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

#211

Post by scarface74 » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 5:25 PM UTC

rmacqueen wrote: post #153

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…

> Case in point, DuckDuckGo etc You're missing the point. The anti-competitive behaviour isn't harmful against other search engines - it's against companies in the other domains where Google can leverage its nigh total search engine dominance to push its other products, e.g. Google Flights and Google Shopping. How is a flight booking service supposed to fairly compete with Google Flights when Google owns the top of t…

The top of the funnel is the url bar. People choose to go to Google.

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

#212

Post by three_seagrass » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 5:25 PM UTC

jancsika wrote: post #175

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.

This is a beautiful implementation of a tactic to shift a conversation. OP starts with a seemingly related pivot to the topic of how to prioritize the regulation of a company like Google with the regulation of other companies. Such a conversation would obviously involve at least few points about why Google ought not top the list. (And hopefully many points given OP says Google is "by far" not top priority.) I was cer…

HN threads are not 1:1 conversations.

Threads start and branch on different topics, which are varying degrees related to the main post.

Kind of like how you have now switched the discussion to Alan Sokal. That doesn't mean you are making some tactical shift as part of a larger strategy.

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

#213

Post by scarface74 » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 5:27 PM UTC

dumbfoundded wrote: post #154

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…

Google clearly meets the definition of a monopoly. It comes down to 3 things: Market power, Exclusionary Conduct, and Business Justification (1). Microsoft was charged as a monopoly but you could always just use linux. Ultimately it comes down to the fact that Google is harming the consumer by using their dominate market power in search to push their own, worse products. (1) https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competitio…

How did that work out? 20 years later MS still has the same share of PC operating systems and approximately the same share of the office productivity space.

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

#214

Post by jariel » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 5:27 PM UTC

shadowgovt wrote: post #51

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.

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…

"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."

And there's technically nothing stopping the US from sending humans to mars either.

There are many reasons that it's not done, including the most important one, which is that it's not necessary.

Simply producing or supporting a standard, and then maybe having some regulations around it would be 100x easier.

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

#215

Post by oh_sigh » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 5:27 PM UTC

jancsika wrote: post #175

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.

This is a beautiful implementation of a tactic to shift a conversation. OP starts with a seemingly related pivot to the topic of how to prioritize the regulation of a company like Google with the regulation of other companies. Such a conversation would obviously involve at least few points about why Google ought not top the list. (And hopefully many points given OP says Google is "by far" not top priority.) I was cer…

The argument for the prioritization is right in OPs post - a vast majority of every person-to-business transaction has a 3% transaction fee layered on top of it.

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

#216

Post by oh_sigh » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 5:30 PM UTC

elicash wrote: post #106

chrisco255 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

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 more akin to a public lightbulb than any kind of interactive service. The government seems to falter when it has to deal with 1:1 interactions with constituents, not when it is simply building something.

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

#217

Post by oh_sigh » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 5:32 PM UTC

im_down_w_otp wrote: post #140

jrockway wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Were you also partially responsible for designing a GNSS system? Otherwise it isn't clear how you can make any claim as to the difficulty of that, if you're using your experience on the former as your bona fides. I think the difficulty of payment processing isn't in the happy path, but in fraud/anomaly detection, merchant servicing/outreach, dispute resolution, all of which do not have a "set it and forget it" solution.

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

#218

Post by wz1000 » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 5:33 PM UTC

jeffbee wrote: post #207

wz1000 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The way that people underestimate the scale and complexity of Google's indexing always makes me chuckle. The same approach that works for Google can also work for a public body supported by public funds. It can also use much of the same systems and maybe even personnel that Google currently employs for this purpose. I'm essentially asking for the search division of Google to be appropriated by the government. > Als…

There are currently zero governments and only about 4 commercial entities possessing a datacenter large enough to do the job.

Doesn't the NSA have a bunch of massive datacenters?

Regardless of that, the datacenter can be appropriated by the government too.

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

#219

Post by Shared404 » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 5:33 PM UTC

hinkley wrote: post #120

Earlier this week when we were talking about FOSS search engines, I thought: How weird would it be if the Internet Archive expanded its mandate to include search? No that’s dumb. Is it? I don’t know. It might be good if search were regulated as a utility. And ad free. I don’t know if regulating Google is the way to do it. The problem is if the government gets too friendly with search then they’ll want the data and ho…

^^This comment is a reminder for everyone to install the Tor Browser or set up Tails, just in case.

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

#220

Post by CPLX » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 5:35 PM UTC

twblalock wrote: post #186

CPLX wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The inquiry was opened in the early 90's and Microsoft's first consent decree to stop them from tying was in 1994. They later argued that IE shouldn't count and continued to bundle Explorer with Windows, and the US DOJ plus twenty states sued over it in 1998.

So, no. The threats of antitrust enforcement against MS were a key part of the timeline for the first dot-com explosion, as they made MS curtail their behavior and provided startups with a little breathing room to exist without being instantly crushed by Bill Gates.

I'm old, I was starting my career and working in and around tech startups at the time, it was a big part of the discussion then. It's hard to overstate how dominant and scary MS was at the time, they didn't have any real rivals.