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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

#261

Post by dang »

decebalus1 wrote: post #142
mrkramer wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's dominant market position was achieved through market competition not through impairing the ability of smaller companies to enter markets. Even in Google Chrome you can pick DuckDuckGo and Ecosia as your default search engine. Most of Chrome users probably never heard of those two search engines. For example would YouTube be successful as it is today if it wasn't Google's resources and knowledge to skyrocket…

> Google's dominant market position was achieved through market competition not through impairing the ability of smaller companies to enter markets. Have you been living under a rock? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_vs._Google#Goog...

Please do not post in the flamewar style to HN. Providing correct information is fine, snark and swipes are not.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#262

Post by dredmorbius »

nostrademons wrote: post #61
iateanapple wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are any of those companies (except Amazon) even in the same league in terms of negative impact as big tech?

Boeing's 737 Max debacle killed two plane-fuls of people . It's pretty hard to argue that either Amazon or Google has had negative effects on that magnitude.

I don't have an example at hand directly involving Google or Amazon (though these may well exist), but if you'll accept a case in which another cavalier tech monopoly has directly contributed to massive loss of life, there is the case of the ongoing Myanmar genocide:

In August 2018, a study[86] estimated that more than 24,000+ Rohingya people were killed by the Myanmar military and the local Buddhists since the "clearance operations" started on 25 August 2017. The study[86] also estimated that more than 18,000 Rohingya Muslim women and girls were raped, 116,000 Rohingya were beaten, 36,000 Rohingya were thrown into fire,[86][87][88][89][90][91] burned down and destroyed 354 Rohingya villages in Rakhine state,[92] looted many Rohingya houses,[93] committed widespread gang rapes and other forms of sexual violence against the Rohingya Muslim women and girls.[94][95][96] The military drive also displaced a large number of Rohingya people and made them refugees. According to the United Nations reports, as of January 2018, nearly 690,000 Rohingya people had fled or had been driven out of Rakhine state who then took shelter in the neighboring Bangladesh as refugees.[97] In December, two Reuters journalists who had been covering the Inn Din massacre event were arrested and imprisoned.[97]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Muslims_in_Myan...

The company involved, Facebook:

is Facebook really doing all it can to try to halt the spread of violence? Not according to the United Nations’ Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, which released its own report on Tuesday looking into the causes of the genocide that has taken place against the Rohingya in that country. Among other recommendations, the UN report says any commercial entity doing business in Myanmar should not “enter into an economic or financial relationship with the security forces,” including the military police, known as the Tatmadaw.

https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/facebook-un-myanmar-geno...

With no absolution at all to Beoing for its impressive death count, 24,000 souls, and tens of thousands of rapes and beatings,, in which Facebook's negligence played sufficient role for the UN to specifically call it out, is more than a couple of planes-full, and is why what happens online is in fact as serious and consequential as can be.

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

#263

Post by davesque »

I think this was a long time coming. However, I don't trust the current administration's motives for doing it. My instinct is that this is just some behind-the-scenes string pulling to eliminate an entity that is seen more as a political threat than an economic one.

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

#264

Post by jorblumesea »

rayiner wrote: post #256
jorblumesea wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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... (

Bush senior was big on incarceration and the war on drugs was a central tenant of his platform. It's pointing out that he [Barr] has a long history of doing what the President wants for political purposes.

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

#265

Post by dang »

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]

Please keep canned arguments and name-calling off HN. It leads to much lamer discussion.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

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

#266

Post by b3kart »

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…

Sure, but when Google have been starting out they didn’t have to compete with...Google (as it is today). While companies that would like to enter the market now have to. And Google has a massive competitive advantage: their data and their scale. Not saying that regulation will necessarily help, and it’s not Google’s fault that they’re so good, but it’s silly not to admit that it’s hard to enter the search market today.

Now DDG is interesting. Their results are noticeably worse (YMMV). But they are using privacy as the selling point. I wonder if you can possibly have results as good as Google’s, or be as big and profitable as Google, while maintaining user’s privacy. I guess we’ll find out.

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

#267

Post by cat199 »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #132
subsubzero wrote: post #66

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…

> But I wonder if Goog wasn't a majority "blue" company would he aggressively go after them. "Majority blue" is in a majority of their employees vote Democrat? That's just what happens when you're headquartered in California, in a metro area, with a workforce that skews younger. I don't think that Google is somehow pushing liberal objectives in a meaningful way.

> I don't think that Google is somehow pushing liberal objectives in a meaningful way.

if they were, i'm sure a careful examination of topics highlighted in google doodles i'm sure would illustrate this one way or another

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

#268

Post by rayiner »

mullingitover wrote: post #252
rayiner wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Why is that the correct metric to use? CNN is a global news outlet, while Fox is primarily domestic. Unsurprisingly, CNN ranks highly on a measure of global website visits. What does that have to do with preferences in the US?

I mean, one possibility is that Google’s algorithms are causing the politics of web site visitors people in France to affect the search results of people in Kansas. That seems like an unintentional form of pressing liberal agendas.

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

#269

Post by [deleted] »

chrischattin wrote: post #48
quattrofan wrote: post #14

The big one is Amazon. The revenue from AWS funds the ability for them to crush the high street on the shopping side. They should be forced to sell off AWS as a separate company.

This is all beneficial for the consumer, no? Having a competitive advantage is not illegal. Someone correct me, but isn't the law's intent to protect people from abuse of monopolistic power? Which wouldn't be the case here.

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