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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

#351

Post by 8note »

Press2forEN wrote: post #187
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…

People should have feel the burden that taxation places on them. Payroll withholding already artificially dampens the strain that taxation imposes on everyone that earns a paycheck. Issuing a pre-filled out form is another step backwards. Paying taxes should be burdensome and uncomfortable.

I don't think that does what you want it to.

Make taxes burdensome, and you create a market for tax filers who make them easy for you. All youve done is make taxes more expensive then, without getting better government services.

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

#352

Post by dhosek »

InitialLastName wrote: post #306
dhosek wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To be fair, the presidential election thing progressives are whining is rigged is that their candidate lost despite getting 3 million more votes than someone they didn't like. That it happened twice in 3 presidents is icing on the "it's rigged" cake.

I was referring to whiners in the primaries. There are many factors for why trunmp won in 2016 and changing any one of them could have changed the outcome. One of those factors was Sanders voters who stayed home or voted for third-party candidates.

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

#353

Post by rossjudson »

It takes less than a minute of searching to find that the first argument Bednar presents is factually incorrect.

Bednar: "Local restaurants, for example, are forced to use Google’s partner ChowNow in order to have convenient “Order Pickup” or “Order Delivery” buttons in search results for their own name, which charges an added hefty fee to the restaurant for each order, hurting their already thin margins."

ChowNow is all about "unlimited, commission-free orders":

https://get.chownow.com/pricing

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

#354

Post by auganov »

tgb wrote: post #339
auganov wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is an example of why I think you are placing the burden of detail too high. The discussion was about the case for why something needed to be done, not specifically what. Yet a lack-of-sufficiently-detailed-solution let's you shut it down. Even in the case of a fairly clear proposal, it's not detailed enough. Search is Google's biggest monopoly and a proposal to separate that out would be obvious. Is Shopping rea…

Anybody can list a bunch of names to be broken up in a few minutes. I gave you plenty of examples to work with. Nothing to do with lawyers.

Google search is approx. 60% of Google's revenue according to the latest 10-K. And may be an even bigger portion of the net income. If you keep that intact you won't kill Google's golden goose nor will you solve many unfairness issues as relating to search.

AdSense et al. is 13%. YouTube is 10%. These 3 are most of revenue-generating Google.

It is important what happens to their many other products. Most of which are not bringing in big money (in an obvious way) but are widely used.

Does everything not-search become one company consisting of Google leftovers? (this may be what you're proposing, but it's not clear)

The goal of any such action is to benefit the consumer in some way. When you actually do start defining how things would be broken up it becomes more obvious how consumers could suffer. And it becomes more obvious how you're not de-monopolizing anything.

> The discussion was about the case for why something needed to be done, not specifically what. Yet a lack-of-sufficiently-detailed-solution let's you shut it down

This may be what the original linked article talks about. I started this thread talking about how instead and it never discussed the why. It's merely a thought exercise aimed at illuminating what I consider a lack of workable solutions. Not telling anybody they cannot be interested in yet-undefined solutions.

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

#355

Post by rossjudson »

a1369209993 wrote: post #321
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

Megawatts are indicative of compute load, not storage load. I can definitely believe that Google is doing more compute than NSA, but that sounds more like a difference of need, not of ability.

What do you think the query pipeline looks like?

I can assure you that it's not mapping each query down to a single-sector disk read off an inverted index.

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

#356

Post by rossjudson »

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.

It also does a lot of storage intensive, non search related stuff, like Google Cloud Storage.

Every Google data center does...everything.

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

#357

Post by tolbish »

stickfigure wrote: post #129
shakna wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every device that I can think of allows you to choose a default search engine. Users, overwhelming, do not change defaults. Period. Unless there is a step where they are shown a range of options and select one, this is not an active choice for them.

Citizens (at least in the US), overwhelmingly, don't vote. But that doesn't mean this isn't a democracy.

You were this close to stumbling on something insightful.

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

#358

Post by Const-me »

joshuamorton wrote: post #350
Const-me wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 r…

> My understanding is that AMP doesn't actually affect ranking

They tell they use AMP versions to measure performance, and the performance affects ranking. AMP is hosted by the same google who does ranking, they gonna measure better performance because it’s their local network. Not sure it was an oversight, looks more like cheating.

Apparently, they’re planning to revert in 2021, but I think it’s too little too late. I think they only doing it due to public and political pressure. Unless regulated, they’ll continue to implement features which maximize their profit at the expense of everyone else on the internets, both users and web site owners.

> As a user, I want my search results to be tailored to me

I certainly don’t, BTW that’s one of the reasons why I’m using duckduckgo instead. Why would you want personalized results? Doesn’t it effectively limit search space to things you already know, or like? That thing probably ain’t a filter technically, and neither it’s censorship legally, but practically speaking reordering stuff to later pages is as good as filtering.

> Do you mean ad space, or something else?

UX patterns to blur the line between fair and paid results. Try to disable ad.blockers, search for something generic and advertised worldwide like “web hosting”, and compare search result pages between google and DDG. Google’s “Ad” is barely noticeable, DDG’s “Ad” has very noticeable outline. Google doesn’t show URL, DDG does.

Also, too much garbage in general. Google shows maps despite completely irrelevant for online-only services like web hosting. The result is more than a page of garbage before the first fair search result, and that’s on my 27” 4k monitor. Will probably be couple pages of garbage for a user with average display and without ad blockers.

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

#359

Post by glitchc »

v7p1Qbt1im wrote: post #256
glitchc wrote: post #52

This seems excessive. Instead of regulating search, which would have a net effect of entrenching Google as the only de-facto search engine, it is better to let competition take its course. A better technology can always up-end Google's business model (it's more fragile than people think). Let the open market perform its function. After all, it was only 2000 when people thought MS and RIM were too big and needed to be…

Mentioning MS in that way doesn’t help your argument. They are doing better than ever before. Who cares about desktop space (which they still have an enormous market share of btw) when you have Azure. I would argue the antitrust settlement actually helped them. Everyone is basically ignoring them in current “tech-lash” discussions. They got away with a slap on the wrist 20 years ago and are just slightly more careful…

On the contrary, MS is an excellent example of a large company being forced to pivot (to cloud) after their existing business model (desktop software) looked increasingly dead in the water. Year to year earnings showcase how much more reliant MS was on desktop software two decades ago. Changes in technology, user expectations and computing model forced MS to innovate, not regulation, and that’s exactly my point.

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

#360

Post by stjohnswarts »

superasn wrote: post #226
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…

You're right. when i searched "digitalocean pricing" today the top results were ads saying "linode is better", "free $100 vps coupon", etc. It seems borderline fraudulent that Google is doing this to companies that clearly should be the first result on the page.

Try it in a private/incognito window and see if you get the same results. When I did that it was all about digitalocean. I'm guessing they used your "anonymous" profile to figure out which ads were best for you.
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