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Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google

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Re: Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google

#301

Post by pimterry »

prepend wrote: post #263
googthrwy_ wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree its not a perfect analogy but you could argue that you can go live somewhere else too. And yes, a lot of the work is funded by the "evil stuff" but Google is trying to expand their enterprise offerings and their hardware business is growing as well. I expect those to be profitable one day if not already.

Moving countries is extremely difficult and sometimes impossible. The US is one of the easiest countries to immigrate to and we only have 14.4% of our population having changes countries (coming in at least) [0]. This LinkedIn article citing BLS stats says the average person will have 12-15 jobs in their lifetime [1]. So I don’t think it’s very comparable to say “you can just change countries.” The vast majority of p…

> The US is one of the easiest countries to immigrate to and we only have 14.4% of our population having changes countries

Just to follow this tangent briefly - I'd be surprised if that first statement is true by most definitions (I'd almost say the opposite), and the implication that 14.4% of the population is therefore a high level certainly isn't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d... has some detailed numbers. In short, although the US has the most immigrants in the world in total, many major nations have double or much higher percentages of foreign-born residents compared to the US. E.g. Singapore (43%), Switzerland (29%), Australia (33%), and that's ignoring the tiny countries with 50+%, or the middle eastern states with large migrant worker/refugee populations, like UAE at 84%, Qatar at 74%, Jordan at 40%, etc etc.

I don't really disagree with your main point - changing countries isn't _that_ hard as a US software developer, but changing jobs is certainly easier - but I keep seeing the US portrayed like this, and it's not really true.

Re: Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google

#302

Post by hliyan »

panarky wrote: post #197
threezero wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Notice that no Googlers have a good response to this or the Eric Schmidt / Hillary Clinton connection. Google’s ties to the Obama administration were deep.

Which raises deep suspicions about the political motivations of this "investigation". Anti-trust is about companies using their market power to exclude rivals, raise prices, and hurt consumers. It's not about consumers overwhelmingly choosing a product because they like it more. Can anyone really say that Google's practices are more anti-competitive than, say, the dominant players in broadband or health insurance or…

> consumers overwhelmingly choosing a product

By "product", I take it you mean their advertising services? Most of the other products are not paid for. In fact, critics are often fond of pointing out that the consumer is the product in this case.

Whether this action is right or not, parallels can be drawn with the Microsoft investigation: Microsoft allegedly used its position within the desktop to "push" their browser; Google is allegedly using its position within search to "push" their browser.

On a personal note, I'm not convinced that this is grounds enough for antitrust action. There could be a personal data related angle to this, but then again that would not come under antitrust.

Re: Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google

#303

Post by xkgt »

soup10 wrote: post #155
benologist wrote: post #53

In the last ~year Google has admitted to accidentally-but-knowingly stealing $75 million from Adwords customers, and settled a case they had fought four years for $11 million to avoid revealing what happens to a banned Adsense account's unpaid revenue. There is likely several hundred million dollars of fraud just in these two 'edge cases' they ignored handling for decades, so it's definitely time for someone to dig d…

lets not forget their latest and greatest of releasing chrome for free until it saturated the market and became a monopoly then maliciously making changes to reduce the effectiveness of adblockers like ublock origin

And they did all they could to kill Windows Phone (a viable alternative ecosystem at that time) by blocking access to Youtube[1] and providing sub-par experience for their other services.

Now I fear Firefox has a similar sisyphean task at hand, trying to keep their browser usable on google services. And for many of the users, that is same as usability of the browser as a whole.

[1]https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/microsoft_on_the_issues/...

Re: Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google

#305

Post by rndgermandude »

bduerst wrote: post #238
GeekyBear wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Antitrust action was recommended by the career antitrust officials at the FTC, not the politicians. It was the political appointees (from both parties) who shut their recommendation that the FTC begin an antitrust action down.

The 2012 antitrust actions were settled with Google by the FTC, not shut down: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2013/01/googl...

It was shut down. They just call it a "settlement" to avoid it looking suspicious and for the FTC to save face.

So what was this "settlement"? Google promised to be nicer and said mea culpa a bunch of times. They did not pay a fine, did not agree to any hard regulations that would carry a penalty if violated, they did not pay any compensation to the entities they kinda admitted they wronged.

Re: Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google

#306

Post by lefstathiou »

threezero wrote: post #188
GeekyBear wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact is that the revolving door between Google and our government was spinning pretty quickly during that period. >The Campaign for Accountability (CFA) this week launched the first two of its Google Transparency Projects. One of the projects – a visualisation of the revolving door between Google, the White House and US government agencies – is so dense, the website suggests viewing it on a desktop display. As we…

Notice that no Googlers have a good response to this or the Eric Schmidt / Hillary Clinton connection. Google’s ties to the Obama administration were deep.

Googles entire restructuring into Alphabet was a response to this imo. They knew this could happen and have already organized the business into discrete operating and reporting lines. The battle will be over how much they fracture the big 4 Google services themselves (Maps, Search, Email and YouTube).

Re: Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google

#307

Post by rndgermandude »

BurningFrog wrote: post #208
panarky wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which raises deep suspicions about the political motivations of this "investigation". Anti-trust is about companies using their market power to exclude rivals, raise prices, and hurt consumers. It's not about consumers overwhelmingly choosing a product because they like it more. Can anyone really say that Google's practices are more anti-competitive than, say, the dominant players in broadband or health insurance or…

This is a bold take! Google's close ties with the Obama administration makes the Trump administration suspicious!

It can be both.

The Obama administration shut down and buried the previous FTC investigation. I'd guess not just because of lobbying, but also because google was nice enough to allow a ton of google employees to take some "vacations" to work for the Obama campaign for a bunch of months, and the likes of Eric Schmidt being chummy with Obama[1].

The current investigation is probably motivated not just by those career bureaucrats who had their previous investigation shut down, but also by the Trump administration wanting to hurt SV and Google in particular for being too friendly with Democrats, and to put those social media companies (Youtube, Facebook, Twitter) on notice not to "prosecute" and ban conservatives on their platforms (at leas that's what Trump and a lot of "conservatives" say is happening).

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/06/obamas-...

Re: Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google

#308

Post by ganeshkrishnan »

pimterry wrote: post #301
prepend wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moving countries is extremely difficult and sometimes impossible. The US is one of the easiest countries to immigrate to and we only have 14.4% of our population having changes countries (coming in at least) [0]. This LinkedIn article citing BLS stats says the average person will have 12-15 jobs in their lifetime [1]. So I don’t think it’s very comparable to say “you can just change countries.” The vast majority of p…

> The US is one of the easiest countries to immigrate to and we only have 14.4% of our population having changes countries Just to follow this tangent briefly - I'd be surprised if that first statement is true by most definitions (I'd almost say the opposite), and the implication that 14.4% of the population is therefore a high level certainly isn't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d... has…

Australia does NOT have real highest percentage of foreign born and is a very hard country to immigrate to.

Their foreign born are mostly from neighbors NZ and UK.

Re: Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google

#309

Post by erikpukinskis »

rndgermandude wrote: post #305
bduerst wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 2012 antitrust actions were settled with Google by the FTC, not shut down: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2013/01/googl...

It was shut down. They just call it a "settlement" to avoid it looking suspicious and for the FTC to save face. So what was this "settlement"? Google promised to be nicer and said mea culpa a bunch of times. They did not pay a fine, did not agree to any hard regulations that would carry a penalty if violated, they did not pay any compensation to the entities they kinda admitted they wronged.

Who did they wrong?

Re: Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google

#310

Post by pimterry »

ganeshkrishnan wrote: post #308
pimterry wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The US is one of the easiest countries to immigrate to and we only have 14.4% of our population having changes countries Just to follow this tangent briefly - I'd be surprised if that first statement is true by most definitions (I'd almost say the opposite), and the implication that 14.4% of the population is therefore a high level certainly isn't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d... has…

Australia does NOT have real highest percentage of foreign born and is a very hard country to immigrate to. Their foreign born are mostly from neighbors NZ and UK.

It's not the highest by a long shot, and their process certainly isn't easy (and I agree biased to friendly English-speaking nations), but 33% of the population is still a lot more than the US.

Or do you mean that that number isn't correct somehow? It's based on a UN report, but I have no idea where their data comes from.

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