Part 4 of 8. Part 3 looked at who pays for the software you use.
What this post covers
- Why the record is worth reading.
- What has been decided about Google.
- What has been decided about Apple.
- What has been decided about Amazon.
- What has been decided about Meta.
- The pattern across the lot.
Why the record is worth reading
Picking a supplier is a prediction. You are deciding how they will behave in 3 or 5 years.
Company values statements are not much use for that. Everyone has one, and they all say much the same.
Findings of fact are better. These are conclusions a court or a regulator reached after hearing evidence.
That is what this post uses. Where a European decision exists, it comes first.
Two things before the list, because they keep it honest.
Not every case went against the companies. Some went against the regulators, and those are in here too.
And this is not a claim that European companies behave better. Volkswagen and Wirecard settle that well enough. The pattern follows from size and market position, not from where a company comes from.
The European Commission got there first, and the cases took a long time to finish.
In 2017 it fined Google €2.42 billion. It found Google had pushed its own shopping comparison service up the search results and rivals down.
Google appealed, and the Court of Justice of the European Union upheld the decision in September 2024.
That is 7 years from the fine, and longer still from the behaviour.
In 2018 the Commission fined Google €4.34 billion over the conditions placed on phone makers who wanted the Play Store. The fine was later cut to about €4.1 billion, and the final appeal was dismissed in 2026.
In 2019 the Commission fined Google €1.49 billion over advertising contracts. The General Court annulled that one in 2024, finding the case had not been made. The regulator lost it.
In the United States, a court found in 2024 that Google had unlawfully held on to a monopoly in search. In September 2025 the same court set out the remedies. It required changes to default agreements and some data sharing with competitors. It declined to make Google sell Chrome or Android.
A separate United States ruling in April 2025 found Google had unlawfully tied 2 of its advertising products together. That remedy is still being decided.
Apple
In 2021 a United States court ordered Apple to let app developers tell customers about other ways to pay.
In April 2025 the same court found Apple had not complied.
It also found that a senior Apple executive had given evidence that was untrue, and that the company’s own internal documents said otherwise. CNBC reported the ruling at the time.
The court referred the matter to prosecutors to consider criminal contempt proceedings. Apple said it would appeal.
This one matters for a different reason from the rest.
A company can take a firm view of its legal position and still deal straight with a court. A finding that evidence was untrue is another thing altogether.
Your relationship with a supplier is a set of promises. This is direct evidence of how promises get treated once keeping them turns expensive.
Amazon
In September 2025 Amazon agreed to pay $2.5 billion to settle a case brought by the United States Federal Trade Commission. The Commission published the detail.
It was $1 billion in penalties and $1.5 billion back to customers.
The case was about the design of Prime sign-up and cancellation. The allegation was that the screens were built to enrol people who had not chosen to enrol, and to make cancelling hard work. The Commission said about 35 million people were affected.
Amazon agreed to change the sign-up and cancellation process as part of the settlement.
Interface designs at that scale get tested and measured before release — that is normal, sensible practice. As such, the effect of a design is usually known before it ships.
Meta
In 2019 the United States Federal Trade Commission imposed a $5 billion penalty on Facebook over privacy practices, after the Cambridge Analytica case.
The bigger item is not a fine.
In 2021 a former employee handed internal company research to journalists, then gave evidence to a United States Senate committee. The BBC reported her central claim, which was that the company had put profit ahead of safety, again and again.
Some of that research looked at the effect of Instagram on teenage users. Parts of it came back worrying.
Meta disagreed with how the research was described. It said the findings were more mixed than reported, and that the former employee had not worked on those teams. The wider science on this is not settled, and it is only fair to say so.
One point is not in dispute, and it is the one to keep.
The company studied whether its product was harming a group of users. Some of that work came back worrying. The results reached the public because somebody carried them out of the building.
Research that only gets out that way is nowt like independent oversight.
The pattern across the lot
Put the cases side by side and 4 things stand out. These matter more for planning than any single case.
1. The penalties are small next to the gain.
A few billion is a small figure against revenues in the hundreds of billions. It also lands years after the money was made.
When a penalty comes to less than the benefit, it works like a cost of doing business rather than a deterrent.
2. The remedies come late.
The gap between the behaviour and an enforceable remedy runs from about 7 to 12 years in these cases.
Competitors rarely last that long. By the time a remedy bites, the market it was meant to protect has usually already changed shape.
3. Individuals are rarely touched.
Fines are paid by the company — so by its shareholders — while the people who approved the decisions usually keep their pay and their jobs.
That matters because it shapes the incentive. Where the cost falls on the company and the reward falls on the individual, the decision looks worth making to the person making it.
4. Problems are known inside before they are known outside.
In several of these cases the outfit had the information first. It reached the public through a leak, a lawsuit or a regulator instead.
Be careful what you take from that, mind.
These are not usually cases of one person setting out to do harm. A team improved a sign-up screen against a target. A ranking system was tuned to increase use. A research finding went unpublished.
The decisions are spread across a lot of people, and each step looks reasonable on its own. That is what makes the pattern so steady, and why asking companies to try harder is unlikely to shift it.
What to do with this
Use it for the question it actually answers.
Where a supplier has a commercial interest and you have no real alternative, the record says the outcome tends to go the supplier’s way.
Any correction usually arrives years later, and usually costs the supplier less than the behaviour earned.
That is not a reason to avoid a supplier over the country it sits in.
It is a good reason not to depend on any supplier you could not leave.
Part 5 looks at how one country’s law can reach companies in another.
First published: 2026-08-25. Last updated: 2026-08-25.