591–600 of 748 posts
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Advertisement is immoral and totally unnecessary to have a profitable business.
I'm curious to know which profitable companies never advertise.
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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.
It's more complicated than that, though. 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.
This entirely new example you are giving is an example of partisan posturing, not evidence of a monopoly. Look at the political affiliation of every single person who signed the letter, and look how many days it was filed before the last federal election.
Again, being popular doesn't make something a monopoly, neither does being a popular target for Republicans.
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."
The government decided that phone numbers are important enough to create regulations that allow phone number portability between carriers. Email addresses need the same regulation. The arguments that lead to phone number portability apply to email addresses as well. And I would argue that email addresses are even more important than phone numbers at this point (it's the single key to all online accounts, most bills,…
The domain is useful to signify membership in an organization. But for individuals, why should our addresses have hotmail or gmail or yahoo or anything else appended to it?
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I imagine you avoid Google because you don't want to get locked into their centralized closed source ecosystem and don't want them to track your entire online presence. So I'm surprised to see you say email should be avoided, as a completely open decentralized communication protocol. Your stances on these two topics just seem to be in contrast with each other, would you care to elaborate?
I don't care about centralization or their tracking particularly much on their own. I don't like to use bad software. It bothers me, fundamentally. I naturally ended up far away from Google by virtue of not liking things that waste computational resources, which all of their software does, and has for years. This is the same reason I stopped using Windows and OS X. I like to use software that makes me feel good, and…
It’s been happening for decades, but while computers get orders of magnitude faster, software gets slower at a faster rate, consuming all of the gains and then some.
Edit: here’s an interesting example just looking at input latency: https://danluu.com/input-lag/ if you take the browser into account as part of the system as well, I’m sure it’s much, much worse.
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I think the whole argument is setting up the presupposition that Google kills non competitive businesses, and that's not what antitrust law is about. It's about protecting consumers, not competitors. Take Android for example. Did Google kill Blackberry with Android? Or was it other factors like the Blackberry CEO cannibalizing their R&D budget, and stubbornly refusing to give consumers what they wanted?
Research in Motion thought the Blackberry keyboard was their killer feature for business professionals. They were wrong. The iPhone killed Blackberry, not Android.
But that's also my point - Blackberry killed Blackberry, not iOS or Android. Should Blackberry have been protected from it's competition?
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There already exist paid search services which you can compare Google to. I use infinitysearch and it costs US $5 per month. It's true that their coverage isn't as good as google, but around $1 per week feels very cheap. And the decreased coverage is at least partly compensated by being treated like a customer instead of a product.
Interesting, never heard of that before. If I can ask, why do you use Infinity Search over Duck Duck Go?
One thing I like about IS compared to DDG is that DDG is still funded by advertising. This means that people are still paying to bias the results I see.
By paying money to a search engine which doesn't rely on advertising at all, I have more trust that IS are really vested in showing me the results that I think are best. (They don't always succeed, but I trust that it's not about the results being undermined by third parties, it's just that they are still fairly small.)
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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…
It’s actually illegal to drill a well in a municipality that provides water service. You’d have to move to a rural area.
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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.
Hence why Google needs to be made a public utility.
Reclassifying a privately owned business to restrict their freedom of association because you think they threaten your political views is autocratic behavior, not democratic.
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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…
I switched to almost only using Google Flights. I try to use Skyscanner because I want to support the underdog, but Google Flights gives me better, and more results. 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.
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no one is forcing you to use google. you could always pick a different one if you want different results
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.