Unfortunately, layoffs in big tech will start again in 2024 where they left us at the end of 2023. And that is with other staff cuts.
Last year, to take just the last two pieces of news, in November it was the turn of Amazon employees, after which – in December – it was Spotify’s turn, which cut its staff by as much as 17%.
In the first days of 2024 the trend does not change. The news is very recent that Twitch, a platform owned by Amazon, will leave 500 employees at home: we are talking about over a third of the total staff, 35%, after closing the service in South Korea (again in November).
And now it’s Google’s turn, which is laying off several hundred workers. What do we know?
Google lays off hundreds of employees
On Wednesday, January 10, Google announced that it will lay off hundreds of employees across several teams as part of a cost-cutting program.
This was reported by Reuters, which would also list the co-founders of Fitbit, James Park and Eric Friedman, as leaving.
While it is The Verge that quantifies the redundancies at around a thousand people.
The positions that will be missed should concern the subsidiary Voice Assistant, but also the hardware team (responsible for Pixel, Nest and Fitbit), the central engineering team and a large part of the team involved in augmented reality.
In a statement released to Reuters, a Google spokesperson said that “over the second half of 2023, some of our teams have made changes to become more efficient and work better, and to align their resources with key product priorities .
Some teams are continuing to make these types of organizational changes, which include eliminating some roles globally.” But without specifying what tasks these are.
Alphabet’s announcement
A year ago, in January 2023, Alphabet (Google’s parent company) announced a global plan that would have involved the dismissal of approximately 12,000 employees, equal to 6% of its workforce. Which as of September 30, 2023 was precisely 182,381 employees.
It would have been a reorganization and a cut in staff also in relation to the ever-increasing attention towards generative artificial intelligence. And so, Google fires at the beginning of 2024, and it also does so in the hardware and in its Assistant unit.
Layoffs.fyi, a portal that provides numbers on job cuts in the tech sector, announced that in 2023 companies in the sector cut a total of over 262,600 jobs.
Google, the EU Court and the maximum fine of 2.42 billion euros
Google fires, and at the same time the EU Court is moving towards confirming the huge fine of 2.42 billion euros imposed on the company headed by Sundar Pichai.
On the morning of Thursday 11 January, the Advocate General of the EU Court of Justice, Juliane Kokott, announced her conclusions regarding a dispute that began in 2017.
Kokott said: “As established by the Commission and confirmed by the court, Google has used its dominant position in the market for general search services as leverage to favor its product comparator by preferentially displaying its results.”
This is a non-binding opinionbut which will certainly have a great weight in the final decision which, probably in a few months, will be taken by the EU Court.
Google’s abuse of its dominant position had already been confirmed by the EU court in November 2021. The fine of 2.42 billion euros, imposed in June 2017, was the highest ever against a big tech company, after the 4.6 billion dollar one again against Google for abuse of dominant position for the Android operating system.
The story
The story, we were saying, began in June 2017, when the EU fined Google 2,424,495,000 euros for abuse of a dominant position.
Very simply, the company ensured that its results appeared first on the search engine in the Shopping serviceso that users clicked more frequently on its links than those of competing companies.
In September 2017, Google appealed against the fine, which was rejected in November 2021. Google appealed the sentence and the rest is very recent history. That is, we arrive at 11 January 2023, when the non-binding opinion of judge Juliane Kokott invites the EU Court to reject the appeal and confirm the fine.
