The case for why Google should be regulated as a public utility • Hacker News Board

Re: The case for why Google should be regulated as a public utility

#131

Post by tgb » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 4:37 PM UTC

auganov wrote: post #85

tgb wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't you think you're putting an unreasonably high burden on people? I can argue that I think the lawmakers representing me and other citizens need to figure out the details without myself having figured out the details. I can point out a problem and ask someone to fix the problem without know what the specifics of the solution look like. I know healthcare is absurdly complicated but I still think single-payer is th…

I haven't searched exhaustively, but nonetheless you'd think there would be more specific proposals being talked about given how hot this topic is. There is very little precedent to regulating tech companies on such a granular level. The closest thing I can think of is various EU regulations that usually amount to shaking down US giants for money once in a while. It's hard to compare this to regulating something like…

So, to be clear, are you saying that someone should make such a proposal or are you saying that advocating for this change requires there to be a proposal? Because I'd be in favor of the former but I think the latter disrupts conversation and is unreasonable. The way you wrote your post sounded strongly like "I have a knock-down argument against any advocates until they have legislation written up." Which would be an unreasonably high bar.

Re: The case for why Google should be regulated as a public utility

#132

Post by hinkley » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 4:37 PM UTC

shakna wrote: post #87

sjroot wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bingo. Every device that I can think of allows you to choose a default search engine. It would be very easy for me to use something other than Google; they have no anticompetitive hold on how I explore the Internet and discover new services. This article is written by someone who would personally profit from Google’s regulation. It’s an ad for his company disguised as virtue signaling.

> Every device that I can think of allows you to choose a default search engine. Users, overwhelming, do not change defaults. Period. Unless there is a step where they are shown a range of options and select one, this is not an active choice for them.

Which is why Google paid the Mozilla Foundation a shitload of money to be the default search engine when Firefox was still running around 25% market share.

Re: The case for why Google should be regulated as a public utility

#133

Post by causalmodels » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 4:38 PM UTC

s3r3nity wrote: post #61

sjroot wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DDG, Yahoo, Bing, are all valid alternatives. Why does Google get screwed after the enormous investment they made (with time and money) to index pages on the internet?

> Why does Google get screwed after the enormous investment they made (with time and money) to index pages on the internet? If that was _all_ they did for the past 20 years to get to where they are today, there wouldn't be any problem. The issue is when you leverage this market gain to punish competitors and expand into spaces at below cost (read: negative profits) to wipe out competitors and gain footholds. See exam…

I think using Mapquest and Yelp as examples harms your argument.

Mapquest and google maps are fundamentally different products. Google maps is a geo database that happens to also give good driving directions. Mapquest just gave people directions. A better example would be google's Waze acquisition, but even that one is not very comparable.

Yelp is basically a protection racket whose sole purpose is to squeeze money from small single location restaurants. They actively harm their customers by promoting reviews based on whether or not you pay them. They are a modern day BBB

Re: The case for why Google should be regulated as a public utility

#134

Post by jquery » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 4:39 PM UTC

chrisco255 wrote: post #95

shadowgovt wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is 100% nothing stopping the Federal government from offering a full-faith-and-credit-backed "America electronic transaction system" for electronic transactions, with those fees handled by taxes. But much as there's nothing stopping the Federal government from greatly simplifying the burden and toil of tax season by issuing 90% of Americans a pre-filled-out "This is what you owe; sign this and return it or disp…

Right, the same government that couldn't get a healthcare website going is supposed to also power every single transaction from internal infrastructure. There are hidden costs that are much higher than 3% to giving the government full control over every transaction in society. It's a single point of failure with no redundancy or decentralization, a large attack vector, and a human rights nightmare. As a general rule,…

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Re: The case for why Google should be regulated as a public utility

#135

Post by rootsudo » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 4:39 PM UTC

tempsy wrote: post #18

I 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.

Not just the fees, but how they can suppress free speech and whatever they deem "unworthy."

Granted a lot of it comes from risk management.

Re: The case for why Google should be regulated as a public utility

#136

Post by jeffbee » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 4:40 PM UTC

tetrometal wrote: post #40

The last thing I want is for government to become even more involved with managing what information I receive or how I receive it. We need less of that, not more. Also, please use competitors such as DuckDuckGo. It's not hard, and they're not bad. It's unconscionable to me that we would resort to government force before taking the obvious step of just not interacting with Google.

That's how you can tell that the SEO people are lying about their motives. They don't want you to switch to DDG, they don't want 1000 search engines to bloom. They want Google to be the big gatekeeper with almost all of the traffic, and they want the government to use regulatory powers to force Google to drive that traffic to their sites.

That's their endgame. They want the EU or whoever to effectively force Google to send flight search traffic to Expedia. They don't get that from a competitive search market, they can only get it if Google remains dominant but becomes subject to a lot of bogus regulation.

Re: The case for why Google should be regulated as a public utility

#137

Post by wz1000 » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 4:40 PM UTC

auganov wrote: post #29

I 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.

Here's one idea: Make the index open and public, set up a public body to update it, and allow anyone to build a frontend. Access can be charged per query. Other companies/entities/governments will be allowed to mirror the index for essentially the price of data transfer.

This is just something I thought up right now, and sure, there might be problems with the approach. But to pretend like there is absolutely nothing that can be done betrays a willful lack of imagination.

Re: The case for why Google should be regulated as a public utility

#138

Post by eggy » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 4:41 PM UTC

I used to use Yandex back in 2012 and DuckDuckGo for a while. I had my browser open up with all three at one point - Google, Yandex, and DuckDuckGo. If I didn't find or feel the results showed what I wanted, I checked all of them.

Another thought, isn't YouTube the largest video streaming service? I think Vimeo has 5% of the registered users, but it is ad-free. Wouldn't it make sense YouTube shows up at top for most searches by sheer number of registered users? Some of my more esoteric searches come up with videos that are only found on Vimeo, and I click on them. Should a single video on Vimeo be given more real estate than the 20 that popup on YouTube?

Re: The case for why Google should be regulated as a public utility

#139

Post by pb7 » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 4:41 PM UTC

s3r3nity wrote: post #83

beders wrote: post #15

Google 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…

> As long as there's an open internet infrastructure, there's no anti-competitive behavior. While I _really_ want to agree with you here, in all due respect this is a naive view on antitrust theory. Elasticity of demand - the ease at which you as a consumer can switch to competitive offerings if price were to suddenly skyrocket - is only one factor of the calculus regarding whether or not Google is anti-competitive.…

>You also need to look at the elasticity of supply: in this example, is it easy to enter the search market? You can learn to make a SERP or an algorithm for indexing / ranking results in an algorithms 101 class...but let's not pretend there's not a SIGNIFICANT investment needed in indexing BILLIONS of pages of documents just to be a viable competitor. This is not free by any means, and requires $millions (dozens? hundreds?) of upfront capital just to maybe get a few % points market share.

This is not as convincing for your argument as you may think. All it sounds like is "you took a big risk, you succeeded, and now that we see it's a pretty neat thing, we're going to take it away from you, thanks, please take more risks and make more cool things so we can take them from you".

The fact that this doesn't happen often is why we can have nice things. As soon as you start seizing things that become successful, the nice things stop.

Re: The case for why Google should be regulated as a public utility

#140

Post by im_down_w_otp » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 4:42 PM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #127

elicash wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, government does GPS. Sends folks to space. You mention SpaceX, but let's not pretend NASA doesn't exist. Yeah, there was once that website that had a bad launch, but there's nothing inherent in government that wouldn't allow this to work well. I do think ideally this could be done by NY or CA first. We should test out ideas in the states, where possible.

GPS is a lot less stateful than real-time financial transaction processing. It takes time corrections from base stations and broadcasts a time signal. End users have no way of mutating state on the GPS satellite; they only listen. I'm not saying it's easy to make a global positioning system, but it's easier than processing every transaction in the United States.

I was partially responsible for designing a system that could be used to eventually scale to handle processing every global credit and debit transaction.

GPS is harder.

disclaimer: I used to work at Visa.