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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

#321

Post by ihumanable »

api wrote: post #235
jonny_eh wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yea, the Ohio Republican Party has rewarded DeWine's reasonable approach to the pandemic by his party threatening to impeach him (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/republican-ohio-gov-dew...) strip him of his executive power (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/ohio-republicans-...) and their leader, trump, has called for him to be challenged in a primary (https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewsolender/2020/11/16/trump...).

His great crime was that he listened to a medical doctor, implemented pretty reasonable common-sense strategies, and for a while did a pretty good job keeping Ohio's pandemic rates low.

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

#322

Post by wyager »

whimsicalism wrote: post #274
wyager wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I trust "political organizing" (codeword for astroturfing and cathedral control) less than I trust Google's profit interests.

I would rather be governed by a public actor with constraints than the arbitrary interference of a private actor. This is the core republican (as in the political philosophy: Discourses on Livy, Philip Pettit, etc.) insight. If you want a stable society, you cannot leave space for arbitrary private individuals to become domineering forces on the rest of society. It's literally textbook how civilizations will fall, ye…

Google is more effectively constrained than, say, the US federal government.

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

#323

Post by justanotherguy0 »

supernova87a wrote: post #290
dcow wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think your argument supports the second conclusion in your penultimate sentence. Seems like a big leap. Power and water “just work” and the utility companies can’t abuse people. As an “end user” I don't get crappier power or worse water because my neighbor is spooked out by smart meters. I highly doubt the savings would be passed on to me anyway. I would 1000 times over rather live in a world where internet u…

Then isn't this an argument that tech companies are not utilities because the things they supply don't "just work" and have no nuance to them? Electricity and water "just work" because you deliver it, you're done. You have no obligations aside from not failing to deliver it, and not exploiting your monopoly market. Tech companies are not utilities because they're not just something you buy like a commodity and have a…

Bullshit. Delivering power and water are incredibly complex. Water has to be sourced from God knows where, you have to do planning on building reservoirs. You have to manage run off (hey, your horses can't keep shitting near that stream!). You have to treat the water and manage it's acidity. You have to keep mains running. If a leak springs and the system goes under pressure, the whole supply can become contaminated! So now you have to notify your users that they need to BOIL THEIR WATER! you have to detect leaks in the last mile of delivery so that you can protect the system. You have to keep your pumps from getting flooded. You have to manage subsidy programs and different user classes. You have to integrate with federal and state water authorities.

Utilities are complicated. There's no such thing as delivering and not failing to deliver.

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

#324

Post by shkkmo »

ribosometronome wrote: post #312
shkkmo wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Data aggregated per month is very different from data aggregated per hour or per minute. You can infer far more personal information from the latter.

You can also bill users for peak usage times when electricity is expensive or requires falling back on non-renewable resources for production with hourly data.

I can think of a number of ways to do that that preserve privacy far better than real-time reporting of power usage.

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

#325

Post by onethought »

shkkmo wrote: post #296
idiotsecant wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sort of horrible privacy issues do you suppose your smart meter has? You already tell your utility how much power you use.

Data aggregated per month is very different from data aggregated per hour or per minute. You can infer far more personal information from the latter.

No you can’t. They don’t know if you have generation or battery capabilities, even if they detect generation capabilities they don’t know how much.

With that in mind what could they “infer”?

I go weeks without triggering a single bit of usage on my meter. I bet you they aren’t thinking: this guy is mining heaps of crypto.

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

#326

Post by Slaminerag »

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…

1) Google isn't carrying anything. It's your ISP that's actually carrying the bits to your house/work/phone/implants. 2) What google search is providing is literally content that they've created. I really don't see how this suit won't get dismissed on first amendment grounds.

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

#327

Post by RosanaAnaDana »

MarkusWandel wrote: post #5

Well, a public utility also doesn't have the right to do this: "You did something wrong, we won't tell you what it was, there's no chance of appeal, and you are now banned from receiving water service again, ever, for the rest of your life, no matter where you move. And don't try moving in with someone else who's still receiving service, because they'll get banned too."

That's a good thing right?

right?

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

#328

Post by Tijdreiziger »

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.

FWIW, I've used Firefox on a daily basis for years, and I have no complaints about desktop Firefox. (Firefox Android does leave some things to be desired, but also functions just fine as a web browser.)

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

#329

Post by shkkmo »

dragonsky67 wrote: post #313
shkkmo wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Data aggregated per month is very different from data aggregated per hour or per minute. You can infer far more personal information from the latter.

Do you carry a mobile phone. If so, you have bigger privacy problems than how much power you use per minute.

That is a trade off that consumers should have the ability to evaluate and decide for themselves.

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

#330

Post by Arch-TK »

softveda wrote: post #306
Arch-TK wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of rational reasons for not wanting a smart meter. Don't let the irrational people detract from the fact that there are many real problems with smart meters. Especially lots of privacy issues. In the UK, I report my own meter readings and the electrical company probably only really ever goes out once every few years when tenancies change. So I actually don't see what money it saves them asides from t…

In Australia, in the state of Victoria all meters are smart meter for few years now. They are also growing in number in other states. There has been no hacking incident. in fact it makes peoples life easier by allowing them to track energy usage at every 15 mins interval with historical data using an app from the utility company. This data cannot be sold either. In fact under the Govt. Open API scheme very shortly yo…

So sounds like Australian smart meter companies are better at security than British ones.

The energy usage tracking can be done without smart meters, in this country electricity companies (and lots of private companies) offered induction clamp based electrical usage logging devices. These may not have been quite as accurate as onboard measuring but this could have easily been solved with some kind of serial protocol exposed on the meter which a third party datalogger could attach to. The ability to track energy usage is not a feature of a smart meter, it's just a feature of having access to the meter's data, this data could always have been made available even if the meter wasn't networked.

Open banking is a complete disaster that I seriously don't think deserves the name "open". I still don't understand how an API which requires you to be a BANK to be able to interact with can remotely claim to be open but having tested some of the implementation for banks it's some horrific over-engineered mess.

Let's hope the data access API for your meter doesn't require you to be an electricity company to access it. As it stands, in the UK, meters are not intercompatible between utility companies so if you switch providers (which I do annually) the old smart meter just becomes a dumb meter again.

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