561–570 of 748 posts
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.
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…
google could take over almost any business like this. That didn't happen to travel companies. Google added flights, but Booking Holdings (aka Priceline) continued to grow each year to 15B in revenue for 2019. (Huge drop for 2020 obviously.) If I type " weather" google will show me the weather, but which weather company has shutdown because of that? Google news is in the search results, but there are a lot of news com…
For hotels, Google started displaying results from other search engines like Agoda, so I just use Google for that too and clickthrough to whatever is the cheapest. They could also just stop displaying agoda from one day to the next.
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…
google could take over almost any business like this. That didn't happen to travel companies. Google added flights, but Booking Holdings (aka Priceline) continued to grow each year to 15B in revenue for 2019. (Huge drop for 2020 obviously.) If I type " weather" google will show me the weather, but which weather company has shutdown because of that? Google news is in the search results, but there are a lot of news com…
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> advertisment is immoral Interesting opinion... have any facts to back up such an opinion? What's immoral about... spreading information about you and your business? There are immoral ways to go about advertising, without doubt. But advertising itself is immoral?
"What's immoral about... spreading information about you and your business?" Non-consensually forcing anyone into anything is wrong. Advertising violates the NAP. "But advertising itself is immoral?" Indeed.
If I say something you disagree with... I'm not violating a "Non-Aggression Principle" - unless you think that opinions make you weak (I believe diverse thought makes you stronger - can't get new ideas without communication).
And if you think communication REALLY is "aggression"... how do you pair the fact that you "forcing" your opinion on me about my opinion on advertising goes against your own principle? Isn't it kinda... a hypocritical blackhole of an opinion?
Sharing info isn't itself immoral... it's LITERALLY the bedrock of civilization, free will, free speech, self defense, etc - all start with communication. The right to say stuff others don't like or even GASP saying stuff that make them uncomfortable - like pointing out your paradoxical opinion. (HOW you share CAN be immoral... but not sharing/communication itself)
Advertising, at it's core, is sharing information. Without freedom to communicate? without the ability to share ideas? We'd be afraid of fire. we would be monkeys in caves...
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> 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 think they are right. Even personally with the Google/DDG split I use, I almost never search for products on them. I go to Amazon or any other retailer. If I don't know what to buy and I need reviews outside of Amazon then I might search for it on Google/Youtube or browse some specific site like WireCutter. For me and for people I know, even the general search is now more and more served by new search engine platfo…
Nobody give a flying flitwick what products you buy - there are only products to buy on the major exchanges (Amazon/Walmart/).
No, this has directly to do with stealing ideas on a mass scale, and then not really being able to cope without handing your sht over - if your business is to sell e.g. lift truck systems to big box stores, and you spend time, energy, effort, going through all the systems to figure out what you need to do properly build systems which those big box stores want, there NOTHING STOPPING GOOGLE FROM STEALING ALL THOSE IDEAS VIA SEARCH RESULT AND PUTTING THAT BIZ OUT OF BIZ.
Now yes you can argue some of it might* be covered by Patent - thing is lawsuits cost time and money, big biz like Google? It can hire a lot of fancy lawyers and spend a lot of time wasting your money while you try to litigate it's IP theft. Meanwhile, because it dominates search results, your revenue streams drop to zero and you can't afford the fees to win...patent becomes irrelevant.
Or worse, because patent's need to be complete ideas/concepts, it auto-files the patent before you ever get done dusting off the cobwebs on your concept.
"Just hire a patent lawyer" - don't be ridiculous, that's exactly how you kill/stifle innovation. Nobody's innovating by first hiring a patent lawyer, that's what you do after the fact or if you just have buckets of money to throw around... (again, killing innovation by reducing 'innovators' to rich fuckers versus anyone who has a good idea and can implement it).
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They may start doing so, if said providers start banning and censoring people based on political beliefs as Google does.
I don't think I've seen anyone get banned from any major platform for their political beliefs. It has always been for hate speech, inciting real-world violence, or spreading blatantly false misinformation that lead to incitements of violence (such as the unfounded claims that the election was stolen). Funny how none of the Republicans pushing this censorship narrative batted an eye last summer when Facebook was takin…
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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.
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The word "popular" is where? "may be inferred from a firm's possesion of a dominant share of a relevant market that is protected by entry barriers" Arguably I left out "protected by entry barriers", but that seems obvious for search.
Dominant market share is reflective of being the popular consumer choice, given the easily accessible supply of other search engines. You're splitting hairs over the word popular now.
For example: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/7273448-DOC.html (page 3)
I'm not saying they are "for sure" a monopoly. I am saying notable numbers of reasonable people with expertise in the space think they are. It's not as clear cut as you're saying.
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> 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.
So why then isn't this an anti-trust case instead of trying to make google a public utility? It seems Ohio is throwing cases and seeing what sticks.
Can a state bring an anti-trust case or does it have to be done by at the federal level?