Honest question, I'm not trying to incite political discussions, but...
Can Google get out of this by sucking up to Trump? It appears that Trump is susceptible to flattery, and he also appears to play favorites.
The other viewpoint might be: can Google get a fair trial in the US court system? Trump has let the Federalist Society pick all the Federal judges he's nominated, as near as I can tell. Some of them haven't been very knowledgeable about the law. Or maybe, should the DoJ worry that its case won't get a very fair hearing at trial?
My point is that we're living in interesting times. Assumptions commonly made in the past just might not hold today, even in the US Court system.
Political discussions on a venture capitalist news aggregator probably isn’t popular with the moderators, it may even disturb their sense of intellectual curiosity. Step lightly.
I think the tactic would work, but I don't think Google would want to use it. IMO they'd burn through a lot of recruiting/culture credit pretty quickly if they became too friendly with the Trump administration. Say what you will about Google, they still have a reputation for hiring some of the best engineers. I think a lot of that is off the back that many do not view them as an "evil" company. Becoming very close with the Trump administration would be good way of doing that. I don't think Google really wants to give up their reputation, even if the cost is a monopoly investigation.
Being too buddy-buddy with conservatives has resulted in pushback for Facebook[0] and Uber[1] (Apple[2] too, but a little less so).
Personally I believe that Google, Amazon, and Facebook( a little bit less so) should all be broken up. When you look at Google and Amazon they have their fingers in every pie, it's mind boggling.
I am more left than right, and I am very skeptical of what the Trump administration would do about this. It feels like, with Facebook especially, conservatives are not exactly mad that the companies are big. They are mad that the companies are big and not entirely right-wing mouth pieces. There's a lot of anger about "biased" Google results[3] and "censorship" from Facebook[4].
If you look at the business landscape in US, most very large businesses are culturally conservative. Most tech companies prefer to project a younger, liberal image partially for recruiting reasons. I don't think the Trump administration would be interested in pursuing this if Google looked and acted a bit more like Procter and Gamble.
This seems like a winning position for Trump and a losing position for Google no matter how it shakes out.
I pretty much agree. I big part of the reason why I personally like Google is because they, or at least a majority of their employees is actively progressive. Even if that’s just PR it’s still a nice counterweight to the mountains of companies who are just completely neutral or conservative culturally. At the same time, they and facebook facilitate the spread if right wing extremist ideology to some extent.
For antitrust? I’d say it did quite a bit, given that it lead to other companies being able to enter the market and take over market share from Microsoft.
Did it really? MS lost browser dominance because they purposefully let IE stagnate at 6, and Firefox then Chrome ate their lunch. They lost OS dominance because of the unforeseen dramatic rise of post-iPhone smartphones. The combination of WebKit on iPhones and Android plus Google using it's own market clout to push Chrome on desktop is what really put the nail in IE's coffin. The anti-trust actions from the US and the EU had little to do with this (the EU's decision to force MS to prompt the user to choose a browser happened in late 2009 when these developments were already well under way, and was limited to EU region installs IIRC). MS still dominates OS's on desktops and laptops, but no one seems to care about that anymore.
We have to remember that from IE4-6 before Firefox came around Internet Explorer really was the best browser in town. When MS dropped the ball on that, it was market forces that caused them to lose market share, not any government action. Same with Windows Mobile/PocketPC. And if the EU's goal was to foster browser diversity in their suit against MS, they missed the boat on that entirely.
Microsoft actually invested in Apple in 1997, in part to help them deal with antitrust concerns. Without that deal, I don't know if Apple would have been around to build the iPhone.
Perhaps some other company would've kicked Microsoft's butt in mobile. It's impossible to know.
No. They didn't get broken up. But they stopped a number of anti-competitive behaviors for a decade or more. It definitely was not "business as usual", either in internal attitude (from what I've heard) or in external behavior (from what I observed).
bullshit. Saying that Microsoft went through some drastic changes would oversimplify it. As a former employee, Microsoft was basically another company after the anti-trust thing.
I don't think they have any more influence than media conglomerates like Comcast, who owns NBC, and who effectively turned the attention from net neutrality to hatred of Facebook, Amazon, and Google. It is rather ridiculous to argue that Google, who provides free services, is any more of a monopoly than broadband ISPs.
If you look at adtech there’s really only Google and Facebook so it’d call this very close to a monopoly. This is also not a free service so you are only comparing a small subset of Google services which are mostly built to fuel the ad part (Search and YouTube being the biggest one probably)
I think you are greatly overestimating their power. It looks to me like they're walking on eggshells precisely because they can't really exercise the power you think they have without immense backlash.
How do investigations like these work (logistically)? Google is a massive, multinational, multi-industry, R&D/Software/Hardware/Logistics/Cloud/SaaS/Ads/everything platform. Google is also one of the very few who can actually say they are hiring only "the best" engineers (*by Google standards for Google's use case).
How would an entity run an investigation or audit against Google?
If I, or I'm assuming anyone who doesn't work in Google, was asked to come in and develop a fundamental understanding of how everything works within Google's software/infrastructure it would likely take me a long time to do that and I'd likely need a lot of help from real Googlers. They are, of course, the best of the best and I'm just some random SWE.
I'm assuming their business side is as complicated as their software must be and I'm assuming their legal/business/executive team is as smart as their engineers. How practical is it for an outside party to claim that they actually understand what is happening within Google? How many people does that take? How long does that take? Does Google need to provide support staff for these people to aid them in understanding Google's internal business structure?
Also, for audits like this is "understanding what is happening within $company" a factor? If a company is so big that it can't see what it's stepping on (crushing in an noncompetitive way) does it get a pass?
I am curious why you think Google, given its spurious record with privacy, security and labor, that it would have the best engineers? Not to mention engineers in the valley often lambast Google for sun setting every decent platform that engineers care about.
Few companies shape their industry as drastically as Google does. Hence the Anti-Trust probe.
Nobody is that good, sadly. Every time someone has looked to be that good historically, it was because they were engaging in anti-competitive practices, and needed to be broken up.
This isn't hard to look up. MaBell, Standard Oil. It's a pretty consistent pattern.
We've been pretty hands off on the trust busting simce the MaBell breakup, and the impetus to do anything about Google or Facebook has been rather low, since there hadn't been any glaringly obvious downsides to letting them do their thing.
However, given certain waves that Big Tech has started to make; Oracle v. Google, making ad blocking in the major dominant browser contingent upon subscription, Cambridge Analytics, perceived political bias and activism by Dr-platforming, tech has not only made it painfully obvious the danger posed by massive stores of unbridled data collection, but that having platforms all economically centralized under a small number of stakeholders is a danger to the continued stability of "the System".
It's one of those wisdom of the masses sort of things. Awareness and sentiment forming seems to have finally hit the tipping point at which enough people are onboard for something to be done about it all.
good point, and it's exactly a strong point why it should be investigated.
given what you said, it's not difficult to conclude there is no one in the world actually understand google's business, and/or engineering, including googlers. therefore, who is going to be hold accountable, which person we need to push if anything goes horribly wrong?
Google, facebook and amazon have been way too powerful financially, technologically, politically and culturally. install armies they will be superpowers. it's better to do something before it's too late.
why do you think checks and balances only apply to politics? power corrupts, and not necessarily only political ones. I'd say any power corrupts, e.g. in marriage, one side gains significant upper hand and he/she has a decent chance to abuse the position.
I'm mostly playing devil's advocate here, but also interested in a potential de-FAANGing law or executive order not setting a dangerous precedent for arbitrary redistribution of power in the future.
Why are you putting Google and its employees on such a pedestal? It's software and business are not magic and there are plenty of people qualified to audit them.
I'm not putting them on a pedestal. I'm exaggerating the situation to make my question simpler to communicate. I think the complexity of an audit holds true for the FAAN in FAANG. I think it likely also holds true for other large companies as well.
It's not complicated. The only thing is that the market might move on before the govt does... An example is Microsoft that missed the boat on the Internet. That doesn't mean that Microsoft didn't violate antitrust law though.
Yeah... The average Google engineer is better than the average engineer. But there are plenty of competent software engineers who don't want to live in South Bay or near a Google hub. There are engineers with interests outside of Google interests.
And there are certainly business people out there with more knowledge than those in Google - see NY.
The business side is easy: subpoena email, documents etc... Google has to cooperate within reason. Then add in lawyers etc, all external communications etc... They will run the discovery through analysis software which is pretty standard plus whatever else the gov't has developed.
And the business is easy: Ads, ads, ads.. plus maybe Google Apps / Compute. Using android unfairly.
Also, if the feds open an antitrust investigation, the companies and people damaged by google will proactively tell the feds where to look. So they don't just have to go entirely hunting on their own; they have a pretty good notion of where to start.
eg phone manufacturers will be upset about google not allowing them to produce devices that compete with android and android devices; yelp and other sites are upset google scrapes their content, etc.
The only other mitigating scenario is that this may be politically motivated. In fact it could be both real and political. It’s a warning shot to Facebook who is arguably more important politically.
It's not so impossibly complex. After all, even for a typical big corp like Google a dozen people or so will be respectively responsible for understanding the functioning of each of their sub-organizations. They will have to understand it in and out -- especially the business/human consequences, if not the technical details. Any new member (at "vice president" level or something) will be on-boarded in this matter in a matter of weeks to months. So it's definitely possible for someone to go in now and get to the bottom of some of these questions.
That doesn't require exceptional "intelligence", but it does require a tenacity in finding information and the integrity to relentlessly ask questions till you understand what's going (without prejudice regarding the outcome), without being prematurely satisfied that it's "too complex".
And of course, it will be a when team of people, who would have developed a similar understanding of other comes situations, and they will have significant help, and the authority to ask questions.
If you want a more explicit and hands on understanding of the process, look up narratives of major investigations, eg: the Challenger disaster investigation, or the investigation that led to the breaking up of AT&T.
Just watch! There are plenty of super-smart and ambitious people looking to take on Google. Just let DOJ start and Oracle, MSFT, AAPL, Yelp and many other companies will tell FBI where to look. The only thing needed is the political will, the rest is easy. Those "best of the best" engineers face jail time and financial ruin, if they lie to cover Google's behind, so they have to think twice.
If that’s the case then this seems even more politically motivated. Oracle and Yelp in particular are some of the most dirty players out there. They realize there is no future for them, so the only hope is legal action.
>I'm assuming their business side is as complicated as their software
That assumption doesn't hold. Google's business model isn't that complicated. Industry experts and competitors understand perfectly well how Google makes money. Any investigation will focus on a handful areas that are well known and often discussed.
And when it comes to understanding who at Google has done what, why and when, there's prisoner's dilemma to the rescue. If investigators question a couple of managers under penalties of perjury, they will put their own personal interests (i.e staying out of prison) over Google's interests and just tell the truth or at least say something that isn't provably false.
Wouldn't it make more sense to break up broadband ISP monopolies first? Google, Facebook, Amazon etc. cannot do business without ISPs. Plus, you can always choose to just not use Google.
And no, I don't think the justice department can or will "do both". It's clear this admin is anti-net neutrality, catering to Comcast's whims.
It's pretty simple: as you say, they're local. Google and Amazon are the big evil corporations on the other side of the country, but Comcast has an office in your town, and your neighbour's son works for them. They're a significant provider of relatively well-paid low-skill jobs in every community in the country. It's incredibly difficult to come down on that.
I don‘t think states have ever been compelled by antitrust suits to change regulations; there is no state-level version of the WTO where one can sue about this.
Remaking federal regulation to preempt states is laborious and fraught with difficulty; see Obamacare.
Most ISPs exist in multiple states. Divvying up local markets does not really prevent interstate competition or impact interstate commerce, or at least that hasn't been tested in court.
The most obvious are Google Payments (from the merchant side), Google Analytics, Google Ads (doubleclick). Then there's street view cars collecting photos and wifi data, Google registry services siphoning up domain metadata, and of course any information someone else enters about you- if they save their contacts to google and it includes you, you're suddenly part of their graph.
Then there's the direct cell phone tracking-
> Investigators who spoke with The New York Times said they had not sent geofence warrants to companies other than Google, and Apple said it did not have the ability to perform those searches. Google would not provide details on Sensorvault, but Aaron Edens, an intelligence analyst with the sheriff’s office in San Mateo County, Calif., who has examined data from hundreds of phones, said most Android devices and some iPhones he had seen had this data available from Google.
This is the main inescapable one for me. I have uMatrix to block analytics and all that, but so many websites simply wont work without recaptcha.
My solution lately has been to feed them junk data until they either give up on me or erroneously perceive my input as non-erroneous (not sure which it is). Takes some time, but to me it’s worth it. If we can get enough people doing this they might have to get rid of it all together. (Vastly unlikely, but a guy can dream, right?)
Small note, but can't you block Google Analytics with something like Privacy Badger? Google Payments and Google registry services seem near impossible to avoid though. Not to mention the near requirement to use certain Google products in certain lines of work.
Don't forget about GMail. Everytime you send a mail to somebody on GMail, which might not be obvious with custom domains, your mail will be analyzed by Google. And your email address serves as the perfect ID.
None of those channels can be shutdown by breaking up Google or other tech giants, let alone imposing a fine.
As long as there's a very popular communications service / social networking service / etc., or even a few of them (none of which dominates the entire market), you can't stop other people from turning in your data (unless you have no connections whatsoever in this world, or you and all your connections live in a cave). And if you use any popular service or visit any popular website yourself, your data will be collected, it's only a matter of the level of details.
But at the very least my mom's contact list shouldn't be able to be used to send me targeted ads in search or suggest contacts to me in Gmail. It would be isolated to those products owned by that newly split off sub-company.
Sure any 3rd party app I install can track me to some degree, but it can't compare my usage against my entire email history, my travel history, recordings of my voice...
> my entire email history, my travel history, recordings of my voice
GGP was talking about data collected involuntarily, and I was responding to that. Google (or any other company) can't have your entire email history, your travel history, and recordings of your voice without your voluntary participation in one of their services or services of a "partner". Those are way beyond drive-by collection.
But then on top of that they're free to merge it with involuntarily collected data. I'm talking about how you can't agree to just give them X. They take XYZ, and A and B and C about you from someone else....
There is no way to only use a Google service and also disable drive by collection. And because they're so huge and cover so many categories, that drive by info is more meaningful in their hands than just a dozen random unconnected companies. Because of that, drive by collection by other 3rd party doesn't really concern me as much. They can't do nearly as much with it.
This seems like a great simplistic unit of measurement for classifying what antitrust action is supposed to target.
When it's extremely difficult, if not practically impossible to escape a private company from extracting/exploiting profit from unwilling persons at scale. When you basically can't opt out.
> When it's extremely difficult, if not practically impossible to escape a private company from extracting/exploiting profit from unwilling persons at scale.
I'm not sure that would fit the current anti-trust legal definition (as in: not a lawyer so don't know answer - not that I think it doesn't fit). Equally, I'm not sure it fits under the more general principles of anti-competitive practices. They - I believe - presume willingness on the part of the consumer to access products or services, but where supply is unfairly limited.
Notwithstanding all that, your statement is an excellent principle and very neatly articulates the problem. I don't know what rule of law it would come under, but it's a succinct illustration.
Thanks for tresorit. That was the only one I hadn't heard of. Their pricing structure is a little hard for me to grasp, but I'll be keeping them in mind.
Indeed. I've been using a combination of pixz, GPG and Wasabi for a few months now, without complaints so far. I suggest mixing a combination of tools and services that are easily replaceable, to avoid relying on a single solution. And open source where possible, of course.
Ideally it would Balkanize user profiles to individual products. It would greatly reduce the harm in using YouTube, maps, and search if they were distinct data silos.
So yea, tracking will continue until people regulate it.
That for one. And products like Assistant would become pretty much useless.
Brin and Page always stated that search is not the end goal. A real AI is. If these actions happen, it‘s pretty much guaranteed that China will get there first. We don‘t have the global regulations in place yet to discourage that arms race.
Not yet. But they are doing everything possible to lay the groundwork. As much accurate data as possible, hire all the best AI talent, pioneering work on quantum computing and constantly improving tooling.
2030 to 2040 will be the earliest AGI could happen realistically.
Feels like Youtube and Maps have a pretty solid foothold given how very few products can compete at that level. I’m not sure how much they rely on data from other Google divisions but even without it I don’t see why they would fare worse than any other map service.
I think there's a difference between gathering information that's necessary for the service at hand (giving your IP address to a server, or your current location to a cell phone network) and milking the user for all identifying information that can be gathered (asking for the user's gender to create a shop account, browser fingerprinting by scanning plugins and canvas hashing, etc).
You can be tracked by every android app, plus DNS and connectivity checks - it's only visible part. Sure any advanced security audit will show much more.
Special mention to reCaptcha, you just doomed to train there AI and it seems to intensify once you start moving away from google. And I bet it's even worst from the 3rd world...
I guess the "don't be evil" way would be to make all those data public. Or just to provide an alternative way to prove your humanity online, without enslaving the whole world.
I've increasingly been getting literally impossible recaptchas lately.
And I don't mean that they're hard to make sense of or something. But if I encounter a recaptcha on one of my specific devices that's not logged into any Google accounts, recaptcha will simply reject all of my clearly correct answers. It'll ask me to pick all of the fire hydrants, show another screen, show me another, show me another, stop for a second, then tell me I failed and repeat. I pick everything correctly, but it fails because somewhere along the line, the absolute clowns at Google decided an auto-rejecting AI would be a good idea for a user validation system.
We need Google out of the internet. As their evil influence continues to expand, they'll use their powers to lock people who don't willingly buy into their ecosystem out of everything. And worse, since Google is the biggest lapdog around for government-led oppression of speech, they'll just filter out anything that doesn't agree with the status quo. And they'll be able to brush it away as an "oops, sorry, your behavior just makes you seem like a bot. Nothing we can do."
> Plus, you can always choose to just not use Google.
A customer can, a company cannot. Similarly to how a customer can choose another ISP, but Google cannot choose to just not to business with ISPs: if a business cannot be connected to their customers, that business cannot live.
I agree that the ISP monopoly problem in the US is by far the bigger problem.
The "last mile" should be owned and controlled by the government, for similar reasons why roads and power lines are. Then handfuls of ISPs would compete for the business of your household. Here in New Zealand that's exactly how it works. I can choose from at least 20 ISPs and net neutrality is a non-issue because free market competition drives the providers to give us what we want.
Thus my stance on net-neutrality is neither for nor against. I think both stances are equally bad, and the root of the problem is ISP monopoly.
I don't understand how having free market competition solves the issue net neutrality is addressing here: what if each ISP has different deals with different internet content providers? Net neutrality prevents this kind of vertical balkanization in a way that the free market can't intrinsically address.
How so? If there's a market for net neutrality, and if there's sufficient competition, someone will provide a neutral option. It just needs to be cheap enough for a competitor to enter the market for that to happen.
I wouldn’t be so sure... look at the cable tv market in the US. Surely there is consumer demand for clear and simple pricing and per-channel choice. And yet the free market has not provided this.
Why stop at the ISP level? Have a system that allows the user device to negotiate a connection with whatever services are available. The service could offer bids from providers which would have to specify a service level and price point. Then have a second price auction for every unit of time (say 10 mins). The user tunes their device to get the level of service and price they want. A contract would then consist of a VPN provider who would make bids on your behalf for a fixed monthly price.
Why aren't they though? What's the point of the justice system if they spend their limited processing capacity in actors that are less damaging to society?
It's a QoS problem - if you only scheduled processing by magnitude of alleged offense, people would optimize their behavior against the tradeoff between scale of offense and likelihood that they get to it in the queue before the statute of limitations expired, and then you end up needing to build a more complicated tiering system if you want anything below that threshold to be a rule followed at all.
(Yes, people do this anyway at differing levels, from betting they won't get charged with jaywalking to betting prosecuting/defending companies won't show to small claims to ..., but purely ordering by alleged damages would give a much stronger guarantee of whether crimes actually got charged, and thus whether you could safely assume you'd get away with them.)
Consider also: if you have a priority system with no disincentive to falsely inflating priority, then people will optimize for whatever matters to them getting done, e.g. finding ways to inflate the priority.
Sorry for the nitpick, but this part really irks me. It could only be true if you define "society" as "people in the US".
American ISPs target American citizens. Google targets pretty much everyone who uses the Internet, regardless of their country. Of course, it's understandable that the US justice system only targets people in the US, so I'm only being nitpicky because you've used the term "society" there. American ISPs, regardless of how shitty they might be, will never be more damaging to the society than a company that impacts the whole world.
Wait, what about "Judicial Economy" (https://definitions.uslegal.com/j/judicial-economy/). I've been annoyed when legal issues I follow get postponed because of "judicial economy" - the economic Judge stays things because he or she hopes that another trial will settle the entire kettle of fish, as it were.
Agreed. ISP monopolies are so obnoxious, and they basically bought legislature in many states to prevent any meaningful competition. All this is amplified by them swallowing each other and huge media companies in billions sized deals.
>>Wouldn't it make more sense to break up broadband ISP monopolies first? Google, Facebook, Amazon etc. cannot do business without ISPs.
Are ISPs favoring Google, Facebook, Amazon etc. ? If so, I agree with you. If not, then...
>>Plus, you can always choose to just not use Google.
Not as simple as you make it. Google for one is hurting competition and using their platform, mainly search, to do so. Different rules apply to companies with a certain market share. No one forced people to use Microsoft Windows either: Apple, Linux, or new companies could have invented many new OS-es.
> Are ISPs favoring Google, Facebook, Amazon etc. ?
No, ISPs favor their own services. See zero rating,
> AT&T is openly advertising that cellular customers can stream the company’s DirecTV Now product without it counting against monthly data caps. Meanwhile, all of the competing video services like Sling TV, Paystation Vue, YouTube TV, Netflix or Amazon Prime count against AT&T data caps [1]
Comcast isn't holding anybody back from innovating. If anything, wireless carriers may break their monopoly suddenly. Google, just like old Microsoft, by a vertical monopoly from OS to applications, is actually already doing harm to competition and innovation. You can feel the tech clock slow down in the last ten years. Imagine what small companies would be doing about security and privacy in search and browsers if Google didn't own that space completely. Imagine what the hordes of rest-and-vest half-working Google Ph.D.'s could be doing if they weren't hoarded by Google because of monopoly money.
> wireless carriers may break their monopoly suddenly.
This sounds like Comcast's argument, which is that there is already sufficient competition due to wireless carriers. The fact is, a fixed line will always be faster.
> You can feel the tech clock slow down in the last ten years
Sorry, but a lot has happened in the last 10 years, in terms of new languages, frameworks, and software.
> Imagine what the hordes of rest-and-vest half-working Google Ph.D.'s could be doing if they weren't hoarded by Google because of monopoly money
Are Google employees not free to do as they please now? If anything, they're being funded to go off and start their own companies. They're not enslaved by high salaries, lol. Quite the opposite.
I know that this is going on in the US so it's normal that your comment is from an American perspective, but:
1. It is nearly impossible to "choose to just no use Google". Tell me how long you can go without getting through reCaptcha or AMP for example (with AMP, often you don't even realise you're using it).
2. From what I hear, it seems that in the US many ISPs operate mostly in a situation of monopoly but this is rare in many other countries (with the exception of remote/rural areas). I know it's just anecdotal but I used to move frequently for work and I lived in many different countries in Europe/Asia/South America/Oceania and it never happened that I couldn't choose from at least a couple different broadband providers, except in one single case (village in a rural area in a South East Asian country).
Good to hear that about the second point. Here in the Netherlands it’s just one broadband provider per location, and I’ve heard similar stories from people in west Germany. So it’s good to know that it’s different for everywhere else.
> Here in the Netherlands it’s just one broadband provider per location
No it isn't. I live in the Netherlands and I can choose from 13 different ISP's on fiber alone. Add to that cable (Ziggo) and another dozen or so ISP's on DSL.
Not sure where you live in NL but in most places there is a LOT of choice. Even my parents who live in the middle of nowhere have several options including cable and fiber.
I'm a big "ISP enthusiast", so it pains me to see that in my home country, Serbia, Telekom Srbija owns EVERY SINGLE phone line in the country, so any and all DSL goes through them.
You can buy DSL from someone else, but it stills goes through their infrastructure, the "virtual" ISP just buys DSL access from Telekom.
Not even actual line access, just routing. You still HAVE to pay for a LANDLINE to Telekom directly, which is 5€ per month.
All other ISPs are either mobile broadband, WISP, or one single CDMA ISP that offers 128/32 Kbps Internet.
Cable ISPs have hidden non-compete contracts so if you have SBB (owned by United Group), you don't have Radijus Vektor, Kopernikus, Masko, etc., because of the non-compete.
By the way, main 2 plays on fixed broadband access are Telekom Srbija (Supernova, which owns almost all cable providers that aren't owned by SBB, mts (for ADSL and fiber)) and United Group (SBB and Beogrid, and others via Cable).
Orion Telekom does fiber in a few % of apartment buildings in Belgrade and Novi Sad, Exe Net in Niš and Leskovac, and that is basically it.
DSL is mostly up to 10/1 Mbps, a number of lucky people have 20/4 Mbps (upload is usually cut back to 2 Mbps) with VDSL, and a really tiny percentage have 50/8 Mbps VDSL and an even smaller number of people have 100+ Mbps with FTTH.
Mobile broadband is limited to up to 200 GB with Vip mobile, and that is a fixed wireless package which is limited to one location. Their speeds are terrible in most urban areas, and it's mostly 800 MHz with 15 MHz channel in rural areas. 4G+ is rare.
WISP (Fixed wireless over 802.11n or ac standard) is apsolutely atrocious, as is everywhere else in the world, with speeds reaching up to 20 Mbps except on dedicated links, mostly 10/2 Mbps for most users.
CDMA deserves no mention, being literally unusuable, and only marginally better than dial-up.
Fiber is extremely rare. Speeds are good, the most affordable ISP is Orion Telekom, but if you want TV, their TV offer is very poor (slow and low quality rebranded wholesale Android STB with a really bad Wowza headend which is overloaded and has poor bitrate leading to abysmal picture quality).
Given that Fiber is not available to most people, DSL being slow and unreliable (up to 10 Mbps), CDMA useless, mobile broadband expensive and limited (often not available due to overloading of cell towers), the only actual posibility for (good) Internet for most people is Cable. And that is a shared medium that is oversold and bundled with CATV.
Here the fiber is also owned by a big telco, but my ISP just rents the fiber. The equipment on both sides of the fiber is owned by my ISP. That's how they can offer gbit speed (and in some locations 10Gbit) while the big telco doesn't offer anything above 500Mbit.
That's very rare in the Netherlands, because phone and fiber network owners are both forced to let many others on their network. And in at least 2/3rd of the country you can also choose cable instead of DSL.
Where in NL? Because I am in a small village and there are multiple options even there. Even in the tiny village in Spain I live part of the year we have multiple choices.
Although for both countries I now just use mobile data. Depends on your usage, but for me (dev, netflix, youtube) it is more than enough. I have an unlimited EU package stuck on a SIM which I put in a Glocalme. Works well.
If you don't even realise that you're using AMP, is it actually to the detriment of consumers? How do you even get to an AMP page unless it's from a Google search?
Right, but I wonder if we restricted the statistics of internet access to the highly non urban areas, does the number of options increase? I personally don't know, I live in a rural area, small city.
This is too narrow understanding of monopoly power. Market
failures happen even when there are multiple suppliers
If some corporation gets into position where customer 'Can always choose' a option that provides less value for them and it's the monopoly power that provides the advantage (size and network effects) markets are not efficient anymore.
Yes. There is evidence that Google and Facebook have monopoly power. Google has 80-90% market share in search and Facebook has similar market share in social media ads. Network externalities make it hard to compete with them.
You can also make case about collusion between FB and Google emerging around 2010-2013. They have divided the markets and have stopped competing. It's hard to find evidence that it's intentional. It can be just understanding emerging from single meeting or natural development. Whatever the reason they seem to avoid direct competition.
But aren't those monopolies mostly there because of the Government protectionism, not just market dominance?
From most articles I see on them, they provide poor value and service, but the government generally gives them a huge amount of leniency and support.
> Wouldn't it make more sense to break up broadband ISP monopolies first?
Probably not for the Department of Justice. Some problems with that approach:
1. If you are trying to address the issue of limited choice in ISPs, I don't see how breaking them up addresses that. If you split an ISP that has a monopoly in a state, say, into separate ISPs for, say, each county...you've just gone from having one monopoly to having several monopolies. The limited choice is because there is only one cable coming into my house, and splitting up the company that owns that cable doesn't change that.
Addressing that probably requires something like making the last mile data transport a regulated utility that ISPs operate on top of. That would probably require Congressional action and a new President to do nationwide or to allow states to do individually.
2. Competition among ISPs in a region can vary dramatically city to city, and even neighborhood to neighborhood. I've not extensively researched this so maybe this is wrong, but the impression I've gotten is that an ISP's prices in a region tend to be pretty similar between those places within the region where they are the only choice, and those places within the region where there are alternatives with similar performing alternatives. That could make it hard to show that the ISP is abusing its monopoly in those parts of its territory where it does not have competition.
3. Aside from rural areas that only have DSL via the phone company, in most places there are multiple ISPs available. It's pretty common to have both cable and DSL, and in many cities there is also a fiber option. There's also wireless options, ranging from the regular consumer service of AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon, and the various MVNOs that are built on those networks, and many places also have wireless available that is not based on the cellular networks.
You might argue that, say, cellular wireless is not really a viable option to Comcast or Charter or whoever the cable company is in a given area, due to the vast difference in speed. But you will have to actually make the argument. You won't be able to just say that they speed difference makes them different markets. You'll have to actually look at how people are using these various services and show that they really are not comparable.
I think that the factors in #2 and #3 make it almost impossible to win an antitrust case against a major ISP as a whole. The DoJ would have to bring smaller cases alleging monopolization in specific regions, tailored to the specific way the factors in #2 and #3 play out in that region.
Having to do this region by region, or even city by city in some regions, would make this a very long, expensive pursuit. (And where they win, there is still the question of whether or not there is an effective remedy they can apply).
Thus, it is probably better for the DoJ to leave this issue to Congress to deal with via legislation.
> Wouldn't it make more sense to break up broadband ISP monopolies first?
No. The ISPs’ argument for breaking neutrality is the tech giants’ capturing of the majority of the profit pie. With competition, those margins should decrease. That, in turn, makes fighting net neutrality less lucrative.
Add on the fact that ISPs are more regulated, federally and at the state level (California can regulate Comcast in a way it can’t Google) and the more-imminent threat is revealed.
You must be joking. In the US, broadband ISPs are regional monopolies that can and do charge whatever they want while delivering lousy service. This happens while net neutrality is in place.
Without net neutrality, ISPs are now free to make whatever deals they want with content providers, double dipping, and providing fewer options for consumers.
AT&T is now offering uncapped access to their video services [1]. Without net neutrality, nothing stops them from throttling Netflix & charging Netflix money for "high speed access", thereby passing costs to the consumer. ISPs can profit more from their regional monopolies simply by forcing services like Netflix to pay more. Consumers will not benefit because the broadband ISP has no incentive to improve service or lower costs. They are regional monopolies.
...? The conclusion of the official report said no evidence of collusion, but couldn’t clear on obstruction (of a crime that it just previously said didn’t happen but that’s outside my legal knowledge).
What are you referring to? I must not have been following it closely enough.
The NSA could just as easily (probably more easily) hack smaller companies. It isn't as if Google is giving the US government access to user data (except when legally obligated through warrants) - the Prism program was essentially spying on these companies without their knowledge.
NSA does not hack Google; it gets direct access through a series of secret laws and courts. American citizens may have some protection against surveillance but the rest of the world does not.
It will be interesting to see how prosecutors argue any anti trust case against Google. In American case law, the doctrine of consumer welfare being the objective of anti trust is pretty deeply enshrined in recent case law [1]. The philosophy essentially says that monopoly is not bad as long as consumers benefit and increasing competition through anti trust actions can increase consumer cost. This is very different from how anti trust works in most other places in the world - so they will have the difficult task to prove consumer harm
I assume it depends on what harm could be described as: Is harm of lost opportunity to a wider market, user data harvesting, incompatibility of websites due to monopolistic standards definition, Etc?
Does the harm have to be obvious and categorised as emotional/physical or similar?
The linked article there does not clarify the matter, to the point of the certainty of the position being vague at best.
The change in legal thinking has been that fewer and fewer situations are held "per se" anticompetitive in US law and cases have to be analyzed by the "test of reason". Even vertical pricing actions (fixing ceiling and in some situations floors) have been held to be not anticompetitive. The article has links to cases where these arguments (known as Chicago School) have been cited and have been precedent setting in American case law
The net result is Google can't be prosecuted just because it's a monopoly. It will require provable consumer harm (not necessarily just industry harm) on a case by case basis (not just hypothetical) to win the case.
I don't understand this philosophy. If monopolies don't harm the customer, why bother having a market at all?
You could argue that freedom requires private property and only a market economy is compatible with private property. But "A planned economy is more efficient but I don't support it because I support private property rights" is a pretty uncommon stance.
Monopolies don't inherently harm the consumer. The harm comes from abusing your monopoly once you have it. Hence, the concentration in law more on the harm than on the existence per se of a monopoly.
It goes the other way, too. Just as having a monopoly doesn't automatically mean you are in violation of antitrust law, not having a monopoly does not mean you aren't violating antitrust law. The practices you use to acquire a monopoly are often harmful long before you reach monopoly, or even before you become the biggest competitor in your market, and those are in scope for antitrust.
Antitrust law is really more about monopolization than about monopoly. The distinction is explained well in this report from the Congressional Research Service [1]. From the summary:
> Antitrust law does not mandate either that markets be competitive, or that they contain some predetermined number of participants/competitors; it is concerned, rather, with the operation of markets, on the assumption that a properly functioning market (i.e., one in which there is an opportunity for viable competition, and is not skewed by the predatory actions of participants), will best protect consumers. "Monopoly" and "monopolist" are, therefore, merely descriptive terms, used to illustrate situations in which a single entity (or group of entities) possesses effective control of the market in which it operates; neither term implies anything about the lawfulness of the monopoly possessed. "Monopolization," on the other hand, is the term used in antitrust law to characterize as unlawful a situation in which a monopolist—irrespective of whether his monopoly has been lawfully achieved—couples his monopoly status with behavior designed to unfairly exploit, maintain, or enhance his market position. Similarly, "attempted monopolization"connotes a situation in which an entity unlawfully or unfairly attempts to secure a market monopoly. The long-standing, judicially created Rule of Reason, which involves balancing an anticompetitive action with any procompetitive results, underscores those facts.
Consumer harm seemed to be predicted based on if prices would increase if the business in question was made to change. The profit margin was never a consideration.
It's easy to say that online search might not be as good if Google were broken up, or that mobile phones might not be as good if Apple were broken up. Or that their "products" might cost more money. But in a competitive market, if their margins are one of the highest in the world, the mkre likely outcome seems like a simple reduction in their margins.
> Monopolies don't inherently harm the consumer. The harm comes from abusing your monopoly once you have it. Hence, the concentration in law more on the harm than on the existence per se of a monopoly.
This is only true if you consider maximizing your profit by producing as cheaply as possible while selling them for the price the market will bear — in short, maximizing profit — an abuse of a monopoly. Banning a for-profit company from trying to make a profit doesn't sound like a coherent policy.
> Antitrust law is really more about
Is is pretty much irrelevant in a discussion about ought.
Amazon seems to have pushed "customer obsession" over overt competitiveness from "the beginning".
Regardless of motivations, it seems to act as a kind of shield from allegations/evidence of Microsoft-style anti-competitiveness. The difference is internal emails saying "customers are demanding a better way to run document-oriented databases" instead of talking directly about leveraging AWS market power against $MDB.
If anything I think it's the other way around. People tend to reminisce about how great the service used to be from Amazon in the early days. Now it's not as good as it used to be, but probably still the best in most markets.
Isn't the "consumer" in the case of Google advertisers rather than the public at large? The question Google should be facing is whether or not businesses can reasonably buy adverts to advertise on the web from someone else, and whether forcing Google to break up would improve the situation.
> they will have the difficult task to prove consumer harm
Reduced choice and human nature tend to result in harm. The novelty, with Facebook and Google, will require measuring harm without explicit prices.
Such an antitrust argument around privacy was recently made against Facebook:
“This sort of thing happened regularly for years. Facebook would try something sneaky, users would object and Facebook would back off.
But then Facebook’s competition began to disappear. Facebook acquired Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. Later in 2014, Google announced that it would fold its social network Orkut. Emboldened by the decline of market threats, Facebook revoked its users’ ability to vote on changes to its privacy policies and then (almost simultaneously with Google’s exit from the social media market) changed its privacy pact with users.
This is how Facebook usurped our privacy: with the help of its market dominance. The price of using Facebook has stayed the same over the years (it’s free to join and use), but the cost of using it, calculated in terms of the amount of data that users now must provide, is an order of magnitude above what it was when Facebook faced real competition.”
The economics being the legislation behind the case law is anachronistic, and the economics profession has done a poor job of updating its theories.
"Digital Monopolies" are barely similar to the heavy industry or commodity monopolies if days past. If you're trying to gauge the impact of google's market share via and prices...
A big part of the space they monopolize is free. No prices. If your fundamentals are based on prices and proxies for prices.. it's not going to work.
Both the reasons for a business to seek monopoly and the rationale for preventing it are estranged from the law, at this point.
Maybe you can't split ads from search, but you could totally split Google Cloud | Search + Ads | Youtube | Maps -- and who knows what else google makes profit with.
The effect on YouTube may be interesting and actually end up more beneficial. They could still run ads based on the videos you are viewing, but maybe they'd have to make up lost revenue by getting more people to pay for subscriptions (e.g. YouTube Red). Those subscriptions would signal to YouTube which users have expendable money (especially if it's a tiered pricing system), and what channels and videos you as a paying customer actually value spending money on. Some of that money could be used to increase payouts for content developers, hopefully increasing quality and user retention, ultimately spurring a positive cycle.
Financial opinion pieces are always a difficult read for me, as they always seem slanted in favor of the company and against any hint of regulations n such. This one seems to have a tone of "can google survive the big bad regulators?" to it that makes me... tired.
Consider this excerpt:
"In the U.S. and elsewhere, politicians from all party
stripes have sought to attack Google or other tech giants for various perceived sins,including being too big for the
good of industry and consumers. Being Google has meant dealing with perennial regulatory and political nightmares."
"sought to attack"... "perceived sins"... "Being google... has lead to nightmares"
Is this language not considered to be pushing the reader's opinion in a certain direction?
On a related note, I would like to postulate that monopolies are inherently anti-consumer because they are anti competitive by design.
A monopoly as a rule breaks capitalism, which only works because of competition. the fact that harm must be proven somehow is a ridiculous notion and too high a bar. The fact that this is even up for debate is wild on its face and I just don't understand why we're here except for maybe we as a country have a collective case of stockholm syndrome towards the market that the government has shown it is unable to control.
Consider the other Google-related link on this very site. Google decided to break adblocking, and because they are a monopoly they can do that.
This and other anti-trust laws we've slacked off on enforcing is how we've gotten to the point where there are very few choices for the consumer in many aspects of life here in the states.
> On a related note, I would like to postulate that monopolies are inherently anti-consumer because they are anti competitive by design.
Monopolies are the fact of absence of competition by definition, but not necessarily anti-competitive by design.
But the absence of competition in a market isn't always bad for consumers.
First, a market may not be a consumer market, and more importantly monopolies may be bad for customers because they may improve the product that can be offered. (Netflix acquiring competition had made each streaming services worse, with smaller and less stable libraries and rising prices; it's been a bonanza for content owners, but not consumers.) One factor in why monopolies can be better for consumers is that they tend also to be monopsonies.
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Can Google get out of this by sucking up to Trump? It appears that Trump is susceptible to flattery, and he also appears to play favorites.
The other viewpoint might be: can Google get a fair trial in the US court system? Trump has let the Federalist Society pick all the Federal judges he's nominated, as near as I can tell. Some of them haven't been very knowledgeable about the law. Or maybe, should the DoJ worry that its case won't get a very fair hearing at trial?
My point is that we're living in interesting times. Assumptions commonly made in the past just might not hold today, even in the US Court system.
Being too buddy-buddy with conservatives has resulted in pushback for Facebook[0] and Uber[1] (Apple[2] too, but a little less so).
Personally I believe that Google, Amazon, and Facebook( a little bit less so) should all be broken up. When you look at Google and Amazon they have their fingers in every pie, it's mind boggling.
I am more left than right, and I am very skeptical of what the Trump administration would do about this. It feels like, with Facebook especially, conservatives are not exactly mad that the companies are big. They are mad that the companies are big and not entirely right-wing mouth pieces. There's a lot of anger about "biased" Google results[3] and "censorship" from Facebook[4].
If you look at the business landscape in US, most very large businesses are culturally conservative. Most tech companies prefer to project a younger, liberal image partially for recruiting reasons. I don't think the Trump administration would be interested in pursuing this if Google looked and acted a bit more like Procter and Gamble.
This seems like a winning position for Trump and a losing position for Google no matter how it shakes out.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/04/technology/facebook-kavan...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/02/technology/uber-ceo-travi...
[2] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/3/8/18256467/ti...
[3] https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-sear...
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/09/facebook-...
This will ends when Google will pay up and promise to do some [cosmetic] changes.
We have to remember that from IE4-6 before Firefox came around Internet Explorer really was the best browser in town. When MS dropped the ball on that, it was market forces that caused them to lose market share, not any government action. Same with Windows Mobile/PocketPC. And if the EU's goal was to foster browser diversity in their suit against MS, they missed the boat on that entirely.
But I agree, macroeconomic forces were more powerful.
Perhaps some other company would've kicked Microsoft's butt in mobile. It's impossible to know.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/appleinsider.com/articles/18/08...
I might be missing some history here :)
For me, it's not the business monopoly, it's the influence monopoly. And that's very much worth regulating.
Please look up the definition of monopoly before throwing the word. Earlier part of your own sentence refutes the claim that google has a monopoly in ad. Further numbers: https://adage.com/article/digital/duopoly-loses-share-ad-spe...
I said „close to a monopoly“ to refer to the big market share of either of them, which is clearly the case as also written in your linked article.
Google has global impact, whereas Comcast (etc) are mostly US?
How would an entity run an investigation or audit against Google?
If I, or I'm assuming anyone who doesn't work in Google, was asked to come in and develop a fundamental understanding of how everything works within Google's software/infrastructure it would likely take me a long time to do that and I'd likely need a lot of help from real Googlers. They are, of course, the best of the best and I'm just some random SWE.
I'm assuming their business side is as complicated as their software must be and I'm assuming their legal/business/executive team is as smart as their engineers. How practical is it for an outside party to claim that they actually understand what is happening within Google? How many people does that take? How long does that take? Does Google need to provide support staff for these people to aid them in understanding Google's internal business structure?
Also, for audits like this is "understanding what is happening within $company" a factor? If a company is so big that it can't see what it's stepping on (crushing in an noncompetitive way) does it get a pass?
Nobody is that good, sadly. Every time someone has looked to be that good historically, it was because they were engaging in anti-competitive practices, and needed to be broken up.
We've been pretty hands off on the trust busting simce the MaBell breakup, and the impetus to do anything about Google or Facebook has been rather low, since there hadn't been any glaringly obvious downsides to letting them do their thing.
However, given certain waves that Big Tech has started to make; Oracle v. Google, making ad blocking in the major dominant browser contingent upon subscription, Cambridge Analytics, perceived political bias and activism by Dr-platforming, tech has not only made it painfully obvious the danger posed by massive stores of unbridled data collection, but that having platforms all economically centralized under a small number of stakeholders is a danger to the continued stability of "the System".
It's one of those wisdom of the masses sort of things. Awareness and sentiment forming seems to have finally hit the tipping point at which enough people are onboard for something to be done about it all.
Interesting times ahead.
given what you said, it's not difficult to conclude there is no one in the world actually understand google's business, and/or engineering, including googlers. therefore, who is going to be hold accountable, which person we need to push if anything goes horribly wrong?
Google, facebook and amazon have been way too powerful financially, technologically, politically and culturally. install armies they will be superpowers. it's better to do something before it's too late.
Seems true, but also too vague. Is because we can't trust a profit-motivated organization with that much influence?
Is it because they (FAANG) came by it dishonestly?
Are they abusing that power?
Are they unique in that regard?
Or is it because "anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things"?
why do you think checks and balances only apply to politics? power corrupts, and not necessarily only political ones. I'd say any power corrupts, e.g. in marriage, one side gains significant upper hand and he/she has a decent chance to abuse the position.
And there are certainly business people out there with more knowledge than those in Google - see NY.
And the business is easy: Ads, ads, ads.. plus maybe Google Apps / Compute. Using android unfairly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law
eg phone manufacturers will be upset about google not allowing them to produce devices that compete with android and android devices; yelp and other sites are upset google scrapes their content, etc.
The best software people I know work in their own companies, and/or doing more meaningful things than selling ads.
That doesn't require exceptional "intelligence", but it does require a tenacity in finding information and the integrity to relentlessly ask questions till you understand what's going (without prejudice regarding the outcome), without being prematurely satisfied that it's "too complex".
And of course, it will be a when team of people, who would have developed a similar understanding of other comes situations, and they will have significant help, and the authority to ask questions.
If you want a more explicit and hands on understanding of the process, look up narratives of major investigations, eg: the Challenger disaster investigation, or the investigation that led to the breaking up of AT&T.
That assumption doesn't hold. Google's business model isn't that complicated. Industry experts and competitors understand perfectly well how Google makes money. Any investigation will focus on a handful areas that are well known and often discussed.
And when it comes to understanding who at Google has done what, why and when, there's prisoner's dilemma to the rescue. If investigators question a couple of managers under penalties of perjury, they will put their own personal interests (i.e staying out of prison) over Google's interests and just tell the truth or at least say something that isn't provably false.
And no, I don't think the justice department can or will "do both". It's clear this admin is anti-net neutrality, catering to Comcast's whims.
I don't know how that would play out with a federal anti trust setup.
It's pretty simple: as you say, they're local. Google and Amazon are the big evil corporations on the other side of the country, but Comcast has an office in your town, and your neighbour's son works for them. They're a significant provider of relatively well-paid low-skill jobs in every community in the country. It's incredibly difficult to come down on that.
It seems more like the actual interest in actually doing any anti trust stuff for any consumer type product just faded away mostly ...
Remaking federal regulation to preempt states is laborious and fraught with difficulty; see Obamacare.
I still can't entirely opt out of Google.
And certainly can't opt out of their tracking.
They are inescapable.
Then there's the direct cell phone tracking-
> Investigators who spoke with The New York Times said they had not sent geofence warrants to companies other than Google, and Apple said it did not have the ability to perform those searches. Google would not provide details on Sensorvault, but Aaron Edens, an intelligence analyst with the sheriff’s office in San Mateo County, Calif., who has examined data from hundreds of phones, said most Android devices and some iPhones he had seen had this data available from Google.
My solution lately has been to feed them junk data until they either give up on me or erroneously perceive my input as non-erroneous (not sure which it is). Takes some time, but to me it’s worth it. If we can get enough people doing this they might have to get rid of it all together. (Vastly unlikely, but a guy can dream, right?)
Through browser fingerprinting that is shared via channels which are undetectable and unlockable via browser scripts.
Through hundreds of many tiny mistakes you make every day and unknowingly let down your guard.
_Oops, damn, I forgot I disabled uBlock when accessing that important page for work._
You cannot opt out.
As long as there's a very popular communications service / social networking service / etc., or even a few of them (none of which dominates the entire market), you can't stop other people from turning in your data (unless you have no connections whatsoever in this world, or you and all your connections live in a cave). And if you use any popular service or visit any popular website yourself, your data will be collected, it's only a matter of the level of details.
Sure any 3rd party app I install can track me to some degree, but it can't compare my usage against my entire email history, my travel history, recordings of my voice...
GGP was talking about data collected involuntarily, and I was responding to that. Google (or any other company) can't have your entire email history, your travel history, and recordings of your voice without your voluntary participation in one of their services or services of a "partner". Those are way beyond drive-by collection.
There is no way to only use a Google service and also disable drive by collection. And because they're so huge and cover so many categories, that drive by info is more meaningful in their hands than just a dozen random unconnected companies. Because of that, drive by collection by other 3rd party doesn't really concern me as much. They can't do nearly as much with it.
This seems like a great simplistic unit of measurement for classifying what antitrust action is supposed to target.
When it's extremely difficult, if not practically impossible to escape a private company from extracting/exploiting profit from unwilling persons at scale. When you basically can't opt out.
I'm not sure that would fit the current anti-trust legal definition (as in: not a lawyer so don't know answer - not that I think it doesn't fit). Equally, I'm not sure it fits under the more general principles of anti-competitive practices. They - I believe - presume willingness on the part of the consumer to access products or services, but where supply is unfairly limited.
Notwithstanding all that, your statement is an excellent principle and very neatly articulates the problem. I don't know what rule of law it would come under, but it's a succinct illustration.
How would breaking up Google prevent tracking?
So yea, tracking will continue until people regulate it.
Brin and Page always stated that search is not the end goal. A real AI is. If these actions happen, it‘s pretty much guaranteed that China will get there first. We don‘t have the global regulations in place yet to discourage that arms race.
2030 to 2040 will be the earliest AGI could happen realistically.
How are you going to stop tracking?
Whenever you interact with a business, online or offline, you're supplying information that can be tracked.
I've asked this question twice now. We can't just break up companies because they collect data. That's not anti-trust.
While tracking and anti-trust are only loosely coupled, both are symptoms of an anti-social company.
You can be tracked by every android app, plus DNS and connectivity checks - it's only visible part. Sure any advanced security audit will show much more.
Special mention to reCaptcha, you just doomed to train there AI and it seems to intensify once you start moving away from google. And I bet it's even worst from the 3rd world...
I guess the "don't be evil" way would be to make all those data public. Or just to provide an alternative way to prove your humanity online, without enslaving the whole world.
And I don't mean that they're hard to make sense of or something. But if I encounter a recaptcha on one of my specific devices that's not logged into any Google accounts, recaptcha will simply reject all of my clearly correct answers. It'll ask me to pick all of the fire hydrants, show another screen, show me another, show me another, stop for a second, then tell me I failed and repeat. I pick everything correctly, but it fails because somewhere along the line, the absolute clowns at Google decided an auto-rejecting AI would be a good idea for a user validation system.
We need Google out of the internet. As their evil influence continues to expand, they'll use their powers to lock people who don't willingly buy into their ecosystem out of everything. And worse, since Google is the biggest lapdog around for government-led oppression of speech, they'll just filter out anything that doesn't agree with the status quo. And they'll be able to brush it away as an "oops, sorry, your behavior just makes you seem like a bot. Nothing we can do."
A customer can, a company cannot. Similarly to how a customer can choose another ISP, but Google cannot choose to just not to business with ISPs: if a business cannot be connected to their customers, that business cannot live.
https://peering.google.com/#/options/peering
https://www.peeringdb.com/asn/15169
The "last mile" should be owned and controlled by the government, for similar reasons why roads and power lines are. Then handfuls of ISPs would compete for the business of your household. Here in New Zealand that's exactly how it works. I can choose from at least 20 ISPs and net neutrality is a non-issue because free market competition drives the providers to give us what we want.
Thus my stance on net-neutrality is neither for nor against. I think both stances are equally bad, and the root of the problem is ISP monopoly.
(Yes, people do this anyway at differing levels, from betting they won't get charged with jaywalking to betting prosecuting/defending companies won't show to small claims to ..., but purely ordering by alleged damages would give a much stronger guarantee of whether crimes actually got charged, and thus whether you could safely assume you'd get away with them.)
Consider also: if you have a priority system with no disincentive to falsely inflating priority, then people will optimize for whatever matters to them getting done, e.g. finding ways to inflate the priority.
Sorry for the nitpick, but this part really irks me. It could only be true if you define "society" as "people in the US".
American ISPs target American citizens. Google targets pretty much everyone who uses the Internet, regardless of their country. Of course, it's understandable that the US justice system only targets people in the US, so I'm only being nitpicky because you've used the term "society" there. American ISPs, regardless of how shitty they might be, will never be more damaging to the society than a company that impacts the whole world.
Are ISPs favoring Google, Facebook, Amazon etc. ? If so, I agree with you. If not, then...
>>Plus, you can always choose to just not use Google.
Not as simple as you make it. Google for one is hurting competition and using their platform, mainly search, to do so. Different rules apply to companies with a certain market share. No one forced people to use Microsoft Windows either: Apple, Linux, or new companies could have invented many new OS-es.
No, ISPs favor their own services. See zero rating,
> AT&T is openly advertising that cellular customers can stream the company’s DirecTV Now product without it counting against monthly data caps. Meanwhile, all of the competing video services like Sling TV, Paystation Vue, YouTube TV, Netflix or Amazon Prime count against AT&T data caps [1]
[1] https://potsandpansbyccg.com/2019/02/13/isps-are-violating-t...
This sounds like Comcast's argument, which is that there is already sufficient competition due to wireless carriers. The fact is, a fixed line will always be faster.
> You can feel the tech clock slow down in the last ten years
Sorry, but a lot has happened in the last 10 years, in terms of new languages, frameworks, and software.
> Imagine what the hordes of rest-and-vest half-working Google Ph.D.'s could be doing if they weren't hoarded by Google because of monopoly money
Are Google employees not free to do as they please now? If anything, they're being funded to go off and start their own companies. They're not enslaved by high salaries, lol. Quite the opposite.
1. It is nearly impossible to "choose to just no use Google". Tell me how long you can go without getting through reCaptcha or AMP for example (with AMP, often you don't even realise you're using it).
2. From what I hear, it seems that in the US many ISPs operate mostly in a situation of monopoly but this is rare in many other countries (with the exception of remote/rural areas). I know it's just anecdotal but I used to move frequently for work and I lived in many different countries in Europe/Asia/South America/Oceania and it never happened that I couldn't choose from at least a couple different broadband providers, except in one single case (village in a rural area in a South East Asian country).
No it isn't. I live in the Netherlands and I can choose from 13 different ISP's on fiber alone. Add to that cable (Ziggo) and another dozen or so ISP's on DSL.
Not sure where you live in NL but in most places there is a LOT of choice. Even my parents who live in the middle of nowhere have several options including cable and fiber.
I'm a big "ISP enthusiast", so it pains me to see that in my home country, Serbia, Telekom Srbija owns EVERY SINGLE phone line in the country, so any and all DSL goes through them.
You can buy DSL from someone else, but it stills goes through their infrastructure, the "virtual" ISP just buys DSL access from Telekom.
Not even actual line access, just routing. You still HAVE to pay for a LANDLINE to Telekom directly, which is 5€ per month.
All other ISPs are either mobile broadband, WISP, or one single CDMA ISP that offers 128/32 Kbps Internet.
Cable ISPs have hidden non-compete contracts so if you have SBB (owned by United Group), you don't have Radijus Vektor, Kopernikus, Masko, etc., because of the non-compete.
By the way, main 2 plays on fixed broadband access are Telekom Srbija (Supernova, which owns almost all cable providers that aren't owned by SBB, mts (for ADSL and fiber)) and United Group (SBB and Beogrid, and others via Cable).
Orion Telekom does fiber in a few % of apartment buildings in Belgrade and Novi Sad, Exe Net in Niš and Leskovac, and that is basically it.
DSL is mostly up to 10/1 Mbps, a number of lucky people have 20/4 Mbps (upload is usually cut back to 2 Mbps) with VDSL, and a really tiny percentage have 50/8 Mbps VDSL and an even smaller number of people have 100+ Mbps with FTTH.
Mobile broadband is limited to up to 200 GB with Vip mobile, and that is a fixed wireless package which is limited to one location. Their speeds are terrible in most urban areas, and it's mostly 800 MHz with 15 MHz channel in rural areas. 4G+ is rare.
WISP (Fixed wireless over 802.11n or ac standard) is apsolutely atrocious, as is everywhere else in the world, with speeds reaching up to 20 Mbps except on dedicated links, mostly 10/2 Mbps for most users.
CDMA deserves no mention, being literally unusuable, and only marginally better than dial-up.
Fiber is extremely rare. Speeds are good, the most affordable ISP is Orion Telekom, but if you want TV, their TV offer is very poor (slow and low quality rebranded wholesale Android STB with a really bad Wowza headend which is overloaded and has poor bitrate leading to abysmal picture quality).
Given that Fiber is not available to most people, DSL being slow and unreliable (up to 10 Mbps), CDMA useless, mobile broadband expensive and limited (often not available due to overloading of cell towers), the only actual posibility for (good) Internet for most people is Cable. And that is a shared medium that is oversold and bundled with CATV.
Although for both countries I now just use mobile data. Depends on your usage, but for me (dev, netflix, youtube) it is more than enough. I have an unlimited EU package stuck on a SIM which I put in a Glocalme. Works well.
Unless you mean western Germany I recommend you pay more attention to the news.
I know this is not the same thing, but my example is meant to highlight the logical fallacy.
As to your second question, I end up on AMP pages by following links shared with me.
To say nothing of websites’ Google Analytics suites phoning home your whereabouts.
This is too narrow understanding of monopoly power. Market failures happen even when there are multiple suppliers
If some corporation gets into position where customer 'Can always choose' a option that provides less value for them and it's the monopoly power that provides the advantage (size and network effects) markets are not efficient anymore.
The idea that two-sided market can't have market failures because one side gets free services is not very strong one.
You can also make case about collusion between FB and Google emerging around 2010-2013. They have divided the markets and have stopped competing. It's hard to find evidence that it's intentional. It can be just understanding emerging from single meeting or natural development. Whatever the reason they seem to avoid direct competition.
Probably not for the Department of Justice. Some problems with that approach:
1. If you are trying to address the issue of limited choice in ISPs, I don't see how breaking them up addresses that. If you split an ISP that has a monopoly in a state, say, into separate ISPs for, say, each county...you've just gone from having one monopoly to having several monopolies. The limited choice is because there is only one cable coming into my house, and splitting up the company that owns that cable doesn't change that.
Addressing that probably requires something like making the last mile data transport a regulated utility that ISPs operate on top of. That would probably require Congressional action and a new President to do nationwide or to allow states to do individually.
2. Competition among ISPs in a region can vary dramatically city to city, and even neighborhood to neighborhood. I've not extensively researched this so maybe this is wrong, but the impression I've gotten is that an ISP's prices in a region tend to be pretty similar between those places within the region where they are the only choice, and those places within the region where there are alternatives with similar performing alternatives. That could make it hard to show that the ISP is abusing its monopoly in those parts of its territory where it does not have competition.
3. Aside from rural areas that only have DSL via the phone company, in most places there are multiple ISPs available. It's pretty common to have both cable and DSL, and in many cities there is also a fiber option. There's also wireless options, ranging from the regular consumer service of AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon, and the various MVNOs that are built on those networks, and many places also have wireless available that is not based on the cellular networks.
You might argue that, say, cellular wireless is not really a viable option to Comcast or Charter or whoever the cable company is in a given area, due to the vast difference in speed. But you will have to actually make the argument. You won't be able to just say that they speed difference makes them different markets. You'll have to actually look at how people are using these various services and show that they really are not comparable.
I think that the factors in #2 and #3 make it almost impossible to win an antitrust case against a major ISP as a whole. The DoJ would have to bring smaller cases alleging monopolization in specific regions, tailored to the specific way the factors in #2 and #3 play out in that region.
Having to do this region by region, or even city by city in some regions, would make this a very long, expensive pursuit. (And where they win, there is still the question of whether or not there is an effective remedy they can apply).
Thus, it is probably better for the DoJ to leave this issue to Congress to deal with via legislation.
No. The ISPs’ argument for breaking neutrality is the tech giants’ capturing of the majority of the profit pie. With competition, those margins should decrease. That, in turn, makes fighting net neutrality less lucrative.
Add on the fact that ISPs are more regulated, federally and at the state level (California can regulate Comcast in a way it can’t Google) and the more-imminent threat is revealed.
You must be joking. In the US, broadband ISPs are regional monopolies that can and do charge whatever they want while delivering lousy service. This happens while net neutrality is in place.
Without net neutrality, ISPs are now free to make whatever deals they want with content providers, double dipping, and providing fewer options for consumers.
AT&T is now offering uncapped access to their video services [1]. Without net neutrality, nothing stops them from throttling Netflix & charging Netflix money for "high speed access", thereby passing costs to the consumer. ISPs can profit more from their regional monopolies simply by forcing services like Netflix to pay more. Consumers will not benefit because the broadband ISP has no incentive to improve service or lower costs. They are regional monopolies.
[1] https://potsandpansbyccg.com/2019/02/13/isps-are-violating-t...
"You" are not Google's real customers, the advertisers are, and most of them most definitely cannot opt out of Google and remain viable.
I feel like this is an action by the DOJ to throw heat off of the recently ignored ruling by Mueller.
“A sitting president cannot be charged with a felony”.
Oh. We should distract the masses with a big (fucking obvious) course of action.
Honestly I’m just a little disappointed in the machinations.
...? The conclusion of the official report said no evidence of collusion, but couldn’t clear on obstruction (of a crime that it just previously said didn’t happen but that’s outside my legal knowledge).
What are you referring to? I must not have been following it closely enough.
Check out Yonatan Zunger's comments from the time this came out: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/06/12/heres...
You're acting like Google was complicit with the NSA capturing data without a specific target - they weren't.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antitrust_Paradox
Does the harm have to be obvious and categorised as emotional/physical or similar?
The linked article there does not clarify the matter, to the point of the certainty of the position being vague at best.
The net result is Google can't be prosecuted just because it's a monopoly. It will require provable consumer harm (not necessarily just industry harm) on a case by case basis (not just hypothetical) to win the case.
You could argue that freedom requires private property and only a market economy is compatible with private property. But "A planned economy is more efficient but I don't support it because I support private property rights" is a pretty uncommon stance.
It goes the other way, too. Just as having a monopoly doesn't automatically mean you are in violation of antitrust law, not having a monopoly does not mean you aren't violating antitrust law. The practices you use to acquire a monopoly are often harmful long before you reach monopoly, or even before you become the biggest competitor in your market, and those are in scope for antitrust.
Antitrust law is really more about monopolization than about monopoly. The distinction is explained well in this report from the Congressional Research Service [1]. From the summary:
> Antitrust law does not mandate either that markets be competitive, or that they contain some predetermined number of participants/competitors; it is concerned, rather, with the operation of markets, on the assumption that a properly functioning market (i.e., one in which there is an opportunity for viable competition, and is not skewed by the predatory actions of participants), will best protect consumers. "Monopoly" and "monopolist" are, therefore, merely descriptive terms, used to illustrate situations in which a single entity (or group of entities) possesses effective control of the market in which it operates; neither term implies anything about the lawfulness of the monopoly possessed. "Monopolization," on the other hand, is the term used in antitrust law to characterize as unlawful a situation in which a monopolist—irrespective of whether his monopoly has been lawfully achieved—couples his monopoly status with behavior designed to unfairly exploit, maintain, or enhance his market position. Similarly, "attempted monopolization"connotes a situation in which an entity unlawfully or unfairly attempts to secure a market monopoly. The long-standing, judicially created Rule of Reason, which involves balancing an anticompetitive action with any procompetitive results, underscores those facts.
[1] https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/RL33708.html
Consumer harm seemed to be predicted based on if prices would increase if the business in question was made to change. The profit margin was never a consideration.
It's easy to say that online search might not be as good if Google were broken up, or that mobile phones might not be as good if Apple were broken up. Or that their "products" might cost more money. But in a competitive market, if their margins are one of the highest in the world, the mkre likely outcome seems like a simple reduction in their margins.
This is only true if you consider maximizing your profit by producing as cheaply as possible while selling them for the price the market will bear — in short, maximizing profit — an abuse of a monopoly. Banning a for-profit company from trying to make a profit doesn't sound like a coherent policy.
> Antitrust law is really more about
Is is pretty much irrelevant in a discussion about ought.
Regardless of motivations, it seems to act as a kind of shield from allegations/evidence of Microsoft-style anti-competitiveness. The difference is internal emails saying "customers are demanding a better way to run document-oriented databases" instead of talking directly about leveraging AWS market power against $MDB.
Reduced choice and human nature tend to result in harm. The novelty, with Facebook and Google, will require measuring harm without explicit prices.
Such an antitrust argument around privacy was recently made against Facebook:
“This sort of thing happened regularly for years. Facebook would try something sneaky, users would object and Facebook would back off.
But then Facebook’s competition began to disappear. Facebook acquired Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. Later in 2014, Google announced that it would fold its social network Orkut. Emboldened by the decline of market threats, Facebook revoked its users’ ability to vote on changes to its privacy policies and then (almost simultaneously with Google’s exit from the social media market) changed its privacy pact with users.
This is how Facebook usurped our privacy: with the help of its market dominance. The price of using Facebook has stayed the same over the years (it’s free to join and use), but the cost of using it, calculated in terms of the amount of data that users now must provide, is an order of magnitude above what it was when Facebook faced real competition.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/28/opinion/privacy-antitrust...
"Digital Monopolies" are barely similar to the heavy industry or commodity monopolies if days past. If you're trying to gauge the impact of google's market share via and prices...
A big part of the space they monopolize is free. No prices. If your fundamentals are based on prices and proxies for prices.. it's not going to work.
Both the reasons for a business to seek monopoly and the rationale for preventing it are estranged from the law, at this point.
A split up google may not be a viable business.
Consider this excerpt:
"sought to attack"... "perceived sins"... "Being google... has lead to nightmares"Is this language not considered to be pushing the reader's opinion in a certain direction?
On a related note, I would like to postulate that monopolies are inherently anti-consumer because they are anti competitive by design.
A monopoly as a rule breaks capitalism, which only works because of competition. the fact that harm must be proven somehow is a ridiculous notion and too high a bar. The fact that this is even up for debate is wild on its face and I just don't understand why we're here except for maybe we as a country have a collective case of stockholm syndrome towards the market that the government has shown it is unable to control.
Consider the other Google-related link on this very site. Google decided to break adblocking, and because they are a monopoly they can do that.
This and other anti-trust laws we've slacked off on enforcing is how we've gotten to the point where there are very few choices for the consumer in many aspects of life here in the states.
Monopolies are the fact of absence of competition by definition, but not necessarily anti-competitive by design.
But the absence of competition in a market isn't always bad for consumers.
First, a market may not be a consumer market, and more importantly monopolies may be bad for customers because they may improve the product that can be offered. (Netflix acquiring competition had made each streaming services worse, with smaller and less stable libraries and rising prices; it's been a bonanza for content owners, but not consumers.) One factor in why monopolies can be better for consumers is that they tend also to be monopsonies.