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United States vs. Google

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Re: United States vs. Google

#191

Post by punnerud »

rland wrote: post #109

> there is a strain of political thought in America, independent of political party (although traditionally associated with Democrats), that is inherently allergic to concentrated power — monopoly in the populist sense, if not the legal one. > Hatred of monopoly is one of the oldest American political habits and like most profound traditions In what country does the author live? Americans are so used to concentrated…

In Norway I pay $10/mo for DSL (300/300Mb/s), ambulance ride is free, don't pay for lifesaving medication. My bos is not allowed to request a drug test, only if this is collectively agreed upon because you as an employee is not in a position to deny. Prisons are not publicly owned. Four companies own a lot of television output, but a fifth is governmently owned, independent and not allowed to be politically biased. You can opt out of credit rating and entitled to get all information gathered on you, and how the calculation is done. 0% of my transactions done within Norway goes to Visa og MasterCard, because the banks have build a system to identify the card to skip the fee (BankAxept). Political ads is not legal on TV, and there is a lot of regulations on the ones that is legal. The retirement funds can freely be transferred between banks to increase competition and your return. To avoid too much wealth or power to group into a handfull of individuals; all the income information and stock positions is made public every year.

Re: United States vs. Google

#192

Post by edgyquant »

alexashka wrote: post #182
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Democracy only works well with an informed and educated populace and we have been defunding education for a decade. Add in the power of lobbyists and the newfound power of tech giants to inflict misery on humanity and you get the current “corporate rule” we are experiencing. https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/a-punishi...

Can you point me to that wonderful time when the populace was informed and educated? The average IQ is 100 - do you consider the capabilities of a person with less than 100 IQ (half the population) to be capable of being informed by your definition of informed? Does a person with less than 100 IQ want to be educated by your definition of educated? --- Alternative theory regarding power/politics: The only thing that's…

I do not believe IQ is a relevant metric to determine ones ability to be informed politically.

Re: United States vs. Google

#193

Post by genidoi »

zepto wrote: post #63
aloisdg wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lets say 1.

The divisions are arbitrary. A search engine is a number of components - e.g. a crawler, an index, and a user interface. Why should one company be able to own all three of these? Why not just one? Perhaps crawling should only be able to be sold as a wholesale commodity.

What is the exact point that a crawler needs to be decoupled (at the corporate level) from it's front end? Is it measured by MAUs? Pages scraped? Or is it going by "it can be decoupled, so it should".

The extreme version of your argument would have companies own the IP to a particular for loop's iterator variable name.

Re: United States vs. Google

#194

Post by nunez »

mdoms wrote: post #171
thayne wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most Americans are unhappy with this situation. But we feel powerless to change it. We may have the right to vote, but we don't have options to vote for anyone that is incentivized to change the status quo.

> I think most Americans are unhappy with this situation. But we feel powerless to change it. BS. Americans will happily send half their disposable income to Amazon in the name of convenience.

Name another company _that is not Walmart_ that can deliver most of the items I want or need (or, hell, anything that I can think of) next day without paying exorbitant shipping fees and I'll switch to them right now.

Re: United States vs. Google

#195

Post by munk-a »

bobthepanda wrote: post #154
sudosysgen wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually yes, this is a good point, a large part of it can be attributed to the FPTP system enforcing two parties that can endlessly justify themselves by being marginally better on some issues (in this case, social issues). Do you see a possible path for something like IRV nationwide?

States are expressly empowered to choose how they run elections, although the current FPTP (at least for the House) is actually a law of Congress. That being said, the major issue with relying on states to do this, is that the first states to do this will probably lose out. In a parallel universe with orange and green parties, if, say, the orange state decides to move to proportional electoral college but the green s…

I think something like the interstate voting compact is an extremely deft strategy for approaching a more proportional voting approach for the executive office - for congressional seats there might be a similar approach possible but I'm not certain - such an approach might need to be activated only when a much higher proportion of states sign on - I agree that the leaders would lose if they approached this individually and, honestly, I think we need a really big change to get into a good place - we might get a bit better incrementally.

I'd really like to see the US have regional and balancing seats in congress - the former tied to districts and the latter allocated to maximize the correctness of the representation - so maybe the Purple wins all the races in Maine but Green had 40% of the vote in both races - Green would gain a non-regionally tied house seat[1] while purple gets both of the regional seats.

1. Potentially seats depending on how national elections go

Re: United States vs. Google

#196

Post by stale2002 »

wonder_er wrote: post #124
Judgmentality wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a red herring fallacy. The government can be more evil than Google and Google can still be evil. Does that mean we should not care that Google is evil? The government is the only tool we have to fight Google. And while there are lots of problems with our government, we still have the ability to enact change by voting. You can't really do that with Google, even as a shareholder. The founders have supervoting r…

> The government can be more evil than Google and Google can still be evil. Does that mean we should not care that Google is evil? You're conflating two things. 1. The government is more evil than Google. 2. Google may still be evil. therefore... use the more evil thing to fight the less evil thing? I disagree with this assessment. I'd say we should focus on mitigating the _most_ evil thing, using _less evil_ tools.…

> There are plenty of other non-coercive tools we can use to "fight" google, and it's called "competition".

Coercion works pretty well though. I don't see why we should not use this effective tool, when we agree that Google is doing a lot of wrong things that should be stopped.

If you believe the government is doing other bad things, against other people, fine you can argue that. But that is not particularly relevant, and is just a non-sequitor.

I don't see how, in this particular situation, using coercion against Google is bad. Seems like it would be pretty good to me.

It can both be true that the government is doing bad things against others, but that in this particular situation, using a monopoly on violence, to use coercion against the Google leadership is a good thing.

To argue otherwise is just an irrelevant point, that is not directly related to the immediate situation.

Re: United States vs. Google

#197

Post by lanevorockz »

It's quite a shallow argument. Google's clients are not their users, the users is their product. Main case is the conveniently tax paradise located Ads team. They are the ones making the money and they are a virtual monopoly.

If you want to advertise on the internet what options do you have for Ad platforms? Not many. That's why Tech Giants are now bigger then countries. We might be moving to the Ultra Capitalist future of Demolition Man.

Re: United States vs. Google

#198

Post by pwinnski »

rland wrote: post #109

> there is a strain of political thought in America, independent of political party (although traditionally associated with Democrats), that is inherently allergic to concentrated power — monopoly in the populist sense, if not the legal one. > Hatred of monopoly is one of the oldest American political habits and like most profound traditions In what country does the author live? Americans are so used to concentrated…

A "strain of political thought" does not mean that this view is the center of mainstream thought. Quite the opposite.

I know people on both far-left and far-right who are just as Thompson describes: upset about any concentration of power, whether political, commercial, or religious. Does that mean they refuse to buy internet service or take medicine? The connection you draw seems nonsensical.

I, personally, loathe concentrated power. I, personally, pay an egregious sum of money for a half-terabit internet connection. That price, and my lack of options, is one symptom of the very issue at hand! Since I alone am unable to change the status quo, I pay what is required of me and grumble about it using that very service.

You describe the status quo as evidence that not one single person fits the description, then go on to demonstrate that you yourself seem to fit the description.

As far as hatred of monopoly being a long trend in America, the original birth of this country had avoiding aying tea in Boston Harbor to setting up three distinct branches of government, the rejection of monopoly and concentrated power was, as Thompson reminds us, a habit and tradition.

Re: United States vs. Google

#199

Post by bun_at_work »

Osiris wrote: post #23
waterside81 wrote: post #12

So if every phone/browser etc. asked you to pick your default browser at setup time - would that placate the DOJ? Wouldn't most people stick pick Google?

I believe your comment is a bit tongue in cheek about Microsoft's settlement over IE. The concern here is that government, especially lawyers, are not good at coming up with remedies. If the court rules Google is a monopoly, then what? What changes will be demanded, and will they "fix" the issue that the government is trying to solve?

Did you read the article? Or any of the lawsuit? The fix the gov't is pushing for seems obvious - in this case it would prevent companies in Google's position from making exclusive deals that promote their product over competitors.

A specific example - Google pays Apple billions of dollars each year to make Google the default search engine. That wouldn't be allowed. What Apple does in response isn't outlined.

Re: United States vs. Google

#200

Post by bogwog »

VikingCoder wrote: post #51
dsabanin wrote: post #47

I think Google is the best search engine. I don't have a problem with that. I do have a problem with them being the best search engine, top online ad platform and a developer of the top mobile OS, top video streaming service, top internet browser, top mapping/navigation service, among other things, at the SAME time. Their assets give them undue and unsupervised influence over a very big chunk of what's happening onli…

1) best search engine 2) top online ad platform 3) top mobile OS 4) top video streaming service 5) top internet browser 6) top mapping/navigation service Okay, you listed 6. What should the law say is the new limit for how many they should be able to have?

Think about it like this: what are the chances any other competitor will be able to challenge those products and succeed?

If some other innovative company “started in a garage” or whatever does challenge one of those, Google has the power to kill it before it becomes a threat, cripple it while they copy the technology or poach the development team, acquire the company with a truckload of money, etc.

So in the end, Google will always come out on top, and consumers will always be stuck with them. The only remedy to that situation is government intervention.

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