We do understand that Google is a company, it will make profits at any cost, even if it has to pay fines later? This is what regulation is for. If the customers are harmed and have no recourse, there must be a way for protection of some kind. I'll take a politician over a predator company any time!
The case for why Google should be regulated as a public utility
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Re: The case for why Google should be regulated as a public utility
#22Both conservatives and liberals are convinced that Google is rigged against them. I don’t trust American lawmakers not to shove their ideologies into a search engine.
Re: The case for why Google should be regulated as a public utility
#23One Google quirk I've been thinking about lately is the times when you search for something and the thing you want is the top advertised and organic result. Seems like a waste of money. An example, if you search for "heroku" then you get an ad for heroku, which, yeah, is what I was searching for, but heroku is also the top result and obviously what I was looking for. Heroku is paying Google to provide Google with the…
Those ads have very good click and conversion metrics, if you're not sophisticated it looks like a good idea to cannibalize your organic traffic that way.
The problem is that your competitors can use your name as keyword, and become the top result for your company name ...
Re: The case for why Google should be regulated as a public utility
#24Even if anticompetitive behaviour is clear, I wonder if a USA government would take action against them. Has such a thing happened before? I mean fighting a company that gaves the USA an advantage in a global market, as opposed to local monopolies.
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Re: The case for why Google should be regulated as a public utility
#25Google is a private corporation that runs various free services, i.e. you are the product. You agreed to their terms and services. If you don't like that, you can use a competitor. As long as there's an open internet infrastructure, there's no anti-competitive behavior. Everyone can be a google competitor of one of its services. Case in point, DuckDuckGo etc. If you want to regulate something, start with the ISPs and…
"If you don't like that, you can use a competitor."
This ignores the tremendos cost to creating a search engine - DDG is the only one that has been able to even make a dent in Google's monopoly.
Re: The case for why Google should be regulated as a public utility
#26Even if anticompetitive behaviour is clear, I wonder if a USA government would take action against them. Has such a thing happened before? I mean fighting a company that gaves the USA an advantage in a global market, as opposed to local monopolies.
Re: The case for why Google should be regulated as a public utility
#27Oh god. If google were regulated like a utility...we would be stuck with them instead of letting them go away by themselves.
And yes, one day google will fail and bring a bunch of companies with them.
Re: The case for why Google should be regulated as a public utility
#28Regulation of all of these services - that affect literally billions of people - is needed.
Trusting the senior citizen center that we call the Senate or White House to get it right - now that's another thing altogether.
But, we've got to start somewhere.
Re: The case for why Google should be regulated as a public utility
#29I love how few actual proposal there are out there as to what the government should actually do. That is - not just "regulate" or "break them up". I'm talking specifics.
Once you start making concrete proposals it becomes increasingly obvious just how hard it is to come up with something that won't make everything worse.
Re: The case for why Google should be regulated as a public utility
#30Until financial institutions are regulated again, regulating big tech is a big joke.
This is true and FB is the proof. They gladly paid a huge fine and still made billions in the process. This is what regulation is for!