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

rankscience.com

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

#281

Post by bananabreakfast »

wz1000 wrote: post #229
jeffbee wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center > 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…

A giant building full of hard drives is NOT a Google datacenter.

You're just comparing two storage numbers without taking anything else that running Google at a global scale requires.

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

#282

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

JAlexoid wrote: post #249
shadowgovt wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a good thing. Private tax accountants are a huge political lobby in the US, so it's a non-starter here. The US barely got off the ground a free option for public e-filing, and we managed to botch it up by handing it to a private company to implement , which promptly turned around and made it absolutely as impossible to access as they were allowed to by law.

US - the cronyism dream.

One way or another, those free markets always turn out to be really expensive for customers and users.

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

#283

Post by cycomanic »

MadSudaca wrote: post #174
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…

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…

The thing that always bothered me about this argument is that in reality the US has many more regulations that apply to regular people than most of what you call "socialistic-leaning" countries (one example look at the regulations for what you can or can't do with your house/yard in many suburbs )

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

#284

Post by jimmaswell »

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.

Payment processor monopolies are also strangling expression and innovation by getting to decide you can't use them for e.g. adult content.

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

#285

Post by bananabreakfast »

CPLX wrote: post #100
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.

The proposal of what to do is for the Justice Department to sue them for antitrust violations and for the courts to break up the divisions of the company that engage in unlawful anticompetitive behavior. Not only is it plausible we saw it done with Microsoft, and the result was an explosion of entrepreneurship and innovation in the relevant markets, which were software and internet services.

lol what? Microsoft did not get broken up. Attributing the dot com boom to the antitrust suit is a very creative interpretation of a spurious correlation.

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

#286

Post by joshuamorton »

Const-me wrote: post #150
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…

> You agreed to their terms and services. Search engine web interface doesn't require users to accept anything. Search crawler indexes the web without any contractual relations with web site owners. > you can use a competitor As a search engine user, I can and I do. However, the party most affected by the monopoly is web site owners. They can't do that. > start with the ISPs and restore net neutrality Where I live, I…

> Search engine web interface doesn't require users to accept anything. Search crawler indexes the web without any contractual relations with web site owners.

robots.txt is obeyed by (ethical) search crawlers, including the ones from big search companies. If you don't want to be indexed, you have many tools to block things or to be served only by specific search engines.

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

#288

Post by jeffbee »

joshuamorton wrote: post #276
wz1000 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center > 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…

Having disk space is only a small part of being able to make use of something like a search index. Arguably the least difficult part. One of your suggestions was > That's why the stipulation that other entities be allowed to mirror the index - they can optimize the index for their own purposes and rankings on their own hardware. And the point is that there's nobody who can do this outside of Google, Microsoft (who al…

99% agreement, except for the amerocentric viewpoint. I think it is likely that Baidu has the scale.

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

#289

Post by auganov »

tgb wrote: post #272
auganov wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I'm merely saying that a lack of proposals indicates a lack of workable solutions. By proposal I don't mean an actual bill ready to be passed, just a high level overview that does talk about the implementation. Obviously doesn't need to be a sound legal document. I think it's perfectly fine and important for people to speak out against perceived injustices committed by tech companies. But yes I do also think th…

The most common proposals I've seen are to break Google into multiple companies, particularly with search being separate. This seems adequately specific. (Though obviously different from the public-utility plan in this article.) Is that not specific enough for you? This seems vastly simpler than GPDR in scope and with much more relevant precedent to draw from.

Well a breakup is definitely easier to define. But you should specify along which lines. YouTube is the obvious one. Maybe a bunch of other acquisitions that aren't too techy can be rolled back.

What about other products? Gmail? Maps? Android/App Store? Chrome? Google News? Shopping? Translate? Docs? Should these be separate companies?

Only once you define that can the plan be criticized.

This is so much easier to do as one only needs to list up to 20 names (and perhaps some minor obligations), yet we're still not seeing too many people spell this out. I think for exactly the same reason - it becomes obvious how unpractical it is.

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

#290

Post by pydry »

joshuamorton wrote: post #279
pydry wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you arguing that it's somehow impossible or technically unreasonable for a startup search engine to piggyback off google's search index in a similar way to how duckduckgo piggybacks off bing's search index? And that the very idea that this could be made possible through law makes you chuckle?

Bing doesn't make its search index public. It has a query api, where you can provide a search query and get Bing's results on a per-query basis. The closest comparison to what this person wants is Common Crawl, which is minuscule compared to the big players, and is a 100TB gzipped download that gets updated monthly.

Bing provides API access to its search index. IIRC the type of queries you can do are a bit more sophisticated than just "what's available via the Bing search engine" (e.g. select a market).
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