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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

#341

Post by jollofricepeas »

Iulioh wrote: post #319
trgn wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how did this happen before advertising? trade shows, trade magazines, word of mouth, window-dressing in the THING-quarter, ... why are personalized ads on a website indispensable?

What do you mean before advertising? There is no before advertising Pretty sure we have ads from Mesopotamia

Give or take a few hundred years.

Advertising (4000 BCE)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_advertising

Fact-checking is literally just a Google search away. Irony intended.

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

#342

Post by nosianu »

voisin wrote: post #130
ergonaught wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google search results are garbage and are still superior to DDG. I start every search in DDG and have to take it to Google fully 90% of the time.

I am just shocked at how different our experiences are. I wonder what leads to the vast gulf? Could your results be better due to what you are searching or is the algorithm producing different results for each of us, based on other Google cues?

I have two examples where Google is really bad.

A general one: Whenever I search for something that was relevant in the past, but the keywords are now hijacked by some current events. Note that setting an upper date limit does not help: My problem is the content itself, not when the content was created. Somebody could still create content today about a historic event.

A concrete example that you guys can try for yourself is that I tried to find a certain Greek fable, because it became important to me because I deeply understood yet another layer of it only recently, decades after hearing the story and the usual interpretations:

Three philosophers discussing... stuff got tired and took a nap under a tree. Some mischievous boy put a black paint mark on their head while they slept. When they woke up, they all only saw the black mark on the other philosophers' heads and laughed at each other. It took a while for one of them to realize that he too must have such a mark.

I tried many questions and keywords and many search engines. The only one that found the fable was - ChatGPT!. All the search eng8ines only showed completely irrelevant stuff. I even tried avoiding the word "philosophers" because there are three well-known ancient Greek philosophers and plenty of results with that exact wording for those guys.

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

#343

Post by mulmen »

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.

> Anywhere there are eyeballs, there will be ads.

I’m not convinced.

Not running ads is what you do when you care about user experience. If you start running ads it’s because you care more about money than user experience.

As long as there is robust competition the consumer’s preferences will be favored, because success comes at their discretion.

So I think it’s more like “wherever the consumer isn’t the customer there will be ads”.

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

#344

Post by Manuel_D »

wonderwonder wrote: post #222
jajko wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google actually tracks associates everywhere you visit in incognito mode in chrome and associates it with your main user id. So whatever pornhub knows, so does google.

I do not believe that was ever the case. They track searches, sure, but it is not associated with your user id. The way they treat incognito browsers is just like a freshly installed firefox browser that's never been logged into a google account. They're logged as anonymous searches.

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

#345

Post by mulmen »

anon291 wrote: post #206

I wish that instead of wasting time on antitrust cases, that the government would just directly fund competition by incentivizing it. I.e, the first company to reach x% browser market share will receive $x million (billion?) in prize money or, the first company to build an LLM-based search engine with x% market share will receive $n million Or structure as a direct investment or heavy tax breaks. Always better to inc…

How does cementing early leaders benefit consumers?

This seems like the opposite of what the government should be doing to incentivize competition and innovation.

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

#346

Post by internet101010 »

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…

I have always thought the reason they became alphabet was because of the expectation that they would eventually get broken up and wanted a company for each letter.

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

#348

Post by relistan »

floxy wrote: post #217
CSMastermind wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sprint is the de-acronymized name for SPRINT: Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Networking Telephony

They started doing public long distance on their own (railroad) network in the 1970s. They were restrained (and frequently sued by) AT&T. The breakup opened the floodgates. They were sold like a half dozen times in the 80s.

But, MCI was AFAIK the largest early fiber pioneer.

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

#349

Post by crabmusket »

api wrote: post #287

The most important thing -- and I doubt this would ever happen -- would be to break off the identity (OAuth) provider and make it some kind of public non-profit. One company should not own the identity layer for such a huge chunk of the Internet, and so many people use Google for this.

Man that would be really cool. I do wish governments would move a bit faster on providing such generic public benefit services.

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

#350

Post by relistan »

nickff wrote: post #194
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.

AT&T had also been granted a long-term monopoly on long-distance telephony by the federal government; Google has never had such protection.

A monopoly is a monopoly no matter how it got that way.
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