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

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

#171

Post by LatteLazy »

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…

"Something has to be done, and this is something!"

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

#172

Post by suifbwish »

bananabreakfast wrote: post #102
ziftface wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish they would do that as well, but that certainly doesn't invalidate these concerns

Sure it does. It undercuts their entire argument by making it look much more like a political stunt than any kind of serious action.

Actually that is what is known as a red herring argument. Bringing up something unrelated saying that the original argument is invalidated because the same reasoning wasn’t applied to it is a common informal fallacy. Most legal documents have something related to severability which states that even if one part of the document is found to be unreasonable/illegal/illogical, it does not invalidate the rest of the document.

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

#173

Post by cm2187 »

pcmoney wrote: post #117
adrr wrote: post #95

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.

You have multiple choices for water, dig a well, buy it from the local grocery store. Same for sewage because self composting toilets exist. Also electricity isn't a utility just use a stationary bike as a generator or buy solar panels... Just because you have multiple choices doesn't mean something is/isn't a utility. Its pretty arbitrary. They also aren't talking about Google products (most of which are completely…

Or like many people put it after the Parler shutdown, build your own water station and power plant from scratch.

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

#174

Post by woodruffw »

jolmg wrote: post #109
woodruffw wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know where I stand on the public utility argument, but to make the strongest possible case for this analogy: most peoples' online lives (including their financials) are tied to a singular email address. That email address forms the ground truth for their identity, including being able to access services that they've lost their credentials for. Google's ability to unilaterally revoke access to the account that…

> gives them the kind of power that we'd normally only see in regional monopolies like water utilities. No access to water from the only provider in your reach, especially if you're kind of broke, really doesn't seem equal to having your email account blocked, when people have very accessible choices of email providers and what they tie to it. The situation sucks, but looking at this from a public utility perspective…

> when people have very accessible choices of email providers and what they tie to it.

I think this point might have been true 15 or 20 years ago, but I suspect that it no longer is on either front:

* E-mail is increasingly non-federated and subject to Google's dictates w/r/t delivery guarantees, origin identification, &c. These aren't bad things; e-mail was a mess before Google started taking it seriously! But it does result in a sort of natural dominance: smaller providers have to play by Google's rules to ensure delivery; large institutions are less likely to debug delivery issues to smaller providers. In other words, I have to be willing to accept a certain amount of second-class treatment.

* It's been my experience that my ability to not tie things to my e-mail has diminished over the years. More recent government systems and financial accounts require a valid e-mail; e-mail + password is now the default setting for creating an account on most services. Even when my e-mail is strictly optional for a service, it frequently operates as a safety net (recovery codes, poor man's 2FA, &c). Put another way: my inbox is treated as the high-availability, high-reliability delivery mechanism.

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

#175

Post by caslon »

neuronflux wrote: post #126
caslon wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google-avoider checking in! It's actually really easy to avoid it. DuckDuckGo's search quality is better, Firefox is deteriorating daily but still looks and feels better than Chrome does, email should really be avoided but there are dozens of really good email services, and their ad service doesn't need a replacement for obvious reasons (just block it).

I imagine you avoid Google because you don't want to get locked into their centralized closed source ecosystem and don't want them to track your entire online presence. So I'm surprised to see you say email should be avoided, as a completely open decentralized communication protocol. Your stances on these two topics just seem to be in contrast with each other, would you care to elaborate?

I don't care about centralization or their tracking particularly much on their own. I don't like to use bad software. It bothers me, fundamentally. I naturally ended up far away from Google by virtue of not liking things that waste computational resources, which all of their software does, and has for years. This is the same reason I stopped using Windows and OS X. I like to use software that makes me feel good, and megabytes being wasted by tracking scripts and terrible Javascript frameworks does not make me feel good, so I avoid their standalone services and block their parasitic services.

However, email isn't really a good decentralized protocol. All federation fails at being meaningfully decentralized given enough time. There are great decentralized protocols; email is not one of them.

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

#176

Post by quadrifoliate »

caslon wrote: post #111
adrr wrote: post #95

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.

Google-avoider checking in! It's actually really easy to avoid it. DuckDuckGo's search quality is better, Firefox is deteriorating daily but still looks and feels better than Chrome does, email should really be avoided but there are dozens of really good email services, and their ad service doesn't need a replacement for obvious reasons (just block it).

What do you do when you have a job interview that is scheduled as a Google Meet meeting? Or when a friend shares a Google Photos album of their newborn's pictures?

I guess you are a Google-avoider, so presumably you still have an actual Google account.

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

#177

Post by woodruffw »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #164
woodruffw wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It occurs to me that I don't have an exhaustive list of all of the accounts that I've signed up to over the years with my email address. If I'm banned by my provider, I won't have any recourse for many of them except to discover at some point in the future that I've missed an important alert, billing statement, or notice of action. And that's even before I know that I need to go to a physical location or mail in some…

You can as easily have the same problem with physical mail, but that doesn't confer an indefinite right to a particular physical address. I do encourage keeping backups of your email to reduce this risk -- at least you can search your records that way.

> You can as easily have the same problem with physical mail, but that doesn't confer an indefinite right to a particular physical address.

Of course not! But the USPS has (virtually) free change-of-address forwarding[1], and we have an entire set of social and governmental institutions pre-built around the impermanency of physical addresses. No such institutions exist for digital addressing.

I agree, re: backups, and I keep them for myself. But it occurs to me that the average non-technical individual probably doesn't know how to make a backup of their GMail account. I use GSuite, and the last time I checked I had to explicitly enable IMAP and then set a custom "app password" in order to set up IMAP access for my backup client. Oh, and there was some Google-specific TLS weirdness; boundaries abound.

[1]: https://www.usa.gov/post-office#item-37197

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

#178

Post by caslon »

balls187 wrote: post #127
caslon wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google-avoider checking in! It's actually really easy to avoid it. DuckDuckGo's search quality is better, Firefox is deteriorating daily but still looks and feels better than Chrome does, email should really be avoided but there are dozens of really good email services, and their ad service doesn't need a replacement for obvious reasons (just block it).

Have you tried the new chromium based Edge?

Using a proprietary web browser would be like using a blowtorch that claimed to be powered by "magic." While I might use, say, a "magic" recipe, or a toy that claimed to be magic, I certainly wouldn't use a real, combustive tool that claimed to be magic.

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

#179

Post by Beached »

genericuser314 wrote: post #148
pcmoney wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have multiple choices for water, dig a well, buy it from the local grocery store. Same for sewage because self composting toilets exist. Also electricity isn't a utility just use a stationary bike as a generator or buy solar panels... Just because you have multiple choices doesn't mean something is/isn't a utility. Its pretty arbitrary. They also aren't talking about Google products (most of which are completely…

I think you're making a category error in your analogy. DuckDuckGo is much more like Google than "dig a well" is like municipal water.

I disagree, wells are equal to or better than municipal water, and can often be cheaper while being higher quality. the inverse can be true. the analogy holds imo.
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