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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

#651

Post by troyvit »

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…

Those are great examples of how a search engine works better at offering some services than any web site that might be surfaced by the results. It's more useful, more ... utilitarian one might say. That to me is why this lawsuit to declare google a utility is most interesting. Like electricity or natural gas these useful widgets turn a search engine into a substrate that people don't even realize they're using until it breaks.

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

#652

Post by Chris2048 »

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…

Luckily, search results are getting progressively worse, and these "value add" features also. Maybe there's a time for a web 2.0 (or, 3.0?) that can integrate APIs without HTML/markup specific to do so?

I really just want to send out a query to various search caches, and get back results that are then merged into one dataset and shown in a native GUI. Forget this website shit.

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

#653

Post by Dah00n »

justbored123 wrote: post #287
pcmoney wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That is a terrible argument. "Go sh*t in a chemical toiled" is not a reasonable alternative, the cost alone is ludicrous. Just have the decency and maturity to admit when you are wrong instead of arguing that you should "go dig a well" in the middle of the city. This is why we can't have reasonable conversations anymore.

>"Go sh*t in a chemical toiled" is not a reasonable alternative, the cost alone is ludicrous.

"Go buy an iPhone" is not a reasonable alternative, the cost alone is ludicrous.

Same situation, different words.

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

#654

Post by krapp »

Chris2048 wrote: post #652
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…

Luckily, search results are getting progressively worse, and these "value add" features also. Maybe there's a time for a web 2.0 (or, 3.0?) that can integrate APIs without HTML/markup specific to do so? I really just want to send out a query to various search caches, and get back results that are then merged into one dataset and shown in a native GUI. Forget this website shit.

>Maybe there's a time for a web 2.0 (or, 3.0?) that can integrate APIs without HTML/markup specific to do so?

Nah. That's what server-side cURL requests are for.

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

#655

Post by Dah00n »

ipaddr wrote: post #239
DarknessFalls wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You have multiple choices for water, dig a well, buy it from the local grocery store. This is a false equivalence. Comparing Google to a municipal water system and other search engines to purchasing bottled water eliminates certain key features of the service, like water conditioning and infrastructure. I use DuckDuckGo and it is no where near the inconvenience implied by "dig a well".

Digging a well would be creating your own search engine. You can pay someone to come in an drill that well for you that doesn't exist a paid search engine. Ddg would be like taking the water from a public fountain.

More like using the "free" fountain with a DDG logo on it with water being transferred from the nearby Microsoft fountain (but with a promise that they add their own magic sprinkly stuff to the water).

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

#656

Post by lotsofpulp »

irrational wrote: post #613
rgbrenner wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If I type " weather" google will show me the weather, but which weather company has shutdown because of that? I have noticed recently that the Weather.com app has added huge advertisements at the top and has roughly doubled the number of ads within the page. It honestly feels like desperation to me and I’ve been wondering if something bad is happening to the company.

It has no reason to exist in the first place. All the data for weather comes from government agencies anyway, and weather.gov does the same job. They’re a relic from when we did not have internet and there might have been some utility in a middleman producing a TV channel to get people that information.

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

#657

Post by valprop1 »

The big tech giants have grown too big for Governments and Lawmakers to regulate. Adding to this problem is the lobbying that runs around these premises. The following article highlights how big tech remain untouchable.

https://www.citizen.org/article/big-tech-lobbying-update/

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

#658

Post by ErrrNoMate »

_jal wrote: post #505
mbreese wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> So long as their products are free, it’s hard to argue that consumers are suffering harm 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 competito…

A sea of comments and this one is the only one mentioning Bork. Well played. Hopefully we can swim closer to looking at things in the round rather than this very narrow and very conservative view of the structures in which we live and operate.

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

#659

Post by ceejayoz »

darkwater wrote: post #622
rgbrenner wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If I type " weather" google will show me the weather, but which weather company has shutdown because of that? I don't know the answer to your (rethorical?) question but what I know is that weather sites and apps were once nice and useful and now are basically a placeholder for advertisement, sometimes even scammy one.

This. Google doesn’t have to knock them out of business entirely to ruin them.

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

#660

Post by roenxi »

Dah00n wrote: post #648
krisoft wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do these services turn themselves into natural monopolies? There are many non-Apple phones available. There are also non-google search engines. What makes these natural monopolies then?

I'm not GP but a monopoly doesn't mean "we own the market everywhere" or "we have close to 100% of the market-share". We have this same discussion every time someone says monopoly.. Apple for example is a 100% monopoly in the app store. Likewise Google can be a monopoly on their search result page. It would have sounded insane some years back but today, when google search is a gatekeeper (like Facebook), they absolut…

> Apple for example is a 100% monopoly in the app store.

Every physical store is a monopoly in their own space. It is hard to see that specific point being important.

The fact that Apple gate-keeps their store is also a major selling point of the iPhone. I don't want random people to be able to load random apps onto the phones of my family members. Having a programmable combined GPS/microphone/wallet/photo repository on hand all hours is already quite bad enough, there is an argument for curation here. If Apple ever starts making decisions that are unacceptable/grossly inferior to an alternative then there are other phones.

> Can you sell your Travel Planner Service to Grandma if Google starts adding the same info to Google search for "free"?

That isn't monopolistic behaviour, that is simply competition. Monopolistic is when Google won't allow your Travel Planner to enter their search index, or deranks it in favour of their alternative. If the competition is head-to-head then there isn't anything special about the situation.

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