Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 502 posts

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

#271

Post by rayiner »

jorblumesea wrote: post #264
rayiner wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is it? Or is it evidence that Barr is a traditional, religious, law-and-order conservative, writing at a time when law and order was in vogue even among Democrats? It should be noted that in 1992, the increase in crime rates compared to 1960 was still significantly larger than the increase in incarceration rates over that same period. (In 1992, crime rates had increased by a factor of 5x, while incarceration had increased by a factor of 3x.)

Likewise for your point that Barr endorses a theory a unitary executive. So do many people. What does that prove? It’s not a controversial idea. The very first sentence of Article II of the United States Constitution says: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” It doesn’t even say something like “there shall be an executive branch and the President shall be in charge of it.” It vests the executive Power (capitalization in original) in a single person. Article I and Article III, by contrast, “vest” the legislative and judicial powers in institutions (Congress, and the Supreme Court). The choice of phrasing appears pretty deliberate. And notably absent from Article II is any mention of career bureaucrats who can exercise the executive Power" of the United States independently of the person in whom that Power is vested.

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

#272

Post by falcolas »

dimator wrote: post #81
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…

There's some truth to this. For many years, Google allows users the ability to wholesale export all of their data (perhaps as a defense for this moment in time). If the consumer market wanted an alternative, wouldn't there be competing companies by now that would ingest all that data and give you matching mail, docs, video, etc, services? On the advertising front, Google is no longer the only game in town, so by defi…

> On the advertising front, Google is no longer the only game in town, so by definition not a monopoly.

Who are their competitors (I've not heard of one that isn't directly tied to a platform (a'la facebook))? How is the market segmented between Google and their competitors? If google had, as an example, 80% of the market share, it could still legitimately be considered to be a monopoly, even if it had 1000 competitors fighting for the last 20%.

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

#273

Post by panopticon »

rayiner wrote: post #244
mullingitover wrote: post #240

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.

Note that "cable news network" is an important qualifier in that statement. The network newscasts (ABC, CBS, NBC) each see 3x Fox's news programming viewership.

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

#274

Post by maxore44 »

papeda wrote: post #163
CaveTech wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're also currently much better regulated

They are? Recent history suggests it's way easier for a random person to build a successful search engine (e.g. DuckDuckGo) than a successful telecom, and I have way more choice of search engine than telecom.

I definitely won't argue that telecoms play fair, but there are high barriers to entry for starting a telecom. If you start a new telecom only to compete for customers with an existing telecom in a certain area, you have to pay a huge expense to build out your network and your upside will be limited by the ensuing price war.

Not arguing that starting a telecom is easier than a search engine, but I think a large part of that difficulty is inherent to the industry.

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

#275

Post by bilekas »

I'm sure I don't need to point it out but:

If we believe for a moment, this is a play against Google's liberal position, or at the very least Google's employees liberal outlook.. (I will try to pull up references).

Lets say it's true: These actions are by all accounts the same as the old communist states.. Only this time they're under the guise of legal proceedings which have some precedent. Americans would usually be so alergic to the idea of such a thought that there would be uproar.. But nationalism and faith in a leader/idea has prevailed.

I would argue that it's super rich for the Justice Dept to be worried about antitrust all of a sudden, as a European, I've been fortunate to be protected far better than the US over the years by why of data protection laws. Also knowing Google and other major tech companies penchant for moving their headquarters abroad (Ireland for example), its super interesting to see a swift interest in antitrust..

The US has had, and still does I believe, a huge fight to get chip & pin on debit and credit cards because of insurance liability.. But hey.. Those tech companies.. Gotta get them first.

I'm no tinfoil hat wearer, but if it walks like a duck .

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

#276

Post by bilegeek »

jorblumesea wrote: post #221
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…

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…

If I may add to the weirdness, there is also his speech on "militant secularism"[1].

[1]https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/attorney-general-william-...

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

#277

Post by mullingitover »

rayiner wrote: post #268
mullingitover wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 unintenti…

You can drill down into US traffic, sure (and I'm sure Google delivers results that are ranked appropriate to region), but Fox still doesn't win there - it's beaten by Huffington Post, CNN, Google News, and Yahoo News.

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

#278

Post by ploika »

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…

I think economists are still happy to use the current term.

The Herfinadahl-Hirschman Index is a widely used measure of market concentration. It's calculated completely independently of how the firms in the market go about getting and protecting their market share.

If the HHI is high enough, and depending on how important the market is, this can be a sign that the market should be investigated to ensure that there aren't monopolistic anti-competitive or anti-consumer practices taking place.

Google is by far the biggest player in the search market (outside China at least), so I don't think an investigation is unjustified. There have been more than enough posts on HN and elsewhere about decisions Google have made over the years that show disregard for both competitors (not so much in search, but in other areas where Google has a footprint) and consumers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herfindahl%E2%80%93Hirschman_I...

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

#279

Post by baddox »

dontreact wrote: post #195
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…

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.

That seems extremely short-sighted. There’s nothing stopping people from coming up with a better way to find what you’re looking for than Google’s search engine.

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

#280

Post by dragonwriter »

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…

> IMHO they're not a monopoly, at least not in the traditional sense of the word.

The antitrust sense is about empirical control demonstrated by how markets respond in practice rather than the abstract theoretical potential you describe.

Post reply on HN