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Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google

wsj.com

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Re: Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google

#221

Post by jorblumesea »

subsubzero wrote: post #66
akersten wrote: post #23

I will continue to believe that this is another tentacle of William Barr's political harassment of Google and tech in general until he leads the same crusade against other 'monopolies' of the same degree like Comcast, Apple, Boeing, Amazon, United Airlines, etc.

Not saying google isn't a monopoly, it classically is, same with facebook. But I wonder if Goog wasn't a majority "blue" company would he aggressively go after them. The problem is there are so many oligarchy's controlling industries. Chips, well its a two or three company game(intel, amd, ARM). Lets look at airlines, well its united, delta, american etc. Communications(cell phones), ATT, Verizon, Sprint/Tmobile. Ame…

William Barr is an extremely contentious pick for DOJ. It's hard to understate this. Just read his bio, it's nuts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Barr

> Barr is a longtime proponent of the unitary executive theory of nearly unfettered presidential authority over the executive branch of the U.S. government.

> Barr as attorney general in 1992 authored the report The Case for More Incarceration, where he argued for an increase in the United States incarceration rate

> Having criticized the Mueller investigation before taking office, Barr did not recuse himself from overseeing the investigation as attorney general. After receiving Mueller's report he issued a four-page letter to Congress, describing what he said were its principal conclusions, and adding his opinion that the evidence presented did not establish obstruction of justice by Trump. Special counsel Mueller privately responded that Barr's letter had misrepresented the report.

> Barr intervened in the criminal case against convicted Trump associate Roger Stone, recommending a lighter sentence for Stone than the career prosecutors who had worked on the case. In May 2020, the Justice Department under Barr announced the dropping of charges against ex-Trump adviser Michael Flynn despite an earlier guilty plea by Flynn, which he later filed to withdraw.

So yeah, he's a hatchet man for the president, through and through. This is just revenge for tech's left leaning donations and stance, at the bidding of Trump of course. Big tech has long been in the sights of conservatives and this is just another shot in what's been a growing conflict.

Re: Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google

#222

Post by nothis »

sub7 wrote: post #197

About fucking time. Search is the big one but please don't neglect Android and Chrome. And take Apple to task as well - their app store policies and new app signing requirements for OSX are absurd. Amazon has just started abusing it's monopoly so they'll be in the next antitrust wave I imagine and get away here. Don't even get me started on Whatsapp. Consistently anti-user and competition crushing behaviour in tech s…

I don’t care about search. This should be about chrome.

Re: Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google

#223

Post by kbutler »

inapis wrote: post #172
tyre wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Precedent is tricky. Democrats removing the filibuster for judges came back to haunt them. There was a recent (last few weeks) SCOTUS decision that came out with numerous opinions by different coalitions. You could tell that they were all maneuvering around this idea of precedent. Liberal justices who ended up on either side (majority or minority) were couching their votes as upholding a prior precedent, even w…

As a non-american, it baffles me that even justices are divided into conservative or liberals. Just why? What’s the history here?

As an American, it baffles me, too.

The courts, and in particular the supreme court, have increasingly been weaponized as ways to both advance agendas and preserve inviolable causes of both parties. Since the justices are appointed by political processes, that appointment has also become increasingly political, to the point that people justify voting for a presidential candidate they dislike because of the supreme court vacancies the candidate will presumably be able to fill.

The libertarian answer would be to reduce the power and discretion of government officials so it won't be such a high-stakes, partisan process.

Re: Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google

#224

Post by nycdatasci »

lhorie wrote: post #194
onewhonknocks wrote: post #188

IMHO they're not a monopoly, at least not in the traditional sense of the word. Traditional monopolies "control supply of a good or service, and where the entry of new producers is prevented or highly restricted." In this case, the supply of a good or service (social networking, webpage indexing and searching) are not controlled by Facebook and Google because they aren't finite resources. Anyone can index the web and…

"If you're not paying for the product, then you are the product" is how the old adage goes. If users are the product, then couldn't one argue that it's a monopoly over the supply of users?

I think this is a good point. Users are the product. From a typical consumer's perspective, there are other viable options for google-like services. From the perspective of a small business trying to target a specific audience with ads, are there viable alternatives?

Re: Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google

#225

Post by gfodor »

md_ wrote: post #153
TheArcane wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I’m not sure that’s inherently disqualifying. When it comes to questions of law and justice, it seems entirely reasonable to ask about similar cases, simply to investigate the equal and fair application of law, no? “Whatsboutism”, as I understand it, is a technique where one brings up ill-proven allegations that are unrelated to the matter at hand merely to distract. Here, the claim seems much more on point: it’s tha…

Law especially at the federal DOJ level is as much about which cases to pursue as it is about what cases have merit. Either no monopolists should be prosecuted or a select subset worthy of the opportunity cost should be. How big the subset is a question, and the proper subset could be zero, but it's not a contradiction to see selective enforcement of anti-trust. The opposite, where many big, massive cases are opened on many fronts simultaneously is almost never the methodology of federal law enforcement afaict.

Re: Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google

#226

Post by t-writescode »

judge2020 wrote: post #217
dontreact wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one can build a search engine as good as Google without the data flowing through it every day. That have so many click logs to train their models and see what works, there is just no way to compete. If all Google engineers left at the same time, Google would still probably end up dominant by hiring new folks to get things back up and running. No amount of human labor will be able to close that data gap.

The Google search engine didn't have anything to build off of when it was introduced since it was using an algorithm and not ML. You could create a search engine today without utilizing any click data outside of "what link did this user click on the result page and did they search for a similar query or try another link as their next action". In fact, this is already happening. DDG is building its own crawler (I ofte…

I believe DDG also uses Bing data.

Re: Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google

#227

Post by mushufasa »

onewhonknocks wrote: post #188

IMHO they're not a monopoly, at least not in the traditional sense of the word. Traditional monopolies "control supply of a good or service, and where the entry of new producers is prevented or highly restricted." In this case, the supply of a good or service (social networking, webpage indexing and searching) are not controlled by Facebook and Google because they aren't finite resources. Anyone can index the web and…

Not sure where you got your definition.

The economic definition of a natural monopoly is where firms have increasing returns to scale. That means where firms can produce more product per unit cost as the volume sold of that product gets large. https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/1997-...

A good example is electricity -- it's super duper hard to put up electrical wires all around a country. But once the wires are up, it's not so hard to maintain them or extend them to cover more people over time.

Google and Facebook are perfect examples. The software engineer salaries ain't cheap to build their product, but once built the products can be scaled quickly at relatively low cost. Furthermore, their products' value itself has increasing returns to scale; the more people on a social network or using a search engine, the more valuable to advertise on them.

Re: Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google

#228

Post by yowlingcat »

TheArcane wrote: post #134
yowlingcat wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, tech is the industry with the most insidious monopolies, not oil, telecom, or defense. And surely, the current government will enthusiastically move forward with the actual /legwork/ (rather than saber rattling) of killing its goose that lays the golden egg. Let's be real here. None of these megacorps are getting broken up any time soon. We haven't had a trustbuster in office for a very long time. The megacor…

[flagged]

> Whataboutism, also known as whataboutery, is a variant of the tu quoque logical fallacy that attempts to discredit an opponent's position by charging them with hypocrisy without directly refuting or disproving their argument.

Oh?

You see, I was not charging the OP with hypocrisy. To the contrary -- I think that the desire makes sense and would be nice to see happen. But I just wonder about how the messy details of that would work. I mean, we have certainly failed to break up other industries because they compromised the antitrust apparatus through regulatory capture. To not engage with the elephant in the room of regulatory capture (when talking about antitrust) is to not talk about antitrust at all.

Re: Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google

#229

Post by dredmorbius »

xoxoy wrote: post #52
pb7 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is Google or Amazon or Facebook a monopoly?

The antitrust lawsuit is focused on Google’s dominance of search. The specific question is whether Google has a monopoly on search. I think the case is pretty strong that it does.

The antitrust lawsuit is focused on Google’s dominance of search...

Not principally:

Much of the states’ investigation has focused on Google’s online advertising business. The company owns the dominant tool at every link in the complex chain between online publishers and advertisers. The Justice Department likewise is making Google’s ad technology one of its points of emphasis. But it is also focusing more broadly on concerns that Google uses its dominant search business to stifle competition, people familiar with the matter said.

From TFA.

Re: Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google

#230

Post by mthoms »

papeda wrote: post #187

As some variant of millenial, I'm continually bemused by how many of my peers are on board with breaking up "big tech" and use "big tech" products multiple times every single day. If I bring up federal contracting, which is an industry of comparable size, and which is dominated by companies founded well over 50 years ago [1], and which is way more politically opaque, and whose funding they cannot as tax-paying US cit…

I'll take a stab at this.

Perhaps it's because the internet (and surrounding technologies) are so much more foundational to society. Without information moving freely and fairly, we'll mostly never learn about any of the other big problems that need addressing (of which, the one you pointed out seems perfectly valid).

Also, I think the average person feels more empowered with regards to shaping the future of the internet, than they do with something so entrenched, opaque, political and corrupt (IMHO) as federal contracting.

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