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Google must pay €4.1bn fine for using Android to 'block' rivals
(www.bbc.co.uk)
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this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2026
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about 0.11% of Google (Alphabet)'s total worth.
the price of doing business
The question is how much money did they make by using Android to block rivals. If using Android helped them make 1bn extra then this fine costs them 3bn and it doesn't make sense from them to keep doing it. If they made 100bn than obviously they will continue.
I mean, with it they've managed to build a walled garden that includes the majority of every phone in the world.
We can probably assume trillions.
It's all hypothetical. You can't know if any of the rivals had any chance at gaining significant share of the market. I was using Blackberry when it was still perfectly fine OS, supported by all the important apps (but before everything was an app) and I didn't know anyone else using it. I think that yes, the deals they made stopped most of the phone manufactures from offering alternative OSes like Geko OS or Lineage OS (before it was called like that) but we can only guess if any of them had any chance of becoming anything else than niche curiosity like Graphene OS today. So you can only really compare this fine with what they are doing now to block Graphene or AOSP. I don't know if this fine is big enough but I doubt they made trillions thanks to those practices.
Total Worth doesn't matter. What matters is revenue and profit and that is the basis for the fine.
When it comes to something punitive like a fine, fine versus worth is literally the only thing that matters. If the fine isn't big enough, it's more like a fee for doing business. They just added to the bottom line and keep rolling.
It really is not. Companies operate on creating profit. Activities are judged on their ROI. Worth is not relevant for the ROI.
I was going to say "Finally, a fine with some substance!" but you took the wind out of my sails...