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US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

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Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#211

Post by yeevs »

tensor wrote: post #191
eagerpace wrote: post #178

Anywhere there are eyeballs, there will be ads. And wherever there are ads there are privacy concerns. Netflix waited until they had sufficiently killed off cable TV, then went back to creating the same problem it fixed. No ads in ChatGPT today, but soon as it (or a competitor) gains meaningful marketshare, there will be ads.

What I'd love to see is regulation forcing companies to provide reasonably priced ad-free options. There should be a right to opt out of ads.

I'd argue almost every platform with ads do have this option. You just may disagree about what's reasonably priced.

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#212

Post by jajko »

stego-tech wrote: post #188

Loving the discourse in the comments here. Speaking as someone who grew up alongside Google in a sense, I fall on the side of the "break it up" camp. It was novel at the time to have a single company so nicely provide us with everything digitally that we could need - G Suite, YouTube, Search, Maps, Advertising, Books, Reader, etc - but in hindsight, we gave too much power to too unaccountable an entity, who in turn u…

If I am worried about anybody holding my private data (apart from US' 3-letter agencies and thats a hill I am not going to die upon since I don't have same basic human rights as US citizens), its Meta.

Sure Google is everywhere, but Meta holds much more data on our inner personal sides, which are the easiest things to actually abuse to no end. That and pornhub.

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#213

Post by hightrix »

stego-tech wrote: post #188

Loving the discourse in the comments here. Speaking as someone who grew up alongside Google in a sense, I fall on the side of the "break it up" camp. It was novel at the time to have a single company so nicely provide us with everything digitally that we could need - G Suite, YouTube, Search, Maps, Advertising, Books, Reader, etc - but in hindsight, we gave too much power to too unaccountable an entity, who in turn u…

> nicely provide us with everything digitally that we could need... Advertising

Sorry for the snark, but no one anywhere needs advertising. Advertising in it's current form is a plague on humanity.

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#214

Post by sitkack »

jajko wrote: post #212
stego-tech wrote: post #188

Loving the discourse in the comments here. Speaking as someone who grew up alongside Google in a sense, I fall on the side of the "break it up" camp. It was novel at the time to have a single company so nicely provide us with everything digitally that we could need - G Suite, YouTube, Search, Maps, Advertising, Books, Reader, etc - but in hindsight, we gave too much power to too unaccountable an entity, who in turn u…

If I am worried about anybody holding my private data (apart from US' 3-letter agencies and thats a hill I am not going to die upon since I don't have same basic human rights as US citizens), its Meta. Sure Google is everywhere, but Meta holds much more data on our inner personal sides, which are the easiest things to actually abuse to no end. That and pornhub.

Are you sure? Google has a search and location data, Google email is on one side if not both of most email chains, receipts, etc.

I don't use meta for much. Google on the otherhand takes some pretty dedicated behavior to avoid.

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#215

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

stego-tech wrote: post #188

Loving the discourse in the comments here. Speaking as someone who grew up alongside Google in a sense, I fall on the side of the "break it up" camp. It was novel at the time to have a single company so nicely provide us with everything digitally that we could need - G Suite, YouTube, Search, Maps, Advertising, Books, Reader, etc - but in hindsight, we gave too much power to too unaccountable an entity, who in turn u…

The GDP argument is weird. If Google being huge is good for GDP why don't we just let them own the whole country? One US company for everything, maximum GDP afterall!

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#216

Post by ryandrake »

mc32 wrote: post #162
Night_Thastus wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also: There is a MASSIVE incentive for foul play from everyone being searched. Every single business wants their results at the top. Everyone is grasping for every single advertiser's cents. The monetary encouragement to game the system is so incredibly strong. Google has to fight that uphill battle 24/7. I have a lot of issues with Google as a company, but I do not envy their position when it comes to the web search…

If they only divided it into information search ("library" knowledge) and business search (Yelp/YP) where you can tweak your preferences. When you search for "vacuum cleaner", you either want online stores or you may want a local store. In either case it's a business query rather than looking for reviews or specs. What's really polluting search, including Google, is the on-demand content generation based on your quer…

Unfortunately, if you did that, the businesses would still do their best to muscle in on the "information search" results. Marketers gotta Market, and placement on a SERP is a zero sum game. If one competitor managed to get themselves highly ranked in the "information search" then there would be incentive for all competitors to try.

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#217

Post by floxy »

CSMastermind wrote: post #187
relistan wrote: post #168

Hilarious to see all the people lamenting the break-up of AT&T. That break-up sparked the long distance phone race, which became the driving force for the massive laying of fiber optics... which enabled the Internet boom of the 1990s.

My understanding was that most of the internet infrastructure was laid by Bell before their break-up because they projected video calling being a huge use case in the future.

1982 seem a bit early for the massive fiber rollout. My recollection was that Sprint was the driving factor for laying fiber, since they had the railroad right-of-ways. But that was quite a while back. Maybe there was also another dark-horse company laying fiber along railroads, but not operating as a phone company? Something not quite at the tip of my tongue. Seems like someone could have written a good history book about internet infrastructure, especially the mid-to-late 90s. Anyone have suggestions?

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#218

Post by ryandrake »

eagerpace wrote: post #178

Anywhere there are eyeballs, there will be ads. And wherever there are ads there are privacy concerns. Netflix waited until they had sufficiently killed off cable TV, then went back to creating the same problem it fixed. No ads in ChatGPT today, but soon as it (or a competitor) gains meaningful marketshare, there will be ads.

> And wherever there are ads there are privacy concerns.

Not necessarily true. Physical billboards are ads but (mostly) without privacy concerns, until they start putting cameras on them watching who walks by and looks.

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#219

Post by sirspacey »

stego-tech wrote: post #188

Loving the discourse in the comments here. Speaking as someone who grew up alongside Google in a sense, I fall on the side of the "break it up" camp. It was novel at the time to have a single company so nicely provide us with everything digitally that we could need - G Suite, YouTube, Search, Maps, Advertising, Books, Reader, etc - but in hindsight, we gave too much power to too unaccountable an entity, who in turn u…

What MSFT learned from that was to open offices in Washington DC, lobby and sell to the federal gov.

Hard to find the sense in this action.

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#220

Post by mcguire »

A fun thing to do with google's search engine: look for "Scheme tutorial".

For me, the links are:

1. Arun Muthu's Programming in Scheme (https://medium.com/atomic-variables/programming-in-scheme-th...) Part 1 of a 4-year-old series of blog posts (on Medium) that has no other parts.

2. Yet Another Scheme Tutorial (http://www.shido.info/lisp/idx_scm_e.html) A decent looking Scheme tutorial, undated.

3. A Scheme Primer (https://spritely.institute/static/papers/scheme-primer.html) Another decent looking tutorial, 2022.

4. Scheme Tutorial (https://www.cs.rpi.edu/academics/courses/fall00/ai/scheme/re...) A copy of a 1997 tutorial for a 2000 class at RPI; has broken links pointing to http://cs.wwc.edu/~cs_dept/KU/PR/.

5. Kent Dybvig's The Scheme Programming Language 4th ed. (https://www.scheme.com/tspl4/)

6. Reddit "Best beginner friendly "write a scheme" tutorial?" (https://www.reddit.com/r/scheme/comments/klt0af/best_beginne...)

7. A link to the introduction of a copy of Paul Wilson's un-attributed An Introduction to Scheme and its Implementation (https://www.cs.rpi.edu/academics/courses/fall00/ai/scheme/re...) from RPI in 2000.

Google is an advertising company with a big IT department, not a technology company.

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