Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google • Hacker News Board

Re: Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google

#411

Post by m0zg » Sun, Jun 02, 2019, 5:17 AM UTC

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…

The mental gymnastics below in the thread where people try to explain why not investigating Google in 2012 was OK and investigating it now is not OK are quite amazing.

Though to be fair, in 2012 Google exerted its monopolistic power far less than it does now.

For the life of me I can't understand why it's good that less than a dozen unelected and non-removable people in this country (Schmidt/Page, Zuck, and the owners of 99% of "independent" media) have the power to decide who wins elections, and what people think about issues.

Re: Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google

#412

Post by _hl_ » Sun, Jun 02, 2019, 6:24 AM UTC

themacguffinman wrote: post #387

_hl_ wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the antitrust argument against AMP is a bit more subtle. The argument seems to be that Google is abusing it's market dominance to push sites into using AMP. This in turn prevents them from using third party trackers, while the pages will be served via Google caches when accessed from Google search. Hence Google gets to track the visitor, while third party tracking from other providers is prevented. I.e. Googl…

Third party trackers are not prevented.

You can use Google Analytics through the element [1], but since AMP prevents third-party scripts that were not approved by Google, I'm not sure how you would include other trackers in an AMP site.

[1] https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...

Re: Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google

#413

Post by drilldrive » Sun, Jun 02, 2019, 7:23 AM UTC

klipt wrote: post #367

roenxi wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does look like their is a strong partisan element here - but that isn't a bad thing in this instance. I think this is an interesting tangent to take. From a health-of-the-system perspective it really should be intolerable that a few large closed-garden platforms control the flow of information. Information monocultures are a threat to everyone, even if one partisan group feels more threatened than the other at any…

On the other hand forcing media to give 50% of time/space to "both sides" leads to silly situations like 50% of media saying vaccines do cause autism, dinosaur fossils were planted by the devil, net neutrality is bad, etc.

You could either keep a blanket rule of 50% coverage excempted from such cases, or you could only mandate 50% coverage rules on particular settings/events, such as Presidential election main-line coverage.

Re: Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google

#414

Post by blub » Sun, Jun 02, 2019, 7:40 AM UTC

summerlight wrote: post #390

blub wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You got a fancy design which may give you a big revenue boost at the cost of compromising user privacy or legal risks? Good luck with upcoming privacy and/or legal review sessions; they don't care about your product since they have no motivation to do that." From the outside, it's doubtful that this team exists at all. Or if they do, they must watch YouTube all day instead of doing their jobs, because Google is gett…

> because Google is getting better and better at compromising privacy, thanks to fancy designs/dark patterns You're suggesting that the situation is getting worse, which I don't really see much clues from the linked report, though I don't want to spend my weekend on scrutinizing 44 pages report. I don't work for Maps, but AFAIK it used to track you silently and didn't give you control on user history. But now at leas…

You seem to know even less about maps than the bunch of HN users complaining about the tricks and dark patterns Google was using to convince people to share location data.

Just do a search for "dark pattern" + Google on HN.

Your business model is at odds with privacy, you have that much figured out. But for unknown reasons you seem to think that Google can win against market forces and implement privacy-maintaining SW solutions.

That is disproven by Google's entire history. It's gotten particularly clear lately with AMP & Chrome.

One more thing: the world doesn't owe Google a business model. The world can survive just fine without internet ads, Google, Facebook and Amazon.

Re: Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google

#415

Post by SomeOldThrow » Sun, Jun 02, 2019, 9:37 AM UTC

googthrwy_ wrote: post #198

nsomaru wrote: post #174

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 c…

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. Googler here, I understand why you may think Google is evil now and I'm not going to say they are a perfect company. But I think you should consider that i…

> If parts of the company is doing bad things, it doesn't make all of us sell outs in my opinion.

You’re either lying to yourself or you’re naive. Either way it’s not an excuse to dismiss agency.

Re: Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google

#416

Post by lame88 » Sun, Jun 02, 2019, 11:35 AM UTC

ryl00 wrote: post #315

jetzzz wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I now trust Microsoft more than Google What's so good about Microsoft? They filled their OS with spyware and adware and they seem to be incompetent as a tech company - remember their recent Windows update that deleted user data even though early testers have reported the issue.

> They filled their OS with spyware and adware But only after Google, et. al. proved how willing we all are to trade our data for free stuff. This is just the new reality of SaaS, at least as targeted to the general public who now expect free updates for life, isn't it?

Sure if you wanna accept it as a foregone conclusion then that will certainly become the new reality. I paid for windows, including those updates, by the way. I dont need to be mined and packaged for all my information’s worth on top of that without any sufficient choice in the matter.

Re: Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google

#417

Post by lame88 » Sun, Jun 02, 2019, 11:44 AM UTC

nsomaru wrote: post #174

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 c…

I hope you’re only marginally more trusting of Microsoft. Open sourcing stuff and embracing linux has given them a lot of tech brownie points (effectively, good PR) but just like with what google was vs what it has become, it’s important to be cautious in taking this all at face value when it’s unclear what their endgame is, besides trying to exploit its position as the dominant OS to catch up to google on data mining and selling their customers. They could very well do the same with .NET (Core), and I fully expect that to be true in some fashion. We’ve already seen signs of it with default “telemetry” in the .net core sdk.

Re: Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google

#418

Post by JacobiX » Sun, Jun 02, 2019, 12:26 PM UTC

malvosenior wrote: post #408

smhenderson wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did nothing to “tweak” Firefox. I did use their binary installer for Linux because I wanted the latest updates and Slackware is a bit conservative with its packages. My Linux box at work is an HP laptop from several years ago with a pretty basic business class AMD graphics card in it, I did have to install AMD’s binary drivers on this machine. And, using Slackware, it’s X. Not sure if Wayland is easily installable…

Thank you for the great info! I bet it's the AMD graphics card helping. I know Nvidia is a mess (and requires the aforementioned tweaking). I'm glad it's working well for you and I'd love to test a setup like this as I really want off Chromium but haven't had an equal experience with Firefox (on OS X and Linux with Nvidia cards).

In my Linux and Freebsd boxes I have to install the proprietary driver for Nvidia cards to have full hardware acceleration.

Re: Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google

#419

Post by Zigurd » Sun, Jun 02, 2019, 2:17 PM UTC

endorphone wrote: post #323

Zigurd wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft managed to kill Windows Phone by itself and take Nokia, and a more mature more viable smartphone OS, down with it. Windows phone was a "viable alternative" by the end, but in the beginning it was uncompetitive without any hindrances. Also recall that mobile carriers and OEMs were opposed to Android because it would further degrade their ability to create walled gardens. The carriers lost control of apps, no…

Also recall that mobile carriers and OEMs were opposed to Android I agree with the other claims (about Microsoft killing Windows Phone through their own actions and choices), however this one is a bit weird. Apple gave essentially no ground to carriers, which was a huge change. Which is why carriers all embraced Android, at a time when it was horribly uncompetitive, because it returned control to them, letting them p…

It was tough sledding at first, with just T-Mobile and HTC, both second-tier players, being first to adopt Android. Android's SDK had been released well before this first deal. Android could have turned out to be an interesting but minor embedded OS with a less well run ecosystem of system integrators than Windows CE.

Android was in fact an alternative to iPhone. Google was more amenable to carrier and OEM mods to Android and third-party app stores. But carriers still were hoping the traditional OEM and app store walled gardens would hold, and Apple could be confined to high-end customers.

App store revenue, at that time, was still small for both the carriers' walled garden and for Apple. It was more a matter of control.

Re: Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google

#420

Post by ocdtrekkie » Sun, Jun 02, 2019, 3:45 PM UTC

bduerst wrote: post #384

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your employer is collecting this data right now , as my link points out. And it's actually gotten better at it in the last few months, as I purged all of my purchases from Gmail that it detected, and then a few weeks later, it found more, as they'd refined their ability to mine more transactional emails. It is absolutely mining email, and it's extracting purchase data from it, that isn't even used in Gmail or reveale…

Again, last time you doxxed me on HN I told you my profile on HN, which you looked at, says my opinions are my own and do not reflect any organization. It's technical illiteracy to confuse parsing and filtering with data mining for ads. Read the article, or don't, this is just a comment.

I recognize the difference, but they're parsing and filtering the most valuable advertising data, and then just... shoving it in settings and doing nothing with it? There's no clear reason why Google is collecting purchase data from Gmail, and actively working on refining the code used for it. If you look at my comment that you originally responded to, I did not say they used it for ad targeting, merely that they collected it, which is true. Even if they do not use it for ad targeting, the only purpose your article states they won't use that data, it's still very valuable research data to collect.

Not only that, but as the articles about purchase data parsing states, you can't even opt out of it or remove items from Google's purchase history information except to delete the emails themselves. Which, for people entrusting their communications to Gmail, is a drastic step. It's surprising to even have a "remove" button, but for it then to tell you, in order to do so, you have to delete your emails.

As an aside, it's not doxxing someone when you post as your real name, and publish your employer publicly under the same name. The "my opinions are my own" line is a release of Google's legal liability for what you say, which is why a lot of employers suggest or require similar statements. However, it's psychologically impossible for your opinions to not be swayed by the employer who pays you and whom you spend a large percentage of your time with, regardless of whether or not you are "representing" them officially or not.