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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

#231

Post by varispeed »

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…

> People turn out to irrationally not want smart meters.

Some people may be irrational, but smart meters are a huge privacy concern - the electricity company can figure out your patterns from the power usage and the "shape" of it. This is the reason why I don't want a smart meter.

Disclaimer: I actually was involved in building firmware and management software of smart meters.

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

#232

Post by ncr100 »

toast0 wrote: post #225
gumby wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...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 devel…

> Android would need to be a separate unit

Android is a separate unit, AFAIK.

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

#233

Post by caslon »

dmitrygr wrote: post #227
caslon wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, but they've expressed a desire to get rid of it in an upcoming update.

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

#235

Post by api »

jonny_eh wrote: post #96
throwaway0a5e wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Mike DeWine in Ohio is fairly reasonable and was among those whose lips were not attached to Trump's behind, but now the Republican base in rural Ohio is angry at him about that.

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

#236

Post by pjc50 »

akiselev wrote: post #208
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.

Wells dug with modern equipment are a perfectly good alternative to municipal water - they can free one from over-regulated or poorly managed utilities. Even in the outskirts of California metros it's sometimes the only option without shelling out hundreds of thousands for extensions. DuckDuckGo, on the other hand, is just Google with bangs, an insignificant spec compared to the latter. Edit: DuckDuckGo US market sha…

> Wells dug with modern equipment are a perfectly good alternative to municipal water

... in certain geologic areas. And this doesn't work if you live in an apartment. I do feel like this is a big example of the "why don't you just" discussion from last week.

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

#237

Post by _trampeltier »

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…

Not just humans can misbehave, machines can also. I work in industrie automation and there is often the question should we produce just errormessages or should or machines produce a product. If you wanna catch ever error, every low or high temp, every whatever, no machine can even start to produce a product ever.

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

#238

Post by gpm »

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?

Too hard to monetize, too high costs, competition by the phone company.

Everyone had one, they were ubiquitous. Without the internet ads are much harder to sell, huge barrier to entry for customer acquisition compared to google. Without real time auctions and targeting ads are worth less, i.e. you can't target search terms in a phone book, only prefixes, let alone things like demographics. The cost to distribute a book to everyone is a lot higher than the cost to serve some traffic. I suspect ad density was too low too.

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

#239

Post by ipaddr »

DarknessFalls wrote: post #201
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…

> You have multiple choices for water, dig a well, buy it from the local grocery store. This is a false equivalence. Comparing Google to a municipal water system and other search engines to purchasing bottled water eliminates certain key features of the service, like water conditioning and infrastructure. I use DuckDuckGo and it is no where near the inconvenience implied by "dig a well".

Digging a well would be creating your own search engine. You can pay someone to come in an drill that well for you that doesn't exist a paid search engine.

Ddg would be like taking the water from a public fountain.

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

#240

Post by loup-vaillant »

yeetman21 wrote: post #90
aetherson wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google doesnt make money of web searches, it makes money off ads, which it competes with fb and others for

Maybe a lawyer can say that with a straight face, but I'm a human being.

Google ad revenues mostly come from 3 services: Gmail, which holds a disproportionate share of all email for what started out as a federated network. YouTube, which basically holds a monopoly on video sharing. And Google search, which basically holds a monopoly on regular web searches.

I count at least 2 monopolies here, both held by Alphabet. The fact that Facebook is able to make advertisement in some other part of the web is immaterial, the same way TV ads are immaterial.

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