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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

#771

Post by sbuk »

forgotoldacc wrote: post #617
filloutform wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monopoly law is based on whether or not consumers are harmed. Consumers want free and cheap and quality, Google gives that thanks to economy of scale. Break up Google and consumers will pay more for the same services. until another company steps up and does the same thing Google does. this could be Baidu or Yandex. Yandex has their own version of drive, maps, Gmail, search etc etc.

But who's the customer? Google is an ad business. It sells human eyes and ears to businesses. They own a massive chunk of the ad business and everything they make benefits ads. People who are buying ads (businesses) might benefit with more competition, because as it stands, we have dumb stuff like lawyers in Missouri buying ads and people in Bangladesh clicking them. Google gains money even though that ad was complet…

You end up in spam with Gmail if you haven’t got your email hygiene in order. I’ve sent messages from cold Hetzner IPs and a cold domain name and managed to deliver to Gmail inboxes by having SPF, DKIM and DMARC correctly configured. It really is that simple. Same goes for Microsoft. Follow the standards, avoid spammy looking words, avoid sending empty messages and you’ll be fine.

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

#772

Post by consteval »

dtquad wrote: post #39

Hilariously shortsighted. Big Tech companies have been a GDP-doubling runaway success for the US economy. It would be like if we here in Denmark started breaking up Novo Nordisk. Our economists would probably do a public lynching of any government official who suggested doing that. However as a European I can't help but welcoming the US shooting themselves in the foot like this. Something tells me we will see more of…

I disagree fundamentally. The fallacy here is that breaking up a company results in it making less money. Usually it's the opposite, because corporate inefficiency stops being as much of a problem.

In my opinion, breaking up Google would only serve to make it even more profitable. Once companies grow to behemoths, they stop doing stuff. They slow down innovation to a crawl, and they essentially exist on life support and inertia until they're overthrown by a much, much smaller company.

We see this pattern of life for a company again and again. We see it RCA, with GE, with GM. The only reason AT&T (Ma Bell) is still around and didn't decay like others before it is BECAUSE it was broken up. It was given new life as a set of new, smaller companies.

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

#773

Post by CAPSLOCKSSTUCK »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #718
mission_failed wrote: post #709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ads force you to pay for some thing Actually no, it's worse. Ad companies take everything they can from you using any method they can including monitoring everything you browse or watch on TV or say near your phone or TV or in your car or what you look at in every shop or what you buy or who you chat to, compile massive secret databases and sell 'you' to anyone willing to pay, regardless of what the information is us…

I mean, every other business I am aware of forces you to pay for something too? I don't see what is confusing here. Consumers love the ad-model because they can get things "free". If the real cost of ad-supported products is too much for you, then its too expensive for you to use. Like someone found the backdoor to the movie theater, and people just go in that way rather than pay for a ticket, and then these same peo…

I completely agree. These discussions are so frustrating because the "ads are evil!" people never acknowledge that they're consuming ad-supported content. "If you don't like ads, stop watching YouTube, or pay for the ad-free version" just gets met with "well they show ads even on the paid version", totally sidestepping the point with BS.

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

#775

Post by [deleted] »

briandear wrote: post #728
hightrix wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fully understand that advertising enables many businesses. But there have been businesses based on lead pipes for drinking water plumbing, asbestos for residential insulation, and so on. You could make an argument that these technologies enabled many businesses as well. That doesn’t mean we should allow lead pipes for drinking water or to use asbestos in residential homes.

Lead pipes are a bad pipe. But we still need pipes. The problem is the lead, not the pipe.

[deleted]

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

#776

Post by consteval »

nickpp wrote: post #638
ssklash wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What part of being a massive ad company whose raison d'etre is to collect as much personal information about you as possible (with limited or no consent) to enable other people to try to convince you to buy stuff even remotely a net positive for the world?

> convince you to buy stuff Ever bought something you didn't actually want? Were you persuaded to want something? What was the exact mechanism? Were you lied to? "Made to" somehow? > net positive for the world How exactly do you find out what is "net positive for the world"? Who assigns the the values and who does the tallying?

> What was the exact mechanism?

We don't actually know, but we know it exists. Because otherwise people wouldn't bother paying for ads. Your average person can identify hundreds of brands instantly. What's the value of that? Billions? Trillions?

Certainly, when cigarettes and chewing tobacco were advertised most people did it. Granted, the addiction helps because you only need 1 successful conversion for a life-long customer.

Well, now very few people do that in the US. Without a shadow of a doubt in anyone's mind, the abolishment of those ads had something to do with it.

One of the most common fallacies I see is that choice is a binary. You either chose something, or you didn't. Meaning you were forced.

In actuality, choice is incredibly complex. There are thousands of individual events that will influence your choices. What you're doing right now could be influencing choices you make next decade, and you wouldn't know.

You can control people's choices without forcing their hand on anything. You can introduce information and events that sculpt their mind without so much as lifting a finger. It's a form of mind control, but not in the TV sense. Because people make the choices themselves.

Making someone do something is almost worthless. Convincing someone it's in their best interest to do something is where the value actually is. Look back at wars and our use of propaganda and try to break down what the end-goal is. It's not "making" people do something.

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

#777

Post by WalterBright »

hightrix wrote: post #756
WalterBright wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would you do without a search engine? Who do you think is going to pay for it?

These are problems unrelated to the topic at hand. We aren't going to solve every bit of this situation in this comment thread. Who pays for it? Not my problem. I'll use whatever free service exists, there will always be one. Without a search engine? The internet would fail and targeted ads would cease to exist.

> I'll use whatever free service exists

You'll get advertisements, then.

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

#778

Post by WalterBright »

account42 wrote: post #669
WalterBright wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> And why do you think that vendors create search-friendly pages? Advertising! No, Marketing. Advertising is only one form and the most antisocial one. There is a huge difference between making it possible for people interested in your product to find you versus going out of your way to shove your product in front of the eyes of people who are doing something at best tangentially related.

You won't be looking for a product you don't know exists.

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

#779

Post by WalterBright »

mulmen wrote: post #459
WalterBright wrote: post #373

What country wouldn't love to have a Google? And the US wants to break its good fortune up. Like all dominant companies, Google will eventually fall via strangulation by its internal bureaucracy. There's no reason to hand the market over to another country.

Why would this breakup hand anything to another country? Competition is good for the economy. Breaking up Google allows new innovators to thrive.

> Why would this breakup hand anything to another country?

For the same reason Google is dominant today. Hobbling American business creates opportunities for other countries to take the top dog position.

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

#780

Post by WalterBright »

Apocryphon wrote: post #551
WalterBright wrote: post #373

What country wouldn't love to have a Google? And the US wants to break its good fortune up. Like all dominant companies, Google will eventually fall via strangulation by its internal bureaucracy. There's no reason to hand the market over to another country.

2017 article so pretty old by now, but: > Microsoft in the year ended June 2016 had $20.1 billion in foreign income and a domestic loss of $300 million. Microsoft’s income tax expense was $3.3 billion, for an effective rate of 16.5%. Alphabet, the parent company of Google, posted a $4.7 billion tax expense, or 19%. Such “avoision” will continue as long as foreign income is subject to lower rates than domestic. https:…

> Who's to say that the other country's Google-killer won't prove to be a greater boon to American consumers?

If you do it by hobbling American businesses, they aren't a greater boon.

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