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

dispatch.com

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

#611

Post by onethought »

MereInterest wrote: post #340
onethought wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No you can’t. They don’t know if you have generation or battery capabilities, even if they detect generation capabilities they don’t know how much. With that in mind what could they “infer”? I go weeks without triggering a single bit of usage on my meter. I bet you they aren’t thinking: this guy is mining heaps of crypto.

Power consumption correlated with commercial breaks tells you what show somebody is watching. Power consumption correlated with 9-5 tells you if somebody is working from home. Power consumption correlated with a specific time in the morning tells you when somebody wakes up and subsequently turns the heat on. Lower power consumption over several days tells you when somebody is on vacation. Are these relatively minor i…

This is conspiracy theory territory. You Thermostat heating ruin your wake up time theories.

And you avoided my actual point: a battery and solar/wind hides all of this,

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

#612

Post by onethought »

shkkmo wrote: post #333
onethought wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No you can’t. They don’t know if you have generation or battery capabilities, even if they detect generation capabilities they don’t know how much. With that in mind what could they “infer”? I go weeks without triggering a single bit of usage on my meter. I bet you they aren’t thinking: this guy is mining heaps of crypto.

Yes, they absolutely can. Like with any surveillance technology, there are things you can do to obfuscate your patterns, but that doesn't mean that a broad rollout of the technology won't have a negative privacy impact on most customers.

It’s not obfuscation, if you are concerned about privacy. You can completely hide your usage patterns with a battery or solar/wind generation.

Are you honesty making the point that: knowing you used 5 units of power in 1 month (where someone has to walk onto your property and read a number, as is the case in most dumb metered scenarios) is less of a privacy concern than knowing you used .3 of unit of power in the last 15 minutes (without needing to walk onto your property).

What am I missing?

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

#613

Post by irrational »

rgbrenner wrote: post #538
amadeuspagel wrote: post #451

If we ignore all this culture war bullshit for a minute there's a really fascinating issue here. The concrete issue is flight search. When you google "flight from a to b", rather then seeing search results linking to websites for flight search, the first thing you see is the results of Google's own flight search. Is that wrong? What about image search? When you search for "skyline berlin", you'll see images of berlin…

google could take over almost any business like this. That didn't happen to travel companies. Google added flights, but Booking Holdings (aka Priceline) continued to grow each year to 15B in revenue for 2019. (Huge drop for 2020 obviously.) If I type " weather" google will show me the weather, but which weather company has shutdown because of that? Google news is in the search results, but there are a lot of news com…

> If I type " weather" google will show me the weather, but which weather company has shutdown because of that?

I have noticed recently that the Weather.com app has added huge advertisements at the top and has roughly doubled the number of ads within the page. It honestly feels like desperation to me and I’ve been wondering if something bad is happening to the company.

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

#614

Post by ayushchat »

Google is not the same as railroads or electricity companies. Nobody pays for Google, and it's not owned by a government. I see the anti trust issues because of Google dominance, but the answer to that is not to make Google a public utility. If governments care about protecting local businesses, they should make their own directories so good that people go there to search instead of Google.

Google is a private company which has made a great product for over 20 years. And now it's benefiting off of it. That's what private companies do

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

#615

Post by Qwertious »

wyattpeak wrote: post #486
amadeuspagel wrote: post #451

If we ignore all this culture war bullshit for a minute there's a really fascinating issue here. The concrete issue is flight search. When you google "flight from a to b", rather then seeing search results linking to websites for flight search, the first thing you see is the results of Google's own flight search. Is that wrong? What about image search? When you search for "skyline berlin", you'll see images of berlin…

> There are only two clear, non-arbitrary rules I don't see any problem with having arbitrary rules so long as they roughly capture the spirit of the outcome people want. The eight-hour workday is an arbitrary rule. The age of majority is an arbitrary rule. Zoning boundaries are arbitrary. They all capture something we (most of us) fundamentally want, but the specific lines are approximate or convenient or customary.

Yes, people often don't see the benefit of a discrete boundary - if everyone draws the line in the same spot, even just legally speaking, then everyone can coordinate their action whenever someone steps over it.

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

#616

Post by johbjo »

Let's say the electric company wants to start a restaurant. So they shut the power to the competing restaurants in the neighbourhood. Everyone agrees it would be outrageous.

Now, what about Apple dictating payment policy on apps in the app store?

Google premiering their own services in the results? Forcing their own apps onto all Android devices, impossible to remove?

These platforms turn themselves into natural monopolies, and therefore they can not be treated as "private companies". Decentralisation would be a technical solution, but meanwhile I think regulation is what will happen.

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

#618

Post by GlitchMr »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #255
kixiQu wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Agreed, but that's a technicality. What matters is, if you want to make a living, you have to host on YouTube. (You can host elsewhere, but over 99% of your revenue will come from your notoriety at YouTube, if not YouTube directly.) And if you want videos, they're all on YouTube. You can search for them elsewhere but most of the content is on YouTube, and you won't avoid it even if your search started from a general…

Another exception would be gaming videos where Twitch is rather popular. Sure, many Twitch users will re-upload their streams on YouTube (no reason not to, YouTube is a popular platform still even in gaming), but most of the revenue will actually come from Twitch. That said, for most videos YouTube is realistically the only choice.

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

#619

Post by chipsambos »

rgbrenner wrote: post #538
amadeuspagel wrote: post #451

If we ignore all this culture war bullshit for a minute there's a really fascinating issue here. The concrete issue is flight search. When you google "flight from a to b", rather then seeing search results linking to websites for flight search, the first thing you see is the results of Google's own flight search. Is that wrong? What about image search? When you search for "skyline berlin", you'll see images of berlin…

google could take over almost any business like this. That didn't happen to travel companies. Google added flights, but Booking Holdings (aka Priceline) continued to grow each year to 15B in revenue for 2019. (Huge drop for 2020 obviously.) If I type " weather" google will show me the weather, but which weather company has shutdown because of that? Google news is in the search results, but there are a lot of news com…

Some within the industry have been making noise that Google is quietly and slowly taking control of the whole trip funnel. Interesting read:

https://www.cartrawler.com/ct/digital-disruption/googles-ste...

I'd agree that providers are ceding too much control to Google for short-term wins, maybe without even realising the power they're handing over to Google.

Google is quietly inserting themselves between the customer and the business in all sorts of industries. They're not fully utilising that power which only makes them a benevolent (for now) dictator.

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

#620

Post by ben_w »

johbjo wrote: post #616

Let's say the electric company wants to start a restaurant. So they shut the power to the competing restaurants in the neighbourhood. Everyone agrees it would be outrageous. Now, what about Apple dictating payment policy on apps in the app store? Google premiering their own services in the results? Forcing their own apps onto all Android devices, impossible to remove? These platforms turn themselves into natural mono…

They have the capacity to be bad, but for example Apple (who are in a similar place WRT this) started with apps you can’t remove and has now made most of them removable; and last time I looked (a while ago now) many unremovable Android apps came from the phone vendor.

I’m all in favour of keeping companies under a close eye to make sure they don’t become an abusive monopoly — my naïve political philosophy is that power should be conserved, so the more e.g. economic power you have the less e.g. free market choice you should be allowed — but I don’t see in Google[0] what you see in them.

Also? If they can easily become a natural monopoly, decentralisation won’t solve anything in the long term.

[0] nor Apple, Netflix, Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter, or Microsoft; but that is how I see Facebook and Amazon.

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