Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google

No, actually. I've been quite clear on my position on this many times on HN (it's just another fun form of bias people try to use to not have to engage in real discussion on the merits, and convince themselves their position is right), and i'm being totally consistent with that.

Do you have anything substantive to add to the conversation? Do you want to disagree with anything I said?

In practice, my comment comes more from being in DC for 7 years, not for working for any company.

What i said applies across just about every media outlet these days. Every unnamed white house advisor (sometimes even "senior advisor", because why not!) who isn't an "anonymous source" is usually unnamed because otherwise you'd be able to point out their job title matches what they were doing and is unrelated to the white house (or their attachment to the white house is "tenuous at best").

It's true the white house sometimes has people with the job title "advisor" in it, but you will notice when articles mention real names, if you were to go looking, you'd see that was usually their real title (or they failed at fact checking).

That's not just the white house either. Random low level people at companies become "senior executives", etc.

This even spreads, unfortunately, using those things as sources, and later often becomes "truth".

Here, i'll take a totally non-political thing as an example for you:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Fredinburg (RIP) was a great person and all around good guy (IME), but he was 100% not a google executive. This is an objective fact, by any definition of executive (including Google's). You can see the sources cited for these claims are news articles.

All of which, in order to play up their narrative on a tragedy, decided to give him that title (and various others!)[1]

Thinking that anything else here is happening, in this, or really any other situation, is just naive (or gross application of variants of gell-mann amnesia).

In the situation in the original article, do you seriously believe that if the current administration had the chance to nail a real former obama whitehouse advisor doing something illegal or untoward, they wouldn't jump at the chance do it?

It's not like they don't have white house visitor logs and plenty of people around the DOJ/FTC/etc who can tell them what happened!

[1] As an aside, i find it pretty sad that it appears people find "google executive" to be a more impressive/etc way to memorialize someone than "good person". If i pass away in a news-worthy event, can y'all make sure it says "good father" or something.

I was the biggest Google fan ever. I recommended all their products to everyone I know.

Gone are those days. I now trust Microsoft (heh! M!cr0$0ft, anyone?) more than Google which is strange given I grew up rebelling against MS’s technical desktop hegemony.

I wonder when Google decided “doing evil” was okay. I wonder how the SWE’s and other senior people in this thread feel about working for a company that many now consider scum. All their excuses and retorts can honestly take a hike: It is my honest opinion that if you still work for Google you’re selling us all out.

After years of serving malware through ads and doing nothing to stop it, they’re now trying to stop us blocking ads?! That’s just the last of many strikes that set me down this road.

Adwords prices are based off the bids submitted - whether this is done through one centralized exchange or many competing ones makes little difference. Each search-based digital advertiser will end up charging the maximum it can while avoiding "vacancies".

Is this sort of compliance testing needed in countries with authoritarian leaders?

Amazon does not collect more data than Google does, even by your own definition. In fact, Google uses Amazon to collect even more information than they do innately by mining Gmail for purchase receipts.