[HN Gopher] Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet comp...
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Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a public
utility
Author : infodocket
Score : 898 points
Date : 2021-06-08 18:31 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.dispatch.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.dispatch.com)
| aptxkid wrote:
| Internet is a utility. Google/Facebook is not. It's like water is
| utility but having ice delivered to you is a service not a
| utility.
| 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.
| ayushchat wrote:
| Google is not the same as railroads or electricity companies.
| Nobody pays for Google, and it's not owned by a government. I see
| the anti trust issues because of Google dominance, but the answer
| to that is not to make Google a public utility. If governments
| care about protecting local businesses, they should make their
| own directories so good that people go there to search instead of
| Google.
|
| Google is a private company which has made a great product for
| over 20 years. And now it's benefiting off of it. That's what
| private companies do
| 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).
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| Why is US laws applicable to Google ???. What if Google simply
| relocates it's incorporation domicile to Lichtenstein or sometime
| to Mars instead ???.
|
| I am baffled as I can access and use Aliexpress based in China
| and they don't have any paperwork filed in my country to operate
| there.
| jaimex2 wrote:
| More countries need to start doing this.
| 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.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| What an awful idea. A municipality would probably only have
| one search engine, search engines would serve municipalities
| which could pressure them to suppress stories, there'd
| probably be one search engine targeting republican
| municipalities and one targeting democrat ones, there'd be
| pressure groups trying to get municipalities to use another
| search engine that doesn't show results they don't like and
| it would be incredibly hard to start a new search engine.
| qxga wrote:
| > Pay-per-search
|
| Yeah, the last thing I would want my search history to be
| tied to is my payment information.
| gnopgnip wrote:
| So trusting a private company that doesn't answer to the public
| at all is better than trusting elected officials that favor the
| incumbents?
| 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.
| adamcstephens wrote:
| Corporatism in practice is an oligarchy. The people at
| the top decide the fate of everyone lower than them. In
| some companies it is effectively a monarchy, as a sole
| person is driving the decisions.
| 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.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Google is effectively unconstrained, so hard to see how
| that could possibly be the case.
|
| Sure, the government has more power, but it is also more
| constrained. There is no public control of Google, it is
| not a publicly sanctioned power.
| wyager wrote:
| > Google is effectively unconstrained
|
| Google is many orders of magnitude less likely to kill
| someone (legally or extralegally) or seize their assets
| than US 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...
| warmfuzzykitten wrote:
| Backing up just a bit, what right does a state have to declare a
| web application a public utility? The jibber jabber about how
| Google might affect Ohio businesses seems just a distraction from
| the basic issue. A public utility is generally a business within
| the state that delivers essential services, like water and power,
| to areas in which there is no reasonable alternative, i.e., as
| local monopolies. If the internet itself is not considered a
| public utility - and indeed companies like Comcast and AT&T that
| deliver the internet as mostly local monopolies are not regulated
| as public utilities - how can a mere application on the web be
| considered a public utility? Even if it were, this would seem to
| be a matter for federal, not state, jurisdiction. The lawsuit
| seems more a publicity stunt than a serious action.
| 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.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I'm surprised I haven't seen much in the responses to this
| comment that the issue isn't so much that _consumers_ have
| other options (though given how high Google 's search reach is,
| how relevant is that if hardly anyone does), it's that for most
| _businesses_ your option is either have a strong search
| presence on Google or go out of business. There is just no
| viable path to avoid Google as a business when they control 80+
| percent of search market share.
|
| And you not only need to play the SEO game, you have to pray
| that Google just doesn't decide to get into your business and
| start returning their own results instead (which is exactly
| what this lawsuit is about). Especially since Google has had
| the chance to suck up all the data that you've provided in
| optimizing your site to provide the most relevant results.
| svachalek wrote:
| Yes, reading through so many responses it's clear that even
| on HN in 2021 we need to remind people that you are NOT
| Google's customer. You are the product!
| unishark wrote:
| > ...most businesses your option is either have a strong
| search presence on Google or go out of business.
|
| Your perspective is a bit skewed here towards the software
| world. There are businesses on every street-corner in the US,
| and for that matter world, without any meaningful internet
| presence or need for great search engine ranking. And for
| that matter, consumer products and consumer-facing businesses
| are only a subset of the $20T+ economy of the US.
| nine_k wrote:
| These businesses without internet presence usually still
| want to be shown on g.maps.
|
| OTOH maps add businesses even if the businesses don't add
| themselves.
| unishark wrote:
| That falls under what I'd call not a meaningful internet
| presence because it is google handing over the same info
| from maps and business directories.
| adrr wrote:
| Do you Google shoes to find shoes,some workout shorts or any
| consumer product line? Search is irrelevant for any consumer
| brand from a discovery standpoint point. What do you Google
| from a consumer perspective?
| kilnr wrote:
| Uh, yes? All of those. What do you do, hope a salesperson
| in a retail store doesn't rip you off?
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > Search is irrelevant for any consumer brand from a
| discovery standpoint point.
|
| I can't believe this is a serious comment. Literally
| hundreds of billions of dollars would say otherwise. I
| search for consumer products on Google all the time.
| actuator wrote:
| I think they are right. Even personally with the
| Google/DDG split I use, I almost never search for
| products on them. I go to Amazon or any other retailer.
| If I don't know what to buy and I need reviews outside of
| Amazon then I might search for it on Google/Youtube or
| browse some specific site like WireCutter.
|
| For me and for people I know, even the general search is
| now more and more served by new search engine platforms
| like Alexa/Siri which are the only search engines on
| products like Echo and have a monopoly.
|
| With vertical search platforms coming up, looking at just
| a general search engine is the old way. Search is no
| longer just the traditional old style search engines from
| 90s. Alexa/Siri haven't been monetised yet, but you can
| see the dominance of Amazon in product search space by
| their rapidly growing ad revenue.
| smaudet wrote:
| Ugh, no.
|
| Nobody give a flying flitwick what products you _buy_ -
| there are only products to buy on the major exchanges
| (Amazon /Walmart/<InsertGroceryStore>).
|
| No, this has directly to do with stealing ideas on a mass
| scale, and then not really being able to cope without
| handing your sh _t over - if your business is to sell
| e.g. lift truck systems to big box stores, and you spend
| time, energy, effort, going through all the systems to
| figure out what you need to do properly build systems
| which those big box stores want, there NOTHING STOPPING
| GOOGLE FROM STEALING ALL THOSE IDEAS VIA SEARCH RESULT
| AND PUTTING THAT BIZ OUT OF BIZ.
|
| Now yes you can argue some of it _might* be covered by
| Patent - thing is lawsuits cost time and money, big biz
| like Google? It can hire a lot of fancy lawyers and spend
| a lot of time _wasting your money_ while you try to
| litigate it 's IP theft. Meanwhile, because it dominates
| search results, your revenue streams drop to zero and you
| can't afford the fees to win...patent becomes irrelevant.
|
| Or worse, because patent's need to be complete
| ideas/concepts, it auto-files the patent before you ever
| get done dusting off the cobwebs on your concept.
|
| "Just hire a patent lawyer" - don't be ridiculous, that's
| exactly how you kill/stifle innovation. Nobody's
| innovating by _first_ hiring a patent lawyer, that 's
| what you do after the fact or if you just have buckets of
| money to throw around... (again, killing innovation by
| reducing 'innovators' to rich fuckers versus anyone who
| has a good idea and can implement it).
| adrr wrote:
| I've built two multi-billion dollar consumer retail
| companies where we didn't focus on SEO nor was organic or
| even SEM traffic a significant source of new customers.
| If you want to dump your money into SEO/SEM go for it but
| that's not how the retail startups are spending their
| money.
| crazygringo wrote:
| It's definitely hyperbole to say "irrelevant", but I
| think the overarching point is right.
|
| When I'm looking to buy something, I'll usually start my
| search on Amazon or Pinterest or Walmart or eBay or Etsy.
| Google is definitely a search of last resort.
|
| Everyone's behavior is different, but while Google may
| "own" search for knowledge, it absolutely does _not_
| "own" search for consumer products.
| nine_k wrote:
| You should check shopping.google.com. They aggregate all
| these, and their search us way less broken than Amazon's.
| zepto wrote:
| Indeed. I still have a Google account but the I don't remember
| the last time I signed in with it.
| asimjalis wrote:
| DuckDuckGo is 10 characters while Google is 6. That is a 67%
| overhead. If it was ddg or duck I would be more tempted to use
| it.
| 29083011397778 wrote:
| How about duck.com? Though it's an extra letter compared to
| _just_ google). Alternately, setting it as your default
| search engine sidesteps the issue just as well :)
| lobocinza wrote:
| All alternatives for Google search end up being Bing and it
| sucks when compared to Google.
| gentleman11 wrote:
| Is there a single internet savvy person besides stallman who is
| able to 100% avoid google? Even if you don't use gmail, almost
| everyone you message does. You lose access to most online
| videos. Google domains, fonts, and maps entangle a truly
| massive number of websites, including healthcare sites. In
| Covid, lots of clients or employers use google video calling.
| Schools almost but not quite make you use google drive. If you
| don't optimize your website for chrome, you worsen the
| experience of 90% or more of your users. If you don't play the
| seo game, nobody will know your site exists. It's not a
| realistic choice for 99% of people
| 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.
| SilverRed wrote:
| Hardly any of firefox is using rust. Servo was abandoned. I
| think the only rust part of FF right now is the CSS engine.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Servo was abandoned after all of the fanfaire? Was a
| reason ever given? I thought we were in the servo era.
| SilverRed wrote:
| Mozilla cut a bunch of jobs and the servo team was one of
| the teams cut. The servo project is not officially
| canceled but there is no clear future for it.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| > I think the only rust part of FF right now is the CSS
| engine.
|
| That's not correct.
|
| Currently, 9.5% is Rust https://4e6.github.io/firefox-
| lang-stats/
| 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.
| Guidii wrote:
| I'm curious to know which profitable companies never
| advertise.
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| Tesla, Huy Fong Foods (Sriracha), Costco, Krispy Kreme,
| Kiehl's, Spanx, Rolls-Royce, and Zara are some examples.
| tremon wrote:
| I wouldn't add Tesla in there, its CEO is an audiovisual
| billboard by itself.
| caslon wrote:
| Sourcehut, as a recent example.
| wernercd wrote:
| > advertisment is immoral
|
| Interesting opinion... have any facts to back up such an
| opinion? What's immoral about... spreading information
| about you and your business?
|
| There are immoral ways to go about advertising, without
| doubt. But advertising itself is immoral?
| caslon wrote:
| "What's immoral about... spreading information about you
| and your business?"
|
| Non-consensually forcing anyone into anything is wrong.
| Advertising violates the NAP.
|
| "But advertising itself is immoral?"
|
| Indeed.
| wernercd wrote:
| "non-consensually forcing anything into anyone" You have
| a perverveted view of "forcing" if you think sharing
| information is, as it sounds like you seem to be saying,
| the equivalent of rape.
|
| If I say something you disagree with... I'm not violating
| a "Non-Aggression Principle" - unless you think that
| opinions make you weak (I believe diverse thought makes
| you stronger - can't get new ideas without
| communication).
|
| And if you think communication REALLY is "aggression"...
| how do you pair the fact that you "forcing" your opinion
| on me about my opinion on advertising goes against your
| own principle? Isn't it kinda... a hypocritical blackhole
| of an opinion?
|
| Sharing info isn't itself immoral... it's LITERALLY the
| bedrock of civilization, free will, free speech, self
| defense, etc - all start with communication. The right to
| say stuff others don't like or even _GASP_ saying stuff
| that make them uncomfortable - like pointing out your
| paradoxical opinion. (HOW you share CAN be immoral... but
| not sharing /communication itself)
|
| Advertising, at it's core, is sharing information.
| Without freedom to communicate? without the ability to
| share ideas? We'd be afraid of fire. we would be monkeys
| in caves...
| caslon wrote:
| "You have a perverveted view of "forcing" if you think
| sharing information is, as it sounds like you seem to be
| saying, the equivalent of rape."
|
| Something doesn't have to be rape to be non-consensually
| forced upon someone; consider slavery, or compulsory
| schooling, or non-free Javascript. A well-documented
| method of torture is obscuring a captive's vision and
| looping a single song on repeat.
|
| "how do you pair the fact that you "forcing" your opinion
| on me about my opinion on advertising goes against your
| own principle? Isn't it kinda... a hypocritical blackhole
| of an opinion?"
|
| You asked for me to share the opinion, and as such, have
| given consent. Wider, though, this is a _message board._
| The point is to share on-topic messages. This includes
| opinions, but does not include ads.
|
| Advertising at its core is manipulation, not sharing
| information. Most advertisements grant the viewer net-
| negative information.
| 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.
| quadrifoliate wrote:
| > I don't think that your unwillingness to talk with your
| friends or business partners makes Google a public
| utility in a regulatory sense
|
| I mean, the tautological definition is that the
| regulators will decide whether Google is a public
| utility, or perhaps too big and needs to be broken up (a
| question separate from this particular lawsuit). All of
| us are just on the sidelines discussing it, and perhaps
| trying to influence our elected representatives.
|
| The fact that courts and regulators are at least
| considering it does mean that there is _some_ merit to
| the argument that it may not be practical to live Google-
| free these days. It 's _probably_ not just me being
| unwilling to talk to my friends and business partners.
| SilverRed wrote:
| >just talk to the person at the other end and ask for
| accomodation.
|
| And for almost every job position. They will tell you
| Meet is what they use and if that doesn't work for you,
| they are happy to cancel the interview.
| 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.
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| It's insane how fast a barebones linux desktop system
| feels these days. Even an rPi 4 can be really snappy with
| the right desktop environment and window manager. It
| makes one realize how slow and inefficient all these
| modern web technologies have become in practice.
|
| It's been happening for decades, but while computers get
| orders of magnitude faster, software gets slower at a
| faster rate, consuming all of the gains and then some.
|
| Edit: here's an interesting example just looking at input
| latency: https://danluu.com/input-lag/ if you take the
| browser into account as part of the system as well, I'm
| sure it's much, much worse.
| 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.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| PeerTube is not a serious alternative to YouTube. Almost
| all of the most popular content is missing and there are
| no reasonable alternatives. It claims to have over
| 400,000 videos on the site; YouTube gets 700,000 _hours_
| of video uploaded each day.
|
| Android without Google Play, unless you live in mainland
| China, does not "work great" the way most people want.
| I've done it and it was basically like not having a
| smartphone at all.
|
| You cannot use banking apps, social media, games,
| streaming/Chromecast, maps (yes, I know OsmAnd exists; it
| has next to no information about businesses or landmarks
| and takes several minutes to plot a route that Google
| Maps or Waze calculates in less than 5 sedonds). Firefox
| is a reasonable alternative to Chrome and K-9 mail is
| good but that's about it. Unless MicroG suddenly became
| good in the past two years it's not a feasible solution
| even for people who are technically-minded.
| fossuser wrote:
| I think it's more possible than others are suggesting,
| but I think there are exceptions.
|
| There is no good competitor to YouTube - there are a lot
| of bad ones yes, but no good one. I'd argue this is
| objective fact.
|
| I use fastmail and my own domain, but most people use
| gmail - I don't think that's that big of a deal though.
|
| It's odd they'd target Google in the OP - telecom
| providers like Comcast and Spectrum are much worse in how
| they treat their customers and in those cases there
| really isn't another option most of the time.
| 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.
| cycomanic wrote:
| He was talking about videos, that is bittorrent as an
| alternative to youtube. So how do you discover legal
| videos that interest you on bittorrent?
| caslon wrote:
| The same way I discover new movies: See what everyone
| else is checking out.
| [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.)
| kevingadd wrote:
| There is market competition in some utilities depending on
| where you live
| 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.
| Matticus_Rex wrote:
| If they're hard to avoid, it's because lots of people are
| voluntarily choosing them because (in their estimation)
| they provide the best value for cost.
|
| I personally find it rather annoying that the mumbly trap
| influence has infiltrated a lot of popular rap, and if
| I'm going to hang out with other hip hop fans, I end up
| hearing some stuff I don't personally love. But it's
| popular because a lot of people like it. It's not
| _impossible_ to avoid -- there 's just a cost to avoiding
| it because of its popularity.
|
| Google's like that.
| simonh wrote:
| We've got multiple comments right here saying how easy it
| was for them to avoid Google completely.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| Used phones exist, and even more are out there if you are
| willing to do things like replace a screen at home.
|
| Facebook and instagram exist for advertising: Small
| businesses aren't going to get much traction on google anyway
| without specific searches for it, though android is finally
| catching up and I now get local places in game adverts.
|
| Do a different job.
| 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.
| SilverRed wrote:
| >You can find a smartphone for under 250 at any phone
| store.
|
| These phones all run android or have no features which are
| required in the modern age. The OP point is that avoiding
| google is a privilege many do not have.
|
| >Small business are finding success through facebook
|
| Your competitors are advertising on facebook and google. If
| you want to compete you have no choice but to do both.
| whynaut wrote:
| > Your competitors are advertising on facebook and
| google. If you want to compete you have no choice but to
| do both.
|
| My intuition is this is not a meaningful factor for a
| locally-focused business.
| SilverRed wrote:
| And if you are bigger than local it doesn't matter if you
| are forced to do business with google? It's pretty easy
| to come up with a number of ways people are forced to use
| google products and how they should be treated different
| to small services.
|
| Right now it would be completely within googles right to
| block an individual from using youtube at all. You would
| have no legal recourse against this and it would
| massively impact your life. Almost all video on the web
| is on youtube. Even government information videos are
| hosted on youtube now as well as countless general
| information videos and health/safety videos.
|
| It's pretty easy to make a case that everyone should have
| a right to watch videos on youtube because of how
| important the content on youtube is. This is what making
| google a utility means. If some random forum bans you,
| you get on with your life. If Google does something it
| can have serious impacts on your life where you have no
| options for alternatives.
| ipaddr wrote:
| I have no idea where you get the type of iphone you
| describe online for $250.00. If I was an apple guy I
| would want to buy new and pay full price so apple had
| more money to make the products I love.
|
| I didn't upgrade since 2013, and since getting my new
| phone I found no new features important or even that
| useful. Having more memory allowed me to download more.
| Bigger screen doesn't fit in the pocket. Features like
| split screen or shake twice for the camera ti show up or
| the new ways to lock and unlock your phone don't really
| matter.
| SilverRed wrote:
| This is exactly the point. There is no $250 iphone. So
| unless you can afford a much more expensive phone, your
| only option is a privacy invasive google phone.
|
| Being able to chose not to use google is a luxury here.
| Therefor google is a monopoly for these low income people
| and also a utility since having a phone and the services
| that come with it are essential.
| haxton wrote:
| > Try finding a smartphone under 250$
|
| Jio.
|
| > try advertising any small business on the internet
|
| Facebook is the dominate player here.
|
| > try avoiding meets meeting when you apply for a job
|
| Zoom? Bluejeans?
| [deleted]
| 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.
| cout wrote:
| So why then isn't this an anti-trust case instead of
| trying to make google a public utility? It seems Ohio is
| throwing cases and seeing what sticks.
| jlarocco wrote:
| That's a good question, and I don't know.
|
| Can a state bring an anti-trust case or does it have to
| be done by at the federal level?
| anders_p 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.
|
| You talking like BUILDING A POWER PLANT is on par with
| drilling a well in your backward.
|
| So how about this, the upfront cost and effort of
| DRILLING A WELL is at least a few orders of magnitude
| easier than BUILDING A POWER PLANT.
|
| ---
|
| Does that mean water shouldn't be a utility?
|
| Or what was your point exactly?
| judge2020 wrote:
| It's relatively simple and easy to change your default
| search engine and/or type in a different url, in fact, it
| quite literally costs you $0 (as in - it doesn't cost you
| any more to use ddg over google), so digging a well, and
| the further cost of routing your pipes to pull from that
| underground water is infinitely more expensive to do.
| This is the principle behind utility companies being
| regulated: it's insanely expensive to do the alternative
| of using that utility company. Now, Apple and Google (in
| terms of Android) might need to be considered some sort
| of public utility (eg. providing an app store) since it
| would cost competitors tens of billions of dollars to
| match the existing ecosystem, but Google Search is far
| from being considered a utility.
| dntrkv wrote:
| The point is neither drilling a well or building your own
| power plant are realistic alternatives for 99% of the
| people. Whereas switching to ddg is a realistic
| alternative for 99% of the people.
| anders_p wrote:
| Is that also a realistic alternative for a business?
|
| To just place their ads on DDG? Where only about 2% of
| consumers are? And a huge part of DDG's users have ad
| block?
|
| That would be a death sentence for a business, when the
| competitors have access to >80% of consumers on Google.
|
| The lawsuit is about Google and their customers (the
| advertisers), NOT their users (who are actually part of
| the product Google sells).
| 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.
| vxNsr wrote:
| Utilities were also originally private competing
| companies and then they consolidated and the gov decided
| to make them regulated monopolies bec it made more sense
| then 10 different companies running their own electric
| lines. It's possible to argue that one good search engine
| makes more sense vs 10 different small ok ones, the gov
| should step in and regulate.
| 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.
| da_chicken wrote:
| Water (or mineral) rights are often not included when you
| buy property within a city, too. "Just dig a well," is
| often literally illegal. Water rights are notoriously
| complicated and obscure.
| 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.
| dismantlethesun wrote:
| Sure, but he poster is arguing that having alternatives
| is no reason to not declare a large company's product a
| utility.
|
| My municipality is great for wells, most houses use them,
| but the water company that was recently introduced is
| still classified a utility.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| "perfectly good alternative"
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&
| que...
| garciasn wrote:
| Often, cities will not allow you to use your own well,
| insisting you move on to city water.
| oogabooga123 wrote:
| DuckDuckGo gives vastly different search results from
| Google. Last thing we need is the government involved in
| "improving" search results.
| entangledqubit wrote:
| Then you can also play a tragedy-of-the-commons aquifer
| game with all the commercial users of water in your area.
| Can you afford to keep making your well deeper than
| theirs? There are a few towns in California engaged in
| the resulting endgame.
| 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.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Most apartment buildings won't let you store large
| amounts of water on property.
| anders_p wrote:
| I'm pretty sure those same apartment buildings wouldn't
| let you set up the large scale server farm required for
| you to set up your own search engine alternative to
| Google either.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| That's not even remotely comparable.
|
| Firstly it's not structurally practical to store giant
| tanks of water on private property. So the comparison
| makes no practical sense anyway.
|
| But more, there is a _significant market_ for private
| water in other properties. It 's a non-trivial market
| which serves a significant proportion of the US
| population.
|
| There is no significant market for private/non-Google
| search. Not only is DDG a footnote, but Google's
| dominance forces businesses to take steps to optimise
| their Google rank - or face penalties by losing access to
| potential customers.
|
| Google can also remove businesses _who aren 't even
| customers_ from its rankings on a whim, with no redress.
|
| It's clearly a monopoly.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| When I lived in China, I didn't have the luxury of having
| access to Google, so I used Bing instead. It was actually
| quite reasonable for most of my needs, I'm not sure why
| more people don't give it a go. Of course, now that I
| live in the states again, I use Google, but most of my
| searching is on YouTube anyways (which was something else
| I didn't have access to in China).
| 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.
| bumby wrote:
| You can also go buy books and search for information
| without using electrons but the analogy is flawed. Your
| rainwater tanks do not have the economy of scale
| necessary to produce a natural monopoly until you build a
| tank and distribution system large enough to supply fresh
| water to an entire town, at which point it makes it
| difficult or impractical to compete.
| 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?
| dntrkv wrote:
| It's not. There are a ton of variables that determine the
| quality of your water. In many cases, well water will be
| significantly worse (my childhood home being a great
| example).
| toomanybeersies wrote:
| Untreated borehole water is often unsafe to for humans to
| drink, at least that's usually the case here in
| Australia.
|
| As for cities, it depends entirely on the specific city.
|
| The city I grew up in was supplied by a river that was
| unsafe to even swim in due to agricultural runoff and
| high levels of heavy metals from volcanic activity. Our
| drinking water was so heavily chlorinated that you
| practically needed a water filter to make it drinkable.
|
| The city I went to university was supplied by an aquifer
| and modern, high quality piping. The water was such high
| quality, it required no treatment at all.
| 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 .
| throwaway_kufu wrote:
| How long to break even after building your own search
| engine?
| 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.
| viraptor wrote:
| No, or at least not only. They mix a few sources.
| nverno wrote:
| how do you dig a well if you live in the city? Buy water from
| the grocery store to take showers? cmon, this is ridiculous
| 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.
| Dah00n wrote:
| More like using the "free" fountain with a DDG logo on it
| with water being transferred from the nearby Microsoft
| fountain (but with a promise that they add their own
| magic sprinkly stuff to the water).
| [deleted]
| 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.
| anders_p wrote:
| I pretty sure that you completely missed the point of the
| comment. - Woosh.
|
| He wasn't arguing that building your own toilet is a good
| option - just that it exists as an option.
|
| And the fact of options merely existing, doesn't
| automatically exclude something from being recognized as a
| utility.
| Dah00n wrote:
| >"Go sh*t in a chemical toiled" is not a reasonable
| alternative, the cost alone is ludicrous.
|
| "Go buy an iPhone" is not a reasonable alternative, the
| cost alone is ludicrous.
|
| Same situation, different words.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| You completely misunderstood the comment you're replying
| to. He's saying that the mere existence of alternatives
| does not preclude something from being a utility.
| pcmoney wrote:
| Thank you! I am also not even saying Google _should_ be a
| utility just that the standards for what makes something
| a utility candidate are not standard but rather
| arbitrary. Most utilities came about through lobbying one
| way or another not through some clinical application of
| rules.
|
| I am concerned with Google's search dominance and its
| ability to use that to suppress and manipulate even if it
| is just to get me to buy something.
| theknocker wrote:
| People who can't admit monopolies exist are why this
| conversation is consistently stupid. You.
| 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.
| pcmoney wrote:
| I am not saying the suit has merit or will or won't get
| dismissed. I am saying Google's dominance in search and its
| willingness to use that to suppress/influence should make
| everyone want that to be a more competitive market.
|
| It is not good that you need to pay "protection" money to
| Google so that your business shows up when your exact
| business name is searched (if your competitors buys your
| keywords). That is of course ok because its Google's
| business decision. What is less ok is that there are no new
| search companies making any headway in regards to market
| share. It is a stagnant sector of what should be a dynamic
| industry.
|
| I want an endless corporate bar fight of companies trying
| to be better at search that works incredibly/game-
| changingly with any tool I have (not just Google apps).
| anders_p wrote:
| Google has a near monopoly on search traffic.
|
| Businesses HAVE to use Google for ads. Only placing ads on
| DuckDuckGo is not a viable strategy when more than 80% of
| all search traffic is via Google.
|
| Google prioritizes their own products. Sometimes they even
| copy ideas and implement their own version of a product,
| and then they bump the competitors below themselves in the
| search results.
|
| THAT is the problem, and why the lawsuit might hold water.
| slenk wrote:
| Not necessarily. I know cities where you HAVE to use their
| water if you want running water. No digging a well.
| pcmoney wrote:
| Move?
| slenk wrote:
| That costs more money
| 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.
| wait_a_minute wrote:
| Interesting perspective,thanks for sharing!
| wait_a_minute wrote:
| In general by government protection we just mean that they
| are receiving property protection from police and from
| local governmental offices for like water quality
| inspections, park maintenance, general public services like
| the post office, etc, right? not that the government
| decides anything of note for the utility/company of people
| who are doing their best to run things based on merit and
| performance and team cohesion and actual delivery of
| objectives? not any political shit? I ask because I'm truly
| afraid at what people are starting to think when they talk
| about government's role, at least from my age or younger
| and I'm probably on the younger side on this forum so I
| want to know what the more experienced people here think
| about this kind of thing.
| bumby wrote:
| It's hard to answer completely because it varies by
| municipality and I'm not an expert. But the public
| utility commission does regulate quite a bit, potentially
| ranging from where a utility can build, how much
| renewable sources they must have, how much they can
| charge, etc.
|
| In exchange, the utility can essentially be guaranteed
| that competitors will not be allowed to enter the market.
| In the past few decades, there has been more movement
| towards deregulated markets but not without issues. (See
| the documentary "The Smartest Guys in the Room" if you
| aren't already familiar with the story of Enron).
| 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.
| ngngngng wrote:
| Even if you do move to alternatives to public utilities,
| many areas will not allow you to disconnect from them and
| have a required minimum bill.
|
| For example, If I got many solar panels and backup
| batteries to power my house, I would still be required to
| pay $5 a month to the local electric company and would not
| be allowed to disconnect from them.
| Biganon wrote:
| People need to stop acting like the law is the same
| everywhere. "X is illegal, period" is probably only true
| for murder and theft, and even then, with a lot of regional
| variations.
| splitstud wrote:
| This is nowhere near universally true
| bliteben wrote:
| My neighbor gets city water and has a well for grey water.
| I live in Washington. Today you learned.
| tremon wrote:
| _I am sure there are a bunch of people on here that don't use
| any Google products_
|
| I am pretty sure that number is close to zero. googleapis.com
| is a Google product, and not using it breaks half the Internet.
| Trust me, I've tried.
| ivanstame wrote:
| Only people like us, developers, geeks uses those kind of
| services. The majority uses google.
| [deleted]
| 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?
| aroman wrote:
| What step were they unable to complete in the process of
| changing their browser's default search from Google to Yahoo?
| (With your walking them through it, I mean?)
| pyuser583 wrote:
| They need to be able to get to Yahoo Mail from their home
| page and the search engine result page.
|
| This is a hard requirement.
| anders_p wrote:
| I second whynaut's suggestion.
|
| That's precisely what I did for the elders.
|
| I set up pinned bookmark shortcuts on the 'tab bar' (had
| to enable the 'show bookmarks bar' option).
|
| Now they have a button for 'mail', one for 'search', one
| for 'maps', and one for 'facebook' etc. Those buttons are
| always visible, no matter how far they venture into the
| internet. Solved the problem for them (or rather, for me,
| lol)
| whynaut wrote:
| No stake in this, just a suggestion and also a little
| curious. Could a shortcut pinned to the tab or nav bar
| work? I keep my email in a pinned Safari tab.
| themolecularman 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.
|
| How old are your parents?
|
| Is it search you're referring to or the email platforms of
| each?
| zionic wrote:
| How many of those users have 8.8.8.8 as DNS and have no clue
| they pipe all their usage to google?
| fomine3 wrote:
| Other alternatives are fine, but Vimeo isn't alternative for
| viewer (or even uploader). YouTube is a platform that hosts
| many unique contents with many worldwide viewers.
| 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.
| SilverRed wrote:
| Discovery and hosting are the exact same thing right now.
| People don't open up their RSS reader to find new videos,
| they go directly to youtube. If you aren't on youtube then
| you won't be seen.
| 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.
| mwilliaams wrote:
| Have you not heard of YouTubers? There are a lot of
| people who make a living off of YouTube.
| 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.
| GlitchMr wrote:
| Another exception would be gaming videos where Twitch is
| rather popular. Sure, many Twitch users will re-upload
| their streams on YouTube (no reason not to, YouTube is a
| popular platform still even in gaming), but most of the
| revenue will actually come from Twitch. That said, for
| most videos YouTube is realistically the only choice.
| 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.
| schainks wrote:
| Ah, yes -- at best, politicians playing dumb, at worst
| politicians actually being that dumb.
|
| Also, the railroad companies have been actively screwing with
| transportation in the US for over a century, so it's pretty rich
| of AG Yost to use them as an example.
| Maursault wrote:
| It surprises me that a lot of the comments here seem to be
| oblivious to how Google's PageRank algorithm ranks search
| results. [1]
|
| _PageRank works by counting the number and quality of links to a
| page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website
| is. The underlying assumption is that more important websites are
| likely to receive more links from other websites._ [1]
|
| The results of a Google search may not be as one expects because
| PageRank is the primary algorithm used to return Google search
| results. If owners of a website want to improve their Google
| result ranking, they are really required to tune their website to
| show up in Google search, but more importantly, they need other
| sites to link to their site, and presumably, the more popular the
| site, the more links there are to it.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank
| psilo wrote:
| Brave Search have plans to charge for searching and no ads. Seems
| an interesting model.
| Keverw wrote:
| Pretty hostile of Ohio. I feel like the governor and other state
| leaders are out of touch with tech. Don't know how this could
| help the state or Columbus attract tech. They should try to learn
| a lesson or two from Texas or Utah. Idiots running the state will
| continue the brain drain problem.
| sarora27 wrote:
| Agreed. This was my biggest reason for leaving Columbus as soon
| as I could. Most of the folks who "talk tech" have no idea what
| they're talking about. Just a sea of Professional Services
| Consultants configuring software for "clients".
| 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.
| adamcstephens wrote:
| Republicans are _a_ problem, but so are Democrats. We
| need more than two parties.
| 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?
| joelbondurant wrote:
| Commies gonna commie.
| thunkshift1 wrote:
| Well, isn't this a fun filled comment section
| 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.
| [deleted]
| 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.
| Jcowell wrote:
| Not that I want to get into politics on HN but care we
| seriously forgetting which party didn't vote to pass a
| stimulus bill for the people a couple a months ago?
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| Also not to get into politics, but this one is near to me
| -- Is anyone in our ___ing government ever going to
| actually care about this insane debt we've accumulated? Do
| you know how long HN made fun of Uber for burning through
| investor cash? What about our Government? Are they beyond
| critique? What's wrong with not passing a stimulus bill?
|
| It was the correct move in my opinion. What in god's green
| earth are we doing adding trillions more to our deficit
| when we are rapidly approaching 30 trillion in the red? We
| are sacrificing many future generations. No one has stopped
| to think if the long term trade offs are worth it. No one
| stopped to think if all this damage to the mental health of
| our young ones, our future, is worth it, if the isolation
| is worth it. No one stopped to think at all. Arguably if
| the federal government would stop being everyone's baby
| sitter, it may push states and local governments to do
| their own jobs instead.
|
| But alas, no one thinks like this anymore. They just think
| there's an infinite well of money, and big daddy government
| is always going to be there to give me a loan, and it will
| always continue to be this way, when there are many, many
| examples of this not being the case. Rome will fall.
| Jcowell wrote:
| I feel like this highlights a disparity between the users
| on Hacker News and the common people. For the majority of
| us , our work was easily transferable online or we we're
| (for the most part) essential workers. This was not true
| for a good chunk of Americans who struggle to make ends
| meet and lived in states were unemployment benefits were
| so inaccessible that people had to write their state
| politicians to push the backlog along. For people like
| this the stimulus and other just as important things were
| crucial to their survival.
|
| What's an absolute joke is that the Richest Country on
| this planet showed the most embarrassing display of
| helping it's citizens while our neighbor up above was
| able to. I cannot see the how states on their own would
| be able to help their citizens when they have no ability
| to print money. This was absolutely the role of the
| federal government and it botched it in the most insane
| way possible.
| 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.
| johbjo wrote:
| Let's say the electric company wants to start a restaurant. So
| they shut the power to the competing restaurants in the
| neighbourhood. Everyone agrees it would be outrageous.
|
| Now, what about Apple dictating payment policy on apps in the app
| store?
|
| Google premiering their own services in the results? Forcing
| their own apps onto all Android devices, impossible to remove?
|
| These platforms turn themselves into natural monopolies, and
| therefore they can not be treated as "private companies".
| Decentralisation would be a technical solution, but meanwhile I
| think regulation is what will happen.
| swiley wrote:
| Making the App Store a public utility instead of preventing
| Apple from forcing their users to do things is absolutely the
| wrong response because it ensures Apple will be in power
| forever.
| ben_w wrote:
| They have the capacity to be bad, but for example Apple (who
| are in a similar place WRT this) _started_ with apps you can't
| remove and has now made most of them removable; and last time I
| looked (a while ago now) many unremovable Android apps came
| from the phone vendor.
|
| I'm all in favour of keeping companies under a close eye to
| make sure they don't become an abusive monopoly -- my naive
| political philosophy is that power should be conserved, so the
| more e.g. economic power you have the less e.g. free market
| choice you should be allowed -- but I don't see in Google[0]
| what you see in them.
|
| Also? If they can easily become a natural monopoly,
| decentralisation won't solve anything in the long term.
|
| [0] nor Apple, Netflix, Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter, or Microsoft;
| but that is how I see Facebook and Amazon.
| silasdavis wrote:
| > If they can easily become a natural monopoly,
| decentralisation won't solve anything in the long term.
|
| I don't follow the reasoning here.
| ben_w wrote:
| Saying something is naturally a monopoly is equivalent to
| saying it's naturally not decentralised. They're opposites.
| cbolton wrote:
| This analogy seems way off to me. It completely misses the fact
| that Google is doing what it's supposed to do which is giving
| the user the information they're looking for.
|
| I don't think cutting power is giving the customer
| (restaurants) or users (not clear in the analogy) what they
| want.
|
| It's true that with flight search, competitor results are de-
| emphasized, but as far as I'm concerned Google could even drop
| them entirely, showing only their internal results if they want
| to. It's answering the user query, and if the user is
| unsatisfied they can trivially switch to another source of
| information.
|
| To make a better analogy, consider that flight search is a
| specialized version of what Google does more generally. So:
|
| Electric company "EC" wants to start providing DC current to
| interested customers, so they show the option prominently in
| their communications with their customers.
|
| This is a tragedy for the existing DC industry because "EC" has
| the best reputation (highest reliability) in the general
| electricity industry so most people will first consider them
| for a DC contract even if they're not necessarily the best for
| DC power. Still, unhappy customers can easily switch to another
| DC provider.
| titzer wrote:
| > It completely misses the fact that Google is doing what
| it's supposed to do which is giving the user the information
| they're looking for.
|
| It used to work that way in the beginning. Now it steers you
| to whatever the highest bidder wants, whatever their massive
| opaque ad-revenue-optimizing AI thinks is best, which
| incidentally seems to be SEO-optimized, pre-digested and ad-
| laden portals into a whole other ecosystem of in-your-face
| click farms and garbage results stabbing you in the eyeballs.
|
| Were you not aware of the massive conflict of interest that a
| search engine with ads represents...from the very beginning?
| ashneo76 wrote:
| Are there many options to Google? That is where the example
| breaks down
| krisoft wrote:
| How do these services turn themselves into natural monopolies?
| There are many non-Apple phones available. There are also non-
| google search engines. What makes these natural monopolies
| then?
| Dah00n wrote:
| I'm not GP but a monopoly doesn't mean "we own the market
| everywhere" or "we have close to 100% of the market-share".
| We have this same discussion every time someone says
| monopoly..
|
| Apple for example is a 100% monopoly in the app store.
| Likewise Google can be a monopoly on their search result
| page. It would have sounded insane some years back but today,
| when google search is a gatekeeper (like Facebook), they
| absolutely can.
|
| You use the example of there being many non-Apple phones
| (while strictly true there are really only two players, iOS
| and Android). Can Apple use their power to kill your new
| innovative Fitness-From-Home app? They are absolutely in a
| position to do so. There's really not much else to it than
| that. Can Google strangle travel planner sites by showing
| flight plans in Google search results? Yes they can and a
| court would likely see this as abuse of a monopoly no matter
| if Google have 70% or 99% of the search engine market.
|
| Or use the grandma test: Can you sell your Travel Planner
| Service to Grandma if Google starts adding the same info to
| Google search for "free"? Can you sell her a Fitness App for
| her iPhone if Apple shuts you out because they are going to
| launch their own iClone fitness app?
|
| If Google goes from Search to Search/travel planner/hotel
| reservation/translator/and so on they are (ab)using their
| power to move into other areas and by shutting out
| competition they get more users thereby becoming a natural
| monopoly.
|
| And as always happens when "The M" word is used and someone
| explains something we will have replies yelling _Apple 's
| AppStore isn't a monopoly, you can just use Android_ and we
| go around in circles.
| roenxi wrote:
| > Apple for example is a 100% monopoly in the app store.
|
| Every physical store is a monopoly in their own space. It
| is hard to see that specific point being important.
|
| The fact that Apple gate-keeps their store is also a major
| selling point of the iPhone. I don't want random people to
| be able to load random apps onto the phones of my family
| members. Having a programmable combined
| GPS/microphone/wallet/photo repository on hand all hours is
| already quite bad enough, there is an argument for curation
| here. If Apple ever starts making decisions that are
| unacceptable/grossly inferior to an alternative then there
| are other phones.
|
| > Can you sell your Travel Planner Service to Grandma if
| Google starts adding the same info to Google search for
| "free"?
|
| That isn't monopolistic behaviour, that is simply
| competition. Monopolistic is when Google won't allow your
| Travel Planner to enter their search index, or deranks it
| in favour of their alternative. If the competition is head-
| to-head then there isn't anything special about the
| situation.
| Dah00n wrote:
| >Every physical store is a monopoly in their own space.
|
| This comparison is disingenuous. There aren't only two
| big physical stores (and maybe a handful small stores
| hardly no one knows about) in the entire world. If 99% of
| all physical stores were a Walmart or Costco you could
| compare but luckily this isn't so.
|
| >The fact that Apple gate-keeps their store is also a
| major selling point of the iPhone.
|
| That is beside the point. Just because something is a
| feature you (or most) like doesn't mean it is legal or
| not, monopoly or not. I'm not going to discuss if it is a
| good or bad feature because it would be off-topic.
|
| >Monopolistic is when Google won't allow your Travel
| Planner to enter their search index, or deranks it in
| favour of their alternative.
|
| Consider this: You have 100.000 result on Travel planners
| today with your site being number 3 and tomorrow you also
| have 100.000 results with your site being number 3 but
| now there's a big box above all the results that tells
| you what you were looking for (and the data might even
| come from your site). This is way worse than being de-
| ranked. That's not fair competition.
|
| Another example: You have one of many Fitness Apps for
| iOS. For years Apple can see data on just what people
| search for, install, etc. and then one day they use all
| this data to create their own fitness app. Quickly your
| app would be irrelevant. Add to that that we have proof
| that Apple abuse their position by offering to buy a
| successful app and if refused they harass the publisher
| in different ways _and_ create their own.
| valprop1 wrote:
| The big tech giants have grown too big for Governments and
| Lawmakers to regulate. Adding to this problem is the lobbying
| that runs around these premises. The following article highlights
| how big tech remain untouchable.
|
| https://www.citizen.org/article/big-tech-lobbying-update/
| jklinger410 wrote:
| Be careful what you wish for, Ohio.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| If we ignore all this culture war bullshit for a minute there's a
| really fascinating issue here.
|
| The concrete issue is flight search. When you google "flight from
| a to b", rather then seeing search results linking to websites
| for flight search, the first thing you see is the results of
| Google's own flight search. Is that wrong? What about image
| search? When you search for "skyline berlin", you'll see images
| of berlin's skyline, before you see links to other image search
| sites.
|
| Same is true for a lot other stuff. If you search "timer", you'll
| see a timer, not links to various timers that look ugly as shit.
|
| As a consumer, I love it. So much easier.
|
| On the other hand, google could take over almost any business
| like this. At least, any business that is "functional" in the
| sense that the only thing you really want is to get some output
| based on your input.
|
| There's a clear tradeoff here between what's good for consumers,
| and concerns about democracy, the concentration of power, etc..
| And also innovation. Why start a new company, if google can just
| take over everything?
|
| There are only two clear, non-arbitrary rules: Search engines are
| only allowed to show a list of links, or search engines can show
| whatever they want.
| troyvit wrote:
| Those are great examples of how a search engine works better at
| offering some services than any web site that might be surfaced
| by the results. It's more useful, more ... utilitarian one
| might say. That to me is why this lawsuit to declare google a
| utility is most interesting. Like electricity or natural gas
| these useful widgets turn a search engine into a substrate that
| people don't even realize they're using until it breaks.
| bjoyx wrote:
| False dichotomy. They could also show 3rd party timer and
| flight widgets in the search results.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| Luckily, search results are getting progressively worse, and
| these "value add" features also. Maybe there's a time for a web
| 2.0 (or, 3.0?) that can integrate APIs without HTML/markup
| specific to do so?
|
| I really just want to send out a query to various search
| caches, and get back results that are then merged into one
| dataset and shown in a native GUI. Forget this website shit.
| krapp wrote:
| >Maybe there's a time for a web 2.0 (or, 3.0?) that can
| integrate APIs without HTML/markup specific to do so?
|
| Nah. That's what server-side cURL requests are for.
| ahallock wrote:
| > There are only two clear, non-arbitrary rules: Search engines
| are only allowed to show a list of links, or search engines can
| show whatever they want.
|
| I want companies to be able to design products that best serve
| customers, not ones limited by narrowly scoped product
| definitions. Google's search page has advanced beyond query +
| results, offering interactivity and shortcuts. I'm not saying
| we shouldn't be vigilant if they start abusing their position
| and dominating too many markets, but let's take that case by
| case.
|
| I also disagree that Google can simply take over other
| businesses so easily. They've failed so many times. You'd think
| Youtube Music would dominate, but Spotify is still more
| popular. YouTube TV? I cancelled that a while ago. What am I
| surprised about is that we don't have a really strong YouTube
| competitor. Twitch, TikTok, and Instagram have made some in-
| roads, but nothing I'd call a strong #2.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _I 'm not saying we shouldn't be vigilant if they start
| abusing their position_
|
| I think that's exactly what's going on though.
|
| > _and dominating too many markets_
|
| How many is too many? I could make the same argument for
| Walmart, Amazon, ...
|
| > _but let 's take that case by case._
|
| No. Let's not drown people in having too many lawsuits. It's
| time for a sea of change.
| unishark wrote:
| > On the other hand, google could take over almost any business
| like this.
|
| I have never worked with a technology company that would in
| danger of being taken over in this way. The examples you list
| are all free information you can find on the internet, which is
| precisely google's business. To run afoul of monopoly laws they
| need to do things like build their own restaurants and route
| searches to them rather than the other local restaurants the
| user was looking for. I assume they are doing this in some
| cases. But the last thing I want is to do a search and find the
| result list giving a bunch of new pages of lists, with yet more
| ads of course, to sift through next.
|
| Software engineers are enjoying a nice run, where one can make
| lots of money applying basic software skills anyone can learn,
| grabbing free info anyone can get, and utilizing libraries
| everyone gets with their computer/phone OS but has not been
| provided access to by their hardware vendor. Hopefully
| technology will keep changing so fast the run will last forever
| (as long as you keep hopping to the newest bleeding edge). But
| this seems like borrowed time to me, access to free info and
| your own computer's clock or whatever is a commodity anyone can
| provide, whether it's someone earlier in the chain selling the
| hardware, or just millions of hungry programmers in developing
| countries.
| greyman wrote:
| >grabbing free info anyone can get
|
| Yes, that's true, the info is free in a sense that someone
| published it on the internet. But taking the weather
| companies as an example, someone has to measure the weather,
| and then compute the predictions. That'a real cost someone
| needs to pay. And that I think is the reason some people
| don't like what Google is doing - they are displaying the
| temperature, while someone else paid for it to be measured.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| TBF though, weather is like the _worst_ example of rent
| seeking. The people that provide the most value to weather
| reporting and prediction is the federal government through
| the a National Weather Service. Private companies usually
| just repackage the free government provided reports, or
| they do some analysis on top of the government provided
| data.
|
| That's what has always made AccuWeather's attempt to
| "privatize" (in reality stop having the government publicly
| publish forecasts, but continue the hard work of data
| collection) the weather service transparent rent seeking.
| travisporter wrote:
| Agreed. weather.gov is maybe a bit ugly but works great,
| and is mobile optimized.
|
| Although I disagree with other point, spokeo and
| fastpeoplesearch is the absolute worst example of digging
| through private info of millions and "only consolidating
| it". SWEs working on this type of stuff are either
| immature or have no soul in my opinion
| simonh wrote:
| Google Search weather data is provided by weather.com in a
| commercial relationship with Google, so either Google is
| paying for the data like everyone else, or weather.com is
| providing it at their cost for their own reasons.
| traviswt wrote:
| Or they could be allowed to show whatever but are required to
| allow users to opt-in/out.
| zeteo wrote:
| Regardless of legal aspects it's hard to ignore that Google is
| now very much in the business of putting to sleep innovative
| products. Either they acquire the startup and no longer invest
| in it, or drive it out of the search results, or invent it
| first in their "moonshot" division and file patents with no
| intention of executing on them. (Note that the innovators
| themselves may not fare badly if they get acquired and/or
| employed by Google. But their product will at best stagnate, at
| worst be killed shortly.)
|
| In the last decade Google has no longer brought to the consumer
| anything major like Gmail, Google Maps or Chrome. I doubt it's
| because of inability to execute - they can and will hire large
| numbers of very smart people. It seems more like a conscious
| decision to err on the side of maintaining the ~2010 status
| quo.
| Nkuna wrote:
| My initial thinking behind any business idea was more often
| than not preceded by "what if Google clones my idea???!?!?
| :((((". Two things wrong with this line of thinking.
|
| First it assumes Google can execute on said idea better than me
| and that I can't innovate. Here's the thing though; the bigger
| a company is the slower it gets. Sure, they can implement
| processes but big always gets more complex. Being small gives
| you an edge. What you do with that edge will determine whether
| FAANG apes your idea or not.
|
| Secondly, big tech isn't immune to market forces. The more
| features they add, trying to please every last potential user
| leads to bloat. At some point their search experience is bound
| to get degraded from adding way too many features in pursuit of
| every last user. This adds more bureaucracy. More tech debt.
| More uncontrollable variables.
|
| Search in 2021, especially on mobile, is vastly different from
| even 5 years ago. There are more ads, more tracking, more
| fraud, more shady back dealing, more user hostile anti-
| patterns. Yes, users currently enjoy their product but at some
| point surveillance capitalism will get its reckoning (see
| Apple, Europe, regulation in general) and for all the various
| products they have, search is the only relevant one. Without
| Search, how 'threatening' is Google really?
|
| Same goes for Facebook and that hot mess of an app. News feed,
| groups, pages, dating, marketplace, messaging, watch, etc. All
| this reeks of a co. that's lost focus in pursuit of not ceding
| users to competitors. This just means when they fail (which
| they will!), they will fail spectacularly.
|
| My advice to you and myself is focus on a niche. Try to do
| things that will be hard for FAANG to reproduce by making your
| users love your product more.
|
| Competing head on with these behemoths is foolish, but a moat
| is possible nonetheless given proper execution.
| o8r3oFTZPE wrote:
| What if Google did not develop flight search but acquired it by
| buying someone out. What if they did not develop image search
| but acquired it by buying someone out. What if they did not
| develop the good-looking timer but copied it from someone else.
|
| If Google was 100% responsible for developing everything they
| offer to consumers, then perhaps there is an argument that
| Google is good for consumers. However the truth is that Google
| Search is what they developed, it became the only search engine
| that most people use, and being a gateway tot he web and having
| the ability to spy on the world's web use is an unfair
| advantage that virtually no one else has.
|
| Anything that becomes popular Google can gobble it up.
| Consumers cannot get superior direct benefits from non-Google
| companies for long. Google will acquire any such companies
| sooner than later.
| thebeardisred wrote:
| I'm not quite following if this is sarcastic or not. For
| example, Google _did_ acquire flight search:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITA_Software
| o8r3oFTZPE wrote:
| Not meant to be sarcastic. A single, web-based company
| could offer wonderful coveniences for web users if 1. they
| know what "all" people are searching for on the web 2. they
| are enabled (by finance) and allowed (by law) to acquire
| any other company that aims to serve the needs of "all"
| people searching for stuff on the web. #1 is a capability
| held by no other company on the planet, except Google. The
| point is that a single, all-knowing company offering such
| wonderful conveniences is not necessary responsible for
| creating them. First, they had to 1. spy on peoples'
| searches to determine what stuff people were looking for on
| the web and 2. acquire other companies that had already
| worked out how to best provide that stuff. If the all-
| knowing company did not exist, the other companies
| providing the stuff that people were searching for would
| still exist. The all-knowing company is initially just a
| middleman. In some cases this middleman has not been
| content to simply connect people with the companies
| providing the stuff and take a cut (through selling
| advertising services). Rather, the middleman seeks to
| acquire the companies and provide the stuff itself
| (enhancing its spying capabilities).
| foolfoolz wrote:
| no one is forcing you to use google. you could always pick a
| different one if you want different results
| craftinator wrote:
| You could always write a program that fuzzed urls at random
| then downloaded whatever's at that address with curl!
| mxcrossr wrote:
| Imagine if thirty years ago we declared the yellow pages a
| public utility.
| heisthefox wrote:
| For flights, you could just query the source directly:
| https://matrix.itasoftware.com/
| astrange wrote:
| Not sure if that's "the source" since the airlines are the
| source for their own data (and Southwest doesn't allow ITA
| to search their flights.)
|
| On the other hand, Google owns ITA and I think the airline
| websites are typically frontends for it anyway.
| kdmccormick wrote:
| Yes, obviously, you _as a user_ are free to find another
| search engine.
|
| However, you _as a creator_ are not free to find another
| universe in which the leading search provider does not use
| their position of influence to squash any competing products
| by ranking their own products higher.
| mbreese wrote:
| But that's not an argument for making Google a public
| utility. That's an argument that they are being anti-
| competitive. That's a whole other discussion. And even
| then, the question isn't are _competitors_ being harmed,
| but are _consumers_ being harmed. So long as their products
| are free, it's hard to argue that consumers are suffering
| harm.
|
| (I haven't heard privacy brought up as a legal measure of
| harm to consumers, which would be an interesting angle, but
| I'm not sure how that plays with current law...)
| _jal wrote:
| > So long as their products are free, it's hard to argue
| that consumers are suffering harm
|
| Well, that is the (Borkian) dominant understanding of
| antitrust right now, but it hasn't always been, and I
| think that view is under pressure again.
|
| It has never been clear to me why we must limit our view
| to consumers when looking at antitrust - there is always
| much more going on than how much things cost. It effects
| competitors (actual and would-be), the environment,
| related industries, available jobs, sometimes national
| security - monopolies can have huge impacts on lots of
| things. Why exactly is this super-reductive, artificially
| crabbed view the only measure of a monopoly's harm?
|
| Medium-term, I think the pendulum is swinging back.
| ErrrNoMate wrote:
| A sea of comments and this one is the only one mentioning
| Bork. Well played. Hopefully we can swim closer to
| looking at things in the round rather than this very
| narrow and very conservative view of the structures in
| which we live and operate.
| josefx wrote:
| > So long as their products are free, it's hard to argue
| that consumers are suffering harm.
|
| It kills competition since most of them are financed by
| an unrelated service (Googles ad network) and without
| competition we get such nice things like randomized
| automated life time bans, non existent customer service,
| products that are randomly killed, overly anti
| competitive licensing agreements (Android apparently
| cannot survive on its own merits) etc. . Privacy is just
| one of many many issues.
| wyattpeak wrote:
| > So long as their products are free, it's hard to argue
| that consumers are suffering harm.
|
| Is it? There's an increasing antipathy towards the amount
| of data Google collect, many people on this forum, if not
| so much in the world at large, would consider that harm.
| If Google's hiding from me a better service that's also
| free, or even has an acceptable cost, I'd consider that
| harm.
|
| It's only hard to argue there's no harm if their product
| is identical to its competitors, which is basically never
| true.
| minsc__and__boo wrote:
| There are entire businesses that run entirely on instagram
| or etsy, which don't even touch SEO.
| antihero wrote:
| OP is not arguing the consumer is restricted in choice, more
| that Google can dominate the market of any information based
| business by coding a widget because they have a huge amount
| of data at their disposal.
|
| Much like if you make a good product and sell it on Amazon,
| Amazon can simply use their might to dupe your product and
| sell it as AmazonBasics.
|
| So innovation is stifled because the second it becomes
| profitable a giant can pluck it from your hands and use their
| power to squash you whilst making money from it.
|
| I am not sure what mechanisms within Capitalism are supposed
| to protect people from the simple power asymmetry of
| companies having far more resources money and lawyers doing
| what the fuck they like.
|
| There should be antitrust lawsuits against all of the giants
| abusing their power but, because of said power asymmetry,
| they of course have a huge amount of lobbying power in
| comparison to anyone else.
| johnswas wrote:
| Ah yes, the "no one is forcing you" argument comes in almost
| every conversation where people complain about the truth of
| something. Almost as if they can do whatever they want and of
| course "no one is forcing you to use it". Also implying that
| you accepted the wrong doings but trying as best as you can
| to defend it.
| anders_p wrote:
| You completely missed the point of the comment.
|
| Google is stealing ideas and products, that they know are
| viable through the metrics they gather from the search data.
|
| Then they implement those products and embed them ABOVE the
| search results.
|
| Effectively killing off the competitors, who invented and
| build the original products.
|
| HOW are developers free to avoid Google killing off their
| businesses like that?
| sumedh wrote:
| > Google is stealing ideas and products, that they know are
| viable through the metrics they gather from the search
| data.
|
| Doesnt Walmart and Amazon do that as well, looking at the
| data and then making their own in house products?
| brokencode wrote:
| Yes, and maybe they should be regulated too. They enjoy
| dominant positions in the market and blatantly rip off
| successful products down to the color and bottle shape.
| unishark wrote:
| But any idiot can figure out which are the successful
| products on those search engines. They are literally
| there trying to be found and broadcast their popularity.
|
| The patent system is for protecting ideas which the law
| allows to be protected.
| brokencode wrote:
| But any idiot can't get Walmart or Amazon to prominently
| place their copycat product on shelves or in search
| results. Only these retail behemoths can guarantee the
| competitive placement of their products in the market.
| russian-hacker wrote:
| No one is forcing you to use an electrical company. You could
| always power your house with a bicycle generator. Therefore,
| electrical companies shouldn't be regulated as public
| utilities.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Creating your own power plant, lugging gallons of oil for
| power generation, or hiring someone to 24/7 power you home
| via bicycle all cost a few orders of magnitude more than
| paying the utility company for service, and creating a
| competing utility company wouldn't make sense competitively
| in any way, so naturally there's a monopoly. For search
| engines, it's both easy to switch to a different one as a
| consumer and it's easy for someone new to come in and
| create a profitable competitor (see bing, ddg).
| inetknght wrote:
| > _so naturally there 's a monopoly._
|
| And, just as naturally, the government actually owns a
| lot of the distribution network. The producers provide
| into the distribution network, the customers receive from
| the distribution network, and the government regulates
| fair (by some definition thereof) access.
| ascar wrote:
| > creating a competing utility company wouldn't make
| sense competitively in any way, so naturally there's a
| monopoly
|
| So how come there are countries without a natural
| monopoly and with competing utility providers?
|
| Also running your own generator with oil isn't a few
| orders of magnitude (i.e. at least 100x) more expensive.
| I wouldn't be surprised if it's not even one order of
| magnitude more expensive, but maybe just twice as
| expensive.
|
| I also don't think GP's simile is good, but some of your
| arguments against it are just blatantly false.
| judge2020 wrote:
| > So how come there are countries without a natural
| monopoly and with competing utility providers?
|
| Local governments own most U.S. utility lines and pipes,
| so a competing for-profit utility would have to go
| against the not-for-profit public service, leaving low to
| no room for profit and no reason to even compete.
|
| Fiber/cable/dsl lines are one of the few U.S. utilities
| with competition because the
| performance/reliability/features of the service can vary
| greatly and because almost no local governments ran their
| own ISP before private companies came in and ran their
| lines. I can bet that any area with a municipal ISP has a
| very low chance of seeing xfinity/att run their own fiber
| if they're not already servicing the area.
| unishark wrote:
| You can make that decision in rural areas. It costs a lot
| of money to get wires run to a new house. You might use
| solar instead with a generator as backup.
|
| In many urban areas you may not even be allowed to opt out
| of utilities meanwhile. I once delayed paying for the water
| bill in a new house for a month till I moved in and needed,
| got a big late bill finally because the fees are mandatory
| for the house.
| torgian wrote:
| Almost like you don't even own the house.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Yes, you have to use the municipal electricity. You cannot
| lay your own power lines, it's illegal. And in most urban
| areas, you can't run your own generator for emissions
| restrictions. You also can't power your home with a
| bicycle. Even champion bicyclists output 50-100 watts.
|
| Using Bing, DuckDuckGo, or other Google alternatives are
| incomparably easier than not using utilities like
| electricity and plumbing. I struggle to see how one can
| honestly make this comparison.
| andyana wrote:
| You might want to rethink your bike claim; it is
| certainly possible.
| ben_w wrote:
| Only as a technicality. Domestic electrical power use
| varies worldwide from "none" to "tens of kilowatts".
| This, for example, is what it takes to run a UK household
| on bicycle electricity: https://youtu.be/C93cL_zDVIM
| josefx wrote:
| You could just create battery trailer to power your house
| and drive to the next Tesla charging station with it
| whenever it runs low. No need for power lines or any
| power generation in your backyard. Maybe someone should
| propose that trailer idea to Elon? Tesla already produces
| everything necessary to take yourself of the grid, it
| only needs to be bundled up right.
| smaudet wrote:
| Such a tiny, piddling outlook on the world.
|
| You can do everything with water with rain-barrels and
| buckets. As others have said, you can do power with
| candles, bike generators, and wood fire.
|
| Is that a realistic solution in a modern society? Hell
| no.
|
| I struggle to see how anyone honestly can lie to
| themselves that it is somehow absurd to label something a
| "utility" just because the technology has advanced beyond
| cave-man level.
|
| Google deserves their status as a utility - monopolies,
| effective or otherwise, we have consistently found to be
| actively harmful.
|
| Furthermore, if a company wants to be a "be-all-
| everything technological solution", it is actively
| attempting to usurp the role of government. And when that
| govt is un-elected, that's a despotic oligarchy, at best.
| We may well be forced to storm Google HQ and put every
| Google CEO's head on the chopping block if we want to
| preserve our liberty.
|
| Or, y'know, maybe just support getting them regulated
| instead, bit more of a humane solution, dontcha think?
| rgbrenner wrote:
| _google could take over almost any business like this._
|
| That didn't happen to travel companies. Google added flights,
| but Booking Holdings (aka Priceline) continued to grow each
| year to 15B in revenue for 2019. (Huge drop for 2020
| obviously.)
|
| If I type "<city> weather" google will show me the weather, but
| which weather company has shutdown because of that?
|
| Google news is in the search results, but there are a lot of
| news companies. Those info panels often come from wikipedia,
| but wikipedia is doing great.
|
| This is something that sounds true, but I'm having trouble
| thinking of an example where it has actually happened. Examples
| appreciated.
| irrational wrote:
| > If I type "<city> weather" google will show me the weather,
| but which weather company has shutdown because of that?
|
| I have noticed recently that the Weather.com app has added
| huge advertisements at the top and has roughly doubled the
| number of ads within the page. It honestly feels like
| desperation to me and I've been wondering if something bad is
| happening to the company.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| It has no reason to exist in the first place. All the data
| for weather comes from government agencies anyway, and
| weather.gov does the same job. They're a relic from when we
| did not have internet and there might have been some
| utility in a middleman producing a TV channel to get people
| that information.
| Frost1x wrote:
| To be fair, NWS does a poor job at presenting their own
| data. Some services do add their own models to NWS but
| the vast majority just re-wrap NWS forecasts. NWS data
| visualizations and the websites aren't the snazziest
| things but they do work.
| swiley wrote:
| I guess I'm weird but I prefer the NWS.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Me too, it's so nice and simple.
| ahallock wrote:
| While weather.gov does serve that purpose, someone else
| could provide a much better UI -- sort of like what
| Simple did with banking (I know they shutdown...haha, but
| they did create a better experience over traditional
| banking). Why give one website a monopoly?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I am not saying they should be restricted from existing,
| but I do not see a business case for it, at least
| certainly not as big of a company as it used to be.
| mattkrause wrote:
| IBM bought them a few years ago.
| arnvald wrote:
| > Google added flights, but Booking Holdings (aka Priceline)
| continued to grow each year
|
| OTAs keep growing, because travel in general keeps growing.
| But Google takes more and more space there. Right now the
| "book now" button on Google hotel page takes you to selection
| of OTAs. But one day it can take you to Google's room
| selection page and eventually to Google's checkout page - the
| actual booking can still be done with some external party and
| they'll handle the customer service etc., but your money will
| go to Google first.
| throwaway_kufu wrote:
| > Google added flights, but Booking Holdings (aka Priceline)
| continued to grow each year to 15B in revenue for 2019. (Huge
| drop for 2020 obviously.)
|
| But did advertising on Google become more expensive for
| competitors once Google entered the market (e.g. did Google
| Flights also bid on Google Ads) and were those additional
| costs passed along to customers?
|
| So while your example shows a competitor survived, it over
| looks the many start ups that did not, it overlooks the
| increased advertising costs, it over looks the increased cost
| to consumers and the chilling effect on potential new
| startups that might have been able to enter the market.
|
| We do not even need to question any of this because before
| Google acquired the startup which became Google Flights the
| acquisition was reviewed and only approved under very strict
| Chinese firewalls between Google flights and Google
| search...but those restrictions only sought to restrict
| Google flight's complete takeover of the market and ignored
| how it is being used to increase ad costs to the remaining
| market competitors.
|
| The same has been seen with Google shopping, where Google
| essentially acquired a startup, it flopped, then Google
| positioned itself ahead of organic results and began
| systematically burying competition in the Google results. The
| fact you can't name any of the travel or shopping startups
| that had thriving businesses that fell once Google entered
| the market is more telling of how Google has dominated the
| market rather than evidence Google hasn't actually put anyone
| out of business.
| dalmo3 wrote:
| > over looks the increased costs to consumers
|
| Google flights takes you straight to the airlines websites.
| No intermediaries. How's that increasing costs to
| consumers?
|
| Do third party booking sites usually offer lower prices
| than the airlines themselves? I've seen it happen but very
| rarely.
| uuuooobbb wrote:
| Google travel search features have a big impact on travel
| search sites such as expedia and tripadvisor.
|
| https://skift.com/2019/11/07/googles-travel-gains-levy-
| pain-...
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/stephenmcbride1/2019/12/06/how-.
| ..
|
| I remember reading a comparison on how the hotel search
| features impacted others vs booking.com and the conclusion
| was that booking.com has alright because it's more of a
| destination of its' own rather than driven by search traffic.
| chipsambos wrote:
| Some within the industry have been making noise that Google
| is quietly and slowly taking control of the whole trip
| funnel. Interesting read:
|
| https://www.cartrawler.com/ct/digital-disruption/googles-
| ste...
|
| I'd agree that providers are ceding too much control to
| Google for short-term wins, maybe without even realising the
| power they're handing over to Google.
|
| Google is quietly inserting themselves between the customer
| and the business in all sorts of industries. They're not
| fully utilising that power which only makes them a benevolent
| (for now) dictator.
| IX-103 wrote:
| Interesting that no one mentions that Google also runs the
| backend flight/hotel search used by most trip planning
| sites. They bought it (ITA) over a decade ago.
|
| So all these providers already lost this power years ago
| and are just providing a fancy UX over Google's backend
| travel search service. Now Google is merging the two search
| engines and cutting out the middleman.
| Mauricebranagh wrote:
| The hotel /travel industry is probably the worst
| complainant as those industry's do a lot of sketchy stuff.
|
| As does the insurance industry ever wonder why the UK
| insurance industry went all in on cuddly mascots - one
| factor was googles clamp down on black hat techniques
| _simples_
| dvcrn wrote:
| I switched to almost only using Google Flights. I try to use
| Skyscanner because I want to support the underdog, but Google
| Flights gives me better, and more results.
|
| For hotels, Google started displaying results from other
| search engines like Agoda, so I just use Google for that too
| and clickthrough to whatever is the cheapest. They could also
| just stop displaying agoda from one day to the next.
| st1ck wrote:
| At least in Europe, Skyscanner has more airlines than
| Google Flights, which makes the latter kinda useless if it
| misses the cheapest/shortest flight. That said, at least GF
| lists Rynanair & Wizzair now, but through Kiwi.com OTA
| which I'd rather avoid (direct is cheaper and less issues
| with changes).
| Bombthecat wrote:
| The killer feature for me is : i can see in a calendar what
| the flight would cost at Google. Every other platform only
| shows exact date..
| charsi wrote:
| Skyscanner has this too. Click on the depart or return
| date and then select 'whole month'.
| donavanm wrote:
| Bringing bookings in to google maps has been a huge challenge
| for hospitality. This is flowing through to search as well. I
| recall someone from the industry doing a great breakdown of
| changes to the maps UI over time, and tying it to bookings &
| ad revenue, but can't find it offhand. This article can
| probably get you started https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzanne
| rowankelleher/2019/06/30...
| minsc__and__boo wrote:
| I think the whole argument is setting up the presupposition
| that Google kills non competitive businesses, and that's not
| what antitrust law is about. It's about protecting consumers,
| not competitors.
|
| Take Android for example. Did Google kill Blackberry with
| Android? Or was it other factors like the Blackberry CEO
| cannibalizing their R&D budget, and stubbornly refusing to
| give consumers what they wanted?
| fraserharris wrote:
| Research in Motion thought the Blackberry keyboard was
| their killer feature for business professionals. They were
| wrong. The iPhone killed Blackberry, not Android.
| ksec wrote:
| I tend to think it was Blackberry killed Blackberry, not
| Android or iPhone. Not willing to change and adapt is the
| recipe for disaster in tech industry. I am not aware of
| any other industry that moves as fast and at such scale
| where the whole industry shift.
| antifa wrote:
| I remember back in the day, I saw what android was about
| to do to the market, the writing was on the wall for palm
| and blackberry. My only thought was that it would be nice
| if blackberry rebased itself as a business+security
| focused flavor of Android devices. Sad to say, I've
| almost never seen a blackberry since.
| giantrobot wrote:
| RIM definitely killed RIM. The sad result of decades of
| computer/phone market reports using "market share" leads
| to people misunderstanding "installed base". As the
| iPhone and Android took off BlackBerry's _market share_
| dropped. As in their share of the total smartphone market
| sales per quarter dropped. Their unit sales (at first)
| didn 't drop much. The installed base of Blackberries
| also didn't drop (at first).
|
| Android and iPhone initially ate into the unit sales of
| feature phones. RIM had pathetic consumer offerings. I
| replaced a Pearl (8100) with the first iPhone with iOS
| 1.0. For all the issues that combination had it was a far
| far better phone than my BlackBerry.
|
| RIM didn't understand the consumer phone market at all,
| and frankly neither did other smartphone vendors outside
| Apple and Google. RIM assumed their Enterprise moat
| (Exchange integration, BES, etc) and a fucking hardware
| keyboard was enough to halt R&D and just sit on their
| hands. Meanwhile Apple and Google added Exchange support
| to their existing (ok but not great)
| POP/IMAP/CalDAV/CardDAV support, good app stores for
| third party software, and maintained their vastly
| superior web browsing capabilities. Their software
| keyboards also improved significantly with just better
| keypress accuracy and better predictive type.
|
| So Apple and Google killed feature phones and then got
| the features people wanted/needed for Enterprise sales.
| They were already _good enough_ for a majority of
| "business" uses since a lot of SMB users of Palms, WinMo,
| and BlackBerries used zero "Enterprise" features. They
| needed e-mail and SMS which feature phones didn't support
| and iPhone and Android had from the outset.
|
| So Apple and Google crossed RIM's moat and RIM had
| _nothing_ to offer as competition. Everything about
| BlackBerries was firmly fixed in 2005. This was 2010 /11
| and iPhones and Androids were the state of the art.
| Instead of trying to meaningfully compete RIM doubled
| down on the 2005 phones.
|
| No one should feel any pity for them. Their management
| seemed trapped in some sort of "we'll just MBA our way
| out of this" fantasy land.
| minsc__and__boo wrote:
| In terms of marketshare, Blackberry's began to decline in
| late 2010, during the meteoric rise of Android. For
| context, Android eclipsed iOS just 6 months later.
|
| But that's also my point - Blackberry killed Blackberry,
| not iOS or Android. Should Blackberry have been protected
| from it's competition?
| fraserharris wrote:
| The 3rd hand story I heard ~2011 from a former RIM
| executive who was there at the time of Steve Job's demo
| of the iPhone was that Mike Lazaridis' (co-founder of
| RIM) reaction to seeing the demo: "It's impossible! The
| whole thing would have to be a battery!"
| swiley wrote:
| He's right, it is impossible for the iPhone and clones to
| match the blackberry's batter life. It turns out any
| (certainly not all but few enough to keep blackberry in
| the market) prefer 60FPS scrolling to having the battery
| last a week.
| marticode wrote:
| > It's about protecting consumers, not competitors.
|
| That's true in the US, but not in the EU. And not operating
| in the EU is not really an option for any of the FAANG.
| darkwater wrote:
| > If I type "<city> weather" google will show me the weather,
| but which weather company has shutdown because of that?
|
| I don't know the answer to your (rethorical?) question but
| what I know is that weather sites and apps were once nice and
| useful and now are basically a placeholder for advertisement,
| sometimes even scammy one.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| This. Google doesn't have to knock them out of business
| entirely to ruin them.
| mattkrause wrote:
| If you're in the market for a replacement, I like yr.no.
| It's a little more graphically polished than weather.gov,
| but no ads.
|
| Although it is a joint project between the Norwegian
| Meteorological Institute and Norwegian Broadcasting
| Corporation, it has forecasts available for the whole world
| in English, Norwegian, and Danish.
| hnick wrote:
| As a content creator rich snippets are such a bugbear. If you
| don't play the game then someone else's content and name shows
| up. If you do, there's a huge chance people get what they need
| and never visit your site. It's a Google wins, consumer wins,
| creator loses situation.
| lupire wrote:
| Many focus on "content" that is more than one paragraph.
| hnick wrote:
| Many queries are relatively simple questions, and you won't
| get placement if you don't answer that question. And if you
| do, they have no need to click through. People care more
| about the answer than the justification. I've done it
| myself plenty of times.
| bushbaba wrote:
| Ugh like recipes. With the damn recipe 10 pages down. I
| don't care about your grandma's life story. I just want to
| know how much flour to eggs ratio for pasta dough.
|
| Incredibly annoying.
| hnick wrote:
| Perhaps you wouldn't have found that recipe in Google if
| they didn't include all that bullshit. Are you frustrated
| because you rarely get shown links in Google that are
| just the recipe, no fluff? Maybe they exist but you never
| get to see them.
|
| They're playing by rules they didn't invent. The belief
| is this content gets indexed better than just recipes
| (which, when well written, are terse) and it should be
| placed above the recipe so it has higher priority. They
| might be mistaken but with the limited amount of
| information Google gives, and the fact that most places I
| stumble across on Google are doing it, I'm ready to
| believe it works.
| Frondo wrote:
| I dislike the content-spamming recipes for another reason
| -- they're an accessibility _nightmare_. I seem to get
| eye strain more easily than most, despite having normal
| vision when my eyes aren 't hurting, so I use the screen
| reader a lot.
|
| Any of those recipe sites? they'll read through several
| minutes of navigations, links, ads, and story before
| getting to the site. I feel badly for anyone who must
| listen to that, i.e. who doesn't have an option to read
| it visually, what a horrible experience.
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| I would argue that bad behavior ("bad" = existing more to get
| ad revenue than to deliver valuable information to users)
| made this a viable business model for Google. I don't love
| snippets, and sometimes they're hilariously wrong, but I'd
| rather get wrong info from a snippet vs having a site waste
| my time and beg me to sign up, blocking the info from view,
| forcing me to "open in app", only to find that it was bad
| info anyway...
|
| Do companies exist to make things that are valuable for
| users, or do users exist to make money for companies?
| hnick wrote:
| If the information is valuable, why aren't we paying for
| it? That's the problem we still haven't solved. It's why
| you are Google's product, and it's why companies use that
| "sticky" behaviour. You need to be a user, a member, a
| customer - that way you might eventually give them a few
| dollars instead of glean a little information and forget
| they ever existed.
|
| I really don't know what a good customer-centric endgame
| looks like. Maybe a self hosted AI assistant that knows
| what I need, coupled with a micropayment infrastructure to
| apportion funds based on where I visit? No idea.
| concordDance wrote:
| > If the information is valuable, why aren't we paying
| for it?
|
| Several reasons:
|
| 1. You often can't judge the value of the information
| before purchase.
|
| 2. The downside of having to decide whether or not to
| purchase is often larger than the value of the
| information.
|
| 3. Microtransaction costs (time and otherwise) are higher
| than the value of the information.
|
| 4. That information is often available for free somewhere
| else (sometimes people just want attention or to inform
| others rather than money). The top results are just the
| ones that spent the most money on SEO (and hence have the
| most intrusive ads).
| SmellTheGlove wrote:
| I agree with you on how interesting the issue you raised is.
| I'm just cynical and I happen to think that won't be the issue
| that gets decided. I wonder aloud if this will boil down to a
| question of whether utilities can exist as services on non-
| utilities, given that we don't presently classify internet
| service as a utility.
| stiray wrote:
| I think that some other example is needed to explain "As a
| consumer, I love it. So much easier."
|
| Please watch this, it is about not well known company called
| Luxottica that holds majority of world market for eyewear.
| There is a good posibilty that if you have sun glasses, they
| made them. It is not something technical, just simple
| merchandise, simple to understand:
|
| https://youtu.be/yvTWjWVY9Vo
|
| Since the video came out, they have also bought (actually
| "merged") one of the largest companies creating perscription
| lenses.
|
| Now, do you like what you see? Is it "so easy" and "good" for
| the customers? Do you love it? How is their status impacting
| you wanting to buy eyewear?
|
| Same is with google, amazon, microsoft, just name it. But yes,
| until they get a vast majority of market, they will not start
| to milk the users. As they want majority of market first.
| Dah00n wrote:
| "99% believe they buy an American brand!" she says with
| horror in her voice. That i so.... American.
|
| While a monopoly is bad this is a very poor source to use to
| prove a point, even though they do admittedly have a point
| (like the broken clock being correct twice a day). The
| problem has absolutely nothing to do with it being an Italian
| company but that is of course a big point in any 60 Minutes
| video (US good, others bad) and I highly doubt it would have
| been made had it been Walmart instead of Luxottica.
|
| But to comment on-topic: I believe Google and/or search
| engines should be put under the same rules and laws as the EU
| did with Microsoft. Search engine is searchengine, not
| search/travelplanner/hotel finder/translator/whatever. It
| strangles competition and innovation. Google should include
| those other things from other services _if another service
| will sell the service to Google_ or keep clear.
|
| Edit: In short, as the EU is already working on, Google and
| the likes that are gatekeepers, needs to be stopped or broken
| up.
| wrycoder wrote:
| That's known as "tying" - an illegal use of a overwhelming
| market position to leverage the market position of other
| products of the same company. That's the key thing that
| determines illegal monopolistic practice.
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| I don't understand how the presence of information on a
| website constitutes tying. What the hell happened to free
| speech?
| MinorTom wrote:
| That's true if you define Google as a link search engine, but
| what if you were to define it as a "solution finder"? This
| way it just fits into the definition.
| Maursault wrote:
| > When you search for "skyline berlin", you'll see images of
| berlin's skyline, before you see links to other image search
| sites.
|
| Not to defend Google, but to be fair, 1) when searching for
| images, you're searching for images, not "image search sites."
| To search for image search sites, you'd search "all" (not
| photos) for "image search," which mostly returns Google image
| search and Google image search help pages as top results,
| burying other image search engines on subsequent pages.
| Google's search algorithm does seem biased against competitor
| image search sites, but maybe Google search is really finding
| only articles. Searching "all" for "image search sites" returns
| links to articles listing image search sites. Searching for
| Yahoo images returns Yahoo Image Search as the top result. 2)
| the images search results are actually thumbnails, _and also_
| links, so you see the thumbs precisely at the same time that
| you see links to the sites that host each image search result.
| heisthefox wrote:
| The funny part is that the flight search portion comes from
| their acquisition of ITA, which I was a part of (worked at ITA
| when it was acquired). The airlines contract with that system
| for _their own internal search_ - so who is the real customer
| there?
| hedora wrote:
| > _There are only two clear, non-arbitrary rules: Search
| engines are only allowed to show a list of links, or search
| engines can show whatever they want._
|
| Ohio is asking for a third option; common carrier status.
| Search and other monopoly infrastructure would be run at arms
| length from the rest of the business, and anyone could pay (the
| same as google) to integrate it into their own offerings.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Apparently, Google Flight Search is not even close to the best
| alternative.1
|
| https://www.frommers.com/slideshows/848046-the-10-best-and-w...
|
| This is interesting because I always thought Matrix from ITA
| Software, a company Google acquired in 2010, was quite useful.
|
| Wonder if links to Skiplagged get subjugated in Google SERPs.
|
| If Google thinks it can replace other websites by providing
| better alternatives, that's great. But then the company should
| get out of the way and let users have a neutral source for a
| comprehensive inverted index of the rest of the web. If there
| is nothing else better out there, then let web users determine
| that for themselves. The index should be a public resource not
| controlled by one company that can see what users are searching
| for and engage in "front-running". (Websites that allow crawls
| by Googlebot, sometimes exclusively, are of course enabling the
| Google monopoly.)
|
| 1. Google bought Frommers in 2012 and nearly killed it.
| Thankfully the founder reacquired the rights.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frommers
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| I've used a number of those others, and at least via my
| personal scoring system, google flights is still by far the
| number one. Your link prioritizes very different things than
| I do, for example one of its top scoring sites has as a con
| that you can't filter out 10+ hour layovers).
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "We also ignored any itinerary that would be hell to fly-
| basically anything increasing total travel time by more
| than half through excessively long layovers, too many
| stops, or flying way out of your way just to change planes.
| Airlines may think that makes for a viable plan, but we
| don't."
|
| Am I reading this wrong or does this indicate Frommer also
| prioritises avoiding long layovers.
|
| (I dislike the inclusion of the long layover options too
| but I have always thought the reason the sites include them
| is that they actually sell. I once met someone who took
| these long layover flights on popular routes that always
| have many shorter options, so I know such people exist.)
| yxhuvud wrote:
| If nothing else they need to exist due to rare
| destinations with few planes going to them, together with
| having to fly to those airports.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Occasionally I am actually looking for the longest
| possible layover. Having a couple of days in another city
| along the route can actually be pretty cool - you get 2
| holidays for the price of one, or a free holiday on the
| side of a work trip.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Another example is people doing mileage runs (see
| FlyerTalk).
| lupire wrote:
| Users can check, Bing, Common Crawl, or even _the other 9
| links on the first page of Google Search_ for more search
| results, no?
| shkkmo wrote:
| Google flight search does just as good as Skiplagged for the
| routes I tend to fly and the UI makes it easier to find the
| cheapest dates.
|
| If I am doing complicated international stuff I will check
| multiple locations for prices but for my simple domestic
| routes the ease and speed of google flights makes it the best
| option.
|
| Edit: That said, I don't use google as my default search
| engine as I switched all my devices to DDG a long time ago.
| [deleted]
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| >" The index should be a public resource not controlled by
| one company that can see what users are searching for and
| engage in "front-running"."
|
| The thing is, it's the index they built with the technology
| they built. Google is not the only index. To build a public
| index, you'd need to have public crawlers, which would bring
| a whole boatload more questions / regulation / debate.
| Google's search ranking is part of the secret sauce that they
| try very hard to obscure, while hinting at how to be good at
| it; basically: provide something valuable to visitors, and
| you'll rank highly, at least in theory. Get caught cheating
| and get blacklisted.
|
| Flight info is already public. Ticket prices are not, and
| vary tons based on all the deals and schemes out there.
| That's not Google's fault, but the fault (if one views it
| that way) of the airlines playing pricing games. Their
| business model relies on getting everyone to pay the highest
| price per seat they can get from a customer, so they benefit
| from not being open about pricing. Their goal is also to fill
| flights with paying customers or paying cargo, or the most
| profitable mix, depending on many factors. Again, not
| Google's fault.
|
| Google is in a position to front-run results and provide an
| experience that other companies cannot by virtue of users
| already being on their site using their search. It doesn't
| seem reasonable to compare Google to a travel site, as it's
| pretty clear that one wouldn't expect e.g. Expedia to list
| Travelocity results alongside their own with equal priority.
|
| I'm usually really against monopolistic behavior, as many
| companies use it to screw users and maximize profits (e.g.
| Comcast). Google isn't in the same league IMO because they
| behave a lot more charitably -- if it were Comcast running
| Google, I would wholly expect them to completely de-list
| every competing travel site and work on lobbying the
| government to get those competitors shut down, while
| channeling tax dollars paid to build infrastructure into
| their own pockets.
|
| It's a dumb lawsuit that will go nowhere. The lawsuit is
| disingenuous as they know it will fail. The true purpose is
| political lip service -- accomplish nothing while claiming to
| be doing something against a perceived enemy.
| [deleted]
| count wrote:
| Crucially, _I went to Googles business first to look for
| things_.
|
| In the olden days, if I went to AAA for travel advice, I'd get
| their partners and such recommended, not generic all-
| encompassing information. But I _went to AAA for it_. I don '
| see how this is any different. I can chose to go to not-google
| and Google then doesn't impact me.
|
| Does Walmart have to put anybody's stuff where they want in the
| aisles?
| ganzuul wrote:
| > Does Walmart have to put anybody's stuff where they want in
| the aisles?
|
| That could be an incredible boon to the ecoconomy.
|
| As a younger man I gave up on the idea of making simple
| consumer products on realizing that the large supermarket
| chains around here could dash my work on the rocks by just a
| middle manager arbitrarily saying 'no' to stocking what I had
| made.
|
| So yes, I think those companies _should_ be forced to work
| with local businesses.
| Mauricebranagh wrote:
| No you have to bribe them :-)
| count wrote:
| Should you be forced to put my stuff in your house? These
| are private companies, where does that force end?
| ganzuul wrote:
| I don't like arguing with hyperboles like that. Please
| suggest something reasonable, which I even could agree
| to.
| blntechie wrote:
| Same with sports scores. I'm surprised the various sports
| websites have not made a cry about this as part of anti-trust
| investigations. Maybe because those sports sites are still
| reliant on Google for their other page views? Which only makes
| it worse.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| There is more at stake here, though: If folks cannot easily
| look up scored and things, who will they blame? Probably the
| sports sites and team owners. It would be similar to the
| companies disallowing sports scores to be printed in
| newspapers.
| amelius wrote:
| Yes, Google is a gatekeeper, and there's no denying about it.
|
| Fortunately, the EU has the upcoming Digital Markets Act,
| ensuring fair competition in the digital space. You can read
| more about it here:
|
| https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/priorities-2019-2024/euro...
| ehsankia wrote:
| > When you search for "skyline berlin", you'll see images of
| berlin's skyline, before you see links to other image search
| sites.
|
| What's next, should they also show Bing and DuckDuckGo search
| results when you search for an arbitrary query too?
|
| The goal of Google isn't to link you to websites, it's to get
| you to your information as quickly as possible. Said
| information could be a website, just as it can be an image, a
| flight or a single sentence pulled into an Answer Box.
| ehsankia wrote:
| Their motto is making the world's information accessible, not
| making the world's website accessible.
| wyattpeak wrote:
| > There are only two clear, non-arbitrary rules
|
| I don't see any problem with having arbitrary rules so long as
| they roughly capture the spirit of the outcome people want. The
| eight-hour workday is an arbitrary rule. The age of majority is
| an arbitrary rule. Zoning boundaries are arbitrary.
|
| They all capture something we (most of us) fundamentally want,
| but the specific lines are approximate or convenient or
| customary.
| Qwertious wrote:
| Yes, people often don't see the benefit of a _discrete
| boundary_ - if everyone draws the line in the same spot, even
| just legally speaking, then everyone can _coordinate_ their
| action whenever someone steps over it.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > There are only two clear, non-arbitrary rules: Search engines
| are only allowed to show a list of links, or search engines can
| show whatever they want.
|
| Those rules are just as arbitrary as all the possibilities in
| between.
| xwdv wrote:
| > Why start a new company, if google can just take over
| everything?
|
| If your company is defeated by Google turning it into some
| widget then you don't have much of a business, you just have a
| feature you monetized and isn't really a long term source of
| revenue. You need rigorous innovation and a clear advantage
| over your competitors.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| False dichotomy; when it comes to flights, they could show
| general information with links to flight companies. When it
| comes to images, they could limit themselves to small image
| previews / thumbnails.
|
| Of course, one reason why I for one prefer to stay on Google
| Images (and have an addon to go directly to an image file
| instead of the site it's on) is that the sites themselves have
| so much cruft on them. And they kinda have to, because there's
| no money to be made on a minimalist image hosting site, while
| there's plenty of expenses - wouldn't be surprised if the brunt
| of expenses is abuse prevention.
| toomanybeersies wrote:
| > Why start a new company, if google can just take over
| everything?
|
| It seems more and more common these days that people start
| companies specifically with the sole intention of being
| acquired by Google (or another large tech company).
| codelord wrote:
| On the one hand it seems Google is unstoppable. Google can do
| everything. But I think iPhone showed an alternative path. Now
| most people are actually using apps (not Google) on mobile for
| different functionalities. I guess this is the argument that
| Google has been making but I buy that. My guess is 20 years
| from now Android, YouTube, Google Maps, etc. would be more
| valuable for Google than search.
| ksec wrote:
| >Google is unstoppable.
|
| Google having to pay $10-$12B a year to Apple just for being
| default search engine. All while Apple is working on stopping
| cookies and now VPN that takes away all the information
| Google could use for Ads. And Siri Search being Apple's
| default recommendation results means most of the valuable ads
| search term revenue are now out of reach for Google. That is
| ~1.4B Apple Active Devices. ( Apple TV or other Appliance
| being counted or not is a rounding error ) and _Growing_.
|
| If App Store spendings are any indication Apple user tends to
| spend _twice_ as much than Google Play.
|
| Basically Apple is squeezing Google left and right. (
| Incidentally they are also what they are doing it to
| suppliers and developers )
| [deleted]
| kbenson wrote:
| > There's a clear tradeoff here between what's good for
| consumers, and concerns about democracy, the concentration of
| power, etc..
|
| Actually, you can just leave it as tradeoffs between what is
| good for the consumer short term and what is good for the
| consumer long term.
|
| Sometimes there are wider issues that affect democracy (e.g.
| social networks and information silos), but usually it's just
| an economic issue that people aren't looking at thoroughly
| enough.
|
| The reason we try to stop monopolies before they happen is not
| because they are hurting consumers at that point. Often they
| are underselling competitors to achieve their monopoly so
| consumers benefit and love them. We stop them because after
| they have that monopoly they no longer have good incentives to
| keep being beneficial for the consumer, so we avoid the problem
| before it is one.
| throwaway888abc wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_vs._Google#Goog...
|
| The scope (of showing nice timer by google on 'timer' search)
| is much broader spanning many verticals
| 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
| wait_a_minute wrote:
| Is this good or bad or irrelevant from a data/cookie security
| perspective?
| [deleted]
| 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?
| asddubs wrote:
| because it's remotely updateable, and an analogue meter
| cannot measure apparent power (when the power returns to
| the grid the wheel would spin in the other direction)
| jpitz wrote:
| Remote updating doesn't provide apparent power
| measurement, a power measurement chip does - this does
| require an upgraded meter, yes, but does not necessitate
| a smart one, although the economics of upgrading a fleet
| of meters probably dictates that they be smart meters for
| other reasons.
| asddubs wrote:
| yes, but my point is that being remotely updateable means
| you can switch over to charging for apparent power
| remotely (which smart meters can already measure)
| 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.
| onethought wrote:
| It's not obfuscation, if you are concerned about privacy.
| You can completely hide your usage patterns with a
| battery or solar/wind generation.
|
| Are you honesty making the point that: knowing you used 5
| units of power in 1 month (where someone has to walk onto
| your property and read a number, as is the case in most
| dumb metered scenarios) is less of a privacy concern than
| knowing you used .3 of unit of power in the last 15
| minutes (without needing to walk onto your property).
|
| What am I missing?
| shkkmo wrote:
| > knowing you used 5 units of power in 1 month (where
| someone has to walk onto your property and read a number,
| as is the case in most dumb metered scenarios) is less of
| a privacy concern than knowing you used .3 of unit of
| power in the last 15 minutes (without needing to walk
| onto your property).
|
| Personally, I think so for most people. But that depends
| on how much privacy your property provides from
| pedestrians and where your meter is located.
|
| However, that is orthogonal to the debate since there are
| other options. Some places allow self reporting and
| Automated Meter Reading can be done without a smart meter
| that reports live power usage.
|
| I am unsure why you are so vested in arguing that nobody
| has a legitimate reason to be concerned about this. It is
| fine if it doesn't bother you, but it is really necessary
| to paint those with different concerns as irrational?
| onethought wrote:
| no, it's always worth pointing out irrational reasoning
| though.
|
| There are clear benefits to real-time monitoring of
| power. So far I've only heard made up, theoretical, what
| if, privacy concerns.
| 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.
| onethought wrote:
| This is conspiracy theory territory. You <100wh tv isn't
| going to show a anything on your power meter during a
| commercial break.
|
| Thermostat heating ruin your wake up time theories.
|
| And you avoided my actual point: a battery and solar/wind
| hides all of this,
| 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.
| shkkmo wrote:
| Which I have the ability to choose when/if I am survieled
| by by leaving it at home or throwing it in a river.
| 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).
| gerash wrote:
| When it comes to smart meter security and privacy (and
| perhaps in this day and age diversity and equity) concerns
| let's discuss them when there's an evidence that they have
| caused problems.
| 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.
| falcolas wrote:
| Or, have them raid your house on the suspicion of growing
| MJ, when you're doing a crypto coin (or something
| similar; folding proteins?)
| walleeee wrote:
| > manage to convince their users to behave well enough to fit
| into the box
|
| Perhaps this is a fundamental limitation of digital technology,
| if not all technology
|
| Being the vastly more flexible party in any interaction with
| it, we tend to adapt to its particular set of affordances and
| constraints
|
| This is often useful but opening any one door will close
| others: deployment at scale carries sociotechnical inertia
|
| It also frequently inverts the agentic orientation: we build
| tools, use them, and before long find ourselves used by them
| 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.
| wearywanderer wrote:
| Somewhere on the net in some parallel forum, water and
| electric utility workers are talking about how simple
| running twitter must be.
|
| > _How hard can it be? If a ethernet cable fails it 's
| not as though it will electrocute the worker or flood a
| town downstream._
| 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."
| bit_logic wrote:
| The government decided that phone numbers are important enough
| to create regulations that allow phone number portability
| between carriers.
|
| Email addresses need the same regulation. The arguments that
| lead to phone number portability apply to email addresses as
| well. And I would argue that email addresses are even more
| important than phone numbers at this point (it's the single key
| to all online accounts, most bills, documents, statements are
| emailed as PDFs, a lot of government services expect a working
| email address).
|
| Email addresses have become critical and portability needs to
| become a requirement for all email services. There are
| technical issues, for example if someone cancels Gmail service,
| how can the @gmail.com address be moved elsewhere? It's not as
| simple as phone number portability. Maybe a regulation that any
| email service must provide forwarding service to another email
| address even if the service is no longer active? Or maybe a
| trusted mapping that exists outside any single service, kind of
| like a DNS for email addresses.
| freyr wrote:
| It would be interesting to have domain-free personal email
| addresses.
|
| The domain is useful to signify membership in an
| organization. But for individuals, why should our addresses
| have hotmail or gmail or yahoo or anything else appended to
| it?
| 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.
| woodruffw wrote:
| > 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?
|
| It's usually the other way around, in my experience: I'm
| sending something from a relatively small provider (or a
| institutional mailserver), and it's rejected (sometimes
| silently) by a larger receiver. The reasons tend to be
| opaque, and support is nonexistent (presumably because
| the overwhelmingly amount incoming mail is illegitimate).
|
| It's a hard problem, and the reality is that Google has
| made the average user's email experience radically
| better. But the drawback of that is that they rule the
| ecosystem by fiat, and that there are relatively few
| entities that can play keep-up with Google's
| (unpublished?) standards for reliable delivery. Getting
| booted out of Gmail increasingly means being left out in
| the cold, especially as institutions (like the company I
| work for!) use GSuite for mail.
| 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.
| themacguffinman wrote:
| If a monopoly over your essential email address is the
| motivation, then _every single provider_ no matter the
| size has a monopoly over your email address. There 's no
| reason to limit your judgement to "companies of similar
| size". Would you argue that ProtonMail and Fastmail and
| so forth are equally responsible for your email address?
|
| Let's go further. Is Apple a public utility? If I buy an
| iPhone and it's painful to lose it, doesn't Apple have a
| monopoly over my iPhone given that they have kill
| switches and update privileges?
|
| Is Hertz a public utility? If I rent a car and it becomes
| very painful to lose it, doesn't Hertz have a monopoly
| over my essential car?
| buran77 wrote:
| I appreciate the time you took to come up with the
| examples but I hope you can see they're not quite
| comparable. An email address, like a phone number,
| identifies _you_ uniquely. But unlike phone numbers there
| 's no "portability", you can't take your gmail address
| with you to yahoo. Losing access to your email is more
| akin to losing access to your name than to an appliance
| of sorts.
|
| A phone or a car are nowhere near that level of
| uniqueness. People don't need your IMEI or VIN number to
| identify you. You can still have a backup of your data
| which for all intents and purposes will turn any other
| phone into the one that was taken from you. And if Hertz
| somehow just takes back your car full of your personal
| stuff you have plenty of recourse. Most other critical
| industries were either regulated as utilities or self
| regulated.
|
| The problem is that companies like Google give you the
| service ostensibly for free and use this to justify being
| able to completely cut access to your account with
| absolutely no recourse and no explanation. You didn't pay
| anything so you can't expect anything. On the other hand
| they do monetize your data which invalidates the "for
| free" premise. They also don't give you any possibility
| to transfer the ownership of those uniquely identifying
| elements.
|
| Perhaps any mail provider like ProtonMail or Fastmail
| should also be regulated as utilities. When electricity
| was deemed a utility it was probably used by fewer people
| and it was less useful to them than mail is today. At the
| very least companies like Google, Apple, and the rest of
| the bunch should be very tightly regulated.
|
| You can use maps or youtube without an account but you
| will never receive that job offer without _your_ email.
| And you may not be able to access your other critical
| accounts since they rely on email.
|
| Let's put it another way: maybe an email provider should
| not be allowed to be used for critical services like
| banking, utilities, public services, etc. unless they
| themselves accept to be regulated as utilities. The point
| is to not have critical services relying on ones with a
| proven low quality of service track record.
| themacguffinman wrote:
| I wasn't talking about a phone number or IMEI or VIN, I
| was talking about an iPhone. An iPhone can identity me if
| I setup iMessage, which is based on a phone number but
| effectively takes it over so that Apple receives all
| texts sent by other iPhone users on my behalf until I
| unregister it in some way. It's a common complaint that
| just switching to an Android phone can result in lost
| messages and is a notable switching cost.
|
| People use my address to identify me too. Does that make
| my rented home a public utility? I can't take my home
| address with me. I guess my landlord should be forced by
| law to renew my lease indefinitely otherwise I'll lose my
| geographical name.
|
| > You can use maps or youtube without an account but you
| will never receive that job offer without your email. And
| you may not be able to access your other critical
| accounts since they rely on email.
|
| Of course you can receive job offers without a specific
| email. You can update your job seeking profile and inform
| companies you've applied to of a new email. It's also
| entirely up to you to share additional forms of contact
| like a phone number when you apply.
|
| Any account critical enough to be considered a public
| utility like banking, utilities, public services, etc
| won't be solely based on email and will have non-email
| recovery mechanisms, usually based on your actual
| identity.
| 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.
| bumby wrote:
| > _should have the right to do business with whomever
| they want, based on any criteria they deem appropriate._
|
| There's a subtle distinction where you may have layered
| your own individual beliefs onto this statement by using
| the word "should", rather than indicating what is
| actually the law. While you may feel they "should" have
| that right based on your own feelings and personal
| morality, there are specific laws that say they do not.
| In many jurisdictions within the U.S., for example,
| businesses generally do not have the right to refuse
| business to a person based on that person being part of a
| protected class.
| gwright wrote:
| Due process is also important. A balance is needed.
| brigandish wrote:
| That's why selling as a private individual is different
| to setting up a company, in the first you can choose not
| to sell to whomever for whatever reason with no legal
| comeback. Try denying service to someone in a protected
| class if you're in the second and you may well end up
| with real legal problems.
| 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]
| missedthecue wrote:
| Even for Facebook, I don't think forcing them to sell
| whatsapp or Instagram would stop the fury at them on this
| forum and others.
|
| Most people are angry at Facebook for reasons like not
| understanding their business model (they sell my data! is
| one I hear often) or because Facebook allows a platform
| where average people can speak their thoughts.
| [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.
| toast0 wrote:
| It's a business unit now, but it would need to be a
| separate company in my proposed breakup. AFAIK, Google
| doesn't operate Android as a wholy owned subsidiary, it's
| just part of Google, Inc which means any separation is at
| the whim of management; in a wholy owned subsidiary,
| there would be some structural barriers at least.
| 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.
| jonplackett wrote:
| That's kind of the point though isn't it?
| 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.
| jonplackett wrote:
| Isn't the problem also that they use the massive profit
| in search to go into other areas and distort the market
| there by being able to subsidise losses with search
| income?
|
| It would also stop them favouring their own products in
| search results
| 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.
| judge2020 wrote:
| it'll be 'easy to break up' because that's what Alphabet
| was created to do - back in 2015 they knew antitrust and
| a monopoly break-up was going to happen at some point, so
| they made these companies largely operationally separate
| so that they have very little hiccup when it is required.
| The only one that'd be hard is YouTube where they might
| require spending some millions reworking the ad model,
| but otherwise they'll have little issues continuing
| business as usual. YouTube is likely profitable[0], so
| it's not like their monopoly over free video content is
| going to cease.
|
| 0: https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-
| google-al...
| 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.
| minsc__and__boo wrote:
| Being popular != Monopoly
|
| Having Market Share Dominance != Monopoly
|
| Being a monopoly means having sole control over the
| _supply_ of a market (conversely, Monopsony is _demand_
| ). When people say Bing, Baidu, DDG, Yahoo, DDG, etc. are
| all a click a way, that means Google does not control the
| market supply.
|
| Just because the majority of people choose to use
| something on an open market doesn't mean that thing has a
| monopoly.
| tyingq wrote:
| Schmidt seems concerned they are in that territory. Also,
| the document I linked to, presumably written by people
| with deep expertise on the topic, has several relevant
| sections. One excerpt:
|
| ===
|
| _A. GOOGLE HAS MONOPOLY POWER IN RELEVANT MARKETS
|
| A firm is a monopolist if it can profitably raise prices
| substantially above the competitive level. [M]onopoly
| power may be inferred from a firm's possesion of a
| dominant share of a relevant market that is protected by
| entry barriers. Google has monopoly power in one or more
| properly defined markets...Staff has identified three
| relevant antitrust markets..._
|
| ===
|
| I think it's at least fair to say that some people with
| expertise in the space feel like Google could have
| monopoly control over one or more markets.
| minsc__and__boo wrote:
| Eric Schmidt is not Google.
|
| Also, a half-redacted document written by an anonymous
| person that was accidentally released almost a decade ago
| does not change the definition of a monopoly.
|
| Yes, you can assume that it's written by someone who
| knows what they're talking about, just as much as you can
| also presume they were wrong because it was squashed.
| That's a moot argument.
|
| None of that changes the fact that being popular does not
| make something a monopoly.
| tyingq wrote:
| _" popular does not make something a monopoly"_
|
| I didn't say that, though, or anything like that.
|
| I did mention market share dominance. But that's often
| related to things like _" A firm is a monopolist if it
| can profitably raise prices substantially above the
| competitive level."_.
| minsc__and__boo wrote:
| >In short, dominant market share in web search.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27440321#27443928
| tyingq wrote:
| The word "popular" is where?
|
| _" may be inferred from a firm's possesion of a dominant
| share of a relevant market that is protected by entry
| barriers"_
|
| Arguably I left out "protected by entry barriers", but
| that seems obvious for search.
| minsc__and__boo wrote:
| _Dominant market share_ is reflective of being the
| popular consumer choice, given the easily accessible
| supply of other search engines.
|
| You're splitting hairs over the word popular now.
| tyingq wrote:
| It's more complicated than that, though.
|
| For example:
| https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/7273448-DOC.html
| (page 3)
|
| I'm not saying they are "for sure" a monopoly. I am
| saying notable numbers of reasonable people with
| expertise in the space think they are. It's not as clear
| cut as you're saying.
| minsc__and__boo wrote:
| You gave an example of monopoly, one of which is
| definitively not a monopoly.
|
| This entirely new example you are giving is an example of
| partisan posturing, not evidence of a monopoly. Look at
| the political affiliation of every single person who
| signed the letter, and look how many days it was filed
| before the last federal election.
|
| Again, being popular doesn't make something a monopoly,
| neither does being a popular target for Republicans.
| 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?
| anders_p wrote:
| > But market share of what? No one pays for web search so
| that's not really a market.
|
| The customer in a web search isn't the USER. It's the
| BUISINESSES whose ads are placed on the search results
| page.
|
| THEY are certainly paying for the web search.
| 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.
| ping_pong wrote:
| If a business gets deindexed by Google or its search
| ranking drops, their income plummets. It's pretty obvious
| they are a monopoly and have monopolistic power.
| minsc__and__boo wrote:
| Just having dominant market share does not make one a
| monopoly. Google would have to control the supply of all
| the search engines to have a monopoly (which they don't).
| lottin wrote:
| Google is not a monopoly, but it has enough market power to
| be a reason for concern.
| minsc__and__boo wrote:
| Anti trust laws are written to protect consumers, not
| inferior competitors.
| ping_pong wrote:
| Yes. And Google is engaging in monopolistic behavior by
| getting rid of any semblance of customer service. This is
| a direct result of their monopoly because businesses and
| customers have no viable alternative. So they can save
| billions by cutting customer support to near zero. That's
| the same as raising prices with impunity.
| minsc__and__boo wrote:
| Poor customer service is not monopolistic behavior.
|
| If consumers preferred a search engine with good customer
| service, they would use the search engine with better
| customer service instead.
| 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?
| asymptosis wrote:
| I don't _not_ use DDG. I also don 't _not_ use Google. I
| tend to mix it up depending on what sorts of results I 'm
| after and how private the search should be.
|
| One thing I like about IS compared to DDG is that DDG is
| still funded by advertising. This means that people are
| still paying to bias the results I see.
|
| By paying money to a search engine which doesn't rely on
| advertising at all, I have more trust that IS are really
| vested in showing me the results that _I_ think are best.
| (They don 't always succeed, but I trust that it's not
| about the results being undermined by third parties, it's
| just that they are still fairly small.)
| 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."
| greyhair wrote:
| I find it hilarious the Red State Ohio wants to increase
| government oversight of corporations.
|
| Populist sentiment has completely rolled on through at this
| point.
| 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.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| What does it make you suspect their motivations are?
| voxl wrote:
| The obvious? More control over a perceived liberal-biased
| company from a republican controlled state.
| muyuu wrote:
| I'm not American but I find it worrisome that some of the
| largest companies in the US (and the world) are so
| "obviously" partisan and willing to exert their power in
| a partisan fashion, as people accept this reality
| uncritically - whether it's in favour of their
| allegiances or not.
|
| That's what a dangerously broken society looks like. The
| common folk should never be openly supportive of "robber
| baron"-style political activism and it's unprecedented
| AFAIK.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Well, what is "obvious" is under dispute too.
|
| It is not "obvious" to me that for instance Google is
| particularly partisan. Most big companies donate to both
| USA parties in large quantities, because they know they
| need to buy the politicians whoever is in power. I
| haven't looked it up, but I assume Google is similar in
| it's lobbying.
|
| The largest companies are almost always mostly looking
| out for their own profits, and use their not
| inconsiderable power mostly to that end. And that's not
| unprecedented. I don't know if it should be less
| worrisome that we accept _that_ uncritically!
|
| (Btw, to say something is unprecedented _and_ call it
| "robber baron style" is a bit confusing, since the term
| "robber baron" as applied to industrialists/capitalists
| is over 100 years old! Whatever the "robber baron style"
| is, it originated in the 19th century! so not
| unprecedented)
| muyuu wrote:
| what is unprecedented is that a faction of the populace
| openly support the barons because they think they're
| doing their bidding
|
| it's a very dangerous game
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| That is not at all obvious to me, that's why I asked, it
| wasn't a trick question, there wasn't an answer that was
| obvious to me!
|
| OK. I dunno if that makes much sense to me, I don't think
| it does. (I am not a conservative fwiw). But thanks for
| clarifying!
| 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.
| awillen wrote:
| Comcast once charged me a $5 self-installation fee. As in
| I set up the equipment in my house and paid for the
| privilege.
|
| My other option was to not have internet.
| sumedh wrote:
| Can someone who has the time and money sue Comcast in
| court for this fee? I believe a judge will say that fee
| is not reasonable.
| minsc__and__boo wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_shaping
| 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.
| minsc__and__boo wrote:
| That's not what a red herring is.
|
| They're calling out the logical inconsistency of the
| claims being made, and in turn questioning the
| genuineness of the speaker's motive.
| Covzire wrote:
| I'm not aware of any ISP in the US that has terminated a
| customer's service for perfectly legal political
| statements.
| zerocrates wrote:
| Certainly it has happened on the _hosting_ side:
| connectivity, domain names, etc.
| minsc__and__boo wrote:
| Outside of certain protected class situations, _Freedom
| of Association_ allows anyone to terminate service
| irregardless of legality of political statements made on
| their own privately-owned platform.
|
| And no, political stance is not a protected class.
| pumaontheprowl wrote:
| Hence why Google needs to be made a public utility.
| minsc__and__boo wrote:
| Except search engines are not a necessary service for the
| public, which is what a public utility is.
|
| Reclassifying a privately owned business to restrict
| their freedom of association because you think they
| threaten your political views is autocratic behavior, not
| democratic.
| 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.
| NationalPark wrote:
| What was it specifically that got you banned?
| ttt0 wrote:
| It was just an old meme and it was in my native language
| so you wouldn't get, but the offensive part of it is
| simply 'bitch'. Not as a direct insult, but kinda like in
| "surprise, bitch".
|
| Another thing is that I got suspended for butting in to a
| conversation about homosexuality where someone was saying
| that homosexuality is natural, and I said something to
| the extent of "rape and murder is natural too" to point
| out the fallacy and they sent me on a 30-day vacation
| from Facebook for that.
| robotdongs wrote:
| First off, a 30 day vacation from Facebook sounds
| wonderful, it'd be a great excuse to leave it all
| together.
|
| Second, not that this was your intent, but that's such a
| poor example to use in pointing out the fallacy that I
| can see why someone might see it as "hateful", which is
| against the TOS, whether or not it should be is a
| separate discussion.
|
| As a side-note, pointing out a logical fallacy doesn't
| invalidate someone's argument, ironically this is itself
| a fallacy.
| pumaontheprowl wrote:
| The definition of hate speech can be made to fit whatever
| political agenda you seek to promote. For example, you will
| get banned from Twitter for saying "feminism is cancer" on
| the basis that the statement is hate speech against women.
| However, saying "white lives don't matter" will not get you
| banned from Twitter, nor will saying "#HitlerWasRight" in
| regards to the Israel/Palestine conflict (both exact quotes
| from racist twitter users who are still on the service).
| 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.
| hellotomyrars wrote:
| I fail to see how it is possible to present a good faith argument
| about how Google is a public utility when the required
| infrastructure that Google is built on is not.
|
| If ISPs aren't a utility then Google can't be. I also don't think
| this is being pursued in good faith which is the sadder part.
| 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?
| bumby wrote:
| Can you expound on your opinion about what Google has
| contributed?
|
| Not that I don't think they have, but I can think of a lot of
| corporations that have contributed more to civilization and
| quality of life, yet we are okay regulating them. So I'm not
| sure that's the best barometer for this discussion.
| 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."
| cwkoss wrote:
| Do states have the power to file antitrust actions against
| companies, or is that only a federal power?
|
| It seems like an antitrust suit would have much better chance of
| success than this. Is this just meaningless political posturing
| or is there actually chance of success?
| bumby wrote:
| Yes, in the case of Ohio it's the Valentine Act. It's a
| contemporary of the federal Sherman Antitrust Act.
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| Sincere question, are most utilities even treated as public
| utilities in Ohio? When I was a kid in Montana, the very popular
| statewide public power utility was deregulated by conservatives
| and it ceased to operate in the public interest at all. It was
| quickly replaced by even less scrupulous businesses after it
| bankrupt itself pursing telecom.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Actually, a common carrier, which is a _private_ utility.
|
| If they wanted Google to be a _public_ utility, they'd have to
| seize or buy their assets; the former of which is prohibited by
| the 5th Amendment, and their ability to compel the second is
| absent because the relevant assets aren 't within Ohio's reach
| for that purpose.
| musicale wrote:
| Why on earth would I want Google to be a government-enforced
| monopoly?
|
| I already have a government-enforced cable monopoly operated by a
| private company, and it's terrible.
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| That would make their Google Fiber ISP a utility too... hmm.
| 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-...
| rta5 wrote:
| Can anyone point to any Ohio legal precedents where something not
| regulated by PUCO has been considered a common carrier?
|
| Per the original "An entity can be a common carrier and/or public
| utility under Ohio common law,even if it is expressly excluded
| from regulation by PUCO"
|
| I'd be curious what precedent makes Google a common carrier in
| Ohio law. From a US federal standpoint individual websites appear
| to me more akin to radio broadcast stations, which according to
| Ronald Coase had a failed attempt to be declared common carriers.
|
| I am not a lawyer, so I'd be happy to be corrected on that.
| eddof13 wrote:
| I support this. I think once the platforms become large enough,
| Facebook, YouTube, Google, etc, they should be regulated as a
| utility.
| scottyvg wrote:
| How do people not see Google search as an advertising platform?
| Google search may act like an advanced dewey decimal system, but
| it is not at all the same thing.
| polskibus wrote:
| Yes please, while you're at it, require separation of cloud
| providers from other software services (ie. Computation utility
| companies)
| simonjgreen wrote:
| The status of Google, and additionally AWS and Azure, is feeling
| very reminiscent of the early days of electricity companies, and
| the early days of (in UK at least) telco. Bit by bit the world is
| realising that the global economy and system is now at the mercy
| of these businesses to a defacto point where there's no option
| any more. I believe it's a responsible direction for governments
| to legislate to control them, if nothing else then purely to
| guarantee risk management and sustainability for the population
| at large.
|
| Suspending for a moment how unlikely it is to happen, imagine if
| Amazon decided tomorrow they were shuttering AWS. Or Google was
| ceasing providing search. These things are so essential to
| everyday life now the impact would be staggering.
|
| Governments should be looking at these threats with open eyes in
| the same way they have had their eyes opened to global pandemic
| prep.
| 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
| uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh wrote:
| Goddamn sue cox first, this is just politicians polluticking
| 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.
| dlsa wrote:
| I'm not sure what public utility means in this context.
|
| Does it still mean privately owned?
| 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.
| Keverw wrote:
| If I was Google, I'd just say screw Ohio when considering
| future expansions. I'd view them as being business
| unfriendly.
| activehuman wrote:
| can we donate to support this lawsuit? :P
| 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.
| psvj wrote:
| this is pretty dumb, does anyone actually think public utilities
| provide quality service? Im baffled why anyone would want to
| create more of these zombie organizations.
| bootlooped wrote:
| My water, trash, sewer, gas, and electric utilities have always
| met my expectations.
| known wrote:
| Isn't it against Capitalism ?
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