Google makes a lot of money

Emailed on March 29, 2019 in The Friday Forward

Last week's news of the European Union's latest antitrust fine levied against Google fattened the already multibillion-dollar tally against the search giant. But like the previous penalties, there aren't many signs the new fine will cause Google to make major changes.

That's because these fines are basically cost of doing business when you're making as much money as Google is.

Google has been fined a total of $9.3 billion by the EU for antitrust violations since 2017. These include...

• $1.7 billion last week for violations in Google's dominance of the digital ad market.

• $4.9 billion in 2018 for violations relating to Google's Android operating system and App Store.

• $2.7 billion in 2017 for violations in its operation of its online shopping service.

• Google has also faced a series of fines from individual EU nations for amounts that are orders of magnitude smaller than those listed above.

Meanwhile, total net income for Alphabet, Google's corporate parent (which derives nearly all of its income from Google), was $63 billion for the 3-year period from 2016–2018.

Google hasn't actually paid any of these big fines yet. It appealed the first two and is still deciding what to do about the most recent one.

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