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…
I would argue that for example Googles push for AMP is anti competitive behavour.
Nobody is charging you by the word. Go ahead and make your argument.
>As the founder of an SEO company [...] Honestly, "SEO" either shouldn't be necessary if content is reasonable and useful, or it's that kind of SEO spam which has had a much worse impact on search results than any of Google's advertisement.
indeed, it's surprising this isn't higher. 5% of SEO is making sure your content is indexable. 95% is tricking a search engine into ranking your site more highly than it should. It's incredibly laughable to think SEO companies want unbiased results. SEO companies are in direct competition with Google for ad spend, ie Acme Corp can either pay Google for an ad (and get detailed metrics for what the money has accomplished) or pay slimy SEO dudes to hopefully trick Google (and just trust that it worked).
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.
Ah, yes, this government right: https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/gps.html
Is this any different from putting up a billboard next to a restaurant for a competing restaurant?
It's more like asking for directions to a restaurant and getting directions to a different restaurant.
It's really not. You're asking for a seafood restaurant and are given directions to various seafood restaurants. You are not shown directions to one (a link) and when you show up there, it's another (link was fake).
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 peop…
I don't think the author's issue was that youtube results were ranked highly, but that they took up a much larger amount of screen real estate. Look at the screenshot in the article - half the page is one youtube video, then there's a video bar (all youtube, perhaps coincidentally) which is twice as tall as the last, non-youtube result.
No, Microsoft was never broken up. That was the initial judgment. The case ended in a settlement [0] which didn't require all that much from Microsoft. The obligations have now long expired. [0] https://www.justice.gov/atr/case-document/file/503541/downlo...
That’s correct, they settled before any divestiture was forced on them, and I assume Google might too. But the threat stopped them from dominating the browser market and enabled the first dot-com explosion. We would be way better off today if there was a powerful countervailing force to all this FAANG consolidation. The current environment is deeply harmful to innovation.
> But the threat stopped them from dominating the browser market and enabled the first dot-com explosion.
The first dot-com explosion was well under way at that point. Microsoft's domination of the desktop didn't stop any e-commerce companies.
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.
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…
People should have feel the burden that taxation places on them.
Payroll withholding already artificially dampens the strain that taxation imposes on everyone that earns a paycheck. Issuing a pre-filled out form is another step backwards.
Paying taxes should be burdensome and uncomfortable.
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…
I actually like this aspect of the USA. Most parts of the world, specially more socialistic-leaning countries, would have politicians eager to expand their powers and size of the state so that they have control over a bigger cut of the pie. Of course, this is supposedly for the good of the people. It seems to me that more people is socialistic-minded in the USA these days, to me that looks like a indicator of the dec…
If you want, you can mail Visa a check for 3% of your spending at the end of each month. A small price to pay for your freedom.
I think their "hotels near" is a bad example. The first two results are hotels.com and tripadvisor. These aren't organic results. They're the champions of a fierce SEO battle. Actual sites for the hotels near X have little chance of comepeting. They'll be buried pages deep behind aggregators that are owned by a handful of companies.
Google killing those intermediaries is probably a good thing long term. Of course not so good if they just take their place.