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Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google

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Re: Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google

#141

Post by dpoochieni »

DannyBee wrote: post #125
GeekyBear wrote: post #59

The career officials at the FTC recommended antitrust action against Google back in 2012, but the political appointees shut them down. >When the Federal Trade Commission neared a momentous decision on whether to charge Google with violating antitrust laws in January 2013, the White House was watching closely. New emails uncovered by the Campaign for Accountability, a public interest watchdog organization, show that a…

FWIW: It sounds nefarious, but the DOJ/FTC/etc quite often meet with all parties prior to taking antitrust action. That's because (at least in the number of times i've been invited to meetings with these sorts of regulators) the relevant folks are not idiots, and in fact are trying to understand all sides of the issue before deciding what they should do. This is actually what you want them to do, as there are rarely,…

FWIW: Before the preceding comment apologizes and distracts from the real issue, the WH involving itself in the issue is very different from the prosecutor meetings described by the previous comment.

Re: Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google

#142

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

darkpuma wrote: post #114
KirinDave wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon is not a "trust" in the strictest historical definition, but it's a amoral and terrifying company with incredible reach that frequently can and does snuff any chance any competitor has of using anything else. If Google is bad for using AMP to try and drive publishers to AMP hosting, then how is Amazon not even worse for ramming crazy terms down publisher's throats while buying or undercutting every other shipp…

Why would Google sell Youtube to Facebook?

What if Alphabet is forced to spin off YouTube in to a seperate entity?

Re: Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google

#143

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

ergocoder wrote: post #65
GuardianCaveman wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ant-competitive practices? Facebook buying up any and all rivals like WhatsApp and Instagram? They are a juggernaut and shouldn’t be able to own all social media.

At the time of buying, people were mocking FB for being delusional left and right. After FB manages these acquisitions well, we are now like "FB is evil and anti-competitive".

Are humans inconsistent?

Are different vocal minorities loudest at different times?

I’m not convinced people is a coherent group.

Does the fact that some people were mocking X at some point in the past negate the validity of antitrust cases against X for ever?

Re: Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google

#144

Post by AmericanChopper »

rayiner wrote: post #66
ggm wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your reply almost immediately says you think a jury could be swayed by argument, sentiment or both. Does that not mean an antitrust suit may actually be reasonable, judged by a potently prosecutor? I think you meant "I don't want them found guilty" which is a different thing. If you really think there is no case to answer I don't think you understand what an antitrust case is about. It's about market dominance and an…

Any antitrust theory against Google would be pretty abstract given that they don’t charge for either search or Chrome. But the pop up trying to get you to switch to Chrome when you go to Google search is pretty much what you’d put in a textbook to illustrate leveraging a monopoly in one sector to gain market share in another. It’s extremely concrete and intuitive. That doesn’t mean it makes the case, of course. But i…

You don’t have to charge for your service to be within the scope of the Sherman Act.

> The Sherman Act broadly prohibits (1) anticompetitive agreements and (2) unilateral conduct that monopolizes or attempts to monopolize the relevant market.

You don’t have to get very abstract at all to see how Google may violating it. Microsoft lost their antitrust case in regards to how they distributed Internet Explorer, another free product.

Re: Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google

#145

Post by sjy »

bilbo0s wrote: post #42
ggm wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your reply almost immediately says you think a jury could be swayed by argument, sentiment or both. Does that not mean an antitrust suit may actually be reasonable, judged by a potently prosecutor? I think you meant "I don't want them found guilty" which is a different thing. If you really think there is no case to answer I don't think you understand what an antitrust case is about. It's about market dominance and an…

> Your reply almost immediately says you think a jury could be swayed by argument, sentiment or both... If this goes to a jury, Google will definitely get off. I seriously hope that doesn't happen.

How can you be so sure about the outcome of a jury trial when the investigation hasn't even reached the point of a specific allegation, let alone one that Google wants to defend at trial?

Re: Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google

#146

Post by yeukhon »

thanatos_dem wrote: post #77
yeukhon wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s wrong with buying competitions?

Well, in a word, it’s anticompetitive

Buying a competition is not anticompetitive. So why congratulate any acquisition on HN?

Re: Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google

#147

Post by AmericanChopper »

nradov wrote: post #120
el_programmador wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On that note, even Internet Explorer (IE) was bundled freely, Microsoft never charged a dime for it. Why was anti-trust pursued against Microsoft then? Honestly, I see no difference between that scenario and this. If anything, Google has been a lot more guilty than for just monopolizing on a browser here.

The initial release of IE was sold as a separate product in retail stores. Microsoft only added it to Windows later. If IE had been just another Windows feature from the start then it would have been more difficult to make an antitrust case against them.

What rulings can you point to to support this legal theory? The Sharman Act relates to monopolising any market, it doesn’t make any distinction between markets that are monetised in different ways.

Re: Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google

#148

Post by sjy »

joemag wrote: post #51
rayiner wrote: post #33

While I think an antitrust suit against Google would be a waste of time, they really need to stop recommending Chrome every time you do a Google search with a different browser. Just stop, that will not play well to a jury.

Similar thing drives me nuts in GMail for iPad. Every time I open a link, it asks me to download chrome. I say no thanks, and uncheck the default “remind me later” option, yet few weeks later it happens again. Been going on for a year now.

This is infuriating, and was one thing that motivated me to quit Gmail. I'm much happier now – traditional mail clients like iOS's Mail app work much better with a mail host that implements IMAP properly.

Re: Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google

#149

Post by DannyBee »

dpoochieni wrote: post #141
DannyBee wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW: It sounds nefarious, but the DOJ/FTC/etc quite often meet with all parties prior to taking antitrust action. That's because (at least in the number of times i've been invited to meetings with these sorts of regulators) the relevant folks are not idiots, and in fact are trying to understand all sides of the issue before deciding what they should do. This is actually what you want them to do, as there are rarely,…

FWIW: Before the preceding comment apologizes and distracts from the real issue, the WH involving itself in the issue is very different from the prosecutor meetings described by the previous comment.

Given that this amazingly nameless "white house advisor"and title is clear spin for their narrative in the same way the "top competition counsel" thing is (and proven wrong by totally trivial fact checking), do you have evidence or anything to back up that this was not a standard meeting?

Re: Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google

#150

Post by maxk42 »

untog wrote: post #75
KirinDave wrote: post #71

Distressingly absent from this list is the company that cheerfully collects and sells even more data that Google about the average American's life and collects MUCH more of their money: Amazon.

Collects money, yes. But collects more data? I'm dubious.

Perhaps you forgot about AWS? More than 70% of the world's internet data goes through just one of their data centers: https://www.nextgov.com/analytics-data/2016/01/70-percent-gl...
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