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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

#521

Post by rta5 »

Can anyone point to any Ohio legal precedents where something not regulated by PUCO has been considered a common carrier?

Per the original "An entity can be a common carrier and/or public utility under Ohio common law,even if it is expressly excluded from regulation by PUCO"

I'd be curious what precedent makes Google a common carrier in Ohio law. From a US federal standpoint individual websites appear to me more akin to radio broadcast stations, which according to Ronald Coase had a failed attempt to be declared common carriers.

I am not a lawyer, so I'd be happy to be corrected on that.

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

#522

Post by minsc__and__boo »

Covzire wrote: post #185
bananabreakfast wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm not aware of any ISP in the US that has terminated a customer's service for perfectly legal political statements.

Outside of certain protected class situations, Freedom of Association allows anyone to terminate service irregardless of legality of political statements made on their own privately-owned platform.

And no, political stance is not a protected class.

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

#523

Post by minsc__and__boo »

ttt0 wrote: post #147
bananabreakfast wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

ISPs don't abuse their power like Google, Facebook, Twitter etc. do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_shaping

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

#524

Post by bushbaba »

lupire wrote: post #502
hnick wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Many focus on "content" that is more than one paragraph.

Ugh like recipes. With the damn recipe 10 pages down. I don’t care about your grandma’s life story. I just want to know how much flour to eggs ratio for pasta dough.

Incredibly annoying.

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

#525

Post by minsc__and__boo »

tyingq wrote: post #68
bmmayer1 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is Google a monopoly? Serious question.

Senator Herb Kohl: But you do recognize that in the words that are used and antitrust kind of oversight, your market share constitutes monopoly, dominant -- special power dominant for a monopoly firm. You recognize you're in that area? Eric Shmidt: I would agree, sir, that we’re in that area....I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding of monopoly findings is this is a judicial process. From: https://www.businessinsider…

Being popular != Monopoly

Having Market Share Dominance != Monopoly

Being a monopoly means having sole control over the supply of a market (conversely, Monopsony is demand). When people say Bing, Baidu, DDG, Yahoo, DDG, etc. are all a click a way, that means Google does not control the market supply.

Just because the majority of people choose to use something on an open market doesn't mean that thing has a monopoly.

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

#526

Post by xwdv »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #451

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…

> Why start a new company, if google can just take over everything?

If your company is defeated by Google turning it into some widget then you don’t have much of a business, you just have a feature you monetized and isn’t really a long term source of revenue. You need rigorous innovation and a clear advantage over your competitors.

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

#527

Post by judge2020 »

jonplackett wrote: post #72
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…

I think the suggestion is breaking up alphabet, which is quite literally loads of companies. YouTube, Google search, deep mind, Google fiber, waymo, Fitbit etc Seems pretty easy to break up if you want to.

it'll be 'easy to break up' because that's what Alphabet was created to do - back in 2015 they knew antitrust and a monopoly break-up was going to happen at some point, so they made these companies largely operationally separate so that they have very little hiccup when it is required. The only one that'd be hard is YouTube where they might require spending some millions reworking the ad model, but otherwise they'll have little issues continuing business as usual. YouTube is likely profitable[0], so it's not like their monopoly over free video content is going to cease.

0: https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al...

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

#528

Post by minsc__and__boo »

aetherson wrote: post #78
bmmayer1 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is Google a monopoly? Serious question.

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.

Just having dominant market share does not make one a monopoly. Google would have to control the supply of all the search engines to have a monopoly (which they don't).

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

#529

Post by adrr »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #504
adrr wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Search is irrelevant for any consumer brand from a discovery standpoint point. 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.

I’ve built two multi-billion dollar consumer retail companies where we didn’t focus on SEO nor was organic or even SEM traffic a significant source of new customers. If you want to dump your money into SEO/SEM go for it but that’s not how the retail startups are spending their money.

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

#530

Post by AussieWog93 »

easrng wrote: post #288
caslon wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Most of the web uses google analytics, so its unavoidable when you visit a website." I actually mentioned that. Just shim GA connections; this happens with most ad-blocking software, and I believe happens in Firefox's "strict" mode by default. It's really trivial. "Most of the web's emails are routed through google; I remember reading a post about a guy who set up his own SMTP server and everything, but then realise…

RE: YouTube alternatives there's also PeerTube which also can use p2p delivery. Can confirm that Android works great without Google Play Services, I don't have it. Most Play Store apps break but most of my apps are from F-Droid anyway.

PeerTube is not a serious alternative to YouTube. Almost all of the most popular content is missing and there are no reasonable alternatives. It claims to have over 400,000 videos on the site; YouTube gets 700,000 _hours_ of video uploaded each day.

Android without Google Play, unless you live in mainland China, does not "work great" the way most people want. I've done it and it was basically like not having a smartphone at all.

You cannot use banking apps, social media, games, streaming/Chromecast, maps (yes, I know OsmAnd exists; it has next to no information about businesses or landmarks and takes several minutes to plot a route that Google Maps or Waze calculates in less than 5 sedonds). Firefox is a reasonable alternative to Chrome and K-9 mail is good but that's about it. Unless MicroG suddenly became good in the past two years it's not a feasible solution even for people who are technically-minded.

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