221–230 of 399 posts
ive never seen any evidence of gov intervention resulting in a better outcome for anyone other than special interest groups.
@freeopinion [0] brought up an interesting idea of setting up more special interest groups, directly in opposition of each other. This may be an effective method of handling this.
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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).
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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.
The settlement did no such thing. The fact that not only Google spammed chrome ads on the most popular web page but they also bundled Chrome with third party installers led to the rise of Chrome.
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.
Imagine if the internet was started by one corporation. Instead, the internet is an open source set of protocols. The answer lies in converting companies which abuse becoming the standard due to network effect, to an open source set of protocols. Maybe give them a period of 10-20 years to profit. Then they have to expose a public set of standards and protocols which can be used by everyone else. For instance microsof…
> and thus microsoft are no longer the standard
15 years ago was 2005. Imagine MS would open source Windows XP SP2.
I don't think anyone would build an OS better than modern Win10 from that code. 15 years is a long time: that WinXP was primarily 32-bit (64 bit build technically existed, but no one used that), it wouldn't support modern hardware, and won't run modern software either. I see why some people would like to have that code (education, research, maybe some embedded applications or servers), but I'm pretty sure Microsoft would remain the standard.
To stop being standard, in addition to that law MS need to screw up Windows in a huge way. I wouldn't expect that to happen ever, they're large company managed by reasonable people.
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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,…
One 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 seems borderline fraudulent that Google is doing this to companies that clearly should be the first result on the page.
I'm not entirely clear why the answer is "regulate google" and not "the government builds and provides an internet search mechanism for its people." I.e., an actual utility from the start.
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…
I would argue for an EU type approach and instead of regulating Google or payment networks - force demonopolization and opening up markets to more competition.
If you wish I can even share the priority list in my mind, for what sectors require addressing before Google:
1. Actual local monopolies
2. Local education sectors and their organisations
3. Radio spectrum for local wireless internet and cable providers (to challenge local cable monopolies)
4. Banking and payments systems
5. Construction sector
... basically there's 99 problems and Google ain't one.
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> 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.
> designed to store data estimated to be on the order of exabytes or larger
While google says:
> The Google Search index contains hundreds of billions of webpages and is well over 100,000,000 gigabytes in size
https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/crawling-indexi...
Seems like the government already has the expertise and equipment required to handle data at Google scale :)
One 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…
eBay used to pay Google $20 million/year for ads with the "eBay" keyword. When they stopped, they noticed no impact on sales: https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-h...
It's possible that the competition stopped advertising against ebay searches as online shoppers migrated to Amazon.