421–430 of 440 posts
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Board members are not company employees, and Eric Schmidt is not a Google engineer as GP claimed. This is a stretch even by conspiracist standards.
Schmidt was the CEO of Google during the first Obama campaign in 2008, and during most of the ramp up to the 2012 campaign.
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…
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This is a bold take! Google's close ties with the Obama administration makes the Trump administration suspicious!
Close ties are suspicious, strong swings in prosecution policy are also suspicious.
So, there is no swing in policy, at least among the career officials.
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Is Amazon Basics any different than any other store brand? It's not like national retailers before amazon were just throwing darts at a printout of their catalog.
That isn't a meaningful question for anti-trust cases. The rules are simply different for big companies.
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Buying competition = removing competition Removing competition is literally the most anticompetitive thing you can do. Like definitionally. That’s why all major (edit: US) acquisitions take months to years to get approval from the SEC.
Buying a competitor is no more anticompetitive than causing a competitor to shut down because they weren’t competitive enough. What is supposed to happen to competitors that are actually less efficient and/or produce less appealing products? Do people really expect “competition” to mean a perpetual exact tie between two or more competitors?
Well first off, predatory pricing is a thing, where competition shuts down because a market participant is deliberately losing money to gain market share in hopes of raising prices after everyone else gives up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing#United_State...
But a competitor doesn't have to shut down to be bought out. In fact, why would a company ever buy a competitor who's only alternative is shutting down? Seems far simpler to buy the useful assets from the bankruptcy. Here's one possibility I've seen: an inefficient incumbent buys a startup that has been winning procurement bids away from them lately. They have deep pockets from all the contracts not yet up for renewal, and can afford to buy the company now while they only have a few source of cash flow. End result is that prices remain high, and the borg lives on a little bit less cash flow until the contracts they just bought are up for renegotiation.
> What is supposed to happen to competitors that are actually less efficient and/or produce less appealing products?
They sell less, and make changes. Maybe they drop prices, invest in efficiency or pursue some differentiation strategy. It doesn't need to be a 50/50 but winner-take-all markets should not be surprised when regulators come knocking.
Look, I get it — the issues with Google, Facebook, Amazon. But I can’t help but think about how AT&T and other ISPs banded together to claim they shouldn’t be regulated because they are Internet companies just like FANG during the Net Neutrality discussions. When I see just how bad ISPs are acting, in lack of competition, price gouging, content ownership, data monitoring, it really seems they were successful in shift…
Not only the US is affected by Google's actions and ISPs are not evil everywhere. This is why Google is the more important issue from the perspective of the rest of the world. This is a transnational issue.
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> The "spyware and adware" is added by those who sell the computers (i.e. the hardware manufacturers) rather than by Microsoft. Hmm? What about the surveillance tech that was added in Windows 8 through a Windows Update that sends pretty much all your activity to Microsoft? Am I missing something about this?
They serve ads in the start menu and on the lock screen, including some fairly pushy ones (Edge! Edge! You must use Edge!). The telemetry is controversial but does not appear to be used in the same ways that Google uses all of their data. Plus, you can disable 99% of the telemetry.
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Which raises deep suspicions about the political motivations of this "investigation". Anti-trust is about companies using their market power to exclude rivals, raise prices, and hurt consumers. It's not about consumers overwhelmingly choosing a product because they like it more. Can anyone really say that Google's practices are more anti-competitive than, say, the dominant players in broadband or health insurance or…
> Anti-trust is about companies using their market power to exclude rivals, raise prices, and hurt consumers. It's not about consumers overwhelmingly choosing a product because they like it more. Antitrust doesn’t care about how you got market dominance. It cares about what you do with it. To use the browser example I used elsewhere: maybe Google’s dominance in search is because it’s indisputably the best. But that d…
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> "push" their browser Windows didn't get to 90% market share because consumers chose it. Windows achieved overwhelming dominance because Microsoft punished computer manufacturers if they sold any competing operating system. That's anti-competitive, and Google isn't doing anything like that. Then Microsoft used their illegally-obtained dominant position in operating systems to bundle their shitty browser, essentially…
> That's anti-competitive, and Google isn't doing anything like that. Just this week it was announced that Google will disable important features required to implement ad blockers. Google absolutely abuses their monopolies (browser, search, streaming video, possibly maps) at least as aggressively as MS ever did. Have you ever tried to watch YouTube on Firefox? That’s a deliberately hobbled experience if I’ve ever see…
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Yet they don't. Selective enforcement is arbitrary, politically motivated enforcement.
Every enforcement agency at every level does selective enforcement. Nobody has the resources to go after every case of law-breaking.