
French and German natural gas companies about €100 million more than they did Intel, just this month.The largest fine they ever levied for illegal trusts was 1.4 billion last year,
for a cartel of French/British/Belgian/Japanese glass makers. Apparently they've started
really putting the screws to anti-competitive behavior in recent years. Think of it like the sudden US crackdown on organized crime that took place during the roarin' twenties if you need an analogy.
Here's
a helpful resource if you want to check their recent cases for yourself. It's somewhat understandable that we in the US haven't heard as much about that stuff, but I'd think common sense should have one hold off on the 'persecution complex' without having more evidence. I find it kind of silly that your preferred
default position is that the EU is picking on American companies out of proportion to their crimes compared to companies from other nations, rather than a spark of interest into whom else they might be fining and how much.
Rather than assume these cases are the only big things going on, it's safer to assume that these cases are only the ones you're likely to
hear about. That can be due to a couple of factors such as US coverage of EU Commission activities (practically nil on any given day) or the tech-oriented nature of these cases, with exceptionally large fines levied against US-based tech companies that are themselves exceptionally large. If this were about natural gas companies, you wouldn't be reading about it on Tom's or Ars or The Register. If these were appropriately smaller fines against some Croatian soft/hardware makers, you also probably wouldn't hear much about it. So you're restricted to hearing about these MS/Intel cases for a number of reasons; from the niche news sites you visit to the scale of their crimes and punishments. It's pretty obvious if you stop and think about it that this is only a sliver of the cases being reviewed and that it's not at all representational of the whole EU Commission... thing. [vocabulary failure!]
For future reference of the general readership, since I see this kind of thing a lot in these EU Commission threads: If you really wanted to have an informed opinion going into these discussions, you could have
justfuckinggoogle'd it. It's the official internet equivalent of "think before you open your mouth."
It took me about three minutes of Googling to find all the appropriate links here, and previously I only had exposure from the same Tom's/Ars/tech news sources which don't cover the other cases and fines. Even if I
had assumed that the EU was picking on American companies (which I think is a ridiculous position to take anyway) I'd want to verify that assumption with some numbers before going off on an anti-EU Commission rant. Rather than leap to conclusions prematurly and run with them, it's a better idea to try and find out if your conclusion is realistic.
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