It would be bad enough if Google bought national land in the USA to do this, but they just cut into European land before even finishing the required paperwork, according to the article.

It's about time we kick Goolag out of the EU.

The "move fast, break laws, reap profits, socialize losses" strategy.

Fuck em. Fuck em all with a fork in the eye.

This is TERRIBLE! And to make sure it DOESNT happen AGAIN we're going to Write a SEMI STERN LETTER while they PROCEED with Construction!

-The Finnish Government?

When the fines aren’t big enough, they’re just the cost of doing business.

Penalties for fuckery like this should be at GDPR levels, meaning a percentage of global turnover of the parent company.

"Incompetence" implies it was unintentional. This was completely intentional.

"Disregard of the law" implies there is some law against this. Any law that will not punish the offender is not a law. So there was no "disregard" of any law in this case.

Sundar Pichai is a conservative. His company leadership reflects conservative values, such as destruction of the environment, supporting genocide, supporting war and supporting fascism.

Conservatism is cancer. The disease has metastasized and has infected most major corporations in the U.S., including Google. I'm not sure a cure is possible, but the treatment for it is not peaceful or pretty. We would need thousands more people named Luigi to be willing to perform heroic, selfless acts.

As Finnish newspaper Kalevareported last month, Google is under fire for clearing over 300 hectares — the equivalent of almost 500 football fields — for two new data centers in the northern part of the European nation without concluding the necessary environmental assessments.

Despite the assessments still being in progress, the tech giant’s contractors started clearing trees in the area months ago, raising the alarm bells at the Finnish Nature Conservation Association.

“Either this is gross incompetence from Google’s Finnish project company, Tuike Finland Oy, or gross disregard for Finnish legislation, or at worst both,” said the association’s chair, Hanna Halmeenpää, in a statement, as translated by Wood Central.

For those who haven’t looked at it

Google razed the forest without the environmental assessments to whether they could do that or not, aka ‘fuck your laws and the wildlife’

Better to pay the small fine, than ask permission.

Fuck the techbros, fuck AI, fuck data centers, fuck billionaires.

Add it to KilledByGoogle.com

Google needs to be broken up and regulated. That they were not found to be a monopoly by Judge Mehta was a travesty. I probably don’t have to convince anyone here about how bad Google is, but seeing as they keep pulling nonsense like this and causing environmental harm is ridiculous. They need to keep growing forever for the sake of investors, no matter how much harm they cause. I avoid their services like the plague. Sorry to go on and on, but Google is one of the worst companies out there right now, closely tied with Meta.

isengard anyone.

Gross “We did it knowing nobody was going to prosecute us because Trump and that’s what bribes are for” reasons.

Remember when they put climate scores for all publicly traded companies on their Google Finance? It's almost like they never a mean a single thing they say.

This is what I'm expecting with the Palantir CEO dude buying up a bunch of forest in Sweden recently. The statement is

Den nya ägaren av skogsfastigheten är mån om markens skönhet och dess bevarande. De vidsträckta, naturliga skogslandskapen erbjuder värdefulla livsmiljöer för växter och djur, samtidigt som de utgör en plats för rekreation och återhämtning

The new owner of the forest property cares for the beauty of the property, and its preservation. The wide, natural forest landscapes provide valuable living space for plants and animals, while simultaneously providing a spot for recreation and respite.

We have "allemansrätten" here, as in you can go to and camp more or less anywhere. You don't need to own the property to enjoy its natural beauty, or recreate there.

It's definitely going to be used for something vile. A datacentre or something.

You know how people have been doing those horrible crimes where they destroy datacentres?

I hope people don't realize the same thing can be done to places like Google's offices. But if they do, I also hope they'd be responsible enough to make sure no low/mid level employees were in the building. I bet, and this is just too sad, that the executives would be the prime targets 😔

That would be tragic. Super duper tragic.

So tragic.

Tragic.

Google’s green image looks increasingly like a marketing layer over an industrial land grab. A company worth trillions wants ever more land, power and water for AI, and now it’s accused of clearing Finnish forest before environmental assessments were complete.

Now I wonder why you only see ethics neglecting data-centers in the US.

Wasn't their slogan, "Be as evil as possible" ?

google fucking up my country, as if i couldnt hate them enough already

They did the same In Finland. They don’t give a shit.

Ecodefense is a pretty good and relevant light read!

The things that truly "slipped their leash" recently are the fucking tech companies.

It’s both.

I used to wonder, when I was a kid what it would be like if somebody/company was rich enough to buy an entire country.

If there's one thing big business exceeds at, it's killing life.

Yeah, it's negligence. They gambled on any paltry fine being worth it, and still being allowed o proceed.

Do no evil

This is par for the course. Pun intended. Where is our project 2025 to move the world in a more humane and sustainable direction? I want radical re-living.

Amazing how no one here opened and read the link but still felt they have to comment a wall of angry dogma.

They should be made to forfeit the land and replant every single tree they felled.

This is what happens when corporate crimes are punished with just slap-on-the-wrist fines that can be written off as a cost of doing business. Why should they obey the law? There is no downside to breaking it.

300 hectares — the equivalent of almost 500 football fields

Thanks for the context. As someone who lives in the US, I wouldn't have been able to put that to scale otherwise.

The personal experience my family has with Google and their data center development, from behind the curtain.

Google doesn't give a fuck. Some of the people outside of their executive offices do, but not Google leadership. They have no conscious, no morality, no sense of duty or patronage.

They will not hesitate to lie, break promises, or hide the full truth.

They exist only to capture more wealth in any way that they can.

Imagine if we treated gross incompetence as malice.

Like, “hey Ford, prove your engineers thought putting the gas tank in a crumple zone was a good idea.”

Imagine if we had a corporate death penalty, where a company who violated the law persistently was dissolved and its assets taken over by the government before being sold off to competitors.

With AI replacing the games and VFX industries, they'll be lots more of this stuff going on I imagine.

Holodeck-like game dev will probably eventually be a thing... And I thought I'd be happy about that. But I'm not.

Hopefully the planet and the species will last long enough that we'll laugh about Data Centers taking up huge buildings... And how toxic everything was back in 2026...

... hopefully we'll survive long enough to see today like we now see the 1950s (with nuclear techniques) and earlier. But I just don't think we're improving the world.

...and Nuclear Power hasn't really be that great either.