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

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

#291

Post by jeffbee »

tgb wrote: post #266
jeffbee wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the comparison to Standard Oil stand scrutiny? The case against Standard Oil wasn't merely that they were popular. After all, kerosene is an undifferentiated commodity where consumers have no preference other than price. The case against Standard Oil was that they held such a breadth of natural resources (which are exclusive; no two parties can pump oil the same barrel of crude oil), and capital-intensive assets…

The comparison holds up if the claim, as stickfigure made, was that the relevant factor is whether or not there is a legally-enforced monopoly. US vs Microsoft shows that the factors you cite aren't necessary either.

Microsoft closely parallels Standard Oil in this regard. Microsoft was forcing Dell to charge a higher price for competing operating systems (in effect, Microsoft got paid $100 every time Dell shipped a computer with OS/2 or whatever). I can easily see how the first party forcing the second party to charge a higher rate to the third party is abusive.

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

#292

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

dhosek wrote: post #171
kebman wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Democratic Party is a long-standing "bankers party" and "corporatists party" (a party for big companies and organizations). In that sense, they're just as "bad" as the Republican Party, and due to how the whole democratic system is set up in the USA, Americans are in reality bereft of alternatives. Picking anyone else than those two, is effectively a blank vote. This system can at least in part explain why so man…

This is why it's important to vote in primaries and to cultivate leaders at the local level. The Republicans became a lock-step far right party by building up infrastructure and candidates at the lowest levels and building from there. Too many progressives don't seem to pay attention to any elections below the presidential election (and then whine that things are rigged when their candidate gets less votes than someo…

The Republicans deliberately built the grassroots top down, with targeted media and subsidised networking. Supposedly grassroots orgs were aggressively seeded and astroturfed.

It's not that progressives don't pay attention, it's that the Democratic machine doesn't do this. In fact it works to sabotage and disempower effective grassroots opposition to its corporatist policies.

There are always a few break outs in every cycle - like Cori Bush this year - but they're there for show, not for policy. If they get too pushy they run into opposition, and if they don't accept a compromise with the party line they're quietly removed by PACs that funnel non-grassroots special-interest money to challengers.

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

#293

Post by post_below »

pydry wrote: post #261
jeffbee wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way that people underestimate the scale and complexity of Google's indexing always makes me chuckle. I'm especially fond of the idea that other parties will just wantonly copy it, like for research purposes or something. Also I'm sorry to inform you that the way the index shards are produced, arranged in memory/on disk, and the manner in which they are queried and ranked are inextricably linked. You can't make a…

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?

I can't answer for OP but I can say it makes me chuckle too.

If the solution was purely to force Google to sell access to their index then yes it seems possible on the surface.

But as mentioned index and ranking are inextricably tied together.

Even if they weren't, no other organization is going to be able to produce search results comparable to Google using their index. You're underestimating what goes on under the hood.

So then the answer (often in these conversations) becomes to open up the ranking algos too.

The problems with that are numerous so I'll just point out some of the bigger ones:

- Arms race: Search is a constant arms race between providers and 3rd parties trying to game the system. The minute you make the algos public, gamers win the race. Search result quality returns to the way it was in the 90's and stays that way until someone else comes up with proprietary algos that work (but is that even legal at this point in our thought experiment?)

- Motivation: If search is open and you therefore can't directly profit from your efforts to improve it (because you automatically give away anything you create to competitors) where is your motivation to keep innovating?

- It's harder than you think: Truly, there's so much more going on in modern search indexing and ranking than you likely realize. The chances that some new organization (especially a gov organization) given access to Google's black box as it exists right now would be able to maintain search result quality for any significant length of time is essentially zero.

But let's imagine that it's as easy as many people think... Wouldn't the solution then be to build a public alternative rather than effectively killing what we have now?

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

#294

Post by wz1000 »

jeffbee wrote: post #231
wz1000 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't the NSA have a bunch of massive datacenters? Regardless of that, the datacenter can be appropriated by the government too.

No, the NSA has one facility that would be a small/medium datacenter in the big league, but only if you assume that the NSA is as efficient as Google, which is a bit of a stretch. NSA Utah: 65 MW Google Pryor, Oklahoma: 340 MW

Presumably that Google data center does a lot of compute intensive, non search related stuff - like GCP for one.

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

#295

Post by a123b456c »

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…

OP may have created some of the child replies, along with rings of upvotes. Classic astroturfing.

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

#296

Post by cycomanic »

tempsy wrote: post #148
elliekelly wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn’t ACH make sense for everyday purchases?

are you asking me why it doesn’t make sense to write a check for every small purchase you make? if the Fed’s faster payment network goes live and makes ACH instantaneous can payments can be done with a QR code or something similar then that is viable but not right now. beyond that, almost no e-commerce store accepts ACH. It also doesn’t benefit the consumer to bother with the hassle of ACH vs card when there’s no dis…

I'm always amazed when talking to US friends how far behind the rest of the world the US is with respect to banking. For a long time friends were telling me they were getting their salary, paying their rent etc. by cheque, when I had been using automatic wire transfers or debits for a long time already. With respect to your comment above, here in Scandinavia (where banks are also atrocious for other reasons) as well as much of Europe, with most of the internet payment processors (like Klarna) you can use wire transfer, debit from the account as well as direct internet banking for online shopping. We also have swish, which is a payment system were you essentially wire transfer money by using the mobile number.

That said many people (myself included) also use credit cards for their convenience.

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

#297

Post by joshuamorton »

jeffbee wrote: post #288
joshuamorton wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I knew I was missing someone. Yes, Baidu (who also already runs a large search index) could probably do the same thing.

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

#298

Post by pydry »

post_below wrote: post #293
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?

I can't answer for OP but I can say it makes me chuckle too. If the solution was purely to force Google to sell access to their index then yes it seems possible on the surface. But as mentioned index and ranking are inextricably tied together. Even if they weren't, no other organization is going to be able to produce search results comparable to Google using their index. You're underestimating what goes on under the…

>But as mentioned index and ranking are inextricably tied together.

I'm pretty sure they're quite extricably tied together. I'm almost certain google's engine weights the different ranking variables (e.g. page speed) differently depending upon context. Why not expose those variables to other search engines? Well, it would kill google's search engine dominance - if you're concerned with that...

Unbundling isn't technically infeasible and it would create more competition. This would help with the arms race alluded to. What if another search engine used google's index to build a more spam free index? not good for google but great for Joe public.

>Motivation: If search is open and you therefore can't directly profit from your efforts to improve it (because you automatically give away anything you create to competitors) where is your motivation to keep innovating?

Nothing saying that they can't make money from the users of their index just as Bing makes money from DDG. However, is there any reason their search engine shouldn't compete with other similar offerings? Maybe somebody out there does it better.

Well, other than "we've got an unfair advantage and wed like to keep it please"

>It's harder than you think

Actually it's probably a LOT easier. This idea is a direct attack on google's power and the easiest response they can make is "too difficult. not possible". Not "this would fuck us in the bottom line". Simply "we can't do it, who are YOU to tell us it's possible? "

fwiw if you look through history similar reactions were made to attempts to regulate pretty much all utilities. Then it happened. This kind of response is kind of an expected part of the process. Most recently it happened in the UK when utilities and banks were told to open up API access to their data. Same claim you made.

Part two is when they tell you "it's not fair!". It's coming.

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

#299

Post by scarface74 »

dumbfoundded wrote: post #269
scarface74 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was also about operating systems and productivity software. Now instead of having an operating system vendor with 80% market share now we have an ad vendor. Win???? Meet the new boss....

Those investigations were closed. Maybe it's more of a failure of the legal system than anything. The one thing that sticked actually seemed to work in the long run. Isn't this whole conversation around Google being a monopoly? Yes, a new boss and hopefully a new antitrust case. Hopefully more sticks this time.

How did an antitrust lawsuit that ended in 2002, lead to MS losing browser market share a decade later? Even if you do count that as a victory - it was still only 1 out of 3 areas that the government went after MS for. Since when was 33% score considered a success?

And the largest anti trust lawsuit before that in technology was IBM. It started in 1969 and it was dismissed in 1983 and nothing came of it.

Maybe the government is just incapable of understanding let alone regulating tech?

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

#300

Post by wz1000 »

bananabreakfast wrote: post #281
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…

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.

The NSA also monitors most of the worlds communications in near real time. A building full of hard drives is also completely useless without some sort of reasonably decent search and indexing capability, so I'm pretty sure the NSA built something for the task.
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