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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

#221

Post by loup-vaillant »

BMorearty wrote: post #146
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’m disappointed to hear Firefox is deteriorating daily. I disagree about DDG’s search quality. I tried it for six months and that was not my experience. Eventually went back to Google.

I believe it depends on people. For some DuckDuckGo works perfectly, and they rarely go back to Google, if at all. For others it just does not work.

This reminds me of the dream of displacing Microsoft Word. Can we make a better product? No we can't. Only Microsoft can, through upgrades. The competition is stuck with making the same thing, and therefore not better, or something different, which is always "worse" because people are used to Word.

Also note that DuckDuckGo has a fundamental disadvantage: by not tailoring its searches to your history, it cannot possibly guess what you want to see as well as Google. Sure you're not trapped in your own search bubble, but you don't feel that. You only feel that the damn search engine can't find that website you are searching for for the fifth time already.

Pro tip: to get back to a web site, type its URL, or use bookmarks. Somehow I've seen many professional programmers fail to do that. I give them a URL, and they type it on the freaking search bar. (The more modern version is failing to type or auto-complete an actual URL in the omni bar.)

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

#222

Post by jsnell »

woodruffw wrote: post #55
jolmg wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Google isn't the only provider of email addresses. In contrast, water utilities typically hold monopoly over their region. EDIT: Many people are replying with some variant that the problem is that Google can block the email account that people have tied to their financial and government services. But the same is true of any other email provider. If Google is somehow turned into a public utility, how does that sol…

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…

Let's follow that argument to its logical conclusion. There is nothing special about the property you've described here. My high school, university, half a dozen previous employers, and several ISPs also gave me email addresses. I did not get to keep any of them when leaving those institutions.

What about smaller webmail providers? Yahoo and Hotmail gave me email addresses back in the day, and then deleted them for inactivity. Your argument applies equally well there. How about those Fastmail accounts that people are paying for? Should they get to keep them even after terminating service?

Clearly all of this is completely absurd. The "important stuff is tied to a single email address" case is extremely weak.

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

#223

Post by jlarocco »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #199
genericuser314 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People talking like drilling a well in your backward is on par with typing in a different URL. So how about this, the upfront cost and effort of typing in a different URL is at least a few orders of magnitude easier than drilling a well.

> So how about this, the upfront cost and effort of typing in a different URL is at least a few orders of magnitude easier than drilling a well.

That's missing the point.

Regardless of whether you personally type google.com or duckduckgo.com, most people use google and so they get directed to other Google products and don't see competing products, and that hurts competition in those spaces.

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

#224

Post by ErikVandeWater »

supernova87a wrote: post #212

A big problem with software and people who write software (often) is that software doesn't like all the ways that human beings misbehave, change their minds, don't have immutable states, and don't fit into the categories you build for them. So any system that has a duty to serve everyone eventually ends up with an operational component that has almost as much human interaction and problem solving required as the soft…

Earnest question - Why does the utility have to honor the request of the owner? Doesn't the utility own the meter and is allowed to make changes to it as it sees fit?

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

#225

Post by toast0 »

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…

To break it up effectively, you'd want to separate out at least a few different business units and restrict the businesses the units can enter as well as the relationships between the units.

Big things would be Advertising separate from other things and bound to only advertising, and require it contract with the other units on public and FRAND terms. Web Search would be another unit, and it would be barred from developing its own advertising platform and need to use a mix of advertising platforms based on public criteria, probably with a cap of say 75%? AdWords. You'd have at least one more group for communications (mail, the 7 messengers, etc) which maybe includes the document tools too, and might include G Suite; this group could develop its own ad platform, but not to sell ads on 3rd party sites. Android would need to be a separate unit, it could either require a per device fee or FRAND terms for search etc bundling (similar the what they do in the EU); Chrome maybe fits in this group, or may need its own group. Google Fiber would probably get shut down or sold to an incumbent telco, but maybe just spun out. Waymo and other research stuff would probably need to be spun out, not sure if that can live on its own though.

Cloud services would be its own group, perhaps providing services to the other groups, possibly requiring public pricing, but I don't know if that's really an issue.

I think that's most of it. Lawyers from DOJ and Alphabet could work out the details. Getting a competitive ad market out of the deal would be hard, but at least it could be more transparent, and eliminating cross-subsidization of Google businesses is definitely possible.

Start by cloning the whole source repository for each company, and prune out the things that don't need to stay; if in doubt all successor companies get access to all of it.

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

#226

Post by ttt0 »

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.

Isn't DDG just a frontend for Bing? I can host my own searx instance, but that's not a real search engine and it shouldn't count IMO.

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

#227

Post by dmitrygr »

caslon wrote: post #206
BMorearty wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m disappointed to hear Firefox is deteriorating daily. I disagree about DDG’s search quality. I tried it for six months and that was not my experience. Eventually went back to Google.

Yeah, it's certainly unfortunate. It gets just a little worse with every single update. The last one removed compact mode, which was the only thing making the UI somewhat bearable on-screen. It is now terribly large and unappealing. What do you use a search engine for? Depending on your set of interests, turning off or on localization might have helped.

In the current build, there is an about:config setting to re-enable compact mode.

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

#228

Post by dumbfoundded »

duck wrote: post #213
dumbfoundded wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are at least a dozen companies you can buy water from and have it delivered to a giant storage tank made by at least 5 different companies. Or you could use a number of companies to dig a well for you. Many people don't have access to municipal water and when I didn't, this is what I did.

Those companies aren't utility companies though.

The main, monopolistic solution of municipal water certainly is. The point is that options can still exist in a monopoly. Google still has a monopoly despite the existence competitors.

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

#229

Post by sneak »

woodruffw wrote: post #138
sneak wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People opted in to that. You don't opt in to the water pipe monopoly.

> People opted in to that. You don't opt in to the water pipe monopoly. I accept this argument for social media, but I don't think I do for online identities that are tightly integrated into financial and government services. I happen to be sufficiently positioned to cause a big stink if Google arbitrarily bans my GSuite account; the average person probably isn't, and would have to spend weeks reidentifying themselve…

You opted in to G Suite by pointing your domain there, as well. You can opt out just as quickly.

Every time you smash that "log in with google" button, you're opting in to letting Google serve as intermediary for access to your account at a third party.

People are fools for doing this, but it's not Google's fault.

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

#230

Post by ipaddr »

Beached wrote: post #179
genericuser314 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would like to learn more. Why is a well cleaner or higher quality than a big city municipal water supply? Is it because city water requires harsher treatment because it comes from a huge pool of waste while a well comes from a clean watershed?
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