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The case for why Google should be regulated as a public utility

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Re: The case for why Google should be regulated as a public utility

#171

Post by dhosek »

kebman wrote: post #141
machello13 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's extremely naive to think that only Republicans are responsible for that.

The Democratic Party is a long-standing "bankers party" and "corporatists party" (a party for big companies and organizations). In that sense, they're just as "bad" as the Republican Party, and due to how the whole democratic system is set up in the USA, Americans are in reality bereft of alternatives. Picking anyone else than those two, is effectively a blank vote. This system can at least in part explain why so man…

This is why it's important to vote in primaries and to cultivate leaders at the local level. The Republicans became a lock-step far right party by building up infrastructure and candidates at the lowest levels and building from there. Too many progressives don't seem to pay attention to any elections below the presidential election (and then whine that things are rigged when their candidate gets less votes than someone they don't like).

Re: The case for why Google should be regulated as a public utility

#172

Post by jeffbee »

tgb wrote: post #109
stickfigure wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bell was a real monopoly - as in, it was literally illegal to start a competing phone company. This is much different from "monopoly" with quotes, as in "gee whiz they seem so big and popular it must be a monopoly ".

I don't see the relevance here. Google knows that both sense of "monopoly" can and have been regulated by the government since Standard Oil was broken up. Hence the threat of regulation did not stop Google from investing in innovation.

Does the comparison to Standard Oil stand scrutiny? The case against Standard Oil wasn't merely that they were popular. After all, kerosene is an undifferentiated commodity where consumers have no preference other than price. The case against Standard Oil was that they held such a breadth of natural resources (which are exclusive; no two parties can pump oil the same barrel of crude oil), and capital-intensive assets such as pipelines and railroads where Standard Oil was bribing the operators to get them to charge higher rates to their competitors.

So what's the comparable unfair practice? You believe Google is paying Level3 under the table to make sure all its competitors pay more for network transit?

Re: The case for why Google should be regulated as a public utility

#173

Post by fuzxi »

pb7 wrote: post #78
kevmo wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a digital protection racket.

Is this any different from putting up a billboard next to a restaurant for a competing restaurant?

It's more like asking for directions to a restaurant and getting directions to a different restaurant.

Re: The case for why Google should be regulated as a public utility

#174

Post by MadSudaca »

shadowgovt wrote: post #51
tempsy wrote: post #18

I would argue Visa and Mastercard and payment processing at large as the top priority by far. It's crazy that we've given up control as a society of the only mechanisms for electronic payments in an increasingly cashless world to unregulated private entities who continue to jack up fees as often as they can get away with. Makes everything 3-5% more expensive. Ridiculous.

There is 100% nothing stopping the Federal government from offering a full-faith-and-credit-backed "America electronic transaction system" for electronic transactions, with those fees handled by taxes. But much as there's nothing stopping the Federal government from greatly simplifying the burden and toil of tax season by issuing 90% of Americans a pre-filled-out "This is what you owe; sign this and return it or disp…

I actually like this aspect of the USA. Most parts of the world, specially more socialistic-leaning countries, would have politicians eager to expand their powers and size of the state so that they have control over a bigger cut of the pie. Of course, this is supposedly for the good of the people.

It seems to me that more people is socialistic-minded in the USA these days, to me that looks like a indicator of the decline of the country.

Re: The case for why Google should be regulated as a public utility

#175

Post by jancsika »

tempsy wrote: post #18

I would argue Visa and Mastercard and payment processing at large as the top priority by far. It's crazy that we've given up control as a society of the only mechanisms for electronic payments in an increasingly cashless world to unregulated private entities who continue to jack up fees as often as they can get away with. Makes everything 3-5% more expensive. Ridiculous.

This is a beautiful implementation of a tactic to shift a conversation.

OP starts with a seemingly related pivot to the topic of how to prioritize the regulation of a company like Google with the regulation of other companies. Such a conversation would obviously involve at least few points about why Google ought not top the list. (And hopefully many points given OP says Google is "by far" not top priority.) I was certainly interested to read such a digression...

Then, like Alan Sokal's prank[1], OP leaves out any argument for that prioritization. Instead, OP moves directly to complaining about the other companies which OP has declared by fiat should take priority.

And, voila! Every single comment below OP at the time of this writing similarly avoids the ostensible discussion about Google's prioritization, instead discussing only the other companies and the efficacy of their regulation. Potential regulation of Google as a topic is completely avoided in any of the child nodes of this OP.

Whether this was intentional or not, it makes an excellent archetype for this tactic.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Sokal

Re: The case for why Google should be regulated as a public utility

#176

Post by anoncake »

ArtDev wrote: post #6

Let's get cable internet regulated like a utility first. Then afterwards we can talk about competing services on the internet. Anti-competitive behavior should be addressed but let's get our priorities straight.

Let's prioritize bickering about what our priorities should be.

Re: The case for why Google should be regulated as a public utility

#177

Post by _Microft »

shadowgovt wrote: post #113
elicash wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, government does GPS. Sends folks to space. You mention SpaceX, but let's not pretend NASA doesn't exist. Yeah, there was once that website that had a bad launch, but there's nothing inherent in government that wouldn't allow this to work well. I do think ideally this could be done by NY or CA first. We should test out ideas in the states, where possible.

SpaceX successfully built a capsule to get people into space. They built it to the specifications that NASA enforced upon them, which were paid for in blood. And you don't have to look far in the SpaceX organization to see what risks the company is willing to take if an external authority isn't imposing regulation on them.

I think this mixes up low odds of success with risk, the latter rather being an expectation value than a probability (i.e. probability of success or failure times the value of the things at stake). Risk can be low even when the odds of success are not good just by nothing being really at stake.

Think about their rocket landing program: the probability of landing a rocket on a boat in the first attempt might have been low but the risk was almost negligible because the launches that SpaceX practiced landing on had been paid for by a customer already. Now, if SpaceX had bet the company on reusability by paying for all these rockets out of their own pocket instead and hoping they manage to get it right before cash runs out, then this could have been called risky.

Re: The case for why Google should be regulated as a public utility

#178

Post by pb7 »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #169
pb7 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have one ISP and they decide to refuse you service for any reason, you don't get Google or any other website. You're putting the cart before the horse.

There are also four national wireless carriers, which offer home service, satellite Internet (including, soon, Starlink...)

All of which can legally block, restrict, or charge extra for traffic to Google since net neutrality has been repealed.

Re: The case for why Google should be regulated as a public utility

#179

Post by jeffbee »

wz1000 wrote: post #137
auganov wrote: post #29

I love how few actual proposal there are out there as to what the government should actually do. That is - not just "regulate" or "break them up". I'm talking specifics. Once you start making concrete proposals it becomes increasingly obvious just how hard it is to come up with something that won't make everything worse.

Here's one idea: Make the index open and public, set up a public body to update it, and allow anyone to build a frontend. Access can be charged per query. Other companies/entities/governments will be allowed to mirror the index for essentially the price of data transfer. This is just something I thought up right now, and sure, there might be problems with the approach. But to pretend like there is absolutely nothing…

The way that people underestimate the scale and complexity of Google's indexing always makes me chuckle. I'm especially fond of the idea that other parties will just wantonly copy it, like for research purposes or something.

Also I'm sorry to inform you that the way the index shards are produced, arranged in memory/on disk, and the manner in which they are queried and ranked are inextricably linked. You can't make a search-neutral index format that can be queried economically.

Re: The case for why Google should be regulated as a public utility

#180

Post by young_unixer »

komali2 wrote: post #63

I'm not entirely clear why the answer is "regulate google" and not "the government builds and provides an internet search mechanism for its people." I.e., an actual utility from the start.

Because even they know the government is not competent enough to create a search service that people would want to use.
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