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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

#421

Post by hightrix »

bloppe wrote: post #406
hightrix wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I started a small business selling candles during the pandemic. It's crazy how quickly you change your opinion about advertisements once you start needing to advertise your own business. All of the sudden, they're this amazing benefit for society. Advertisements can be good (when the business is good and genuinely wants you to know about good new product), and they can be bad (when the business if bad / misleading /…

> I suppose you wouldn't consider yourself an optimist.

With regard to modern advertising, you are absolutely correct!

That said, I fully understand and agree with the usefulness of advertising. What I'm against is the modern state of advertising. If all ads were simply contextual based on the content being shown and not the user, I don't think many of us would have problems with the ads industry.

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

#422

Post by Kon5ole »

someluccc wrote: post #320
ta1243 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very few of that is free. openstreetmap - that's free. Google maps is an advertising and data mining platform.

So you’re telling me the evil monopolist that charges nothing has a competitor, and that competitor is free? Which is why we must break up the evil monopolist?

The case against Google surely is that they shouldn't be allowed to use their dominant position in ad sales to price dump unrelated businesses until all competitors are gone.

Like for example having youtube be free until they're the only game in town then start charging 14 dollars monthly to avoid 30% ads. Or targeting ads to gmail users so you can artificially provide a cheaper mail service than anyone else.

There's an actual law saying you can't do stuff like that.

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

#424

Post by robertlagrant »

pembrook wrote: post #368
lotsofpulp wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not “de facto” selling data about an individual to other businesses. No one can go to Google and buy information about a specific person.

I think we’re just arguing semantics. No, you can’t buy user data on 1 specific person (then again, there’s many examples of people buying ads on a persons name to catch them googling themselves), but you can buy user data on small groups of people.

> there’s many examples of people buying ads on a persons name to catch them googling themselves

What does this mean? What is the value of "catching" someone googling themselves?

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

#425

Post by makeitdouble »

gaiagraphia wrote: post #181

The free market's great IF there's competition. If the market's dead, it's time to reinject some life and keep the cogs turning. Scale's great, but it often comes with a societal cost. For every efficiency made, there's less agency and decent jobs to go round. Seems unfair to make such decisions ad-hoc though, and string it out through years of court cases and m/billions of lawyer fees. Why not establish rules of the…

I think you're partly describing nationalisation of a business when it becomes so big it can't be left alone and needs to be readjusted to help the market.

It's bought by the gov ("payout to the shareholders"), regulations are enacted to delimit what it can and can't do, and the whole thing is setup to make sure it's for the benefit of the larger public, with additional consideration on how to reintroduce competition on part of its mandate.

We' ve seen it with postal services and telecom, and if the whole thing becomes outdated it can spun out as a private entity again.

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

#426

Post by pawelmurias »

hightrix wrote: post #421
bloppe wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started a small business selling candles during the pandemic. It's crazy how quickly you change your opinion about advertisements once you start needing to advertise your own business. All of the sudden, they're this amazing benefit for society. Advertisements can be good (when the business is good and genuinely wants you to know about good new product), and they can be bad (when the business if bad / misleading /…

> I suppose you wouldn't consider yourself an optimist. With regard to modern advertising, you are absolutely correct! That said, I fully understand and agree with the usefulness of advertising. What I'm against is the modern state of advertising. If all ads were simply contextual based on the content being shown and not the user, I don't think many of us would have problems with the ads industry.

How are ads for less relevant products better? If the user tracking data is used only for showing ads and doesn't leak I would guess 99% of people would care about getting tracked.

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

#427

Post by 0xB31B1B »

duped wrote: post #335
ta1243 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google doesn't really sell products though, not to businesses. It sells individual data to businesses, it sells advertising to businesses. The only thing the government will be interested in is the spying which they aren't allowed to do, but unaccountable corporations are allowed to do. As people become more aware of this it means google becomes less and less useful.

GCP isn't a B2B product?

GCP doesn't make money

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

#428

Post by hyggetrold »

someluccc wrote: post #304
dartos wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A) Do you pay them? - No: then yes it is free And here we see the ostrich. When faced with the horrors of reality, sticks its head in the sand. It’s simpler in there.

If I build a movie theater and give away the tickets knowing that I can make money on ads before a movie that does not mean that 5 minutes of your eyesight is now worth something

Movie theater is an interesting analogy because they make zero money on ticket sales. Usually ticket revenue pays for the cost of the movie (theaters pay the studio for the movie). The way the theaters make money is on concessions, hence why they're crazy expensive.

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

#429

Post by 0xB31B1B »

makeitdouble wrote: post #420
svara wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sort of playing devil's advocate here, but well run companies with near monopolies have on many occasions provided massive benefits that would not have been possible at smaller scale. Think of Bell Labs. Google has a number of Bell Labs style projects ongoing that massively benefit scientific research. Transformers, AlphaFold, etc. It's hard to see how a smaller, more focused company would be able to justify that typ…

> It's hard to see how a smaller, more focused company would be able to justify that type of R&D. Typically that's solved with R&D happening in academia or semi-public space. How much this happens depends on the opportunities to do it in private companies, so entities like Google paying big salaries for R&D probably means we don't see what alternatives they would be if they stopped doing so.

so who are the academics raising 1b+ dollars to build and operate GPU farms to work on the frontiers of transformer models?

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

#430

Post by makeitdouble »

0xB31B1B wrote: post #429
makeitdouble wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's hard to see how a smaller, more focused company would be able to justify that type of R&D. Typically that's solved with R&D happening in academia or semi-public space. How much this happens depends on the opportunities to do it in private companies, so entities like Google paying big salaries for R&D probably means we don't see what alternatives they would be if they stopped doing so.

so who are the academics raising 1b+ dollars to build and operate GPU farms to work on the frontiers of transformer models?

I'd raise you the same question on which private company is spawning its own LHC to research fundamental physics.
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