[HN Gopher] Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet comp...
___________________________________________________________________
Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a public
utility
Author : infodocket
Score : 434 points
Date : 2021-06-08 18:31 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.dispatch.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.dispatch.com)
| tclancy wrote:
| "Ohioans simply don't want the government to run Google like a
| gas or electric company. We can prove this based on your search
| history and emails!"
| okareaman wrote:
| It's terrible how people are locked in to Google and they won't
| let you switch browsers or search engines
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| this stupidness always ends up lost in people's lack of
| understanding about what Google is, how the internet works, what
| SEO is etc. Waste of time and Google's right, not grounded in any
| kind of legality.
| einpoklum wrote:
| Good on them - even if they may be totally hypocritical in doing
| that. Search should be a public utility. Perhaps even an
| international public utility.
|
| Google's statement that "Google Search is designed to provide
| people with the most relevant and helpful results" is untrue.
| Google Search is designed to benefit Google (or rather Alphabet)
| Corporation. That involves providing relevant and helpful results
| - to some extent, but it also involves promoting results Google
| favors and demoting or filtering out results it disfavors. For
| example, political content which Google does or does not approve
| of, respectively:
|
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-google-interferes-with-its-...
|
| this includes explicit conscious censorship of specific news and
| commentary websites (such as the World Socialist Website,
| AlterNet, etc. and sites on the political right as well, IIANM).
| Aunche wrote:
| While Google is functionally a public utility, it's not something
| that I want to be regulated like a public utility. If the
| government can't be trusted to law lines on a map that aren't
| blatantly rigged to favor their own political party, I can't
| trust that they won't tamper with search results the same way.
| epigen wrote:
| The cost-per-search is negligible even if every user had to
| pay. Instead of _running_ the search the government could
| implement policies that make search advertising illegal and
| thus forcing another business model.
|
| Pay-per-search would be cheap enough for municipalities to
| negotiate subscriptions for their entire broadband network as a
| part of broadband service.
| qxga wrote:
| > Pay-per-search
|
| Yeah, the last thing I would want my search history to be
| tied to is my payment information.
| ziftface wrote:
| Unfortunately that skepticism is warranted today. American
| politics were always somewhat broken in the past, but the
| blatant partisanship today makes any kind of progress almost
| impossible.
| leafmeal wrote:
| At least with government we have the powers of oversight and
| political organizing. It seems like a better bet then a
| corporation who's accountable to a bottom line, or owners.
| wyager wrote:
| I trust "political organizing" (codeword for astroturfing and
| cathedral control) less than I trust Google's profit
| interests.
| leafmeal wrote:
| I'm confused, do you not believe there is "political
| organizing" outside of the guise of astroturfing? And even
| when political organizing _is_ just astroturfing, isn 't
| the motivator just the same as Google's profit interest?
|
| Whether you believe it or not, you have a lot more power to
| influence government (locally at least) than you do to
| affect what Google does. That was my only point.
| crocal wrote:
| I guess you are ready for dictatorship then?
| wyager wrote:
| Could you explain this take further? I'm tempted to write
| this off entirely, but I'm curious if you actually have
| some reason to associate corporatism with monarchy.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I would rather be governed by a public actor with
| constraints than the arbitrary interference of a private
| actor.
|
| This is the core republican (as in the political
| philosophy: Discourses on Livy, Philip Pettit, etc.)
| insight. If you want a stable society, you cannot leave
| space for arbitrary private individuals to become
| domineering forces on the rest of society. It's literally
| textbook how civilizations will fall, yet as a species we
| seem incapable of avoiding our own mistakes.
| wyager wrote:
| Google is more effectively constrained than, say, the US
| federal government.
| the_only_law wrote:
| Wake me up when they decide the same for ISPs
| trothamel wrote:
| While I'm not sure that a lawsuit like this is the right venue,
| companies like Google arguably deserve to be treated at least
| something like a public utility. The power and phone companies
| are allowed to dig or put up poles and wires where they want to -
| that's necessary for them to do their business.
|
| Companies like Google (and Twitter) require special rules to
| function - a generous view of fair use, and things like section
| 230 for exemptions to copyright liability. I think they should
| probably get those - I'd argue that both companies improve the
| world, in the same way that having power lines does. But it's
| worth considering if stipulations should be attached.
| takeda wrote:
| This doesn't have any real goal. The point is to start it, and
| once it will fall, blame it on Democrats.
|
| If they were serious about it, they would start with declaring
| ISPs as utilities.
|
| Also by all means I think that Google, Amazon and others should
| have be split into smaller companies.
| justbored123 wrote:
| This is simply g*rbage.I wish all my utilities were as cheap and
| amazing as google. Why don't we go the other way and make a law
| demanding that?
|
| - Google services are free. If they are a utility they should
| charge you like any utility, go ask Texans and Californians about
| their recent power bills.
|
| - There is an endless amount of comparable alternatives to
| Google, here you have 17
| https://www.searchenginejournal.com/alternative-search-engin....
| The idea that google is just as important and monopolistic as you
| power provided is just incredibly stupid. Sorry about been rude
| but I have heard from the same crowd that "facts don't care about
| your feelings" and that door swings both ways.
|
| - Nobody forces you to use Google, its not the first option
| installed in a Windows computer, that would by Bing.com and I
| don't see any complaints. Users go out of their way to go to that
| site because is the best option. It's a perfect example of the
| free market. And even in the case of android phones the different
| brands like Samsung or Motorola make that call. Google gives you
| an amazing OS completely free.
| ndesaulniers wrote:
| > go ask Texans and Californians about their recent power
| bills.
|
| FWIW here in Santa Clara we have not-for-profit municipal power
| that costs less than half the surrounding area for residential
| service: https://www.siliconvalleypower.com/svp-and-
| community/about-s...
| adrr wrote:
| But I have multiple choices for email, search, video hosting and
| browsers. I don't have any choice for water, electricity, sewer,
| on any other public utility.
|
| I am sure there are a bunch of people on here that don't use any
| Google products and are using DuckDuckGo, Firefox, ProtonMail,
| Vimeo. There are many choices.
| zepto wrote:
| Indeed. I still have a Google account but the I don't remember
| the last time I signed in with it.
| caslon wrote:
| Google-avoider checking in! It's actually really easy to avoid
| it. DuckDuckGo's search quality is better, Firefox is
| deteriorating daily but still looks and feels better than
| Chrome does, email should really be avoided but there are
| dozens of really good email services, and their ad service
| doesn't need a replacement for obvious reasons (just block it).
| ipaddr wrote:
| Firefiox: I remember the first few versions since the
| rewrite. It was very fast. Fast forward to today and it's so
| slow.
|
| What is the reason? Are the privacy changes affecting this by
| using more resources or pages are requesting domains that
| hang for too long?
|
| It gives rust a bad name because this is one of the bigger
| rust products I know.
| msbarnett wrote:
| Now try advertising your business while avoiding Google. Keep
| in mind that if you don't buy ads under your Company's Name
| from Google, Google will allow your competitors to buy those
| placements and make them the top results anyone searching
| your company on Google will see.
| caslon wrote:
| Advertisement is immoral and totally unnecessary to have a
| profitable business.
| quadrifoliate wrote:
| What do you do when you have a job interview that is
| scheduled as a Google Meet meeting? Or when a friend shares a
| Google Photos album of their newborn's pictures?
|
| I guess you are a Google-avoider, so presumably you still
| have an actual Google account.
| caslon wrote:
| "What do you do when you have a job interview that is
| scheduled as a Google Meet meeting?"
|
| Unlikely scenario; the companies that overlap with my set
| of skills either have their own offering or use a libre
| one. I will admit, this might be harder for other people
| (my skills hover around RTC heavily).
|
| "Or when a friend shares a Google Photos album of their
| newborn's pictures?"
|
| My friends range from "Too young to be using a 'boomer'
| service like Google Photos" to "Too old to be doing
| anything technical that isn't just texting photos via SMS,"
| and most of them in the 25-30 child-having age either
| _also_ avoid Google or would just show the pictures in
| person. I don 't live in the Valley, though, so this could
| be a regional thing.
|
| "I guess you are a Google-avoider, so presumably you still
| have an actual Google account."
|
| No, I don't. It never seemed necessary to me.
| ipaddr wrote:
| If you need a google work account I guess choices need to
| be made. It is rare that hr wouldn't have another option
| available for the interview. But many employers use it.
|
| Newborn's pictures could be obtained another way if you
| were a close relatives or friends. If you are not close
| enough then the desire to see them decreases anyways.
|
| You always have the choice of creating a new google profile
| and disreguarding it later.
|
| Many have
| jrockway wrote:
| I think you can just talk to the person at the other end
| and ask for accomodation. I use Zoom for interviews, but if
| someone emailed me and was like "can we use Google Meet" I
| would be happy to change. Similarly, if someone texts me "I
| can't open that link to the photos you sent", I can just
| email them the photos.
|
| It's not really a big deal, and I don't think that your
| unwillingness to talk with your friends or business
| partners makes Google a public utility in a regulatory
| sense.
| neuronflux wrote:
| I imagine you avoid Google because you don't want to get
| locked into their centralized closed source ecosystem and
| don't want them to track your entire online presence. So I'm
| surprised to see you say email should be avoided, as a
| completely open decentralized communication protocol.
|
| Your stances on these two topics just seem to be in contrast
| with each other, would you care to elaborate?
| caslon wrote:
| I don't care about centralization or their tracking
| particularly much on their own. I don't like to use bad
| software. It bothers me, fundamentally. I naturally ended
| up far away from Google by virtue of not liking things that
| waste computational resources, which all of their software
| does, and has for years. This is the same reason I stopped
| using Windows and OS X. I like to use software that makes
| me feel good, and megabytes being wasted by tracking
| scripts and terrible Javascript frameworks does not make me
| feel good, so I avoid their standalone services and block
| their parasitic services.
|
| However, email isn't really a good decentralized protocol.
| All federation fails at being meaningfully decentralized
| given enough time. There are great decentralized protocols;
| email is not one of them.
| balls187 wrote:
| Have you tried the new chromium based Edge?
| caslon wrote:
| Using a proprietary web browser would be like using a
| blowtorch that claimed to be powered by "magic." While I
| might use, say, a "magic" recipe, or a toy that claimed to
| be magic, I certainly wouldn't use a real, combustive tool
| that claimed to be magic.
| ccity88 wrote:
| Except it's actually not that easy. Most of the web uses
| google analytics, so its unavoidable when you visit a
| website. Most of the web's emails are routed through google;
| I remember reading a post about a guy who set up his own SMTP
| server and everything, but then realised that everyone he was
| contacting was using gmail anyway (can't find the post).
| Every time you see an add that's served by google, that means
| that there's a google embed in the page your looking at.
| Also, what alternative is there for YouTube? there isn't a
| realistic competitor. If you have an android phone (most of
| the world does) you're forced to use google play services. In
| today's world, they're unavoidable. That being said, making
| them a public utility is a bit forward...
| caslon wrote:
| "Most of the web uses google analytics, so its unavoidable
| when you visit a website."
|
| I actually mentioned that. Just shim GA connections; this
| happens with most ad-blocking software, and _I believe_
| happens in Firefox 's "strict" mode by default. It's really
| trivial.
|
| "Most of the web's emails are routed through google; I
| remember reading a post about a guy who set up his own SMTP
| server and everything, but then realised that everyone he
| was contacting was using gmail anyway (can't find the
| post)."
|
| Only true if the majority of people you converse with over
| email are boring.
|
| "Every time you see an add that's served by google, that
| means that there's a google embed in the page your looking
| at."
|
| Again, why would you ever look at an ad? That's a ludicrous
| idea.
|
| "Also, what alternative is there for YouTube? there isn't a
| realistic competitor."
|
| Bittorrent.
|
| "If you have an android phone you're forced to use google
| play services."
|
| Completely false. Android works fine without Google Play
| Services.
|
| EDIT: Made words better.
| easrng wrote:
| RE: YouTube alternatives there's also PeerTube which also
| can use p2p delivery.
|
| Can confirm that Android works great without Google Play
| Services, I don't have it. Most Play Store apps break but
| most of my apps are from F-Droid anyway.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| >""Also, what alternative is there for YouTube? there
| isn't a realistic competitor."
|
| Bittorrent."
|
| I should avoid Google's monopoly by becoming a criminal?
| easrng wrote:
| Torrenting is not a crime. Piracy is a crime and a
| popular use of BitTorrent, but BitTorrent is also used
| for distributing non-criminal things like Linux ISOs and
| some app and game updates and art dumps (I have friends
| who release via torrent monthly) and datasets (for
| research and AI) and many other things.
| caslon wrote:
| Insinuating that using Bittorrent is inherently tied to
| criminal activity is like suggesting the same for a
| person who uses a car.
| [deleted]
| BMorearty wrote:
| I'm disappointed to hear Firefox is deteriorating daily.
|
| I disagree about DDG's search quality. I tried it for six
| months and that was not my experience. Eventually went back
| to Google.
| caslon wrote:
| Yeah, it's certainly unfortunate. It gets just a little
| worse with every single update. The last one removed
| compact mode, which was the only thing making the UI
| somewhat bearable on-screen. It is now terribly large and
| unappealing.
|
| What do you use a search engine for? Depending on your set
| of interests, turning off or on localization might have
| helped.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| In the current build, there is an about:config setting to
| re-enable compact mode.
| caslon wrote:
| Yes, but they've expressed a desire to get rid of it in
| an upcoming update.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| FWIW, I've used Firefox on a daily basis for years, and I
| have no complaints about desktop Firefox. (Firefox Android
| does leave some things to be desired, but also functions
| just fine as a web browser.)
| loup-vaillant wrote:
| I believe it depends on people. For some DuckDuckGo works
| perfectly, and they rarely go back to Google, if at all.
| For others it just does not work.
|
| This reminds me of the dream of displacing Microsoft Word.
| Can we make a better product? No we can't. Only Microsoft
| can, through upgrades. The competition is stuck with making
| the same thing, and therefore not better, or something
| different, which is always "worse" because people are used
| to Word.
|
| Also note that DuckDuckGo has a fundamental disadvantage:
| by not tailoring its searches to your history, it cannot
| possibly guess what you want to see as well as Google. Sure
| you're not trapped in your own search bubble, but you don't
| feel that. You only feel that the damn search engine can't
| find that website you are searching for for the _fifth_
| time already.
|
| Pro tip: to get back to a web site, type its URL, or use
| bookmarks. Somehow I've seen many professional programmers
| fail to do that. I give them a URL, and they type it on the
| freaking _search bar_. (The more modern version is failing
| to type or auto-complete an actual URL in the omni bar.)
| satellite2 wrote:
| Try finding a smartphone under 250$, try advertising any small
| business on the internet, try avoiding meets meeting when you
| apply for a job
| Matticus_Rex wrote:
| Yeah, it's really cool that a company has done a good enough
| job in so many different areas that the other alternatives
| are often unambiguously worse.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| No, its products are forced down your threat and impossible
| to avoid.
| ipaddr wrote:
| These are things that are done locally. You can find a
| smartphone for under 250 at any phone store. Or by calling a
| number. I got one by text the other day through my carrier. I
| can't find an iphone 12 for that online or locally legally
| and I would have better luck getting a stolen phone cheaper
| locally.
|
| Small business are finding success through facebook and other
| social platforms. Not sure google is a player here. Remember
| google+? I can't believe they shut that down with a decent
| userbase because it didn't reach some scale meanwhile any
| startup would have called it a big success and built on it.
| tintor wrote:
| Bottled water, water tanks, septic tanks, solar/wind power,
| generators, ...
| mdoms wrote:
| Now put yourself on the other side of the equation. As a
| business you rely on Google Search because it's effectively the
| only search engine anyone uses. As a video content creator you
| rely on Youtube because no one is searching Vimeo for your
| product, nor are they relying on Vimeo recommendations to find
| it. As a developer you primarily target Chrome-based browsers
| because that makes up four fifths of your user base.
| pcmoney wrote:
| You have multiple choices for water, dig a well, buy it from
| the local grocery store. Same for sewage because self
| composting toilets exist. Also electricity isn't a utility just
| use a stationary bike as a generator or buy solar panels...
|
| Just because you have multiple choices doesn't mean something
| is/isn't a utility. Its pretty arbitrary. They also aren't
| talking about Google products (most of which are completely
| irrelevant aside from their ability to help Google sell ads)
| they are focused solely on search. Not saying they are "right"
| just that Google's search dominance is a thing and they use it
| support their own stuff. Eg: You can buy our electricity but it
| only "recommends" appliances we also sell
| genericuser314 wrote:
| I think you're making a category error in your analogy.
|
| DuckDuckGo is much more like Google than "dig a well" is like
| municipal water.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| People talking like drilling a well in your backward is on
| par with typing in a different URL.
|
| So how about this, the upfront cost and effort of typing in
| a different URL is at least a few orders of magnitude
| easier than drilling a well.
| jlarocco wrote:
| > So how about this, the upfront cost and effort of
| typing in a different URL is at least a few orders of
| magnitude easier than drilling a well.
|
| That's missing the point.
|
| Regardless of whether you personally type google.com or
| duckduckgo.com, most people use google and so they get
| directed to other Google products and don't see competing
| products, and that hurts competition in those spaces.
| tigerBL00D wrote:
| Are those the right categories? Utilities are built (at
| least partially) and maintained using taxpayer money.
| Google acquired dominance by collecting user data. In both
| cases users, as a class, get access to essential services
| that what wouldn't have been possible without their
| contributions.
| akiselev wrote:
| Wells dug with modern equipment are a perfectly good
| alternative to municipal water - they can free one from
| over-regulated or poorly managed utilities. Even in the
| outskirts of California metros it's sometimes the only
| option without shelling out hundreds of thousands for
| extensions.
|
| DuckDuckGo, on the other hand, is just Google with bangs,
| an insignificant spec compared to the latter.
|
| Edit: DuckDuckGo US market share: 2.5% [1], US population
| getting their water from a well: 13% [2]
|
| [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1220046/duckduckgo-
| searc...
|
| [2] https://www.usgs.gov/special-topic/water-science-
| school/scie...
| pjc50 wrote:
| > Wells dug with modern equipment are a perfectly good
| alternative to municipal water
|
| ... in certain geologic areas. And this doesn't work if
| you live in an apartment. I do feel like this is a big
| example of the "why don't you just" discussion from last
| week.
| akiselev wrote:
| "Why don't you do something that works for over 40
| million people all over the US" is a very far cry from
| "why don't you build your own power plant, datacenter,
| and networking infrastructure." It's a far better
| argument than DDG which - if my usage is anything to go
| by - is just a frontend for Google with convenient
| shortcuts to specialized searches like Github.
|
| If you live in an apartment, you live in a multi-family
| building built by a developer with a lot more money than
| a single family can spend. They're exactly the ones who
| _can_ afford alternatives, like paying the city to tear
| up roads and lay down a pipe to municipal water.
|
| The point is that a well supports a tiny number of people
| compared to a municipal water system, but it's a real
| alternative. In the search engine space, DDG is just
| token opposition and there is no one analogous to a
| property developer that can afford a competitor to
| municipal water so it's Google or nothing.
| sbazerque wrote:
| I think he's not - when you look at it from the point of
| view of someone who wants to buy search advertisements.
|
| Duck Duck Go doesn't come nearly close to the kind of reach
| Google has.
| sangnoir wrote:
| The difference between DDG and Google ads is quantitative
| - not qualitative.
| dumbfoundded wrote:
| There are at least a dozen companies you can buy water from
| and have it delivered to a giant storage tank made by at
| least 5 different companies. Or you could use a number of
| companies to dig a well for you.
|
| Many people don't have access to municipal water and when I
| didn't, this is what I did.
| duck wrote:
| Those companies aren't utility companies though.
| dumbfoundded wrote:
| The main, monopolistic solution of municipal water
| certainly is. The point is that options can still exist
| in a monopoly. Google still has a monopoly despite the
| existence competitors.
| mdoms wrote:
| I am on my own rainwater tanks. I don't see any reason it's
| not a viable alternative considering how many of us use it.
| Beached wrote:
| I disagree, wells are equal to or better than municipal
| water, and can often be cheaper while being higher quality.
| the inverse can be true. the analogy holds imo.
| ipaddr wrote:
| I would like to learn more. Why is a well cleaner or
| higher quality than a big city municipal water supply? Is
| it because city water requires harsher treatment because
| it comes from a huge pool of waste while a well comes
| from a clean watershed?
| seemaze wrote:
| I'm sure there are different geographical and utility
| costs, but every well I've ever priced was between 25-100
| years to break-even .
| ttt0 wrote:
| Isn't DDG just a frontend for Bing? I can host my own searx
| instance, but that's not a real search engine and it
| shouldn't count IMO.
| DarknessFalls wrote:
| > You have multiple choices for water, dig a well, buy it
| from the local grocery store.
|
| This is a false equivalence. Comparing Google to a municipal
| water system and other search engines to purchasing bottled
| water eliminates certain key features of the service, like
| water conditioning and infrastructure. I use DuckDuckGo and
| it is no where near the inconvenience implied by "dig a
| well".
| ipaddr wrote:
| Digging a well would be creating your own search engine.
| You can pay someone to come in an drill that well for you
| that doesn't exist a paid search engine.
|
| Ddg would be like taking the water from a public fountain.
| justbored123 wrote:
| That is a terrible argument. "Go sh*t in a chemical toiled"
| is not a reasonable alternative, the cost alone is ludicrous.
| Just have the decency and maturity to admit when you are
| wrong instead of arguing that you should "go dig a well" in
| the middle of the city. This is why we can't have reasonable
| conversations anymore.
| Slaminerag wrote:
| 1) Google isn't carrying anything. It's your ISP that's
| actually carrying the bits to your house/work/phone/implants.
| 2) What google search is providing is literally content that
| they've created. I really don't see how this suit won't get
| dismissed on first amendment grounds.
| cm2187 wrote:
| Or like many people put it after the Parler shutdown, build
| your own water station and power plant from scratch.
| markozivanovic wrote:
| It might be out off topic, but this reminded me of one of the
| songs that gets recorded and released with every new version
| of OpenBSD[1], when we're talking about water. It's fun.
|
| [1]https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#36
| syshum wrote:
| I am not aware of any city or town that has utilities and
| allows property owners to opt out and dig a well or put in a
| septic,
|
| Maybe you could use composting toilet however you would still
| be required by law to hook up and maintain a connect to the
| public water and sewer system or the city would condemn your
| home
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| And if you are currently on a well and your municipality
| brings sewer or water service down your street, you are
| usually required to connect to them and decommission the
| septic system and well.
|
| (I've heard that you can sometimes keep the well for
| irrigation purposes, but the house cannot be connected to
| it and the water cannot go down the drain.)
| bumby wrote:
| To a certain extent, utilities differ in that they are
| regulated monopolies protected by the government. Any
| competing water company, for example, can't just start
| running water mains without government approval. In exchange
| for that protection, the existing water utility incurs
| additional regulations, like needing approvals to raise rates
| and bring required to provide services to areas where it may
| not be profitable by itself.
|
| Regarding your electrical example, that only works in
| isolation. You cannot just decide to tie your solar or
| generator to the grid, for example, because that utility is a
| regulated public good.
| mfer wrote:
| With tech (from search to ISPs) there are monopolies. Do
| they break them up or regulate them like utilities or
| something else? Our politicians are starting to tackle some
| real issues and we'll have to see how this shakes out.
| BooneJS wrote:
| It's actually illegal to drill a well in a municipality that
| provides water service. You'd have to move to a rural area.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| My elderly parents are unable to make the switch from Yahoo to
| Google. I've walked them through it multiple times. It's just
| not possible for them. They don't have the knowledge and
| skills.
|
| They are smart. Advanced degrees in STEM. Multiple languages.
| Doesn't matter.
|
| I can't imagine the transition from Google to
| DuckDuckGo/Firefox/ProtonMail being easier.
|
| Am I wrong about that?
| bitcurious wrote:
| 1. Planning to avoid Google is a lot easier than being forced
| to with little/no notice.
|
| 2. You're thinking as an individual, but there's also how
| Google treats businesses. It's a lot harder to replace Google
| Ads than gmail.
| loup-vaillant wrote:
| > _But I have multiple choices for email, search, video hosting
| and browsers._
|
| Not video hosting you don't. If you want to build a significant
| English speaking audience, your only real choice is YouTube,
| because that's where people search from. Seriously, who has a
| "Vimeo" app on their phone? On their set-top box?
|
| Same thing if you want to _watch_ interesting videos: most of
| the content is on YouTube.
| kixiQu wrote:
| That's not _video hosting_ that 's monopolyish, then, that's
| _English-speaking-audience video discovery_ , which is a
| quite different proposition.
| jeffgreco wrote:
| To be fair, "English-speaking" is pretty relevant in the
| state/country being discussed.
| loup-vaillant wrote:
| Agreed, but that's a technicality. What matters is, if you
| want to make a living, you have to host on YouTube. (You
| can host elsewhere, but over 99% of your revenue will come
| from your notoriety at YouTube, if not YouTube directly.)
|
| And if you want videos, they're all on YouTube. You can
| search for them elsewhere but most of the content is on
| YouTube, and you won't avoid it even if your search started
| from a general purpose search engine like DuckDuckGo.
|
| One notable exception of course is porn. But that's such a
| separated segment that it's pretty obvious I meant "non-
| porn videos" all along in this thread.
| ipaddr wrote:
| What kind of living are you making just posting videos to
| youtube?
|
| A random example but most stage hypnotists sell their
| shows via vimeo. If you ever go to a show and want to buy
| a copy they will send you there. The stuff they post on
| youtube is mostly highlights or lower quality video. It
| would take them 100,000 ad views (1,000,000 regular
| views) to equal one copy sold.
|
| Youtube could get you some views but you need to make
| your money elsewhere. In the case above the additional
| revenues are from vimeo. Youtube's role is to hopefully
| get someone to book the event but you would be better off
| having good word of mouth than hoping someone sees your
| videos on youtube and lives in the same area and tries to
| book you for a corporate gig or faire.
| loup-vaillant wrote:
| > _Youtube could get you some views but you need to make
| your money elsewhere._
|
| Yes of course. But YouTube will still be responsible for
| most of that money: want a sponsor to pay you? You need
| to have enough viewers in the first place. Want
| donations? You need enough viewers for donations to flow
| in. Selling swag? You need enough viewers to know about
| your store.
|
| Even your stage hypnotists: why people go see their shows
| in the first place? I bet many learned about those shows
| from YouTube. Also, stage performers are a bit different
| in that their main activity happens offline. If all your
| activity is online, you're back to YouTube being the only
| point of entry.
| acituan wrote:
| Video discovery in itself is not monopolyish either. It is
| the vertical integration of video hosting + video discovery
| that makes the monopoly.
|
| Hence the solution being a break up; separate youtube-the-
| video-hosting-infra from youtube-the-recommendation-engine,
| allow market access to infra, allow competition on video
| discovery.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Its rair for something to be so accurately true, yet so
| irrelevant
| ipaddr wrote:
| Tiktok has a lot of interesting videos and a big english
| audience
| sparrc wrote:
| I don't use google products much anymore, but the transition
| takes a long time, especially getting off of gmail.
|
| I'm also not sure it would even be possible to transition if
| you don't have access to your google account anymore. You would
| just be literally completely shut out of many of your online
| accounts.
|
| And for watching online videos there really isn't any viable
| alternative to youtube.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Public utilities generally have regulation commensurate with
| their status as local monopolies. There are constraints requiring
| they offer service because if they refuse service, a consumer
| can't just walk down the street and get water from the next water
| company over.
|
| For this reason, it's going to be difficult to argue this case in
| the affirmative when google.com, bing.com, and duckduckgo.com are
| exactly as far away from the end-user in terms of "digital
| distance."
| Buttons840 wrote:
| > the lawsuit seeks a legal declaration that Google is a "common
| carrier," like phone, gas and electric companies, which must
| provide its services to anyone willing to pay its fee.
|
| How can something on the internet be a common carrier when the
| internet itself is not a common carrier?
| epigen wrote:
| > How can something on the internet be a common carrier when
| the internet itself is not a common carrier?
|
| Because it hasn't happened yet doesn't mean that it shouldn't
| happen.
|
| Maybe Google is the last straw that leads to proper governance
| of utilities in the public's interest.
| l33t2328 wrote:
| It's kind of analogous to the way TCP can be a reliable
| service built on unreliable IP.
| babypuncher wrote:
| The problem is that the Republicans trying to declare tech
| companies "common carriers" pretty much lied through their
| teeth 4 years ago when they argued that ISPs are absolutely
| not common carriers, in opposition of overwhelming popular
| opinion to the contrary.
| epigen wrote:
| Yes, the problem is Republicans. And yes, that problem has
| yet to be solved.
| zackees wrote:
| ISPs aren't censoring people, Big Tech is, and BigTech were
| always exempt from all net neutrality laws.
|
| So your comment is factually wrong.
| ggggtez wrote:
| Great point. I can't imagine paying for water, and then having
| the pipe company ban me, and having no recourse.
| vletal wrote:
| Not defending Google, but it's because the analogy does not
| hold. You can be hardly banned from receiving water, because
| the interaction with it is pretty limited and it does not
| allow you to directly interact with other individuals.
| ggggtez wrote:
| That doesn't hold up, because an ISP can ban you for any
| reason they want. It has nothing to do with interacting
| with other people.
| [deleted]
| einpoklum wrote:
| You're forgetting what a Common Carrier is, by definition:
|
| "A common carrier in common law countries ... is a person or
| company that transports goods or people for any person or
| company and is responsible for any possible loss of the goods
| during transport..."
|
| So, a _company_ can be a common carrier. An abstract notion
| describing interconnected physical entities and organizational
| entities related to them cannot be a common carrier (nor, in
| fact, any carrier).
| avs733 wrote:
| Because bad faith arguments don't necessitate logical
| consistency.
|
| The motivation here is they want to regulate Google for
| political purposes, not that they want to regulate utilities
| better.
|
| If you have questions, Dave Yost's political donors are public
| information:
|
| https://www6.ohiosos.gov/ords/f?p=CFDISCLOSURE:48:0::NO:RP:P...
| zackees wrote:
| ...because Google decided that entire classes of people will
| be kicked off their systems if they have the wrong political
| opinion.
|
| Despite the fact they promised in their IPO they would never
| do this.
|
| "Don't be evil"
|
| "Organize the worlds information and make it Universally
| Accessible and useful".
|
| Now they (and Facebook and Twitter) are banning political
| candidates they don't like AROUND THE world.
|
| Getting Google and big tech to not act like a weaponized
| foreign influence operation not "political". It's ensuring a
| free market of ideas and equal access.
| vvillena wrote:
| You don't have to have internet access to have an internet
| presence.
| _hyn3 wrote:
| > How can something on the internet be a common carrier when
| the internet itself is not a common carrier?
|
| The internet isn't a thing. It's not a single entity (or even a
| single idea).
|
| It was different in the days of Ma Bell, when there was one
| entity for the entire U.S. with phone service (could we define
| _that_ in today 's age? is VOIP phone service? mobile?
| Whatsapp?), and it was even different later, when the baby
| bells blanketed the U.S. without overlapping areas.
|
| What makes this more challenging is that by regulating "ISPs"
| (if someone could please define that, or even what the Internet
| _is_ , in a legal sense), we might then be strangling new and
| interesting startups that might not conform to the definition
| of an ISP from a decade prior.
| notatoad wrote:
| when people talk about the "the internet" being a public
| utility, they mean _internet access_. which is "a thing",
| and is a single discrete idea.
|
| public utility status for the internet means that every
| packet delivered over internet protocol (aka "IP", which
| again, is _a thing_ ) must be delivered by the carrier/ISP
| without discrimination.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Yes. If my service was declared a common carrier I'd
| experiment with creating my own ISP and banning people at
| the ISP level, which also happens to be the only ISP
| hosting my service.
|
| This is why this doesn't make sense. Some internet
| companies can arbitrarily block you and others can't?
| notatoad wrote:
| It doesn't make sense if your goal is to create a fair
| internet for everybody, or to build a consistent set of
| rules based on reasonable principles.
|
| it makes perfect sense if you are a politician looking to
| hop on the anti-google bandwagon enough to make it look
| like you're doing something without actually doing
| anything.
| Splendor wrote:
| Yeah, that's bizarre.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| I'd lean into this. Instead of trying to defend Google as not
| being a utility we should be calling for utility regulation for
| both web services as well as residential access providers.
| wyager wrote:
| > we should be calling for utility regulation for both web
| services as well as residential access providers
|
| I would prefer not to completely stagnate the internet just
| yet.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > I would prefer not to completely stagnate the internet
| just yet.
|
| Isn't Internet infrastructure in a lot of the US kind of
| stagnant right now?
| Hamuko wrote:
| So Republicans have completely flipped on the sovereignity of
| private companies?
|
| Or is this just posturing to please the number one of the GOP
| (Dave Yost filed a "friend of the court" brief in support of
| invalidating 2020 votes in Pennsylvania)?
| api wrote:
| Only when it comes to private company actions that could harm
| the Republican Party.
|
| Also: RTFA and this is not really about political stuff. It's
| about prioritization of businesses in search results in ways
| that are anti-competitive.
| stale2002 wrote:
| Even republicans are opposed to anti-competitive behavior done
| by firms with large amounts of market power.
|
| You would be hard pressed to find a modern day Republican who
| thinks that all water, electricity, and telephone services
| should have their common carrier status changed.
|
| Common carrier laws are uncontroversial, on both sides of the
| political spectrum. Few people would argue in favor of cutting
| off power and water, to their political opponents.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Wasn't GOP behind the net neutrality protections repeal?
| stale2002 wrote:
| Maybe on net neutrality, but the point still stands. You
| are not going to be able to find many modern day
| republicans who think that it would be OK for electric
| companies, or water companies, to cut off power from their
| political opponents.
|
| There are lots of common carrier laws, and anti-monopoly
| laws that are uncontroversial. Few people would come out in
| favor of the standard oil monopoly, for example.
| Covzire wrote:
| Regulating monopolies is a bipartisan issue isn't it? The fact
| is that three companies in the same or adjacent zip codes have
| a monopoly over the online square, which means that especially
| during times of a pandemic, if they take away someone's voice
| their free speech is effectively null and void.
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| This is the beginning of the Republican rebrand to be the
| people's party again, since democrats have abandoned that cause
| long ago. They simply seek to be the in charge political force,
| and they are winning, as evidenced by every major corporation
| seemingly overnight bending over to satisfy democratic
| candidates and democratic voting blocs.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > the Republican rebrand to be the people's party again
|
| Or at least the party of _some_ people. If they thought they
| had the majority on their side, they wouldn 't be afraid of
| the popular vote, or need to gerrymander every map they get
| their hands on.
| RobRivera wrote:
| No
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Every state that is not deep blue is not Alaska levels of red.
|
| Ohio and much of the mid west is moderately red or moderately
| blue depending on the policies in question so you get middle of
| the road policy like this that isn't hard-line one way or the
| other but appeals to the tons of people on both sides of the
| isle who think big tech is f-ed up right now.
|
| While this move might alienate people on the far right for
| being a violation of a business's right to freely associate and
| far left for failing to go far enough, it's kind of a no
| brainier if you want to appeal to people who want something
| done and don't care which side of the isle that something is
| from is as long as it's not too extreme. Big tech is getting
| out of control according to many on both sides and utilities
| are an existing legal framework for regulating big but
| essential consumer facing business.
|
| I don't know exactly how the Ohio state government is formed
| but it's also highly likely that this is political maneuvering
| by the AG or the executive branch and they expect it go
| nowhere.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| > Every state that is not deep blue is not Alaska levels of
| red
|
| Maybe not the state, but the Republican leadership is. There
| are vanishingly few moderate Republicans left in any office
| in the country.
| api wrote:
| Mike DeWine in Ohio is fairly reasonable and was among
| those whose lips were not attached to Trump's behind, but
| now the Republican base in rural Ohio is angry at him about
| that.
| ihumanable wrote:
| Yea, the Ohio Republican Party has rewarded DeWine's
| reasonable approach to the pandemic by his party
| threatening to impeach him
| (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/republican-ohio-
| gov-dew...) strip him of his executive power
| (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/ohio-
| republicans-...) and their leader, trump, has called for
| him to be challenged in a primary (https://www.forbes.com
| /sites/andrewsolender/2020/11/16/trump...).
|
| His great crime was that he listened to a medical doctor,
| implemented pretty reasonable common-sense strategies,
| and for a while did a pretty good job keeping Ohio's
| pandemic rates low.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Look into HB6 and you will see the red is bought and paid for
| by the energy utilities no matter how pellucid.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Except we don't really have politicians anymore - just
| parties. Politicians vote in unison now more than ever. So
| even if the voters of the state are pretty evenly split
| politically - whichever party is in power of the state is
| pretty much all that matters.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| "Something has to be done, and this is something!"
| mikey_p wrote:
| Ohio GOP have really ramped up their rhetoric in the last
| year or so, including their attacks on their own like the
| infighting with Dewine over how he handled the states
| response to covid.
| hirundo wrote:
| You're expecting Republicans to be consistent libertarians? It
| seems to me that as practiced, the intersections between the
| two philosophies are rare and ephemeral and much more common in
| word than deed.
| [deleted]
| kyrra wrote:
| Republicans are a coalition party, just like the democrats are.
| It's really important to remember just how broad of a group
| those 2 parties cover. AOC said it correctly in Jan 2020[0]:
| "In any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same
| party, but in America, we are."
|
| So while there are free-enterprise republicans, there are also
| those that worry about how companies behave. At this point,
| there are D's and R's in Washington that agree on how big-tech
| should be treated (Josh Hawley and Elizabeth Warren for
| example[1]).
|
| [0] https://www.politico.com/news/2020/01/06/alexandria-
| ocasio-c...
|
| [1] https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/10/29/20932064/senator-
| josh-...
| api wrote:
| Not sure why the downvotes. A consequence of our two-party
| system is that both parties end up being uneasy coalitions of
| many different "parties."
|
| The Republicans have long been an uneasy coalition of the
| religious right, paleoconservatives, fascists, economic
| libertarians, right leaning neocons and neoliberals, and mid-
| century centrist "Eisenhower conservatives." Major fault
| lines have been between the libertarians and the religious
| right and between the neocons and the paleocons and
| nativists.
|
| The Democrats have long been an uneasy coalition of left
| leaning neocons and neoliberals, social libertarians, anti-
| war activists, minorities who feel threatened by Republican
| tolerance of racism and nativism in their "big tent,"
| atheists and minority religions who feel threatened by the
| religious right, and socialists. Major fault lines have been
| between the socialists and the various economic centrist or
| libertarian factions, between socially conservative
| minorities and the social liberals, and between the neocons /
| neoliberals and the anti-war / anti-empire factions.
|
| Each party contains at least three or four other parties
| within.
|
| A shuffle seems to be happening right now where the nativist,
| paleocon, and fascist parts of the Republican Party have
| gained power at the expense of the neocons and neoliberals
| after the latter discredited themselves with the Iraq war
| disaster and the 2008 financial bailout shitshow (which can
| technically be blamed on both parties since Obama presided
| over some of it).
|
| Another shuffle occurring is that libertarianism has really
| taken a hit as a result of anxiety over wealth distribution
| and issues with globalism and neoliberalism. Many
| libertarians on the right have been converted to the alt-
| right/fascist side, and on the left quite a few have gone
| further left economically and joined the AOC wing of the
| party.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| Be careful what you wish for, Ohio.
| bsimpson wrote:
| It's interesting when they use examples like Google Flights. You
| can certainly make the argument that Google Flights is just a
| flight-specific results page for Google Search.
|
| The lines between search and many other Google products are
| pretty blurry.
| scardycat wrote:
| right ... ISPs are not a public utility but a web service
| provider is? If you want to tackle this, best to start with the
| most common sense place, the ISP
| emidln wrote:
| How exactly is Google.com different from a phone book in 1990?
| Phone books, to my knowledge, were not prohibited from
| advertising Southwestern Bell or Ameritech junk at the beginning,
| they were just incentivized not to do so because selling ads was
| more profitable.
| [deleted]
| ericmay wrote:
| I don't have a great answer for you, but I have another
| question: if Google isn't different than a phone book in 1990,
| why were phone books never a top 10 business in the United
| States?
| gpm wrote:
| Too hard to monetize, too high costs, competition by the
| phone company.
|
| Everyone had one, they were ubiquitous. Without the internet
| ads are much harder to sell, huge barrier to entry for
| customer acquisition compared to google. Without real time
| auctions and targeting ads are worth less, i.e. you can't
| target search terms in a phone book, only prefixes, let alone
| things like demographics. The cost to distribute a book to
| everyone is a lot higher than the cost to serve some traffic.
| I suspect ad density was too low too.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| > why were phone books never a top 10 business in the United
| States?
|
| They were always hyper local, or just offered by the
| telephone companies themselves.
| supernova87a wrote:
| A big problem with software and people who write software (often)
| is that software doesn't like all the ways that human beings
| misbehave, change their minds, don't have immutable states, and
| don't fit into the categories you build for them.
|
| So any system that has a duty to serve everyone eventually ends
| up with an operational component that has almost as much human
| interaction and problem solving required as the software side of
| it. Or the software has to be really smart or complex.
|
| Tech companies don't like that because that increases a lot of
| costs. For some companies, they manage to convince their users to
| behave well enough to fit into the box. Other companies have to
| reduce their profits, or go kicking and screaming down the path
| of accepting the cost of business.
|
| Example: Public electric company wants to switch people to smart
| meters to reduce the cost of going to read every meter, more
| reliable operation, easier billing, turn on/shut off, etc. Reduce
| the number of legacy billing systems. People turn out to
| irrationally not want smart meters. Now utility needs to maintain
| 2 systems, and an exception list of people who don't want the
| smart meter system, and still have to run trucks and meter
| readers, and procedures for people with old meters.
|
| If something is to be declared a utility, the tech company had
| better gulp in fear of what's required. But we better as well, if
| we're thinking of wanting our software to be turned into
| something that involves those obligations and costs too. There's
| a reason that Google (well, maybe other tech companies) bring you
| new things, and the electric company doesn't. It's not all roses.
| _trampeltier wrote:
| Not just humans can misbehave, machines can also. I work in
| industrie automation and there is often the question should we
| produce just errormessages or should or machines produce a
| product. If you wanna catch ever error, every low or high temp,
| every whatever, no machine can even start to produce a product
| ever.
| asddubs wrote:
| one reason I've heard against smart meters is that it would
| make it easy for power companies to start charging non
| commercial users for apparent power rather than real power, as
| a way to indirectly raise prices.
| jpitz wrote:
| Why would you need a smart meter?
| Arch-TK wrote:
| There are plenty of rational reasons for not wanting a smart
| meter. Don't let the irrational people detract from the fact
| that there are many real problems with smart meters. Especially
| lots of privacy issues.
|
| In the UK, I report my own meter readings and the electrical
| company probably only really ever goes out once every few years
| when tenancies change. So I actually don't see what money it
| saves them asides from the money lost from chasing up issues
| where people are trying to cheat the system.
|
| In this example it really makes me wonder if replacing all the
| meters in the country with non-intercompatible smart meters
| really saves that much money. So you have to start asking what
| else is in there for them to do this. Probably money for the
| data I would have to imagine.
|
| Also, given how absolutely atrociously shite the security of
| these smart meters is (and you'll have to trust me on this, I
| don't know how public this information is) I wouldn't want that
| crap anywhere near my house in the eventuality that someone
| hijacks it to make it look like I'm using more electricity when
| they're using less (while keeping the overall books balanced so
| to speak) or some other nefarious purpose.
|
| Certainly these meters won't give you 5G cancer, but they're
| really a horrible idea as they stand and I don't recommend
| anyone install them, at least not in the UK.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| What sort of horrible privacy issues do you suppose your
| smart meter has? You already tell your utility how much power
| you use.
| shkkmo wrote:
| Data aggregated per month is very different from data
| aggregated per hour or per minute. You can infer far more
| personal information from the latter.
| onethought wrote:
| No you can't. They don't know if you have generation or
| battery capabilities, even if they detect generation
| capabilities they don't know how much.
|
| With that in mind what could they "infer"?
|
| I go weeks without triggering a single bit of usage on my
| meter. I bet you they aren't thinking: this guy is mining
| heaps of crypto.
| shkkmo wrote:
| Yes, they absolutely can. Like with any surveillance
| technology, there are things you can do to obfuscate your
| patterns, but that doesn't mean that a broad rollout of
| the technology won't have a negative privacy impact on
| most customers.
| MereInterest wrote:
| Power consumption correlated with commercial breaks tells
| you what show somebody is watching. Power consumption
| correlated with 9-5 tells you if somebody is working from
| home. Power consumption correlated with a specific time
| in the morning tells you when somebody wakes up and
| subsequently turns the heat on. Lower power consumption
| over several days tells you when somebody is on vacation.
|
| Are these relatively minor invasions of privacy compared
| to what advertising companies perform? Yes. But that's no
| reason to pretend that they aren't privacy-hostile moves
| on their own.
| supernova87a wrote:
| I think it's only a matter of degree. And at every level
| someone can complain. So where do you draw the line?
|
| Watching a meter spin or reading it once a month you can
| tell if someone is on vacation. Isn't that equally
| private and personal information?
| shkkmo wrote:
| It is a matter of degree, but that degree is not small.
| Anytime you decrease the interval, you need to justify
| the commensurate loss of privacy. You can't just handwave
| away these concerns like posters in this thread are
| doing.
|
| A rough inference of which months might involve vacations
| (data about which is probably already being sold from
| other sources) is far less invasive than a daily record
| of your sleep cycle.
|
| With the lack of privacy laws in the US, it is pretty
| much a given that this data will be sold as soon as the
| private utility companies in the US start collecting it.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| ...You say from your personal wiretapping device.
| ribosometronome wrote:
| You can also bill users for peak usage times when
| electricity is expensive or requires falling back on non-
| renewable resources for production with hourly data.
| shkkmo wrote:
| I can think of a number of ways to do that that preserve
| privacy far better than real-time reporting of power
| usage.
| dragonsky67 wrote:
| Do you carry a mobile phone. If so, you have bigger
| privacy problems than how much power you use per minute.
| shkkmo wrote:
| That is a trade off that consumers should have the
| ability to evaluate and decide for themselves.
| supernova87a wrote:
| There's not that many things about the smart meter that are
| much worse than the vulnerabilities of the plain old spinning
| disk meter. There were many problems with old meters too. And
| the benefits far outweigh those issues. Smart meters are not
| being hacked left and right.
|
| And your privacy concerns are just a matter of granularity of
| time. You report your usage monthly -- that is also private
| information. Smart meters just do it on a finer timescale.
| Not a fundamental difference.
|
| Anyway, back to the main topic.
| Arch-TK wrote:
| The vulnerabilities of the plain old spinning disk meter
| may have been bad but they couldn't be exploited remotely
| from someone else's house.
|
| Yes, granularity of the measurements IS a problem. If these
| things only reported the readings when I pressed a button,
| I would not be so concerned about privacy (that is if the
| companies could prove to me that the meters did not report
| the readings outside of these times).
| ashneo76 wrote:
| I don't trust private companies doing anything "smart".
|
| I say this as an electronics and software engineer. Companies
| doing have our best interests in mind.
|
| Want to refute that claim? Show me the source code then
| LambdaComplex wrote:
| And, even if they do show you "the source code," how can
| you be sure it's the code that's actually running on the
| device?
| softveda wrote:
| In Australia, in the state of Victoria all meters are smart
| meter for few years now. They are also growing in number in
| other states. There has been no hacking incident. in fact it
| makes peoples life easier by allowing them to track energy
| usage at every 15 mins interval with historical data using an
| app from the utility company. This data cannot be sold
| either. In fact under the Govt. Open API scheme very shortly
| you will be able to give access to your own data for
| comparison to select the best plan for you (just like open
| banking).
| Arch-TK wrote:
| So sounds like Australian smart meter companies are better
| at security than British ones.
|
| The energy usage tracking can be done without smart meters,
| in this country electricity companies (and lots of private
| companies) offered induction clamp based electrical usage
| logging devices. These may not have been quite as accurate
| as onboard measuring but this could have easily been solved
| with some kind of serial protocol exposed on the meter
| which a third party datalogger could attach to. The ability
| to track energy usage is not a feature of a smart meter,
| it's just a feature of having access to the meter's data,
| this data could always have been made available even if the
| meter wasn't networked.
|
| Open banking is a complete disaster that I seriously don't
| think deserves the name "open". I still don't understand
| how an API which requires you to be a BANK to be able to
| interact with can remotely claim to be open but having
| tested some of the implementation for banks it's some
| horrific over-engineered mess.
|
| Let's hope the data access API for your meter doesn't
| require you to be an electricity company to access it. As
| it stands, in the UK, meters are not intercompatible
| between utility companies so if you switch providers (which
| I do annually) the old smart meter just becomes a dumb
| meter again.
| WolfRazu wrote:
| I'd like to point out that ever since SMETS2 new (and
| some firmware updated) smart meters are compatible in the
| UK, although I do acknowledge they didn't used to be.
| QasimK wrote:
| Arch-TK I absolutely agree with everything you are
| saying, and I don't intend to get a smart meter myself
| for as long as possible.
|
| However, you are incorrect that meters are incompatible
| between utility companies. You are right that SMETS1
| meters _are_ incompatible. However, all new meter
| installations are SMETS2 and these are fully compatible
| between energy companies.
|
| SMETS2 has been the standard for a number of years now.
| There are still old SMETS1 installations still active
| though.
| danielheath wrote:
| The big benefit imo is the load smoothing; statewide, power
| is cheaper and cleaner than it would otherwise have been.
|
| Right now it's factories and a few early adopters like me,
| but anyone can sign up for it and it's substantially
| cheaper assuming you don't mind turning things off at peak
| times.
| labcomputer wrote:
| Sure, but those not-irrational reasons are locale-specific.
| I've never heard of someone self-reporting the meter reading
| here in the US. The meter still keeps a local log of how much
| energy was used, so worrying about being framed for using too
| much energy still feels a bit irrational to me.
|
| OTOH, smart meters allow the utility to charge TOU rates,
| which helps even out the load on the grid. It benefits the
| utility, of course, but also customers. For example, it is
| minimally inconvenient to set my car to charge or my dish
| washer to run at night instead of day, but I might not bother
| to do so unless the utility charges me below average rates to
| do so. I calculate that I am earning several hundred dollars
| per hour for the time spent taking advantage of TOU rates.
|
| As for selling the data... the solution to that is banning
| such sales, not banning smart meters.
| Arch-TK wrote:
| If a smart meter gets hacked it's not unreasonable to
| imagine the local logs are compromised. This is a bit like
| all the arguments against voting machines but in a less
| concerning setting.
|
| TOU rates are a thing you can get with pre-programmed
| meters. They may not benefit the utility company as much as
| tailored rates but they probably have 90% of the benefit
| while having 0% of the privacy implications.
|
| The companies don't even have to sell the data, they can
| just mine it for information, such as which rate to
| automatically put you on once your contract finishes to
| make the most money out of you etc.
| InvertedRhodium wrote:
| I just don't want the timing of my electricity consumption
| to end up being used as evidence against me for growing
| cannabis. Feels pretty rational from my perspective.
| dcow wrote:
| I don't think your argument supports the second conclusion in
| your penultimate sentence. Seems like a big leap. Power and
| water "just work" and the utility companies can't abuse people.
| As an "end user" I don't get crappier power or worse water
| because my neighbor is spooked out by smart meters. I highly
| doubt the savings would be passed on to me anyway. I would 1000
| times over rather live in a world where internet utility
| service providers were required to substantiate service
| terminations the details of which are governed by civil law not
| by an abusive EULA written to protect tue company not the user.
| If it means email costs $1/month so be it. I pay for email on
| principle anyway.
| supernova87a wrote:
| Then isn't this an argument that tech companies are not
| utilities because the things they supply don't "just work"
| and have no nuance to them?
|
| Electricity and water "just work" because you deliver it,
| you're done. You have no obligations aside from not failing
| to deliver it, and not exploiting your monopoly market.
|
| Tech companies are not utilities because they're not just
| something you buy like a commodity and have a right to not
| have complex terms of usage?
|
| You want the best of both worlds. Maybe that's not possible.
| justanotherguy0 wrote:
| Bullshit. Delivering power and water are incredibly
| complex. Water has to be sourced from God knows where, you
| have to do planning on building reservoirs. You have to
| manage run off (hey, your horses can't keep shitting near
| that stream!). You have to treat the water and manage it's
| acidity. You have to keep mains running. If a leak springs
| and the system goes under pressure, the whole supply can
| become contaminated! So now you have to notify your users
| that they need to BOIL THEIR WATER! you have to detect
| leaks in the last mile of delivery so that you can protect
| the system. You have to keep your pumps from getting
| flooded. You have to manage subsidy programs and different
| user classes. You have to integrate with federal and state
| water authorities.
|
| Utilities are complicated. There's no such thing as
| delivering and not failing to deliver.
| XorNot wrote:
| Nothing gives away a software engineer with no experience
| then when they look at physical infrastructure and
| declare "that's easy to do".
|
| This is the profession where getting an SOE imaged
| machine in a new employees hands on their first day is
| considered a big achievement.
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| In the UK the government imposed a quota to the utility
| companies for smart meter installations. Hence they are
| desperate to boost adoption, recently they have drafted Albert
| Einstein into their all-out advertising campaign. The
| government is clearly anxious to push this change which is
| precisely why i'm not rushing.
| ErikVandeWater wrote:
| Earnest question - Why does the utility have to honor the
| request of the owner? Doesn't the utility own the meter and is
| allowed to make changes to it as it sees fit?
| [deleted]
| quickthrowman wrote:
| The large utility in my state provides the meter, the
| customer provides the meter socket and everything downstream
| of the meter.
|
| For 400A (really 320A, 80% of 400) and larger services
| (commercial) the customer supplies everything beyond the
| transformer (service disconnect and CT cabinet, typically),
| but the utility will provide meters or CTs depending on how
| it's being metered.
| amelius wrote:
| > There's a reason that Google (well, maybe other tech
| companies) bring you new things, and the electric company
| doesn't. It's not all roses.
|
| There is a solution: Google writes the software. The utility
| company runs it.
|
| The problem right now is that Google takes too many roles.
| varispeed wrote:
| > People turn out to irrationally not want smart meters.
|
| Some people may be irrational, but smart meters are a huge
| privacy concern - the electricity company can figure out your
| patterns from the power usage and the "shape" of it. This is
| the reason why I don't want a smart meter.
|
| Disclaimer: I actually was involved in building firmware and
| management software of smart meters.
| jeffgreco wrote:
| Usage patterns seem extremely important for building out a
| renewable power grid. Meanwhile, what is the privacy concern
| with the "shape" of your usage?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Usage patterns at the substation level are important. They
| don't need household detail.
| somethingwitty1 wrote:
| At my house, I have a meter that I get a feed from. So I
| look at the graphs. From the graphs, you can learn about
| what is happening in the house. You know when someone is
| showering, left home for work (arrived home), doing
| laundry, went to bed/got up, used the microwave and so on.
| Some of that you could determine by watching the house, but
| that requires constant surveillance. A smart meter provides
| all this data with no effort and at mass scale. If I can
| glean that level of information just by glancing at the
| graphs, I'm sure someone better equipped could determine
| even finer grain details of what is going on in the house.
| varispeed wrote:
| I am disabled and I was considering growing my own medicine
| in the event of losing job or not having funds for filling
| my prescription any more - hopefully that will never
| happen, but knowing that I have a smart meter, that would
| add a lot of anxiety that I don't need.
| elliekelly wrote:
| A change in your usage pattern could be used to ID any
| number of private things that could then be used against
| you:
|
| - When you've gone on vacation and your home is unattended.
|
| - When you have an additional tenant, a long-term
| houseguest, have a new significant other or even have a
| baby.
|
| - Whether or not you're actually working when you're
| working from home.
|
| - Homes that use greater than X amount of electricity are
| at greater risk of Y and so your home owners/rental/car
| insurance premium goes up.
|
| - People who play computer/video games late at night are at
| higher risk for health issues is your health insurance
| premium goes up.
|
| And I bet there are other, much more subtle things they
| could figure out once given the opportunity to vacuum up
| your data: like estimate what temperature you set your AC
| to and determine whether or not someone in the house was
| awake at any given moment of any given day.
| aaron-santos wrote:
| These are all really good reasons to be against mobile
| device tracking and electronic telemetry too.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| I am not sure why I ( or you for that matter ) am forced
| to defend my stance on privacy by listing things I want
| to stay private. The objection is that I do not want to
| have my every move monitored with ever-increasing
| accuracy.
|
| This seems to be an annoying issue. Any serious proponent
| of privacy is already taking steps to hold on its
| vestiges, which include not taking a public stance on it.
| seemaze wrote:
| Not only the electric company, anyone with a hint of
| ambition. I can read my own meter, along with 60 of my
| closest neighbors if I so chose (I don't) because every meter
| emits unencrypted packets several times for each reporting
| interval (5 minutes in my case)
| idiotsecant wrote:
| If the electric company sends someone out to read your meter
| every day is that objectionable? Every hour? Every minute? At
| what resolution is energy usage too invasive? Why?
| supernova87a wrote:
| How do you defend against the argument that it's just a
| matter of degree?
|
| I can tell from your old spinning mechanical meter that
| you're at home and not on vacation. That's personal
| information. Why is a smart meter so different?
| elliekelly wrote:
| One is connected to the internet and sends data every
| second of the day (hopefully only to authorized recipients)
| while the other provides only one monthly datapoint and is
| quite a pain for bad actors, or anyone really, to collect.
| It's like the difference between showing someone you have
| $X in your checking account vs showing someone all of the
| transactions you've conducted in the account over the last
| month. One is far more invasive because it's a window into
| your daily habits.
| QasimK wrote:
| You cannot tell from your old meter because it does not
| submit meter readings every minute (or whatever the
| configuration is) because it does not have an internet
| connection.
| rurp wrote:
| Why would you assume that increasing the effect of
| something by orders of magnitude is harmless? Chugging 1
| glass of water is great, but 100 will kill you; the only
| difference is a matter of degree.
|
| A spinning meter can be manually checked to find out if
| someone is on vacation, but doing that is slow and isn't
| very worthwhile for criminals. Being able to monitor
| 100,000 meters at once for empty homes might suddenly be
| very economical for criminals.
| sneeuwpopsneeuw wrote:
| An Example for your Example. Yes i'm one of those people who
| tried to keep his old electricity meter the longest time
| possible. I have 36 solar panels installed on my roof and the
| old disk meter just rotated backwards when I was not using all
| that electricity during the day. The new meter, that i could
| only delay a year or 2, is electronic and does not give me
| anything when I push energy to the net all day. The government
| in my country can give you money for that energy but that would
| be the raw price without any tax and the energy you use later
| on the day still has tax on it so that does not really help,
| The tax is also 80 to 90% of the price.
|
| So I hope that gives some perspective why people may prever to
| keep an old system around and not be forced by a big company to
| change it.
| duxup wrote:
| So google would be a public utility... but not my ISP?
| theknocker wrote:
| I can't wait to hear from a bunch of idiots about how it's ok for
| an oligarchy to rape our human rights since it's private.
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| Well, a public utility also doesn't have the right to do this:
| "You did something wrong, we won't tell you what it was, there's
| no chance of appeal, and you are now banned from receiving water
| service again, ever, for the rest of your life, no matter where
| you move. And don't try moving in with someone else who's still
| receiving service, because they'll get banned too."
| sixothree wrote:
| "but we still fully intend to profit off your data."
| dilyevsky wrote:
| Actually they can. Someone i know has a restraining order from
| ohio dmv (bmv) for getting into argument there and can't get dl
| there. Hilarious regulation coming from the state that
| completely privatized their dmv services
| selimthegrim wrote:
| And I thought Louisiana charging a fee for using a debit card
| at state dmv (OMV) offices instead of cash [1] courtesy of
| Bobby Jindal was something. Sad to see my state of origin has
| outstripped that.
|
| [1] I should also mention the time I looked at my driving
| record in Louisiana and discovered the remnant of their
| pre-1981 practice of putting race on driver's licenses. Under
| my ethnic category (which I had never filled out or been
| asked) was 'O'. I turned to the clerk and asked "What does
| this stand for?" She replied "Other." I said "I thought maybe
| it would be Oriental" (since I am Pakistani-American). She
| replied "That would be too politically incorrect." I said,
| "My expectations for this state in that regard are not high."
| RosanaAnaDana wrote:
| That's a good thing right?
|
| right?
| [deleted]
| fridif wrote:
| Finally, Alex Jones is coming back
| fatnoah wrote:
| I feel like this is becoming a thing with banks now, too.
| elliekelly wrote:
| I suspect that has more to do with AML programs becoming
| significantly more automated/data-driven and the increased
| information sharing between financial institutions. Twenty
| years ago one bank would ban you. Now they all do.
| thera2 wrote:
| Although I understand what you're saying, email and YouTube
| access is not the same as water. Depriving someone of water
| would be the same as depriving them of life, which is not true
| of email, YouTube, and whatever g-services.
| russian-hacker wrote:
| There is only one Google/YouTube. Water is plentiful.
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| It's pretty much impossible to function in modern society
| without an email address that you can rely on.
| jolmg wrote:
| But Google isn't the only provider of email addresses. In
| contrast, water utilities typically hold monopoly over
| their region.
|
| EDIT: Many people are replying with some variant that the
| problem is that Google can block the email account that
| people have tied to their financial and government
| services.
|
| But the same is true of any other email provider. If Google
| is somehow turned into a public utility, how does that
| solve the problem for those that are locked out of their
| email accounts by Fastmail, for instance? Make Fastmail a
| public utility too, or somehow regulate it? But it's an
| Australian company, so kind of outside of American
| jurisdiction. Or regulate the addresses themselves? Put up
| a law that says that only US public utilities can
| administer emails on the .com domain? I don't really
| understand what people are proposing.
|
| Or is the proposal just to regulate gmail.com addresses in
| particular? Treat them as the exception and incentivize
| more people to use that one provider so they get the
| protections offered by the proposed regulation.
| colordrops wrote:
| It could be very difficult or impossible to access some
| accounts that use the email address for two factor
| authentication. And these are typically the most critical
| accounts.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| I mean, that's really on the user for not setting up more
| than one 2FA method for their highly critical accounts
| colordrops wrote:
| That's for properly engineered services. There are many
| services that won't grant access without your email after
| auth has expired.
| vvillena wrote:
| In some countries water distribution companies are not
| the same as the commercial suppliers, and you can freely
| contract your supply with any company you want.
|
| The issue isn't that people are free to choose any email
| address. The problem is that Google effectively holds
| people hostage once they get involved with its ecosystem.
| And due to its sheer size and power, no one can afford to
| be banned by Google. And there's no real way to appeal.
| It's a rights regression of sorts.
| basch wrote:
| However, even with an email address, what are the chances
| you eventually try and email someone who has gmail. If
| you get put on the spam list, youre as good as not
| existing. In concept thats not that different than having
| an internal account shut down. You still dont exist to
| google, or any of their patrons.
| woodruffw wrote:
| I don't know where I stand on the public utility
| argument, but to make the strongest possible case for
| this analogy: most peoples' online lives (including their
| financials) are tied to a singular email address. That
| email address forms the ground truth for their identity,
| including being able to access services that they've lost
| their credentials for.
|
| Google's ability to unilaterally revoke access to the
| account that ties you to your banking accounts, your
| state's online service portals, &c. gives them the kind
| of power that we'd _normally_ only see in regional
| monopolies like water utilities.
| jolmg wrote:
| > gives them the kind of power that we'd normally only
| see in regional monopolies like water utilities.
|
| No access to water from the only provider in your reach,
| especially if you're kind of broke, really doesn't seem
| equal to having your email account blocked, when people
| have very accessible choices of email providers and what
| they tie to it.
|
| The situation sucks, but looking at this from a public
| utility perspective seems like an XY problem.
| woodruffw wrote:
| > when people have very accessible choices of email
| providers and what they tie to it.
|
| I think this point might have been true 15 or 20 years
| ago, but I suspect that it no longer is on either front:
|
| * E-mail is increasingly non-federated and subject to
| Google's dictates w/r/t delivery guarantees, origin
| identification, &c. These aren't bad things; e-mail was a
| mess before Google started taking it seriously! But it
| _does_ result in a sort of natural dominance: smaller
| providers have to play by Google 's rules to ensure
| delivery; large institutions are less likely to debug
| delivery issues to smaller providers. In other words, I
| have to be willing to accept a certain amount of second-
| class treatment.
|
| * It's been my experience that my ability to _not_ tie
| things to my e-mail has diminished over the years. More
| recent government systems and financial accounts
| _require_ a valid e-mail; e-mail + password is now the
| default setting for creating an account on most services.
| Even when my e-mail is strictly _optional_ for a service,
| it frequently operates as a safety net (recovery codes,
| poor man 's 2FA, &c). Put another way: my inbox is
| treated as _the_ high-availability, high-reliability
| delivery mechanism.
| jolmg wrote:
| Regarding your first point, is that from experience? Have
| you known of a case where a large institution sends a
| legitimate email to a small provider, the small provider
| rejects it, and the large institution does nothing about
| it?
|
| If you're paying for your email provider, I would think
| opening up a ticket and asking to let their email through
| would not be much of an issue, if this ever happens.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| You can get the email address attached to any irl
| accounts reassigned by presenting yourself to the bank
| branch in person with ID. Probably there are mechanisms
| using certified mail as well for places that don't have
| nearby branch offices. It would be inconvenient but
| Google does not have the ability to unilaterally separate
| you from your financial accounts on any kind of permanent
| basis.
| woodruffw wrote:
| It occurs to me that I don't have an exhaustive list of
| all of the accounts that I've signed up to over the years
| with my email address.
|
| If I'm banned by my provider, I won't have any recourse
| for many of them except to discover at some point in the
| future that I've missed an important alert, billing
| statement, or notice of action. And that's even before I
| _know_ that I need to go to a physical location or mail
| in some kind of identification!
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| You can as easily have the same problem with physical
| mail, but that doesn't confer an indefinite right to a
| particular physical address. I do encourage keeping
| backups of your email to reduce this risk -- at least you
| can search your records that way.
| woodruffw wrote:
| > You can as easily have the same problem with physical
| mail, but that doesn't confer an indefinite right to a
| particular physical address.
|
| Of course not! But the USPS has (virtually) free change-
| of-address forwarding[1], and we have an entire set of
| social and governmental institutions _pre-built_ around
| the impermanency of physical addresses. No such
| institutions exist for digital addressing.
|
| I agree, re: backups, and I keep them for myself. But it
| occurs to me that the average non-technical individual
| probably doesn't know how to make a backup of their GMail
| account. I use GSuite, and the last time I checked I had
| to _explicitly_ enable IMAP and then set a custom "app
| password" in order to set up IMAP access for my backup
| client. Oh, and there was some Google-specific TLS
| weirdness; boundaries abound.
|
| [1]: https://www.usa.gov/post-office#item-37197
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| > No such institutions exist for digital addressing.
|
| I do think it would be optimal if there were a fallback
| option for all types of digital accounts. It is not
| Google's fault, though, that there isn't, as they are not
| the cause of the assumption of email address permanence.
| You need to lay your blame at the feet of the service
| providers.
|
| I do also think it might be ideal if Google would forward
| emails to an address of your choosing in the event they
| closed your account.
| sneak wrote:
| People opted in to that. You don't opt in to the water
| pipe monopoly.
| woodruffw wrote:
| > People opted in to that. You don't opt in to the water
| pipe monopoly.
|
| I accept this argument for social media, but I don't
| think I do for online identities that are tightly
| integrated into financial and government services.
|
| I happen to be sufficiently positioned to cause a big
| stink if Google arbitrarily bans my GSuite account; the
| average person probably isn't, and would have to spend
| weeks reidentifying themselves to essential services (my
| power bill goes through my email!) to ensure that their
| material welfare isn't disrupted. Is that acceptable?
| sneak wrote:
| You opted in to G Suite by pointing your domain there, as
| well. You can opt out just as quickly.
|
| Every time you smash that "log in with google" button,
| you're opting in to letting Google serve as intermediary
| for access to your account at a third party.
|
| People are fools for doing this, but it's not Google's
| fault.
| woodruffw wrote:
| > You opted in to G Suite by pointing your domain there,
| as well. You can opt out just as quickly.
|
| I won't deny that I opted in to a _particular_ service,
| or that I can opt out just as quickly. But cf. the other
| threads about my formal recourses, quality of service,
| and others ' expectations around reliability of delivery
| should I choose to leave the Google bubble.
|
| Google's fault or not, I don't think this is an
| acceptable situation.
| jsnell wrote:
| Let's follow that argument to its logical conclusion.
| There is nothing special about the property you've
| described here. My high school, university, half a dozen
| previous employers, and several ISPs also gave me email
| addresses. I did not get to keep any of them when leaving
| those institutions.
|
| What about smaller webmail providers? Yahoo and Hotmail
| gave me email addresses back in the day, and then deleted
| them for inactivity. Your argument applies equally well
| there. How about those Fastmail accounts that people are
| paying for? Should they get to keep them even after
| terminating service?
|
| Clearly all of this is completely absurd. The "important
| stuff is tied to a single email address" case is
| extremely weak.
| woodruffw wrote:
| My university sheltered me and gave me a physical
| address, during which time that address formed an
| essential part of identifying myself to my bank(s) and
| the US Government.
|
| You'll note that I haven't said anywhere that Google (or
| anyone else!) is obligated to provide indefinite email
| service to anybody who happens to sign up. What I've
| observed is that, _unlike_ my physical address, there are
| virtually no formal recourses proportional to the role
| that my email has in my _official_ identity. I can
| request an address change with USPS, I am guaranteed
| delivery service, and federal law protects my mailbox
| from tampering and snooping; _nothing_ requires Google to
| provide anything resembling these safeguards.
| jsnell wrote:
| What do physical addresses have to do with this? The
| discussion was about email.
|
| I understood your argument to be "email addresses are
| important" + "Google provides email addreses" -> "Google
| should be regulated as a public utility". But like I
| showed, the same applies to basically every kind of
| organization providing email addresses.
|
| So either you are asking for basically every single
| organization to be a public utility, or there is some
| discriminating function you're not stating.
| woodruffw wrote:
| > I understood your argument to be "email addresses are
| important" + "Google provides email addreses" -> "Google
| should be regulated as a public utility". But like I
| showed, the same applies to basically every kind of
| organization providing email addresses.
|
| It's getting a little muddled, but the observation was
| this: email addresses increasingly serve the same role as
| physical addresses. We have an entire social and legal
| framework around the guarantees of physical mail because
| of how important it is to our ability to transact our
| daily lives; no corresponding framework exists for email.
|
| > So either you are asking for basically every single
| organization to be a public utility, or there is some
| discriminating function you're not stating.
|
| The discriminating function, as I said in the very first
| response, is the necessary role of a service in
| identifying ourselves to _essential_ services (read:
| utilities, financials, government). My belief is that
| email satisfies this condition. But _also_ , as I said in
| the first: I don't really know if I commit to the public
| utility argument; I merely wanted to point out that email
| serves a role tantamount to _the_ canonical public
| service (public mail). If that 's the case, we ought _at
| the very least_ to have similar entitlements with our
| email providers.
| buran77 wrote:
| No, but Google holds monopoly over _that_ email address
| that you 've been using and passing around for years, and
| all the data associated to it. Losing access to it can
| prove to be a major issue.
|
| Of course this is nowhere near as critical as water,
| food, or shelter. But in the modern world losing access
| to your long time email address, like a phone number,
| will cause some pain. I see no reason not to put such a
| responsibility on Google or companies of similar size
| which are so tightly integrated with the critical modern
| infrastructure.
|
| I think we need to look at the utility of the service in
| the world and society we live in. Things change, 400
| years ago a mill was the first utility in the US. That
| doesn't quite fit the definition anymore these days.
| [deleted]
| ljm wrote:
| A phone number is less of a problem as you have
| portability. Or you can have it. In the UK for example,
| regulation means that you can automatically transfer your
| number between providers at no cost. It's a painless
| process.
|
| That's going to be a lot more difficult when your email
| address is tied to a certain domain, like gmail. I think
| there has to be a different kind of solution there, that
| is more accessible to the layman than setting up your own
| domain and dealing with MX records and stuff.
| Dma54rhs wrote:
| Not if you're allowed to build a well, which is a lot of
| places. Install a pump. Same for electricity - solar and
| huge ass batteries for the night. Definetly not only
| providers despite being classified as utilities.
| darig wrote:
| ok boomer
| rch wrote:
| I believe your local public library _should_ be able to
| provide this, even though it probably doesn 't at present.
| [deleted]
| justbored123 wrote:
| You are aware that public utilities CHARGE FOR THEIR SERVICE A
| LOT? Ask Texans and Californians about their power bills in the
| last months. The level of entitlement of people like you using
| a free service and expecting to impose the rules as they see
| fit and getting all angry at the company giving them an
| absolutely world class amazing service for free because they
| don't want to piss off the advertisers that pay for the whole
| deal is very hard to understand.
| olivierestsage wrote:
| I don't see what any of that has to do with it being
| impossible to appeal or contact someone about the ban,
| though.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| The level of entitlement of thinking you can exploit private
| data of millions of people for profit and be above the law,
| undermining our democracy and paying no tax while cozying up
| to horile regimes, dictators and tyrants.
|
| Two can play this maralism game, see?
| ping_pong wrote:
| This is a direct result of their monopoly, which is why Google
| should be broken up. Because they have such a huge monopoly,
| they can afford to ignore customers and have a draconian
| approach to people, and can get away with it. If there were
| better competition, they wouldn't have been able to ignore
| their customers. Breaking them up will alleviate this by
| ensuring that each company needs to be able to survive on their
| own, of which one aspect is having better customer support and
| service.
| izacus wrote:
| Except that this behaviour shows up in non-monopolistic
| markets as well. Apple does it. PayPal does it. Heck, our
| European banks have started doing it despite there being
| ample competition. What the competition did, is made sure
| EVERY competing entity does that because it's cheaper and
| costs were brought down with race to the bottom.
|
| I don't get where this bizarre belief that "moar free market"
| will solve issues. Let's setup proper legal framework where
| these companies must have a good reason to terminate contract
| instead - and properly explain it with the ability to appeal.
| dantheman wrote:
| Freedom of association is important, and you shouldn't have
| to do business with people you don't want to.
| mc32 wrote:
| So it's okay for banks to choose who they'll let bank
| with them?
|
| In any case, I disagree. Some things are basic
| necessities.
| asiachick wrote:
| banks do that all the time. try writing a few checks over
| your balance and not paying up. they will definitely
| terminate your account.
|
| https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/banking/can-my-bank-
| close...
|
| That said I do wish there was some regulation for
| accounts for Apple, Microsoft, Google, Steam, etc as
| closing an account can have huge reprocussions.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Credit unions frequently have exclusive membership,
| typically a certain geographical area though many started
| out specifically for members of certain unions.
| paddez wrote:
| Yes. Banks close accounts all the time of clients they no
| longer want to risk business with.
| leetcrew wrote:
| yes...? if you overdraw your account and/or bounce checks
| over and over, it's not unreasonable for the bank to
| close that account eventually.
| 35fbe7d3d5b9 wrote:
| "Sorry Mr. Jones, we've decided your, _ahem_ alternative
| lifestyle and beliefs are fundamentally incompatible with
| the views of our company. Your electrical service will be
| discontinued in three to five business days. "
| aaron-santos wrote:
| I may be misunderstanding this. Does this mean "You [a
| business] shouldn't have to do business with people you
| don't want to"? If so, why should rights of people extend
| to businesses? People already have the freedom of
| association of employment that seems to cover this. ie:
| if someone doesn't want to associate with someone else as
| an employee of a business, they can simply not work at
| that business.
| thegrimmest wrote:
| > You [a business]
|
| Businesses aren't people, they're legal fiction. The
| individuals who make these decisions do and should have
| the right to do business with whomever they want, based
| on any criteria they deem appropriate. This constitutes
| the distinction between the private and public sphere.
| gwright wrote:
| Due process is also important. A balance is needed.
| mclightning wrote:
| You need to find the person whose KPI would be effected by
| you leaving as a customer.
|
| Go find them on LinkedIn, message your experience and
| statement that you're leaving.
|
| When corporations put up higher and higher walls around
| their official channels of communication, you either need
| to get louder or go around the wall.
|
| I am working for a big e-commerce corp., we are made to
| read/go-through customer feedback occasionally. That is
| just to find a %1~ of potential conversion improvement we
| can make.
|
| Companies do care about conversion/retention. Problem is
| only the communication between the customer and the right
| team of people inside.
| [deleted]
| gumby wrote:
| > ...their monopoly, which is why Google should be broken up.
|
| Not denying their monopoly position, but how could Google
| meaningfully be broken up? It's really just a single business
| (advertising) with a gaggle of loss leaders adding up to less
| than 20% of revenue. Even pushing advertising down to 80%
| took a huge amount of effort.
|
| It's not like Standard Oil which was a vertically integrated
| trust of several points in the value chain, or the bell
| system which could be broken up geographically (and
| manufacturing spun out). Or FB which could divest business
| units like Instagram and WhatsApp.
| riknos314 wrote:
| The simplest split with potential to start addressing
| concerns in this particular lawsuit is to break the index
| that results from google's web crawling out into a utility.
|
| With competing "engines" (defined as a ranking algorithm
| and frontend to query said algorithm) building from the
| same, high-quality index competition in the search space
| could get much better.
|
| Engines such as DuckDuckGo relying on Bing for the majority
| of their index is a decent example of how this might work.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| mdoms wrote:
| > It's really just a single business (advertising) with a
| gaggle of loss leaders adding up to less than 20% of
| revenue.
|
| I mean, yeah this is exactly the point. They have locked
| competition out of the loss-leading categories by
| undercutting them. Breaking them up forces the loss leaders
| to compete on an even playing field, which will mean more
| competition.
| ericmay wrote:
| Even just divesting YouTube would be a start.
| bananabreakfast wrote:
| YouTube is hardly profitable. They would barely be able
| to afford their own infrastructure under their current
| revenue.
|
| They would immediately be acquired by a competitor or
| declare bankruptcy.
| russian-hacker wrote:
| Good. This'll even the playing field for competitors.
| It'll be a net win for humanity.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Thats exactly the point
| SonicScrub wrote:
| That's an argument for the break-up, not one against it.
| If Google is using their monopoly powers to create wholly
| unprofitable endeavors, then they are likely choking out
| competition. There can be no Youtube Killer if Youtube
| does not have to make money.
| pcmoney wrote:
| You really think someone couldn't build a business out of
| YouTube independent of Google? Just because it is hardly
| profitable _now_ as managed by Google in support of ads
| doesn't mean there isn't another model there.
| ericmay wrote:
| I'm sure they can figure it out.
| alxlaz wrote:
| Well, tough luck. Not all business plans are destined for
| success.
| tengbretson wrote:
| Maybe we shouldn't be letting this gaggle of loss leaders
| distort the market in their respective verticals.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Exactly, this should be absolutely obvious.
|
| If an oil compnay gave away cars for free and became a
| car monopolist, people would be up in arms, vut Google's
| BS is somehow acceptable
| colechristensen wrote:
| Maybe break ads up into two or three businesses then break
| the loss leaders up into a dozen different companies. You
| don't have to own the ad company to sell advertising, let
| them place ads from google or whomever else just like
| everybody else on the Internet, alternatively let them
| start leaning more on paid services instead of customer-as-
| product.
| toast0 wrote:
| To break it up effectively, you'd want to separate out at
| least a few different business units and restrict the
| businesses the units can enter as well as the relationships
| between the units.
|
| Big things would be Advertising separate from other things
| and bound to only advertising, and require it contract with
| the other units on public and FRAND terms. Web Search would
| be another unit, and it would be barred from developing its
| own advertising platform and need to use a mix of
| advertising platforms based on public criteria, probably
| with a cap of say 75%? AdWords. You'd have at least one
| more group for communications (mail, the 7 messengers, etc)
| which maybe includes the document tools too, and might
| include G Suite; this group could develop its own ad
| platform, but not to sell ads on 3rd party sites. Android
| would need to be a separate unit, it could either require a
| per device fee or FRAND terms for search etc bundling
| (similar the what they do in the EU); Chrome maybe fits in
| this group, or may need its own group. Google Fiber would
| probably get shut down or sold to an incumbent telco, but
| maybe just spun out. Waymo and other research stuff would
| probably need to be spun out, not sure if that can live on
| its own though.
|
| Cloud services would be its own group, perhaps providing
| services to the other groups, possibly requiring public
| pricing, but I don't know if that's really an issue.
|
| I think that's most of it. Lawyers from DOJ and Alphabet
| could work out the details. Getting a competitive ad market
| out of the deal would be hard, but at least it could be
| more transparent, and eliminating cross-subsidization of
| Google businesses is definitely possible.
|
| Start by cloning the whole source repository for each
| company, and prune out the things that don't need to stay;
| if in doubt all successor companies get access to all of
| it.
| ncr100 wrote:
| > Android would need to be a separate unit
|
| Android is a separate unit, AFAIK.
| ketzo wrote:
| GSuite/Gmail, YouTube, Search, Android, Google Shopping,
| Google Maps -- all of these could become separate software
| companies. Not saying they would _enjoy_ that, of course,
| but those are some of the divisions that immediately jump
| to mind.
| babypuncher wrote:
| That doesn't do much to break up the effective monopoly
| these services have in their respective markets. You
| split off Google Search into it's own company and they
| will still have 90% of the search market share when
| you're done.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| > _It 's really just a single business (advertising) with a
| gaggle of loss leaders adding up to less than 20% of
| revenue_
|
| A better way of looking at it is that Google is a
| collection of traffic drivers (YouTube, Gmail, etc) and
| monetizers (ads).
|
| If you break the monetization into a separate company, the
| traffic drivers aren't profitless: because a large part of
| the ad profit was created _from_ their traffic.
|
| If Google Ads had to buy space / share ad revenue from
| Google YouTube, Google Gmail, etc then economics would look
| a lot more reasonable.
|
| And I'd frankly be shocked if that isn't what they do
| internally, albeit more in the sense of "How much ad
| traffic do you drive, from your corner of the company?"
| jonplackett wrote:
| I think the suggestion is breaking up alphabet, which is
| quite literally loads of companies.
|
| YouTube, Google search, deep mind, Google fiber, waymo,
| Fitbit etc
|
| Seems pretty easy to break up if you want to.
| gumby wrote:
| > I think the suggestion is breaking up alphabet, which
| is quite literally loads of companies.
|
| Few, if any of those companies would be viable on their
| own. They require monopoly support. For example Google
| Cloud loses a billion a quarter (they spent $5B last
| quarter total in $4B).
|
| As far as the cloud market goes there's really only one
| player, the profitable, pure play AWS. Everybody else is
| losing money, and mostly fudging the numbers (Google
| "cloud" includes Gmail, Google Workspace etc; MS's cloud
| includes running Windows for big customers, Office 360
| etc etc).
|
| Nest is marginally profitable.
|
| Otherwise it's pretty thin gruel.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| The parent's point was that breaking up Alphabet in any
| way that leaves Google Ads contiguous is insignificant.
| When you go to the barbershop and get a haircut, you've
| broken up your person into 100,001 individual pieces, but
| that hasn't solved your weight loss problem, because the
| 100,000 bits of hair are only a few hundred micrograms
| each and the one piece that is your body still weighs 90
| kg.
|
| Google Cloud is big enough to be significant in terms of
| revenue, but AFAIK is only maybe breaking even in terms
| of profit. If you break up Alphabet into 26 or more
| different companies, you haven't broken up the monolith
| into non-problematic small companies 1/26th the size of
| the original, you've got 25 irrelevant companies and then
| one subsidiary that gets Ads which is almost as big as
| the original. Google even says as much in their financial
| statements, most of those listed companies are listed as
| 'other bets' and are a tiny fraction of the main line
| item that represents ads.
| gumby wrote:
| > Google Cloud is big enough to be significant in terms
| of revenue, but AFAIK is only maybe breaking even in
| terms of profit.
|
| Google cloud gotten profitable enough that they only
| spent $5B to earn $4B in revenue last quarter. After a
| dozen years that's the best ever (classic case of
| monopoly leverage to get into a different market).
|
| Advertising is "only" 81% of revenue but almost 100% of
| profit.
|
| Some other commenters have proposed that properties like
| YT and Android drive ad traffic but when I looked at the
| last 10Q it looked like YT was about 10% of ad revenues.
| I believe Android is a net loss but worth it in that it's
| an offset to reduce payments to Apple. But I just skimmed
| the filing because this is just an HN comment.
| summerlight wrote:
| And it will have literally zero impacts on its business
| practices. They can simply form a "Google/Alphabet
| cartel" via preferential treatments, and will be
| structured and operating effectively in the same way and
| then eventually get merged together. If you want to
| attack Google and other big techs' monopoly, you need to
| design a precise regulation on very specific anti-
| competitive behaviors.
| amluto wrote:
| Which accomplishes what, exactly?
|
| Perhaps Google Search, Chrome, and the advertising
| business could be split. Or Google Search could be split
| into Google Search 1 and Google Search 2.
| frankbreetz wrote:
| If an advertising company didn't have access to your
| search history, there would be a more level playing field
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Breaks it up into smaller business models, each of which
| makes it easier for companies with a more narrow, yet
| aligned, focus to compete with.
| bendergarcia wrote:
| I think it could be done depending on how you slice it. For
| example you could definitely put YouTube as its own
| separate entity YouTube and google play together, as an
| entertainment company. Gmail plus drive and calendar as a
| productivivity company, web search as it's own company. One
| thing that could make this easy would be to remove the
| google identity as a single company for SSO into all types
| of services. Then all the other companies could have sign
| in with FB Microsoft LinkedIn etc. google maps could be a
| standalone company. Nest/google home could easily be its
| own company. Especially if they spin off google identity as
| a separate product. Oh and google shopping could be it's
| own company. Lastly all these things could still feed into
| google search results using APIs from all those services. I
| think we could benefit from a break up.
| bmmayer1 wrote:
| How is Google a monopoly? Serious question.
| tyingq wrote:
| Senator Herb Kohl: _But you do recognize that in the words
| that are used and antitrust kind of oversight, your market
| share constitutes monopoly, dominant -- special power
| dominant for a monopoly firm. You recognize you 're in that
| area?_
|
| Eric Shmidt: _I would agree, sir, that we're in that
| area....I 'm not a lawyer, but my understanding of monopoly
| findings is this is a judicial process._
|
| From: https://www.businessinsider.com/is-google-a-monopoly-
| were-in...
|
| Also, the FTC's initial memo from 2012 that somebody higher
| up in the food chain quashed is pretty interesting:
| http://graphics.wsj.com/google-ftc-report/
|
| In short, dominant market share in web search. Though I
| think you could argue other things, like dominance in
| _affordable_ smart phones. Android is effectively a
| monopoly for people that can 't afford an iPhone.
| bananabreakfast wrote:
| Google would argue that web search is not their market.
| They are in the business of online advertising in which
| they most definitely do not have dominant market share.
| tyingq wrote:
| I can't say for sure whether they have a monopoly, but
| it's interesting that Eric Schmidt can't either.
| croes wrote:
| Yeah, that's why to google something means advertising
| and not searching for something on the internet. No, wait
| ...
| sneak wrote:
| Google also doesn't have a monopoly on search.
| tomcooks wrote:
| Try to get people to use your software, or read your books,
| or buy your merchandise, etc. without using Google.
|
| They own the highway, the restaurants along the way, the
| billboards and even the car most people drive.
| aetherson wrote:
| Google controls the vast majority of the web search market.
| More than 90%. What exactly a monopoly constitutes is
| something that people can disagree about, but "has 90%
| market share" is not by any means a crazy definition of a
| monopoly.
| yeetman21 wrote:
| Google doesnt make money of web searches, it makes money
| off ads, which it competes with fb and others for
| loup-vaillant wrote:
| Maybe a lawyer can say that with a straight face, but I'm
| a human being.
|
| Google ad revenues mostly come from 3 services: Gmail,
| which holds a disproportionate share of all email for
| what started out as a federated network. YouTube, which
| basically holds a monopoly on video sharing. And Google
| search, which basically holds a monopoly on regular web
| searches.
|
| I count at least 2 monopolies here, both held by
| Alphabet. The fact that Facebook is able to make
| advertisement in some other part of the web is
| immaterial, the same way TV ads are immaterial.
| bananabreakfast wrote:
| But market share of what? No one pays for web search so
| that's not really a market.
|
| Facebook has 90%+ market share of social media. Do they
| have a monopoly?
|
| GitHub has a 90%+ market share of open source code
| hosting. Do they have a monopoly?
| cpu_architect wrote:
| Markets are not necessarily based on money; they are
| about exchange. In the web search market, users exchange
| their attention for search results.
|
| I don't know whether this kind of market dominance
| factors into the legal determination of monopoly, but
| conceptually I think it makes sense to say that Google
| has a monopoly in the web search market.
| lottin wrote:
| Google is not a monopoly, but it has enough market power to
| be a reason for concern.
| wayneftw wrote:
| We usually have to pay for utilities, no?
|
| If Google search were a utility what would my search bill look
| like?
| asymptosis wrote:
| There already exist paid search services which you can compare
| Google to. I use infinitysearch and it costs US $5 per month.
|
| It's true that their coverage isn't as good as google, but
| around $1 per week feels very cheap. And the decreased coverage
| is at least partly compensated by being treated like a customer
| instead of a product.
| istjohn wrote:
| Interesting, never heard of that before. If I can ask, why do
| you use Infinity Search over Duck Duck Go?
| frockington1 wrote:
| Not saying I agree with it but, per the article: "In lieu of a
| fee, Yost argues in the complaint, Google collects user data
| that is monetized primarily by selling targeted
| advertisements."
| jbgreer wrote:
| Interesting approach, especially given that they don't seem to be
| concerned about having internet service providers declared public
| utilities.
| ziftface wrote:
| I wish they would do that as well, but that certainly doesn't
| invalidate these concerns
| gruez wrote:
| It doesn't invalidate the concerns, but it makes you question
| their motivations.
| wyager wrote:
| If this violates your a priori expectation of politicians'
| behavior, your prior was bad.
| bananabreakfast wrote:
| Sure it does.
|
| It undercuts their entire argument by making it look much
| more like a political stunt than any kind of serious action.
| ttt0 wrote:
| ISPs don't abuse their power like Google, Facebook, Twitter
| etc. do.
| verall wrote:
| They absolutely do? ISPs frequently rate the top of most
| hated companies lists, and many Americans do not have
| access to more than 1 ISP offering (>=30mbit) high speed
| internet.
| ttt0 wrote:
| Well then go after them too. And most importantly, go
| after banks, payment processors and money/infrastructure
| people in general so they aren't allowed to kick people
| off just because they don't like someone.
| marnett wrote:
| Retail Banks are highly regulated though..?
| suifbwish wrote:
| Actually that is what is known as a red herring argument.
| Bringing up something unrelated saying that the original
| argument is invalidated because the same reasoning wasn't
| applied to it is a common informal fallacy. Most legal
| documents have something related to severability which
| states that even if one part of the document is found to be
| unreasonable/illegal/illogical, it does not invalidate the
| rest of the document.
| Covzire wrote:
| I'm not aware of any ISP in the US that has terminated a
| customer's service for perfectly legal political
| statements.
| mansion7 wrote:
| They may start doing so, if said providers start banning and
| censoring people based on political beliefs as Google does.
| babypuncher wrote:
| I don't think I've seen anyone get banned from any major
| platform for their political beliefs. It has always been for
| hate speech, inciting real-world violence, or spreading
| blatantly false misinformation that lead to incitements of
| violence (such as the unfounded claims that the election was
| stolen).
|
| Funny how none of the Republicans pushing this censorship
| narrative batted an eye last summer when Facebook was taking
| down local BLM groups that called for violence.
| ttt0 wrote:
| I got banned from Facebook for swearing basically. Someone
| took it as 'cyberbullying' or whatever nonsense. I tried to
| appeal explaining my intentions, but they basically told me
| that my intentions don't matter.
|
| By the way, spreading misinformation like the infamous lab
| leak theory? Facebook fact checkers are a joke, they're
| fact checking stupid memes.
| mansion7 wrote:
| This is the reason that is given, that you have chosen to
| accept.
|
| The catch is, they label their own violence as speech, and
| their opponents speech as violence, conveniently.
|
| Hidden camera interviews with numerous employees of the
| multiple tech monopolies in question reveal that not only
| do they in target people for censorship based upon their
| political beliefs and political speech, and in the service
| of the political parties to which they also overwhelmingly
| donate, but they do so with glee.
|
| The actions of Facebook, Google, Twitter in their selective
| banning, deplatforming, and other algorithmic weaselry is
| often indistinguishable from an in-kind donation directly
| to the DNC.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| _especially given that they don 't seem to be concerned about
| having internet service providers declared public utilities._
|
| Which is why it will obviously fail at actually doing anything
| useful.
|
| However, the intended purpose may not be so much to do anything
| useful, as it is to score some points for incumbent
| politicians. In that, it could succeed brilliantly. It's
| actually a very smart move if you consider the political
| benefits accrued to politicians.
| tolbish wrote:
| What a smart, optimal use of taxpayer dollars. Ohio residents
| should be proud.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Name even one way in which Google resembles a public utility.
|
| When I build a house, do I have to pay $25k to get my Google
| pipes hooked up? Seriously where are the parallels?
| ketzo wrote:
| It's a service with which essentially every person living
| in present-day America needs to interact on a day-to-day
| basis. And yes, they _need_ to. I think it is hugely
| disingenuous to pretend otherwise.
|
| We can talk all day about how DuckDuckGo and ProtonMail
| exist. But for a huge, _huge_ majority of people, Google
| simply _is_ the internet.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| The material point is that an ISP is what you need to get
| to Google. You don't need Google to get to the ISP.
|
| You need electricity to get television, you don't need
| television to get electricity. You need electricity to
| get the internet, you don't need the internet to get
| electricity. Now whether or not television or internet
| are more useful than electricity is an entirely separate
| question. But which of the three is the baseline utility
| is a bit obvious.
|
| But again, the intended purpose is probably not to make
| Google a utility, it's to score political points. So none
| of these arguments are really relevant to the calculus
| that a politician would work through before taking an
| action like this. This is still a brilliant action from a
| political perspective because it will undoubtedly win
| incumbents some votes.
| bananabreakfast wrote:
| Hard disagree.
|
| Gmail maybe. Providing email as a utility service is a
| strained argument but could be made as there is a
| parallel to actual mail service.
|
| Literally everything else Google does has a mainstream
| alternative that is a click away.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| > everything else Google does has a mainstream
| alternative that is a click away.
|
| Except no one clicks away (most people).
| sabhiram wrote:
| "Google declares Ohio backwards, and restricts their access"
| mikestew wrote:
| A Republican seeking to "nationalize" a private company? Sounds a
| little...socialist, don't ya think?
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| What do you mean by "nationalize"? It doesn't seem like Ohio
| wants Google to be owned and/or run by a government. Most
| utilities in America aren't nationalized. Why would this be any
| different?
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Regulation != ownership.
| question000 wrote:
| If you want to talk about specific political parties on HN you
| have to use coded phrases or you will get flagged and
| downvoted. The current ones are "college educated" (democratic)
| or "average American" or "not city dwelling" (republicans)
| [deleted]
| jjcon wrote:
| The horseshoe strikes again
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory
| mullingitover wrote:
| We can't even get ISPs regulated as public utilities.
| thegrimmest wrote:
| Why can't we all collectively show an attitude of humble
| gratitude to an organization that has done so much to advance our
| civilization and improve our quality of life?
| YinzerNxtDoor wrote:
| Who's ungrateful? Ohio rocks!
| thegrimmest wrote:
| Should I parse that to read you disagree with my
| characterization of Google? Care to elaborate?
| quotemstr wrote:
| Because that organization has abused its power and gone from
| serving the public to ruling it.
| thegrimmest wrote:
| Can you point out exactly when they crossed this line? Seems
| to me like they're pretty much doing what they've always
| done, and being punished for being the best at it.
| ddingus wrote:
| Wow!
|
| I feel strongly about there being an process associated with
| accounts.
|
| Deleted, banned, suspended, and more all have significant
| ramifications.
|
| Lessig wrote about all this in "CODE" where code acts like law.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Reminds me of Snowcrash, the novel by Neil Stephenson. Technology
| was so far ahead of conventional people that the US govt became
| vestigial and largely ignored.
| jbgreer wrote:
| "When you are wrestling for possession of a sword, the man with
| the handle always wins."
| Animats wrote:
| Hm. Here's Ohio's definition of a public utility.[1] It might be
| argued that Google is a telephone company or a messenger company,
| but that's a stretch.
|
| Regulating Google as a common carrier would make more sense.
| Common carriers (which, by the way, UPS and FedEx are not, but
| Union Pacific is) are required to accept and deliver cargoes for
| anybody who ship according to their posted rates and terms.
|
| [1] https://codes.ohio.gov/ohio-revised-code/section-4905.03
| abeppu wrote:
| But that concept of common carrier implicitly assumes that
| carrying for party X doesn't harm party Y. You can put a lot of
| stuff on a train, and if you need to you can run a lot of
| trains. Shipping is non-rivalous or whatever the economics term
| is.
|
| But Ohio is pointing out that _ranking_ of results in response
| to a search (e.g. for flights) is giving preferential placement
| for Google's own offerings. And only one thing can be shown at
| the top of the page for "flights to chicago" or whatever.
| Ranking kind of intrinsically means rivalry.
|
| And further, the common carrier idea is based around serving
| any customer that pays a posted rate. But the point of search
| results (as versus ads) is that it's not supposed to be the
| case that sites need to pay a fee to appear anywhere in the
| rankings.
|
| I think maybe if the existing laws and categories don't
| describe this situation well, then we should make new laws and
| categories.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Seeing what the electric utilities did in terms of essentially
| buying passage of referenda and laws to their satisfaction in
| Ohio [1], I'm expecting Google to just open its wallet.
|
| [1] https://energynews.us/2020/03/05/dark-money-dominated-
| ohios-...
| polskibus wrote:
| Yes please, while you're at it, require separation of cloud
| providers from other software services (ie. Computation utility
| companies)
| Grimm1 wrote:
| I don't want more utilities, I want more competition, failure,
| and new players to fill spaces where old players died. Crony
| protectionism, and lax acquisition constraints are why we have a
| lot of these companies at where they are.
|
| When the seeming majority of exit plans for companies is an
| acquisition by a larger existing entity you have a problem. If
| our laws were better, people would be able to compete against
| <FAANG HERE> because they wouldn't have a hand in a crazy amount
| of markets and able to easily fend off good newcomers without a
| good amount of resources being expended. I heavily disagree with
| making things like Google a utility when the reason they're where
| they are today is largely artificial. They are not a natural
| monopoly they just took advantage of a weak government and pulled
| up the ladder behind themselves.
| zaptheimpaler wrote:
| The world is increasingly winner-take-all, so its hard to do
| that. Very few people want to use the second best search engine
| instead of the best, or constantly use multiple search engines.
| Seems like a natural monopoly to me. How can you complain about
| a weak-willed government in a post showing the opposite
| anyways?
| Grimm1 wrote:
| One instance of a single state showing teeth means nothing
| about the strength of our federal government which matters
| much more here.
|
| How is Google a natural monopoly?
| istjohn wrote:
| It could be a natural monopoly if Google is able to use
| their user's click traffic to out-manuever SEO spam and
| their competition is unable to reach the necessary scale to
| obtain sufficient volume of user click traffic to compete
| with Google on quality.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| For those who find scribd.com annnoying, here is a PDF of the
| complaint (SNI required):
|
| https://aboutblaw.com/XXw
| throwawaysea wrote:
| This is exactly what needs to happen, and not just because Google
| is steering people towards their own products preferentially. All
| the big technology companies are providing services that are
| fundamentally necessary to live and operate in our modern
| society. Their ability to act outside the laws that constrain
| public agencies or other regulated private organizations is
| simply not acceptable. I am specifically thinking of their role
| in information exchange - whether that is books sold on Amazon,
| results shown on Google search, social media accounts/posts on
| Facebook, or other examples.
|
| These companies are simply too big and powerful to be allowed to
| continue operating as unregulated private companies. They are
| more than just another random company, given that they have
| billions of users and control the public square as it exists
| today. The fact that they have massive network effects with
| billions of users limits their exposure to competition - for
| example, it's not possible to make a viable competitor to YouTube
| given that Google has an existing platform with a large number of
| content creators, advertisers, and users. The same network means
| that Google's decisions (to ban content, demonetize content, lock
| user accounts, etc.) are as impactful as a government agency or
| any other utility making such a decision, because there isn't a
| good alternative. And in many ways, the tech companies are more
| powerful than governments because they have more users than most
| nations have citizens.
|
| In comparison, a power utility can't just arbitrarily turn off
| your electricity because they disagree with your speech or
| political position. The water company can't withhold service
| without explanation. Virtually all laws that companies have to
| abide by constitute "regulation". There's nothing stopping us
| from tweaking how companies like Google are treated.
| justicezyx wrote:
| Given the use of information search, and its importance as the
| tool for gather factual data, conventional search indexing should
| be a public utility.
|
| Like rail road, motor road, electricity, which were started as
| private enterprises, and eventually turn into public utility.
| Information search appears on the same route.
|
| But, the catch is that "Internet" the physical infrastructure
| should be turned into public utility first. And then we can
| discuss the fundamental services running on Internet.
|
| So I support this direction. But I think the focus of the effort
| to be on turning Internet into public utility, right now.
| metalman wrote:
| Guggle has little place in my life. Android phone that has been
| heavily fiddled with,no pay store,no jeemail,etc. This is hard to
| maintain ,as so many services are interlinked and useing heavy
| duty add blockers ,etc breaks a lot of sites. Living in a low
| population rural area,mobile intetnet is the by far best choice
| for me. And so I am in the process of choosing a new phone that
| will be my main device,it will be very tame and to my liking,and
| my current phone will get a talk and text sim with no data and be
| reset to factory level awfulness and used for those occasions
| where its just much easier to let the algorithyms play with each
| other and hold my nose untill its switched off. I will delay
| getting an actual guggle account as long as possible. So here I
| am a hardcore lemyalone Ill mind my own buisiness type,doing all
| the workarounds ,and just finding that non viable and costing me
| what has become basic access to goods and services.
| sigzero wrote:
| What a waste of resources to sue like that. They aren't going to
| win it.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| They don't have to win it. They have to make Google think
| carefully about what boundaries exist for them, politically,
| and make sure that they don't cross them to the point that Ohio
| (or whoever) can win. And if that restrains Google's behavior,
| Ohio may have in fact won, even if they don't win the lawsuit.
| obnauticus wrote:
| So why aren't we doing the same thing to Comcast again?
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Comcast isn't a global monopoly. It's a small regional monopoly
| in some rural areas where it's mostly unprofitable for other
| ISPs to build out.
|
| Comcast just lacks Google's PR flair, and doesn't have an army
| of paid lobbying organizations entirely focused around making
| them look like a public good. (And yes, TechDirt is one of
| these paid organizations.)
| the_only_law wrote:
| How is google a global monopoly, there are other search
| engines out there, other mobile operating systems, other
| cloud providers, etc.
|
| EDIT: not even trying to bicker, there are multiple comments
| calling Google a monopoly, but I have no idea what market
| they dominate, or perhaps I'm misunderstanding what I
| monopoly is.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| So, for one, "monopoly" doesn't technically concern
| "literally only one", but that it has a "dominant market
| share". Monopoly is a term that feels a bit too narrow, but
| it's understood to apply to the issue a bit more broadly in
| law and legal discussions. In many cases, you're understood
| to be a monopoly if you have say, 70% of a market or more.
|
| Google is over 85% of all search traffic. Now, you might
| argue as Google has, that sure, anyone can change their
| default search to Bing. However, the issue with dominant
| companies is the network and second order effects of how
| they impact everything else.
|
| For example, Google's search data is primarily refined by
| "the fact that everyone is searching with Google". So the
| more popular Google becomes, the better it's data
| becomes... and the less possible it is for other search
| engines to compete. It's not a talent problem, it's a data
| problem.
|
| But another big aspect is the _other side_ of a search
| transaction: The websites you find with Google. Since
| Google is 85% of search, Google search rankings determine
| if businesses survive, pretty much singlehandedly. It doesn
| 't matter if you're first on Bing, because people who find
| you on Bing aren't enough to sustain your business. You
| must be findable on Google.
|
| Often, that means businesses must do business with Google:
| The first "search result" on Google search is almost always
| a paid advertisement. Businesses are forced to do business
| with Google to exist, and the fact that other search
| engines exist is... mostly irrelevant to them. This also
| means Google can dictate what websites can and can't
| display, what technologies they must and must not use, etc.
| AMP is terrible but Google was giving preferential
| treatment to websites with AMP, so AMP is understandably
| all over the place now.
|
| Mobile operating systems is an intriguing one, because
| believe it or not, if you understand the market they're in
| _Android is a total monopoly_. Android is 100% of the
| mobile operating system market. The default question to ask
| is "what about iOS", and the answer is simple: iOS isn't
| on the market. Because the market isn't consumers, it's
| phone manufacturers, and Apple iOS is only available for
| the Apple iPhone.
|
| If you're Samsung or HTC or Lenovo or Huawei or ZTE or
| Motorola, you have one option to sell phones: Sell
| Androids. Sure, Huawei has forked Android because it got
| banned by the US, but it's _still Android_. The only
| competitor in the mobile OS space that had any traction at
| all was Windows Mobile and it 's dead. If you go into a
| cell carrier store today, they'll sell you an iPhone, or
| they'll sell you two dozen phones that all run the only
| operating system on the market: Android.
|
| Android has an "other side" aspect too: App developers.
| Even if iOS exists, businesses have to develop Android apps
| to reach consumers on mobile devices, and that means they
| have to do business with Google. And not just app
| development companies either. Imagine if Allstate Insurance
| said their app was only available on iOS: Pretty much every
| business in every category of industry ends up having to do
| business with Google. And that's a monopoly.
|
| Google isn't a monopoly in cloud providers, it's actually
| in like fourth place. Apparently they're just... not good
| at everything. *shrug*
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Comcast lobbyists bribe better.
|
| _Allegedly._
| sidibe wrote:
| I think Google can bribe just as well. The difference is
| politicians feel like Google and its business model are more
| actively disliked because the media is very focused on it,
| particularly the more left-leaning and right-leaning media. I
| think outside of hacker news and politics bubbles, people
| actually still have a positive view about Google's services
| though
| fn-mote wrote:
| Yes, shaking my head here. If they don't have the willpower to
| manage Comcast, market cap ~$250B, how in the world will they
| be able to do anything with Google, worth ~$1600B?
|
| I wish so much they would care about something they could
| _actually change_.
| [deleted]
| Andrex wrote:
| I'd rather they target the ISPs first, personally. I realize it's
| not zero-sum.
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