501–510 of 748 posts
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ISPs don't abuse their power like Google, Facebook, Twitter etc. do.
Comcast once charged me a $5 self-installation fee. As in I set up the equipment in my house and paid for the privilege. My other option was to not have internet.
If we ignore all this culture war bullshit for a minute there's a really fascinating issue here. The concrete issue is flight search. When you google "flight from a to b", rather then seeing search results linking to websites for flight search, the first thing you see is the results of Google's own flight search. Is that wrong? What about image search? When you search for "skyline berlin", you'll see images of berlin…
As a content creator rich snippets are such a bugbear. If you don't play the game then someone else's content and name shows up. If you do, there's a huge chance people get what they need and never visit your site. It's a Google wins, consumer wins, creator loses situation.
If we ignore all this culture war bullshit for a minute there's a really fascinating issue here. The concrete issue is flight search. When you google "flight from a to b", rather then seeing search results linking to websites for flight search, the first thing you see is the results of Google's own flight search. Is that wrong? What about image search? When you search for "skyline berlin", you'll see images of berlin…
In the last decade Google has no longer brought to the consumer anything major like Gmail, Google Maps or Chrome. I doubt it's because of inability to execute - they can and will hire large numbers of very smart people. It seems more like a conscious decision to err on the side of maintaining the ~2010 status quo.
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I'm surprised I haven't seen much in the responses to this comment that the issue isn't so much that consumers have other options (though given how high Google's search reach is, how relevant is that if hardly anyone does), it's that for most businesses your option is either have a strong search presence on Google or go out of business. There is just no viable path to avoid Google as a business when they control 80+…
Do you Google shoes to find shoes,some workout shorts or any consumer product line? Search is irrelevant for any consumer brand from a discovery standpoint point. What do you Google from a consumer perspective?
I can't believe this is a serious comment. Literally hundreds of billions of dollars would say otherwise. I search for consumer products on Google all the time.
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Yes, obviously, you as a user are free to find another search engine. However, you as a creator are not free to find another universe in which the leading search provider does not use their position of influence to squash any competing products by ranking their own products higher.
But that’s not an argument for making Google a public utility. That’s an argument that they are being anti-competitive. That’s a whole other discussion. And even then, the question isn’t are competitors being harmed, but are consumers being harmed. So long as their products are free, it’s hard to argue that consumers are suffering harm. (I haven’t heard privacy brought up as a legal measure of harm to consumers, whic…
Well, that is the (Borkian) dominant understanding of antitrust right now, but it hasn't always been, and I think that view is under pressure again.
It has never been clear to me why we must limit our view to consumers when looking at antitrust - there is always much more going on than how much things cost. It effects competitors (actual and would-be), the environment, related industries, available jobs, sometimes national security - monopolies can have huge impacts on lots of things. Why exactly is this super-reductive, artificially crabbed view the only measure of a monopoly's harm?
Medium-term, I think the pendulum is swinging back.
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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…
To a certain extent, utilities differ in that they are regulated monopolies protected by the government. Any competing water company, for example, can’t just start running water mains without government approval. In exchange for that protection, the existing water utility incurs additional regulations, like needing approvals to raise rates and bring required to provide services to areas where it may not be profitable…
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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?
As for cities, it depends entirely on the specific city.
The city I grew up in was supplied by a river that was unsafe to even swim in due to agricultural runoff and high levels of heavy metals from volcanic activity. Our drinking water was so heavily chlorinated that you practically needed a water filter to make it drinkable.
The city I went to university was supplied by an aquifer and modern, high quality piping. The water was such high quality, it required no treatment at all.
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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?
The customer in a web search isn't the USER. It's the BUISINESSES whose ads are placed on the search results page.
THEY are certainly paying for the web search.
If we ignore all this culture war bullshit for a minute there's a really fascinating issue here. The concrete issue is flight search. When you google "flight from a to b", rather then seeing search results linking to websites for flight search, the first thing you see is the results of Google's own flight search. Is that wrong? What about image search? When you search for "skyline berlin", you'll see images of berlin…
That's known as "tying" - an illegal use of a overwhelming market position to leverage the market position of other products of the same company. That's the key thing that determines illegal monopolistic practice.