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Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google

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

#251
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Comcast, they need to be broken up Breaking up a regional monopoly into smaller regional monopolies doesn't work (see baby Bells). What would be better is requiring the owners of any last mile infrastructure to lease said infrastructure to any other interested operator at cost. This worked with DSL, but the mandate ended when we moved on to other technologies like cable and fiber that had no such requirements. Inst…

Moot point, everything will be wireless in 10 years with 5G speeds and the expense of laying fiber.

I’ll believe it when I see it. Nothing wireless comes close to The experience of a wired fiber connection, especially getting through walls of various materials.

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

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might be based on user preference influencing weighting for search results. I've know I've personally done all I can to block Fox News and other low quality sources from Google News.

Fox News is by a large margin the #1 cable news network. If search results were weighted based on user preferences you’d expect it to show up more, not less.

There might be less overlap between people who passively leave their TV running on Fox News and people looking up articles on the internet than you think. It's ranked #21 in News and Media sites[1]. CNN is ranked ninth, so actually it'd be pretty questionable if Fox News were returned in search results more than CNN.

[1] https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/category/news-and-me...

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

#253
post #206

Interesting, I wonder if it has anything to do with this [0]. Google wanted to play politics by choosing winners and curating results...now they get to face the consequences for abusing such an enormous power 0. https://www.siliconrepublic.com/companies/google-diversity-i...

How is your link related to antitrust?

Google is regularly accused of leaning left and has taken open steps to curate search results and other content in an ostensibly unbiased manner, but one which may disproportionately censor right leaning sources.

This is motive for a right leaning government lead by an infamous narcissist to attempt to rein in Google's power over information.

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

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telecom is a horse of a slightly different color though because they are intentionally granted regional monopolies over utilities. There should be better regulatory enforcement of these utility deals, but between regulatory capture and nearly trust-like brokered deals to swap regions among each other to best minimize any particular region's regulatory control and collusion opportunities between neighboring regions, a…

Telecoms aren’t intentionally granted regional monopolies. It’s illegal under the Cable Act of 1992.

The distinction is on which meaning of "monopoly" and "monopoly with respect to what". Yes, no telecom should be the only telecom in a region, but each telecom is granted an exclusivity (monopoly) on a particular utility line: cable companies are given (in most regions) exclusive rights to a region's originally TV focused fiber and coax cables and phone companies are given (in most regions) exclusive rights to a region's originally phone-focused fiber and coax cables. The convergence of all such lines towards data/internet-utility lines has let things like the Cable Act of 1992 declare a telecom not a monopoly with respect to a region so long as there is, for instance, a duopoly with a cable and a phone company. But there is still just one cable company with a (should be) regulated monopoly on cable lines and installations, and there is still just one phone company with a (should be) regulated monopoly on phone lines and installations. Those exclusive utility licenses themselves are still called and managed as intentionally granted monopolies for the public benefit (which is why they are regulated as such, and should be enforced better).

Yet even under this situation of "competition" between say a cable company and a phone company in most regions you have a duopoly and in very rare cases you find tripolies in the US. I did accuse these companies of swapping agreements in a friendly matter like if not exactly as a Trust to evenly distribute such duopolies and make it tough to enforce the places where the laissez faire regulatory environment around the duopolies have led to de facto monopolies by benchmarks such as which provide modern internet speeds at the neighborhood and/or building level. (It's been too long since the US was last interested in trust busting. It's also maybe been too long with the hand off the regulatory rudder for those cable and phone monopoly licenses.)

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

#255

I don't have a problem with this. But I wonder why there isn't similar willpower to pursue, say, telecoms, banks, Monsanto, Luxxotica, Disney, and the like. Why is it just big tech?

Very specific big tech. There has been far more blatant antitrust behavior from Amazon lately for example.

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

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

As someone who is on the liberal side on incarceration issues: what does arguing in favor of higher incarceration rights have to do with being a “hatchet man” for the President? Especially when the President in question has made strides in reducing mass incarceration that even Vox had to admit were extremely significant: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/12/18/18140973/state... (

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

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Below is a link to a list of mergers and acquisitions by Google over the last twenty years, many of them were search engines and online portals. This is the type of thing that the Antitrust Laws were meant to prevent. However laws are only as good as the government's willingness to exercise them. Hopefully this signals the end of the second Gilded Age, and a return to the creative destruction that has made the USA's…

Not a fan of creative destruction in the software sphere, personally. In a lot of sectors, sure. I'm all for someone building a better car. What benefit does mass competition in the software service space give me? How many bespoke APIs am I expected to integrate against to build something useful? Different for difference's sake is the curse of our industry.

Without creative destruction in software, there is no Linux, there is no GCC. So no Apple macOS, all PC's run Windows, and likely there is no iOS/iPhone.

Microsoft would also [1] own the internet. Their browser IE would be the only significant consumer share, there would be no Mozilla, no open source browser. So no incentive to open the browser up to plugins. Microsoft would hold all the information on consumer browsing habits. Would they permit other search engines? Unlikely if there is no antitrust regulation compelling them to do so.

But that was then. I think your premise is, we more or less have all the software technology we need why do more, unless it comes from an incumbent, in the form of incremental improvements? Why shouldn't Apple, Google, Microsoft shut down their app stores a little more? Keep the development in-house. What's the point of allowing this creative destruction from 3rd parties? More and more, we only get these increasingly tired, corporate innovations. Fewer ports on computers in the name of locking down devices to make them less 'hackable', more restrictions on these OS that increasingly feel like sandboxes, because why bother giving users the unfettered ability to create stuff, it just allows more creative destruction. Why should corporations knock it out of the park when they can just suppress upstarts with unfair competition?

By the way, antitrust regulation also prevents [2] Apple, Google, Adobe etc suppressing developer salaries. Remember antitrust law also shares incentives and motivation, to encourage progress.

But the better question is what is the future without without creative destruction, without shared incentives and competition? We have the answer in thousands of years of monarchies. Monarchies are a stagnant form of human development, they have no incentivize to upset their current order so they constantly suppress change. We don't celebrate this ancient monarchy or that one, like we do federated political systems. Compare the cultural developments in ancient Greece's federated city states vs surrounding empires. Or the Roman Empire, when it was ruled by the Senate, before emperors ran it into the ground. Or the Gutenberg Press, that brought printing to the European states where publishers were incentivized by profit, compared to dynastic China that developed the technology hundreds of years before, which helped trigger the Renaissance. Or Britain after the Glorious Revolution broke the monarchy's monopolies and led to the Industrial Age. Or the Jamestown settlement after it began profit sharing to motivate the colonists, in the face of failure, which directly lead to the political institutions which created the United States of America. Without power sharing, all civilizations degrade into inheritance systems, where opportunity is few and far between, unless you go rogue.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/6/17827042/antitrust-1990s-m...

[2] https://www.justice.gov/atr/case-document/final-judgment-0

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

#258
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 agree. In believe such opinions are shaped mainly by the media. So I'd argue these people are in fact ill-informed and to be more blunt, not that intelligent after all.

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

#259
post #52
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.

Nope. I use Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo daily.

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

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DuckDuckGo has better human-centered results, but they miss a lot of the more technical stuff.

Try using bang syntax for more specific results. Ie: append `!so` to search Stack Overflow, etc. It's similar to Google's `site:stackoverflow.com` but much nicer.

Does DDG support the site: search modifier? I find that to be much more discoverable and usable than remembering a laundry list of !commands.
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