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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

#471

Post by threeseed »

someluccc wrote: post #390
nosianu wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that does not mean that 5 minutes of your eyesight is now worth something The advertisers paying to get their ads placed in front of those eyes disagree. And ye, since another comment questions this, data or "eye-time are similar - they can be broken down to the individual. The advertisers pay some price expecting a certain number of people to see the ad, and even if data about people is sold in bulk (too) there is…

You can literally use Chrome, Workspace, Drive, Android and Maps without seeing a single ad, without an ad blocker, without EVER using google search, for free.

Google Maps is full of local search ads and Workspaces isn't free.

Also Chrome exists primarily to ensure their ads business remains healthy i.e. they have massively watered down privacy restrictions.

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

#472

Post by jamesy0ung »

api wrote: post #364
crabmusket wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm not a huge fan of governments doing Internet services, but the identity layer is something that actually fits within their sphere. Governments already provide the canonical identity layer for society and have since, like, ancient Egypt. Your drivers' license could have a chip in it capable of FIDO2 etc. and it could be linked with an OAuth provider. I know login.gov already exists but it's not built to be used ev…

I'd rather my real identity not be linked to any/all online accounts.

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

#473

Post by AlienRobot »

zo1 wrote: post #434
AlienRobot wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not my experience. I'd like to see you prove this.

Not OP. I switched to DuckDuckGO about 1.5/2 years back, and it was awesome at the time. But it has gradually gotten worse to the point where I @google search pretty much 70% of the time. Now that could be me being in a bit in the honeymoon phase with DDG at the time and it wore off, or maybe it's actually been getting worse. My pet, unproven, theory. Is that DDG has been "improving" but that's been making the search…

My pet theory is that the reason why every search engine is worse than Google is because they all use Google's interface. They want a single textbox capable of searching everything. Google spent who knows how much money in R&D perfecting this search box. You can't make a search box more perfect than what Google has. I'd even say that most problems of "bad search results" are directly caused by this minimized interface design.

I think alternative search engines would have better chances if they provided alternative interfaces to refine search queries instead of trying to compete with Google/Bing.

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

#474

Post by BurningFrog »

hightrix wrote: post #405
BurningFrog wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the worst attempt at logical reasoning I've seen in a while...

What’s hard for you to understand? Plumbing is good and useful. Plumbing using lead pipes is harmful. Advertising can be good and useful. Modern advertising that requires tracking everything a user does is harmful.

After rereading a few times, I think I've parsed your argument:

That X enables many businesses to exist doesn't mean that X is a good thing on balance, because X itself can have harmful effects that outweigh the benefits.

This is of course true, and I can look past the inelegant phrasing.

But to make this a credible argument you need to argue for why the costs of advertising outweigh the benefits.

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

#475

Post by mulmen »

zaphar wrote: post #172
tivert wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're getting it backwards. The research operations are a desperate attempt stave off regulation to keep the sweet, sweet monopoly profits coming in (and those profits are so big that the bean-counters allow it). I believe that was the explicit strategy at AT&T. We collectively pay way, way more. It'd be way more efficient and cost effective to just set up a well-funded government labs to do that research.

I am not at all confident that a government lab will be either well-funded or efficient in any sense of the words.

It’s this kind of baseless negativity that is toxic to mental health. I’m done with this site for a while. It’s just too exhausting reading lies about how much everything sucks.

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

#476

Post by whatever1 »

ensignavenger wrote: post #393
whatever1 wrote: post #330

Advertising venues that hold auctions need to be opened up to competition and provide full transpancy. These are markets that need regulations. Today ad auctioning is the ultimate scamming game. The force everyone to pay more, and nobody wins except the ad venue.

If the advertisers weren't winning, they would stop using those platforms.

Many times it's just the fear of losing. Aka if you are hp you are paying for the printer keywords out of fear that Epson might take them instead

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

#477

Post by AtlasBarfed »

adam_arthur wrote: post #248
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…

Competition usually leads to higher wealth creation and GDP, not less. If you use real life examples and history as a benchmark

There's been a lot of comparisons between the gilded age and modern us economic structure with respect to individual wealth.

I contend the even more disturbing mirror is the trust/monopoly/cartel structure of virtually all industries and markets in the United States.

The ultra rich are a symptom, not necessarily the cause: we need a massive breakup of practically every sector in the United States, and it's not just for what the parent of this comment says about wealth creation: increased employment, more job mobility, more innovation, overall competitive advantage in the world, more resilience to global supply chain disruption, and innumerable other national security and economic concerns.

Monopolies are really bad for freedom. As we see with the closed no-appeal ban systems of internet companies and utter lack of customer service, your very day to day freedom can sharply be curtailed at a whim by the centralized power of monopolies.

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

#478

Post by hug »

someluccc wrote: post #388
braabe wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of these examples are probably in part or fully paid for with some sort of taxes. So it is less "no payments" and more "deferred payments". I would argue that the question of "Is it free?" should not be restricted to monetary payments. If I offer you dinner for an hour of yardwork - are you receiving the food for free? If I would offer you that same dinner in exchange for letting me watch you use your computer fo…

#1. Would I have used the computer at the same time/place/duration? Then yes it is free. It literally cost me nothing. #2. You can pay? Also is the argument somehow that the free thing isn’t free because the ad in it makes the UX worse? Also curious to know how many ads exactly do you get while using google workspace? drive? android? maps? Finally: You can literally use Chrome, Workspace, Drive, Android and Maps with…

There are costs other than monetary associated with doing things. Just because you are not giving someone cash directly does not mean it is "free".

Those semantics aside:

- Maps has ads in the form of sponsored results all over the map.

- Android is only a decently functional platform with Play services installed, which includes ads. I don't have an Android phone handy but I'm pretty sure there's up-sells included in quite a few places, I just can't name any right now.

- Chrome is a browser you cannot use for its primary purpose without seeing ads.

- Workspace is a directly paid-for product.

Google is an ad company. Essentially all of its products are supported by advertising, and it's slightly odd to suggest they are not.

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

#479

Post by BurningFrog »

loumaciel wrote: post #228
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.

Tons of small businesses rely on advertising. Tons of legit businesses only exist because online advertising became easy and widespread.

I'll try to explain to the young people how bad things used to be.

Google ads was (and is) incredibly good for niche companies, since it makes it possible to advertise to people who are interested in your product instead of the general public.

So if you sell Warhammer paraphernalia, you can buy ads to be shown only to people who have searched for Warhammer related words, rather than "everyone in Wisconsin".

This lowers ad costs by many orders of magnitude, and makes a lot of businesses possible that simply couldn't exist before.

I'd want some damn good reasons to go back to the old ways!

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

#480

Post by CatWChainsaw »

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…

Thiel himself said competition is for losers. He also said he thinks democracy and freedom are incompatible. His cohort doesn't want a free market, it wants godlike technofeudalism.
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