Interesting theoretical case study, but moot point. America is a business, not a country. Will never happen in our lifetimes.
The case for why Google should be regulated as a public utility
41–50 of 399 posts
Re: The case for why Google should be regulated as a public utility
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cable internet providers are relatively inept local monopolies in some, usually the least profitable parts of their service area. They are comparatively harmless to FAANG monopolies, which have global scale and the ability to bully entire countries into complying with their business models. Tech companies have invested massive amounts of money in lobbying and paid media to convince you to worry about ISPs so you give…
If you live in an area where Comcast has a monopoly, or a pretty strong implied monopoly you pretty much have to do business with them. Most places in the US have at most two ISPs, one that offers reasonable speeds and the other for compliance that offers piss-poor speeds, but hey it's offered so all is well. You're never forced to use Google. Google has a huge Internet footprint, but you can absolutely use the Inter…
Incorrect: Nearly all business ventures must use Google. If you do not, you do not exist. Doesn't matter if you're a website or a restaurant. No Google presence, no business. Go run ads for your startup on Bing and see where that gets you.
Also, try to be a user on the Internet without using reCAPTCHA...
In increasingly more school districts you have to either give Google your kids' data and a Chromebook account or you have to homeschool, Google Classroom is often mandatory, as it is here.
Again, there are some local areas where one ISP or another might have a monopoly, but it isn't even remotely comparable to what Google is.
Re: The case for why Google should be regulated as a public utility
#43I would argue Visa and Mastercard and payment processing at large as the top priority by far. It's crazy that we've given up control as a society of the only mechanisms for electronic payments in an increasingly cashless world to unregulated private entities who continue to jack up fees as often as they can get away with. Makes everything 3-5% more expensive. Ridiculous.
Unregulated?! IMO they are heavily regulated. I can understand believing that they are under regulated, but they are hardly unregulated.
E.g. https://www.fdic.gov/regulations/laws/rules/6500-2260.html https://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/help/card-act-1... https://blog.payjunction.com/credit-card-processing-regulato...
Re: The case for why Google should be regulated as a public utility
#44When someone describes search results as “unbiased” you know right there and then they fundamentally do not understand the act of searching.
I take it you refer to "Google started out as an almost benevolent index of the world wide web, showing users ten blue, unbiased links for whatever users were searching for." Leaving aside whether it's true or not, this could be interpreted more charitably. Search results are necessarily biased to provide relevant links, based on some definition of "relevant". We can interpret "unbiased" in this context to mean that…
Yeah, I was just trying to politely point out that this article is dumb and the author fails to make their case.
Take the example of the basketball dribbling video. The insinuation is that Google serves YouTube results because Google is biased; it owns YouTube. The claim is that Google should mix in results from Vimeo. This supposes that there are worthwhile results on Vimeo, that Google can index them, and that people want to see them. The refutation of this bias claim is pretty easy. If you do the same search on Bing, you get the exact same results, all from YouTube. So whatever causes these results to be 100% YouTube, it cannot be explained by Google's bias.
The second flaw in the argument is the idea, which all SEO people hold dear, that a search engine exists to serve the content providers, and that they somehow owe a debt to middlemen. This is not the case. The search engine serves the querier. When I search for airfares from New York to San Francisco, it makes sense that a search engine serves the underlying data about the flights and their prices. Air travel is provided by airlines, not by Expedia. Travelocity, Orbitz, and Kayak are not naturally occurring "organic results", they are grifting middlemen who use dark patterns to chisel a few dollars out of people who just want to fly.
Re: The case for why Google should be regulated as a public utility
#45One 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…
It's definitely a questionable business model, whose obvious problems are underscored by the fact the Google doesn't allow you to do it with some some entities. In other scenarios, it's a borderline protection racket.
For example, you can't use ads to squat on search terms for government agencies. I haven't tested it extensively, but I'm pretty sure even searches for things that are outsourced to third parties still land on the .gov page. Search for " state park reservations" and you'll usually see only organic results, with the .gov as the top result. The actual provider (Reserve America in many states) is below the .gov in most cases. Sometimes (most notably california), the provider is the top organic result.
In most verticals, you'd see a wall of bullshit ads for affiliates to the reservation provider.
Re: The case for why Google should be regulated as a public utility
#46I would argue we should regulate the internet as a utility first.
Re: The case for why Google should be regulated as a public utility
#47We 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!
> I'll take a politician over a predator company any time!
I don't understand this take. You can use DuckDuckGo right now, without having to invoke a predator politician.
Re: The case for why Google should be regulated as a public utility
#48I 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.
1. There needs to be guidelines for what Google can and can't do with search. Ex: Only 25% of the screen real estate can go to Google-owned ad products for allowing it to continue as a monopoly. 2. YouTube should possibly be broken out as a separate company and it shouldn't get favorable placement and treatment in search results 3. Businesses need to have more control over how their businesses appear when users searc…
> 1. There needs to be guidelines for what Google can and can't do with search.
Again that's vague. And once there are such guidelines who enforces them? Will it be law applicable to all companies? Will there be a special govt office enforcing this? What kind of punishments? Fines?
> 2. YouTube should possibly be broken out as a separate company and it shouldn't get favorable placement and treatment in search results
Who and how will determine if treatment is favorable? Auditing code and internal comms for signs for favoritism? Otherwise if you can go only by appearances then how do you keep this system fair to the companies subject to this scrutiny?
> 3. Businesses need to have more control over how their businesses appear when users search for them directly
Again how do you codify this into law?
Re: The case for why Google should be regulated as a public utility
#49There is no "public" here. There is only "government". It might do a better job than Google at this. It might not.
Re: The case for why Google should be regulated as a public utility
#50On top of search, one of the real issues is that they set their ad prices with no market forces at play.
$50 per click? Why yes, but only because they say so... Fake click? We say its real, pay us...