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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

#341

Post by rmacqueen »

scarface74 wrote: post #211
rmacqueen wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

And people 'chose' to have a Microsoft operating system in the late 90s. What's your point?

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

#342

Post by pc86 »

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.

Said as a former brick-and-mortar business owner, if CC fees disappeared overnight, companies with breathe a sigh of relief and proceed to not lower prices one cent.

Nobody is making purchasing decisions based on a 1% different in price for a car, let alone day-to-day purchases.

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

#343

Post by autokad »

ALittleLight wrote: post #11

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…

its kind of a form of ransom. now they can seek rent from roku to pay for their own word to stay on top or else their competitors will do so

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

#344

Post by xadhominemx »

revnode wrote: post #69
satyrnein wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I definitely have concerns about the stranglehold the payment processors have, but does it really make everything 3-5% more expensive? My understanding was that a good chunk of the 3% fee is given back to consumers as cash back or rewards, and that dealing with cash also had costs for businesses.

This is correct. The best you can usually do is 2% cash back, so really the consumer is being charged 1% for the convenience of using a credit card. Obviously most consider that worth it, which is why credit cards are so popular.

Banks basically break even on interchange after paying out awards and security costs and then the merchant acquirer + network get like .2% - 1% depending on the size of the merchant. V/M is one of the most benign duopolies out there.

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

#345

Post by xadhominemx »

the-dude wrote: post #270
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.

The Dutch payment system iDeal charges between a couple of cents for the big retailers to maybe 15 - 20 cents for small fish. These fees are absolute, not relative to the purchase amount. edit : I meant our PIN payments card, not iDeal. But the point is true for both.

Sure but almost all interchange flows right back to the consumer via cash rewards

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

#346

Post by Const-me »

joshuamorton wrote: post #286
Const-me wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> If you don't want to be indexed

If I had a web site that actually makes money as opposed to only consuming money for domain and hosting, I would want it to be indexed, and I would want search results from that index to be fair.

By “fair” I mean I want it to only depend on the content of the site. I’m OK for search results to depend on the content of other pages on the internets which might link to it, helps to rank pages making search results more relevant. I don’t want search results to depend on my choice of web technologies (see AMP), or commercial relations between search engine and third parties.

I don’t do web development, but I have some understanding of the tech involved, and I think many people have reasons to be unhappy with the status quo.

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

#347

Post by jimbokun »

wz1000 wrote: post #324
jeffbee wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Even if all you say is true and it is truly impossible for the government to replicate any of what Google does, the point is moot. If the government is going to appropriate Google's index, might as well appropriate the datacenters too. Really, whats Google going to do with them once search is gone? According to you, it is the only thing they have have running there.

Might as well appropriate the engineers, too, and chain them to their desks and force them to keep everything working.

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

#348

Post by Shared404 »

komali2 wrote: post #338
Shared404 wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, I don't trust either. However, I think I trust government less, if only slightly. I also don't use Google.

Just curious, what do you use?

Mostly DDG, along with a side cast of others if I can't find what I'm looking for. I've got a list here [0]

[0] http://a-shared-404.com/other-stuff/

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

#349

Post by opportune »

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…

I don’t understand the comparison of tech companies to countries. It only makes sense on a very superficial level. They provide vastly different goods , services, and roles in society. Their monetization schemes are completely different.

I honestly don’t believe any major tech company, with the exception of Facebook (who tries to acquire every perceived competitor), is anticompetitive and I don’t think any needs to be broken up. It’s not hard to find alternatives to any individual service. They should only be broken up if they abuse their market share to prevent competitors from existing.

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

#350

Post by joshuamorton »

Const-me wrote: post #346
joshuamorton wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> If you don't want to be indexed If I had a web site that actually makes money as opposed to only consuming money for domain and hosting, I would want it to be indexed, and I would want search results from that index to be fair. By “fair” I mean I want it to only depend on the content of the site. I’m OK for search results to depend on the content of other pages on the internets which might link to it, helps to rank…

> I don’t want search results to depend on my choice of web technologies (see AMP), or commercial relations between search engine and third parties.

(I work at Google, but not on search).

My understanding is that AMP doesn't actually affect ranking. Performance affects ranking, and AMP affects performance. But so do many other things.

There's also a similar conversation about placement (the "carousel"), which isn't ranking exactly, and that is affected by web technologies, in that certain placements require certain types of structure in the underlying site (metadata, etc.). AMP is one, but not the only, way to achieve this.

> By “fair” I mean I want it to only depend on the content of the site.

This is a definition of fairness, but it's certainly not the only one, and it may not be the best one. As a user, I want my search results to be tailored to me, which means that your ranking would depend on third parties (my priors).

Like, as an alternative, Google could list all search results alphabetically by url, like a phone book. That's fair too. But probably worse. So discussions of fairness don't make sense, because there are tons of terrible but "fair" ranking strategies, and for basically any query, there's someone who thinks they should be higher and that the reason they aren't is that the system is unfair.

> or commercial relations between search engine and third parties.

Do you mean ad space, or something else?

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