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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

#311

Post by Nasrudith »

albacur wrote: post #302

I realize the big tech companies aren’t perfect. But it’s weird to me that when tech is one of the few bright spots of the U.S. economy in our lifetimes, and one of the few industries offering a large swath of employees a path to the middle class and upper-middle class that only previous generations could aspire to, and there are so many people hell bent on capping it at its knees.

That is easy to understand - the old stagnation hates growth with an undying passion and envy. They take what they think they are entitled to (customers) that were never theirs and by doing better make them question their own worth. It is just so much easier to hate than to try to do anything better. And that applies to so many things at all walks of society and the crab-bucket mentality.

The fact it is "nerdy" just ads fuel to the fire given the anti-intellectuslism, that they already committed lives to their existing paths, and that provokes envy far beyond say bankers. They imagine only a lack of money stops them from being rich off of passive income (there are also mentality changes involved including ability to evaluate them but they are ignorant of them) but tech riches? To imagine changing would call for themselves to imagine themselves degraded. Nerds being successful instead of ones to look down upon are abomination to their social order and conception of the world.

The hysteria against "monopolies" with a tortured definition is just an extension of the crab bucket envy. Not wanting help but to drag others down with them.

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

#312

Post by martin_drapeau »

badRNG wrote: post #263
martin_drapeau wrote: post #258

When a country regulates Google, they raise borders. Google, like any other global internet compnay, is across borders. I would hate to be blocked form accessing US Google when I live in Canada. Putting up barriers on the Internet is contrary to an open Web. It does exist for content. For example Netflix content in Canada is different than in the US. You just can't do that for web pages. In addition, nothing prevents…

> What do you do when FAANGs become larger than some countries? This seems to be a bigger issue than tech companies. The tendency towards monopoly is a problem that every industry faces, where many international trusts hold more power than many of the governments in the countries they do business in. Worse, in some cases these trusts can exert undue influence over these governments. It isn't unreasonable that at some…

Last century companies sold or produced physical goods. You could always tie them to a geographical area. With FAANGs it is a digital world without borders. I think it's different.

Your last point is dead on. FAANGs have carte blanche for now.

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

#313

Post by treis »

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…

> their dominate market power in search to push their own, worse products.

This is the central problem. Yes, Google use market dominance to push their products. But by and large their products were also better. Gmail was better than Yahoo/Hotmail. Chrome was better than Firefox/IE. Maps better than MapQuest. Android was better than what non-Apple phone makers were using.

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

#314

Post by wz1000 »

Nasrudith wrote: post #308
wz1000 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are my personal decisions relevant? I'm calling for a government appropriation of the search division of Google.

If you say you want it government run after stealing it (lets not mince words here) and aren't using a government run one right now kind of undermines the sincerity of your arguments.

> aren't using a government run one right now kind of undermines the sincerity of your arguments.

First I never said I'm not. Either way it is pretty irrelevant to the discussion.

If, in fact, I am not using a government run one right now, maybe it is precisely because the government hasn't yet stolen Google's? If the government already had something as good as Google, clearly there would be no point in them stealing Google's, would there?

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

#315

Post by jeffbee »

pydry wrote: post #290
joshuamorton wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

That's not index access. You are getting ranked results. Index access would give you the posting list for the term "moose", or the intersection of the posting lists of "moose" and "caribou", or whatever.

You can't make a neutral service that returns ranked results, because that's contradictory.

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

#316

Post by Nasrudith »

qshqwudhoquc wrote: post #242
jakeva wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard this before but I'm not convinced. Not every big company fails and goes away. Not every company is Yahoo.

This doesn't seem like an argument you can make since A) modern capitalist companies have only been around for 400 or so years B) 'big' companies since then have not lasted more than 200 years at the very high end. There is literally not enough data to make the point you are trying to make. All evidence available, which isn't much, shows big companies are destined to fail if they keep expanding.

It is essentially an incompletely defined argument that goalposts can be set anywhere from absurdly near term (it won't die in the next five seconds and thus is immortal) to the absurdly far (it almost certainly won't survive in a millenia and is thus already dust). Shell has spanned slavery to fossil fuels in commodities sold but the mortality curve shows only very few outliers can survive historic terms, let alone grow over them.

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

#317

Post by [deleted] »

wz1000 wrote: post #300
bananabreakfast wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#318

Post by jeffbee »

wz1000 wrote: post #294
jeffbee wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Another thing that people persistently misunderstand is the scale relationship between GCP and the rest of Google.

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

#319

Post by a1369209993 »

Const-me wrote: post #224
schalab wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Nice idea but not sure about the example. > 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…

> Imagine MS would open source Windows XP SP2. [...] I don't think anyone would build an OS better than modern Win10 from that code.

Uh, yes they would? It's literally trivial - you just hit compile. As you note, a 64-bit build did exist, so it's not even limited to now-obsolete hardware, although unless you want to call some of the things at [0] automatically better than XP just because they run on amd64, even that wouldn't disqualify it from being better than windows 10.

0: https://wiki.osdev.org/Projects

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

#320

Post by freshhawk »

badRNG wrote: post #301
theplague42 wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So when Facebook has a monopoly on social media and allows misinformation to spread about _those exact three topics_, what would you suggest we do about it?

I addressed this in the third sentence of my comment: > However the fact that these other bigger issues exist doesn't mean we shouldn't care about or take action on the lesser. If one brings up how we should address issue 'x' and are met with "but what about issue 'y'?" it does give the impression of deflection or of whataboutism. The point is that we can care about more than one issue at a time.

But if you really cared about "election interference" then attacking media monopolies would be at the top of your list and you wouldn't make this argument.

You need to pick things that aren't directly connected if you want to deflect, or your argument comes across as being too obviously in bad faith.

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