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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

#381

Post by a1369209993 »

rossjudson wrote: post #355
a1369209993 wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

?

I think the query pipeline for NSA (relative to the scales of Google's query pipeline) looks like absense-of-query-pipeline. Hence NSA using less compute and thus (the reasoning goes) less power consumption.

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

#383

Post by wz1000 »

jimbokun wrote: post #347
wz1000 wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Truly an absurd comment. The US government is the largest employer in the country, with something in the order of 10 million employees. Are they all slaves chained to their desks?

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

#384

Post by Const-me »

a1369209993 wrote: post #380
Const-me wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on your definition of “work”. The driver is called “basic display adapter” or something like that. Modern Windows is barely usable without 3D GPU acceleration. Too many pixels to render and doing that on CPU is too slow, especially so on laptops. Vast majority of modern software, web browsers included, normally use a 3D GPU to render. And since Vista, windows desktop compositor, dwm.exe, uses a 3D GPU to comp…

> Modern Windows is barely usable without 3D GPU acceleration. That is a specific example (admittedly only one) of why Windows XP is better than Windows 10, so I'm not sure why you're citing that as if it supports your point.

> admittedly only one

Other hardware requirements are much lower too, XP will work on Pentium 233 MMX with 64MB RAM, Win10 requires at least 1GHz CPU and 1GB RAM. Some old software, and many old device drivers, won’t run on Win10 even if the OS is 32-bit.

> why Windows XP is better than Windows 10

The hardware evolves just as fast as the software. If you run XP on modern PC with a 4k display, I don’t think it will do great even if you’ll manage to install a 3D GPU driver (you probably need some GeForce 900-series GPU to try that, or maybe virtualized VMware GPU will do). If you run Win10 in 800x600 resolution, will probably work OK even with that basic unaccelerated driver, will render on CPU.

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

#385

Post by im_down_w_otp »

oh_sigh wrote: post #217
im_down_w_otp wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was partially responsible for designing a system that could be used to eventually scale to handle processing every global credit and debit transaction. GPS is harder. disclaimer: I used to work at Visa.

Were you also partially responsible for designing a GNSS system? Otherwise it isn't clear how you can make any claim as to the difficulty of that, if you're using your experience on the former as your bona fides. I think the difficulty of payment processing isn't in the happy path, but in fraud/anomaly detection, merchant servicing/outreach, dispute resolution, all of which do not have a "set it and forget it" soluti…

The platform had to encompass all of those payments infrastructure responsibilities. I'm quite aware of their relative difficulty.

Separately, I did not have to implement a GNSS system, but at the job I had immediately after Visa, I did have to work very, very closely with GNSS vendors who integrated with our AV middleware software (including having to write drivers for them), and in my current role I'm CEO of a company which produces a software platform that provides automated V&V of complex SISoS (including those integrated with and dependent on GNSS).

End to end payments systems are hard in the rats nest of legacy expectations and integration sense. End to end GPS deployment & management seems hard in the science and systems engineering sense.

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

#386

Post by justinclift »

crazygringo wrote: post #237

This is a weird headline. "Regulated as a public utility" means, economically, that prices/profits are set by law -- that there's only one electricity provider but they can't jack up prices because there's no competition. That makes no sense when applied to Google. The type of remedy appropriate for what the author describes (Google favoring their own products in search) is relatively simple. That Google, Amazon, and…

> "Regulated as a public utility" means, economically, that prices/profits are set by law ...

That's one part of it. Another part - unfortunately not even considered by the article - is customer support.

Utilities must provide customer support. For example, if a customer loses their account password.

Google famously has no recourse for people locked out of an account. If Google were to be regulated as a public utility, that would need to change.

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

#387

Post by crazygringo »

justinclift wrote: post #386
crazygringo wrote: post #237

This is a weird headline. "Regulated as a public utility" means, economically, that prices/profits are set by law -- that there's only one electricity provider but they can't jack up prices because there's no competition. That makes no sense when applied to Google. The type of remedy appropriate for what the author describes (Google favoring their own products in search) is relatively simple. That Google, Amazon, and…

> "Regulated as a public utility" means, economically, that prices/profits are set by law ... That's one part of it. Another part - unfortunately not even considered by the article - is customer support. Utilities must provide customer support. For example, if a customer loses their account password. Google famously has no recourse for people locked out of an account. If Google were to be regulated as a public utilit…

But the article is about Google as search, only, which needs no customer support, since it requires no account.

Whether Google (or other companies) provide support for their free consumer accounts is a totally orthogonal issue -- and I haven't heard anyone claiming that Gmail or Docs or Drive is being anticompetitive and needs to be regulated.

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

#388

Post by justinclift »

crazygringo wrote: post #387
justinclift wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Regulated as a public utility" means, economically, that prices/profits are set by law ... That's one part of it. Another part - unfortunately not even considered by the article - is customer support. Utilities must provide customer support. For example, if a customer loses their account password. Google famously has no recourse for people locked out of an account. If Google were to be regulated as a public utilit…

But the article is about Google as search, only, which needs no customer support, since it requires no account. Whether Google (or other companies) provide support for their free consumer accounts is a totally orthogonal issue -- and I haven't heard anyone claiming that Gmail or Docs or Drive is being anticompetitive and needs to be regulated.

You're right the bulk of the article is focused on Search. However, it also has this:

  There are very specific kinds of businesses and business
  models that should be overseen. The first and most
  important thing is a body [that] oversees the collection
  of user data and privacy and identification.
The "user data and privacy and identification" piece is also important. It's just not something this article really gets into.

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

#389

Post by shadowgovt »

jeffdn wrote: post #225
chrisco255 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, the same government that couldn't get a healthcare website going is supposed to also power every single transaction from internal infrastructure. There are hidden costs that are much higher than 3% to giving the government full control over every transaction in society. It's a single point of failure with no redundancy or decentralization, a large attack vector, and a human rights nightmare. As a general rule,…

To be fair, that was the first time the federal government had attempted to build a modern web application. There's a great interview with President Obama, I believe in FastCompany, where he discusses the approach to building healthcare.gov -- the crux of the issue was with the mindset. When you build large physical infrastructure, you need large companies, but the same is not true of technical infrastructure. This m…

Among the things that failed in the design for healthcare.gov: the overall plan was to have each component built, to a specification, and then any two teams that were integrating components would test integration, and the whole thing would work.

Three pieces of the puzzle missing:

1) It appears there was no honest-to-God real end-to-end testing in the plan: no team to own it, no chain of responsibility if it didn't work. So cross-functional issues like total system performance were ownerless, and it is the nature of government contracting work to push blame away, not assert ownership where none is demanded by the contract.

2) Even in integration testing, responsibility was unclear when it failed. If the specification itself proved faulty, neither side of the protocol had ownership over fixing the problem; faulty specs led to pissing matches of blame-pushing instead of any party saying "Okay, the spec is now this, just fix it."

3) Since nobody had holistic ownership, no core infrastructure decisions were made. The whole project, under the hood, was a mismash of different databases, languages, messaging services, and protocols, owned by (and chosen by) each contractor with no thought paid to long-term maintenance of the app as a singular service. Each team had their own ad-hoc dashboards with no top-level view to allow anyone to understand why the end-to-end site experience was broken. There was nobody to own a concept equivalent to "Ops" or "Site reliability" who had authority to make judgement calls here; long-term maintenance was going to look like full understanding of dozens of similar systems doing similar tasks.

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

#390

Post by rmacqueen »

scarface74 wrote: post #367
rmacqueen wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No people didn’t choose to have Microsoft. Microsoft forced OEMs to bundle Windows with all of their computers. Even if the OEM decided not to bundle Windows, they still had to pay a license fee. No personal computer comes with Chrome installed by default unless the OEM made a deal with Google to bundle it along with other crapware. Users have to explicitly download Chrome. It’s a lot easier to change your default se…

The issue isn't how Google achieved its search engine dominance - it's what it is doing with that dominance. No one denies Google became the search platform of choice because it is genuinely better. That doesn't change the fact that Google is now using that position of near total dominance to stifle competition in other areas, such as e-commerce. That's the (sound) basis for the anti-trust charge.
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