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

311–320 of 502 posts

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

#311

Post by thekyle »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #126
aspenmayer wrote: post #2

'Both the Justice Department and a group of state attorneys general are likely to file antitrust lawsuits against Alphabet Inc.’s Google—and are well into planning for litigation, according to people familiar with the matter. 'The Justice Department is moving toward bringing a case as soon as this summer, some of the people said. At least some state attorneys general—led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republ…

The case against Google is "whatever we can throw together to pressure them to stop pushing end-to-end encryption we can't break". Google is by far the biggest proponent of this, and they have both the most popular browser and some of the most popular sites on the Internet, so they can very easily do so. Whether you think Google is a monopoly or not, and whether you think they've done harm with that monopoly or not,…

I don't see how you can consider Google to be "by far the biggest proponent" of end-to-end encryption. What Google products even use end-to-end encryption? Duo and Chrome sync are all I can think of.

Even Facebook has end-to-end encryption in WhatsApp and says it's coming to their other messaging products which is far more than Google does.

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

#312

Post by jorblumesea »

rayiner wrote: post #271
jorblumesea wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 incr…

> Is it?

Yes. Barr was well known as a controversial politician even in those times. You can find numerous news reports affirming this. His entire political career is one giant walking controversy. While I agree that his words and opinions were more mainstream at the time, he was at the storm of more than a few scandals. Iran contra pardons are another obvious one.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1992/03/05/b...

> "{Are his actions} politically motivated? {Or} self-serving? I'm asking myself those same questions," said one key Justice Department official

> Much of what Barr has done since his confirmation seems to benefit the administration politically. He pleased conservatives by reversing policy and offering Justice Department help to states that want to get out from under court-ordered prison population caps.

https://www.nytimes.com/1992/10/19/opinion/essay-the-patsy-p...

Lots of stuff out there.

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

#313

Post by a1369209993 »

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.

> It's pretty hard to argue

No, it's not; it's just tedious and requires math and statistical/actuarial concepts like quality-adjusted-life-years. (The TL;DR would be that google inflicts significantly less harm per person to vastly larger numbers of persons.)

Unpleasant and time consuming is not the same as difficult.

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

#314

Post by bhahn »

marmada wrote: post #302

A take: monopoly in tech is good. Because Google/Amazon/FB have so much money they can do things that push tech forward as a whole. Think about the revolutionary improvements Google has made towards data centers, AWS, and all the research/open source contributions these companies have done. Unlike other monopolies (telecom, defense contracting) etc. where the monopoly is used to stagnate innovation (see Comcast being…

I don’t think comparing monopolies across industries is justification for a monopoly in tech. A more telling comparison would be monopoly in tech vs no monopoly in tech.

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

#315

Post by maximente »

c1b wrote: post #111
shadowgovt wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been a major gap between the American understanding of monopoly protection and the European one. In the European space, protection of smaller business' ability to compete is factored in. But the US space, in general, has not cared if smaller businesses can compete and tends to take a laissez-faire attitude towards business-on-business market pressures. It's the effect of the market on consumers that's paramo…

Funny how making books cheap is considered a failing.

such a small trite comment can't really be taken by itself as a consideration of whether or not amazon has behaved in an anti-competitive manner. it's not appropriate to look at a part of amazon's portfolio in isolation; their dominance in one particular area is not particularly anti-competitive. amazon's book sales dominance, nor their dominance as an e-commerce platform, seem to be particularly egregious.

what's clear, however, is that they use their e-commerce position to also one-up competitors as a retailer. they have access to data about what's hot, what could benefit from a more economic option, etc. which they can use - perhaps anti-competitively (by e.g. intentionally selling at loss to defeat the new competitor).

additionally, their entire cloud computing arm affords them the opportunity to run other parts of their business at a massive loss, perhaps intentionally (again, to defeat competitors) as needed.

as an analogy, imagine if standard oil also had a financial operation that low-balled "normal" banks, intentionally losing money on every loan or instrument, just so those other banks blew up.

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

#316

Post by pdonis »

marmada wrote: post #302

A take: monopoly in tech is good. Because Google/Amazon/FB have so much money they can do things that push tech forward as a whole. Think about the revolutionary improvements Google has made towards data centers, AWS, and all the research/open source contributions these companies have done. Unlike other monopolies (telecom, defense contracting) etc. where the monopoly is used to stagnate innovation (see Comcast being…

> here the monopoly leads to more innovation

More innovation in what? And as compared to what?

The innovations you mention are all addressing issues that only huge tech giants like Google have anyway. And they are all funded by the ad-supported business model, which IMO is a negative that outweighs those positive contributions.

Plus, the ad supported business model means users only get the benefit of any innovations Google makes when it increases Google's ad income. That incentive is not well aligned with the needs of users. How many times has Google discontinued a popular application because it wasn't making them enough money? A company in Google's position is exactly the company that could figure out how to get a billion users to pay them directly for services those users want, instead of using their eyeballs as commodities, but Google has put zero effort towards that highly desirable innovation.

We also don't see all the innovations that are not happening because the people that would have made them are being paid by Google and other tech giants to look for new ways to capture more eyeballs instead.

> I'm pretty sure this lawsuit is just a political attack. It seems reasonable that other monopolies in healthcare/defense/etc. are much much worse, yet they aren't "liberal"/"blue" companies, so there are no lawsuits.

If this hypothesis were correct, we would have expected to see lawsuits against those other monopolies during, say, the Obama administration. But we didn't.

The lawsuit is specifically stated in the article to be targeted at the ad-supported business model, so the obvious inference is that all the issues with that business model that have come up over the years have finally built up enough political pressure that the government feels it has to do something about it.

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

#317

Post by z3ncyberpunk »

marmada wrote: post #302

A take: monopoly in tech is good. Because Google/Amazon/FB have so much money they can do things that push tech forward as a whole. Think about the revolutionary improvements Google has made towards data centers, AWS, and all the research/open source contributions these companies have done. Unlike other monopolies (telecom, defense contracting) etc. where the monopoly is used to stagnate innovation (see Comcast being…

They push tech where they want it driven, big difference, don't be brainwashed

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

#318

Post by alentist »

marmada wrote: post #302

A take: monopoly in tech is good. Because Google/Amazon/FB have so much money they can do things that push tech forward as a whole. Think about the revolutionary improvements Google has made towards data centers, AWS, and all the research/open source contributions these companies have done. Unlike other monopolies (telecom, defense contracting) etc. where the monopoly is used to stagnate innovation (see Comcast being…

Why aren’t you disclosing that you’re working for Google?

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

#319

Post by ocdtrekkie »

marmada wrote: post #302

A take: monopoly in tech is good. Because Google/Amazon/FB have so much money they can do things that push tech forward as a whole. Think about the revolutionary improvements Google has made towards data centers, AWS, and all the research/open source contributions these companies have done. Unlike other monopolies (telecom, defense contracting) etc. where the monopoly is used to stagnate innovation (see Comcast being…

Google/Amazon/Facebook have each served to stagnate tech, not push it forward. If you read their headlines, sure, you'll believe they're doing groundbreaking things. But in reality, these behemoths have killed thousands of innovative startups to protect their cash cows. The uncommitted experiments they run, meanwhile, never amount to anything useful for the world.

There were better social networks than Facebook, but they didn't make money the way Facebook does, so Facebook bought them and killed them. There were better online stores than Amazon, but they didn't abuse humans and play the same games Amazon does to succeed, so they died and it won. Tech monopolies are monopolies, and they're particularly aggressive ones.

I also don't think you grasp the scope of tech monopolies. You cannot operate a business today without doing business with Google. You can hate Google, but you still have to do business with Google. Because if you aren't putting out Google Ads or at least optimizing your SEO for Google's bots, if you aren't launching your app in the Play Store, you're cutting off the majority of your customer base, and you're dying.

Healthcare has to do business with Google. Defense has to do business with Google. Effing Comcast has to do business with Google. There has never been a monopoly on this planet that had more power and that was so unavoidable. And it doesn't take a lot of research to find places people are being hurt or having their livelihoods taken by the unholy beast that it's become.

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

#320

Post by chrischattin »

aspenmayer wrote: post #260
chrischattin wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes.
Post reply on HN