LOL. Good point. Imagine if IBM had filed an amicus brief saying that if Google's use of the Java APIs is not fair use, then neither is Oracle's use of SQL, and announcing its intention to based on the precedent. $9B? Pah. Oracle owes virtually every penny it has ever made to the RDBMS and SQL.

Openness allows people and organization to do what they like, rather than what you like. This is why the slightly-less-open GPL is in many cases superior to fully-open licenses like Apache. Android chose not to go the GPL route, I suspect because of concerns that manufacturers wouldn't use it if they were forced to publish their "special sauce" (which isn't all that special, IMO, but they think so). Were those concerns misplaced? I doubt it, but no one knows.

Given that Android is what it is, the only option Google has is to try to apply pressure to align the manufacturers' interests more closely with the users'. This is not easy, particularly since most users don't think about updates, much less source code access, when buying a phone. By adding the "security patch level" and making it visible to users and app developers, and by taking public position that OEMs should release monthly updates and should provide defined periods of support, Google hopes to help users to think about that and factor it into their buying decisions. Assuming the rumor is true, tracking update statistics by OEM and device -- and possibly publicly shaming those who are particularly bad -- is another way to hopefully make users care about updates when making purchase decisions.

Of course, Google's big hammer is the Play store, but that hammer is too big, so it has to be used carefully.

Yes, having the source and being able to modify, build and run it on your device is great. Not something that will move the broader market, though.

Read the article. The application of US law was based on activities performed in the US. The people weren't in the US, but the servers were.

https://www.google.com/contributor

Oh, I agree that it will be a great opportunity to free people to do what they want to do. But that doesn't change the fact that it's going to dramatically rearrange the economy and therefore society, and such changes are painful.

It will dramatically lower the cost of goods and services for everyone. Just as the industrial revolution made lots of goods dramatically cheaper (good for everyone), but also eliminated lots of jobs (bad for those who did those jobs).

Sure, if the only obstacles were technical. I'll grant that I only mentioned the technical obstacles in the interest of brevity, but the deeper issues underlying the technical ones are ones of relationships. Android is an ecosystem, not a product, and device manufacturers insist on a high degree of control over what they deliver to their customers. They are willing to accede to the compatibility requirements enforced by the compatibility test suite in order to get permission to install Google's apps and give their devices access to the Play store, but Google's control has very definite limits.

Robots will replace people in lots of professions. Economically this will be fantastic, but it's going to require a serious restructuring of our economy, and the faster it happens the more painful it will be.

Raising the minimum wage will increase the pace of the transition, which will make it hurt more.

Google doesn't have the source code that was used to build the binaries on non-Nexus devices, and doesn't have the keys needed to sign those binaries so that the device will run them.

That's not relevant. Yes, there are ups and downs, but in the long run markets seek a certain rate of return on capital. Where it's not obtained, capital goes elsewhere and the underperforming companies are defunded in favor of others that meet the expected rates. Taxation doesn't change any of that; increasing taxes doesn't change market expectations, so prices and costs are adjusted to meet those expectations, on average.

Your argument is basically the same as people who say "Global warming is a crock because it was damned cold this winter." While it may have been cold where you are, that doesn't change the long-term, aggregate trends. Industry ups and downs similarly don't affect long-term aggregate performance expectations and results.

Corporate taxes seem useful only to those who don't understand economics.

Meh.

My point is the more important one. If Google hasn't paid the taxes owed under the law, investigation will find that and the taxes will be demanded, and paid. If Google actually has followed the letter of the law, then the French government is just engaging in some obnoxious (and probably illegal) intimidation tactics. Either way, it'll be resolved.

But the whole question is wrong-headed because corporate taxes are a very bad idea and should be eliminated.

Not only should Google not have to pay any tax, no corporation should, because corporate taxes are evil and harm the people. The dynamics of markets mean that in the long run corporations never actually pay any tax regardless of the checks they write to the government. That's because regardless of whether or not they have tax expenses, their after-tax profits are determined by market forces, and their before-tax profits adapt to generate that net profit level regardless of taxation, because either they generate the returns expected by the market or their capital gets sent to others who will. They do this adaptation by pushing the cost of the taxes off on employees and customers. Mostly customers.

In short: corporations inevitably pass taxes onto customers in the form of higher prices and employees in the form of lower wages. Those that don't get squeezed out entirely.

So, only people pay taxes. Sometimes we pay them directly and know about it, sometimes we pay them indirectly, hidden in other costs. The latter situation is evil and corporate taxes create exactly that situation. It's evil because while taxes are necessary, in a properly-functioning democracy (of whatever form) it's critical that taxpayers know what they pay so they can act as informed voters. Lawmakers love corporate taxes because as far as the voters can see, the taxes fund the government at no cost to the voters themselves... but they're wrong. The voters do pay all of those taxes, every penny. And the taxes aren't allocated according to a nice, progressive scale, they are allocated however the corporations and their competitors decide.

Corporate taxes are evil and we should abolish them.

Emacs, mostly. Other things, but especially Emacs.

Nope, they don't come out of profits. There's a return rate that corporations have to achieve to attract investment, to have good bond ratings, etc. What this rate is varies by market segment (roughly correlated with segment risk), but there's also a sort of overall norm; companies either provide that rate of return or they fail, get bought out, split up, etc.

When you increase taxes you don't change any of that, you just force companies to adjust. In the short term their after-tax profit margin will take a hit, but within a few years it will be back up because they (all of them, collectively) will have adjusted. Wages will be pushed down, suppliers will be paid less, prices will be pushed up... but the profits will be back in line with expectations. Note that this also applies if you cut taxes: in the short term profits will rise, but competition will squeeze them back down to the expected rates.

I'm talking about long-term, steady-state equilibria here, of course. In practice it's more dynamic than that as innovations or particularly good or bad management boost one company or damage another, and there are market-wide periods of growth and decline, but overall, and over time, that's how it works: Companies will generate the market-demanded rates of return, or they'll be defunded in favor of others that do.

A great primer on this, BTW, is Thomas Sowell's "Basic Economics". Be prepared for the fact that Sowell is a conservative, but if you can look past that he provides beautifully simple and lucid explanations of market dynamics.