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Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a public utility

dispatch.com

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Re: Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a public utility

#91

Post by bananabreakfast »

aetherson wrote: post #78
bmmayer1 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is Google a monopoly? Serious question.

Google controls the vast majority of the web search market. More than 90%. What exactly a monopoly constitutes is something that people can disagree about, but "has 90% market share" is not by any means a crazy definition of a monopoly.

But market share of what? No one pays for web search so that's not really a market.

Facebook has 90%+ market share of social media. Do they have a monopoly?

GitHub has a 90%+ market share of open source code hosting. Do they have a monopoly?

Re: Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a public utility

#92

Post by croes »

bananabreakfast wrote: post #84
tyingq wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Senator Herb Kohl: But you do recognize that in the words that are used and antitrust kind of oversight, your market share constitutes monopoly, dominant -- special power dominant for a monopoly firm. You recognize you're in that area? Eric Shmidt: I would agree, sir, that we’re in that area....I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding of monopoly findings is this is a judicial process. From: https://www.businessinsider…

Google would argue that web search is not their market. They are in the business of online advertising in which they most definitely do not have dominant market share.

Yeah, that's why to google something means advertising and not searching for something on the internet. No, wait ...

Re: Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a public utility

#93

Post by riknos314 »

gumby wrote: post #48
ping_pong wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a direct result of their monopoly, which is why Google should be broken up. Because they have such a huge monopoly, they can afford to ignore customers and have a draconian approach to people, and can get away with it. If there were better competition, they wouldn't have been able to ignore their customers. Breaking them up will alleviate this by ensuring that each company needs to be able to survive on their…

> ...their monopoly, which is why Google should be broken up. Not denying their monopoly position, but how could Google meaningfully be broken up? It's really just a single business (advertising) with a gaggle of loss leaders adding up to less than 20% of revenue. Even pushing advertising down to 80% took a huge amount of effort. It's not like Standard Oil which was a vertically integrated trust of several points in…

The simplest split with potential to start addressing concerns in this particular lawsuit is to break the index that results from google's web crawling out into a utility.

With competing "engines" (defined as a ranking algorithm and frontend to query said algorithm) building from the same, high-quality index competition in the search space could get much better.

Engines such as DuckDuckGo relying on Bing for the majority of their index is a decent example of how this might work.

Re: Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a public utility

#94

Post by frankbreetz »

amluto wrote: post #79
jonplackett wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the suggestion is breaking up alphabet, which is quite literally loads of companies. YouTube, Google search, deep mind, Google fiber, waymo, Fitbit etc Seems pretty easy to break up if you want to.

Which accomplishes what, exactly? Perhaps Google Search, Chrome, and the advertising business could be split. Or Google Search could be split into Google Search 1 and Google Search 2.

If an advertising company didn't have access to your search history, there would be a more level playing field

Re: Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a public utility

#95

Post by adrr »

But I have multiple choices for email, search, video hosting and browsers. I don’t have any choice for water, electricity, sewer, on any other public utility.

I am sure there are a bunch of people on here that don’t use any Google products and are using DuckDuckGo, Firefox, ProtonMail, Vimeo. There are many choices.

Re: Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a public utility

#96

Post by jonny_eh »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #14
Hamuko wrote: post #2

So Republicans have completely flipped on the sovereignity of private companies? Or is this just posturing to please the number one of the GOP (Dave Yost filed a “friend of the court” brief in support of invalidating 2020 votes in Pennsylvania)?

Every state that is not deep blue is not Alaska levels of red. Ohio and much of the mid west is moderately red or moderately blue depending on the policies in question so you get middle of the road policy like this that isn't hard-line one way or the other but appeals to the tons of people on both sides of the isle who think big tech is f-ed up right now. While this move might alienate people on the far right for bei…

> Every state that is not deep blue is not Alaska levels of red

Maybe not the state, but the Republican leadership is. There are vanishingly few moderate Republicans left in any office in the country.

Re: Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a public utility

#97

Post by zaptheimpaler »

Grimm1 wrote: post #66

I don't want more utilities, I want more competition, failure, and new players to fill spaces where old players died. Crony protectionism, and lax acquisition constraints are why we have a lot of these companies at where they are. When the seeming majority of exit plans for companies is an acquisition by a larger existing entity you have a problem. If our laws were better, people would be able to compete against beca…

The world is increasingly winner-take-all, so its hard to do that. Very few people want to use the second best search engine instead of the best, or constantly use multiple search engines. Seems like a natural monopoly to me. How can you complain about a weak-willed government in a post showing the opposite anyways?

Re: Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a public utility

#98

Post by [deleted] »

Buttons840 wrote: post #34

> the lawsuit seeks a legal declaration that Google is a "common carrier," like phone, gas and electric companies, which must provide its services to anyone willing to pay its fee. How can something on the internet be a common carrier when the internet itself is not a common carrier?

[deleted]

Re: Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a public utility

#99

Post by stale2002 »

Hamuko wrote: post #2

So Republicans have completely flipped on the sovereignity of private companies? Or is this just posturing to please the number one of the GOP (Dave Yost filed a “friend of the court” brief in support of invalidating 2020 votes in Pennsylvania)?

Even republicans are opposed to anti-competitive behavior done by firms with large amounts of market power.

You would be hard pressed to find a modern day Republican who thinks that all water, electricity, and telephone services should have their common carrier status changed.

Common carrier laws are uncontroversial, on both sides of the political spectrum. Few people would argue in favor of cutting off power and water, to their political opponents.

Re: Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a public utility

#100

Post by jonny_eh »

ericmay wrote: post #73
emidln wrote: post #4

How exactly is Google.com different from a phone book in 1990? Phone books, to my knowledge, were not prohibited from advertising Southwestern Bell or Ameritech junk at the beginning, they were just incentivized not to do so because selling ads was more profitable.

I don't have a great answer for you, but I have another question: if Google isn't different than a phone book in 1990, why were phone books never a top 10 business in the United States?

> why were phone books never a top 10 business in the United States?

They were always hyper local, or just offered by the telephone companies themselves.

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