Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

dispatch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 748 posts

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

#371

Post by walleeee »

supernova87a wrote: post #212

A big problem with software and people who write software (often) is that software doesn't like all the ways that human beings misbehave, change their minds, don't have immutable states, and don't fit into the categories you build for them. So any system that has a duty to serve everyone eventually ends up with an operational component that has almost as much human interaction and problem solving required as the soft…

> manage to convince their users to behave well enough to fit into the box

Perhaps this is a fundamental limitation of digital technology, if not all technology

Being the vastly more flexible party in any interaction with it, we tend to adapt to its particular set of affordances and constraints

This is often useful but opening any one door will close others: deployment at scale carries sociotechnical inertia

It also frequently inverts the agentic orientation: we build tools, use them, and before long find ourselves used by them

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

#372

Post by wearywanderer »

justanotherguy0 wrote: post #323
supernova87a wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then isn't this an argument that tech companies are not utilities because the things they supply don't "just work" and have no nuance to them? Electricity and water "just work" because you deliver it, you're done. You have no obligations aside from not failing to deliver it, and not exploiting your monopoly market. Tech companies are not utilities because they're not just something you buy like a commodity and have a…

Bullshit. Delivering power and water are incredibly complex. Water has to be sourced from God knows where, you have to do planning on building reservoirs. You have to manage run off (hey, your horses can't keep shitting near that stream!). You have to treat the water and manage it's acidity. You have to keep mains running. If a leak springs and the system goes under pressure, the whole supply can become contaminated!…

Somewhere on the net in some parallel forum, water and electric utility workers are talking about how simple running twitter must be.

> How hard can it be? If a ethernet cable fails it's not as though it will electrocute the worker or flood a town downstream.

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

#373

Post by gentleman11 »

adrr wrote: post #95

But I have multiple choices for email, search, video hosting and browsers. I don’t have any choice for water, electricity, sewer, on any other public utility. I am sure there are a bunch of people on here that don’t use any Google products and are using DuckDuckGo, Firefox, ProtonMail, Vimeo. There are many choices.

Is there a single internet savvy person besides stallman who is able to 100% avoid google? Even if you don’t use gmail, almost everyone you message does. You lose access to most online videos. Google domains, fonts, and maps entangle a truly massive number of websites, including healthcare sites. In Covid, lots of clients or employers use google video calling. Schools almost but not quite make you use google drive. If you don’t optimize your website for chrome, you worsen the experience of 90% or more of your users. If you don’t play the seo game, nobody will know your site exists. It’s not a realistic choice for 99% of people

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

#374

Post by adamcstephens »

wyager wrote: post #317
crocal wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you are ready for dictatorship then?

Could you explain this take further? I’m tempted to write this off entirely, but I’m curious if you actually have some reason to associate corporatism with monarchy.

Corporatism in practice is an oligarchy. The people at the top decide the fate of everyone lower than them. In some companies it is effectively a monarchy, as a sole person is driving the decisions.

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

#375

Post by aroman »

pyuser583 wrote: post #217
adrr wrote: post #95

But I have multiple choices for email, search, video hosting and browsers. I don’t have any choice for water, electricity, sewer, on any other public utility. I am sure there are a bunch of people on here that don’t use any Google products and are using DuckDuckGo, Firefox, ProtonMail, Vimeo. There are many choices.

My elderly parents are unable to make the switch from Yahoo to Google. I’ve walked them through it multiple times. It’s just not possible for them. They don’t have the knowledge and skills. They are smart. Advanced degrees in STEM. Multiple languages. Doesn’t matter. I can’t imagine the transition from Google to DuckDuckGo/Firefox/ProtonMail being easier. Am I wrong about that?

What step were they unable to complete in the process of changing their browser's default search from Google to Yahoo? (With your walking them through it, I mean?)

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

#376

Post by adamcstephens »

epigen wrote: post #187
babypuncher wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that the Republicans trying to declare tech companies "common carriers" pretty much lied through their teeth 4 years ago when they argued that ISPs are absolutely not common carriers, in opposition of overwhelming popular opinion to the contrary.

Yes, the problem is Republicans. And yes, that problem has yet to be solved.

Republicans are a problem, but so are Democrats. We need more than two parties.

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

#377

Post by amadeuspagel »

epigen wrote: post #106
Aunche wrote: post #25

While Google is functionally a public utility, it's not something that I want to be regulated like a public utility. If the government can't be trusted to law lines on a map that aren't blatantly rigged to favor their own political party, I can't trust that they won't tamper with search results the same way.

The cost-per-search is negligible even if every user had to pay. Instead of running the search the government could implement policies that make search advertising illegal and thus forcing another business model. Pay-per-search would be cheap enough for municipalities to negotiate subscriptions for their entire broadband network as a part of broadband service.

What an awful idea. A municipality would probably only have one search engine, search engines would serve municipalities which could pressure them to suppress stories, there'd probably be one search engine targeting republican municipalities and one targeting democrat ones, there'd be pressure groups trying to get municipalities to use another search engine that doesn't show results they don't like and it would be incredibly hard to start a new search engine.

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

#378

Post by zerocrates »

Covzire wrote: post #185
bananabreakfast wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure it does. It undercuts their entire argument by making it look much more like a political stunt than any kind of serious action.

I'm not aware of any ISP in the US that has terminated a customer's service for perfectly legal political statements.

Certainly it has happened on the hosting side: connectivity, domain names, etc.

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

#379

Post by SilverRed »

kixiQu wrote: post #204
loup-vaillant wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I have multiple choices for email, search, video hosting and browsers. Not video hosting you don't. If you want to build a significant English speaking audience, your only real choice is YouTube, because that's where people search from. Seriously, who has a "Vimeo" app on their phone? On their set-top box? Same thing if you want to watch interesting videos: most of the content is on YouTube.

That's not video hosting that's monopolyish, then, that's English-speaking-audience video discovery , which is a quite different proposition.

Discovery and hosting are the exact same thing right now. People don't open up their RSS reader to find new videos, they go directly to youtube. If you aren't on youtube then you won't be seen.

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

#380

Post by oogabooga123 »

akiselev wrote: post #208
genericuser314 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're making a category error in your analogy. DuckDuckGo is much more like Google than "dig a well" is like municipal water.

Wells dug with modern equipment are a perfectly good alternative to municipal water - they can free one from over-regulated or poorly managed utilities. Even in the outskirts of California metros it's sometimes the only option without shelling out hundreds of thousands for extensions. DuckDuckGo, on the other hand, is just Google with bangs, an insignificant spec compared to the latter. Edit: DuckDuckGo US market sha…

DuckDuckGo gives vastly different search results from Google. Last thing we need is the government involved in “improving” search results.
Post reply on HN