
The case for why Google should be regulated as a public utility - abhivyas5
https://www.rankscience.com/blog/why-google-should-be-regulated-as-a-public-utility
======
ALittleLight
One Google quirk I've been thinking about lately is the times when you search
for something and the thing you want is the top advertised and organic result.
Seems like a waste of money.

An example, if you search for "heroku" then you get an ad for heroku, which,
yeah, is what I was searching for, but heroku is also the top result and
obviously what I was looking for. Heroku is paying Google to provide Google
with the search result that Google should've (and does) already identified as
the right result.

I assume the reason these ads exist is because if they didn't competitors
would take them, but still, it feels like an odd arrangement very much to
Google's benefit where companies pay Google up prevent competitors from taking
their traffic.

~~~
xnx
It's also the best way to get accurate data on how many searches for "heroku"
there are. Without an ad running, you only get estimates.

~~~
ALittleLight
That's an interesting idea. I just looked up "heroku" on Google's keyword
planner and the max cost per click is 3.00. Is it really worth three dollars a
click to know the ratio of people who click heroku over people who search it?

Seems like a crazy loss of money to me.

~~~
qwertycrackers
Afaik, on Google ads, cost per click scales inversely with page quality. So
clicks on the heroku ad searching for heroku generally find what they are
seeking and therefore don't cost very much. If Google thinks you are
advertising people toward trash, they charge a lot more.

------
auganov
I love how few actual proposal there are out there as to what the government
should _actually_ do. That is - not just "regulate" or "break them up". I'm
talking specifics.

Once you start making concrete proposals it becomes increasingly obvious just
how hard it is to come up with something that won't make everything worse.

~~~
MattGaiser
Or all the impacts down the line. If they decided to basically seize Google,
they would be telling investors that long term investment doesn’t work as the
government will come along and ruin it.

Watch as companies like Google rapidly stop any innovation spending and become
high dividend stocks built only to pump out cash.

~~~
tgb
Hasn't this already happened with Bell and Bell Labs? Why didn't the breakup
of Bell stop Google from investing in innovation?

~~~
stickfigure
Bell was a real monopoly - as in, it was literally illegal to start a
competing phone company. This is much different from "monopoly" with quotes,
as in "gee whiz they seem so big and popular it must be a _monopoly_ ".

~~~
tgb
I don't see the relevance here. Google knows that both sense of "monopoly" can
and have been regulated by the government since Standard Oil was broken up.
Hence the threat of regulation did not stop Google from investing in
innovation.

~~~
jeffbee
Does the comparison to Standard Oil stand scrutiny? The case against Standard
Oil wasn't merely that they were popular. After all, kerosene is an
undifferentiated commodity where consumers have no preference other than
price. The case against Standard Oil was that they held such a breadth of
natural resources (which are exclusive; no two parties can pump oil the same
barrel of crude oil), and capital-intensive assets such as pipelines and
railroads where Standard Oil was bribing the operators to get them to charge
higher rates to their competitors.

So what's the comparable unfair practice? You believe Google is paying Level3
under the table to make sure all its competitors pay more for network transit?

~~~
tgb
The comparison holds up if the claim, as stickfigure made, was that the
relevant factor is whether or not there is a legally-enforced monopoly. US vs
Microsoft shows that the factors you cite aren't necessary either.

~~~
jeffbee
Microsoft closely parallels Standard Oil in this regard. Microsoft was forcing
Dell to charge a higher price for competing operating systems (in effect,
Microsoft got paid $100 every time Dell shipped a computer with OS/2 or
whatever). I can easily see how the first party forcing the second party to
charge a higher rate to the third party is abusive.

------
beders
Google is a private corporation that runs various free services, i.e. _you_
are the product.

You agreed to their terms and services.

If you don't like that, you can use a competitor. As long as there's an open
internet infrastructure, there's no anti-competitive behavior. Everyone can be
a google competitor of one of its services. Case in point, DuckDuckGo etc.

If you want to regulate something, start with the ISPs and restore net
neutrality.

~~~
rmacqueen
> Case in point, DuckDuckGo etc

You're missing the point. The anti-competitive behaviour isn't harmful against
other search engines - it's against companies in the other domains where
Google can leverage its nigh total search engine dominance to push its other
products, e.g. Google Flights and Google Shopping. How is a flight booking
service supposed to fairly compete with Google Flights when Google owns the
top of the funnel where users go to search for these services? It's exactly
the same thing that Microsoft did with Internet Explorer in the 90s: leverage
their control of the platform (in that case, an OS) to exclude competitors for
their other products (web browsers).

~~~
scarface74
The top of the funnel is the url bar. People choose to go to Google.

~~~
rmacqueen
And people 'chose' to have a Microsoft operating system in the late 90s.
What's your point?

~~~
scarface74
No people didn’t choose to have Microsoft. Microsoft forced OEMs to bundle
Windows with all of their computers. Even if the OEM decided not to bundle
Windows, they still had to pay a license fee.

No personal computer comes with Chrome installed by default unless the OEM
made a deal with Google to bundle it along with other crapware. Users have to
explicitly download Chrome.

It’s a lot easier to change your default search engine than change your
operating system.

The proof is in Google’s dominance. Google became popular when IE was the
default browser on PCs and Safari was the default browser on Macs.

~~~
rmacqueen
The issue isn't how Google achieved its search engine dominance - it's what it
is doing with that dominance. No one denies Google became the search platform
of choice because it is genuinely better. That doesn't change the fact that
Google is now using that position of near total dominance to stifle
competition in other areas, such as e-commerce. That's the (sound) basis for
the anti-trust charge.

~~~
scarface74
I’m saying that government intervention through anti trust actions were
_useless_ the last two times in the modern era - MS and IBM.

Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Google came to prominence by being able to
execute. Even MD stayed relevant while the other four were growing through
better execution.

Why would anyone think that the government has all of the sudden become
competent when it comes to regulating tech when we have forty years that shows
just the opposite?

Did you see the dog and pony show when it the government trotted out the 4
tech CEOs? Would you really trust them to be both competent and not corrupt.

------
jeffbee
When someone describes search results as “unbiased” you know right there and
then they fundamentally do not understand the act of searching.

~~~
sidlls
I take it you refer to "Google started out as an almost benevolent index of
the world wide web, showing users ten blue, unbiased links for whatever users
were searching for."

Leaving aside whether it's true or not, this could be interpreted more
charitably. Search results are necessarily biased to provide relevant links,
based on some definition of "relevant". We can interpret "unbiased" in this
context to mean that content providers cannot introduce "bad" bias (e.g. by
misrepresenting their actual content, by paying for ads to indirectly boost
placement, or directly paying for placement, etc.).

~~~
jeffbee
Yeah, I was just trying to politely point out that this article is dumb and
the author fails to make their case.

Take the example of the basketball dribbling video. The insinuation is that
Google serves YouTube results because Google is biased; it owns YouTube. The
claim is that Google should mix in results from Vimeo. This supposes that
there are worthwhile results on Vimeo, that Google can index them, and that
people want to see them. The refutation of this bias claim is pretty easy. If
you do the same search on Bing, you get the exact same results, all from
YouTube. So whatever causes these results to be 100% YouTube, it cannot be
explained by Google's bias.

The second flaw in the argument is the idea, which all SEO people hold dear,
that a search engine exists to serve the content providers, and that they
somehow owe a debt to middlemen. This is not the case. The search engine
serves the querier. When I search for airfares from New York to San Francisco,
it makes sense that a search engine serves the underlying data about the
flights and their prices. Air travel is provided by airlines, not by Expedia.
Travelocity, Orbitz, and Kayak are not naturally occurring "organic results",
they are grifting middlemen who use dark patterns to chisel a few dollars out
of people who just want to fly.

~~~
fuzxi
I don't think the author's issue was that youtube results were ranked highly,
but that they took up a much larger amount of screen real estate. Look at the
screenshot in the article - half the page is one youtube video, then there's a
video bar (all youtube, perhaps coincidentally) which is twice as tall as the
last, non-youtube result.

~~~
jeffbee
I just produced a search result that puts a Vimeo video in the carousel at the
top of the page. It was difficult, because Vimeo sucks and nobody uses it, but
it proves that the arrangement of junk on the SERP is origin-neutral. The top
result gets a bigger box.

------
blauditore
>As the founder of an SEO company [...]

Honestly, "SEO" either shouldn't be necessary if content is reasonable and
useful, or it's that kind of SEO spam which has had a much worse impact on
search results than any of Google's advertisement.

~~~
bagacrap
indeed, it's surprising this isn't higher. 5% of SEO is making sure your
content is indexable. 95% is tricking a search engine into ranking your site
more highly than it should. It's incredibly laughable to think SEO companies
want unbiased results. SEO companies are in direct competition with Google for
ad spend, ie Acme Corp can either pay Google for an ad (and get detailed
metrics for what the money has accomplished) or pay slimy SEO dudes to
hopefully trick Google (and just trust that it worked).

------
crazygringo
This is a weird headline.

"Regulated as a public utility" means, economically, that prices/profits are
set by law -- that there's only one electricity provider but they can't jack
up prices because there's no competition.

That makes no sense when applied to Google.

The type of remedy appropriate for what the author describes (Google favoring
their own products in search) is relatively simple. That Google, Amazon, and
others -- anybody who runs any kind of search mechanism, store, etc. -- are
not allowed to give their own products preferential priority.

Public utilities are a super-weird and unhelpful analogy.

~~~
justinclift
> "Regulated as a public utility" means, economically, that prices/profits are
> set by law ...

That's one part of it. Another part - unfortunately not even considered by the
article - is customer support.

Utilities _must_ provide customer support. For example, if a customer loses
their account password.

Google _famously_ has no recourse for people locked out of an account. If
Google were to be regulated as a public utility, that would need to change.

~~~
crazygringo
But the article is about Google as search, only, which needs no customer
support, since it requires no account.

Whether Google (or other companies) provide support for their _free_ consumer
accounts is a totally orthogonal issue -- and I haven't heard anyone claiming
that Gmail or Docs or Drive is being anticompetitive and needs to be
regulated.

~~~
justinclift
You're right the bulk of the article is focused on Search. However, it also
has this:

    
    
      There are very specific kinds of businesses and business
      models that should be overseen. The first and most
      important thing is a body [that] oversees the collection
      of user data and privacy and identification.
    

The "user data and privacy and identification" piece is also important. It's
just not something _this_ article really gets into.

------
glitchc
This seems excessive. Instead of regulating search, which would have a net
effect of entrenching Google as the only de-facto search engine, it is better
to let competition take its course. A better technology can always up-end
Google's business model (it's more fragile than people think). Let the open
market perform its function. After all, it was only 2000 when people thought
MS and RIM were too big and needed to be regulated. Nowadays, MS has lost much
of its competitive edge in the desktop space and RIM is just a patent-holding
shell of its former self.

~~~
v7p1Qbt1im
Mentioning MS in that way doesn’t help your argument. They are doing better
than ever before. Who cares about desktop space (which they still have an
enormous market share of btw) when you have Azure. I would argue the antitrust
settlement actually helped them.

Everyone is basically ignoring them in current “tech-lash” discussions. They
got away with a slap on the wrist 20 years ago and are just slightly more
careful.

~~~
glitchc
On the contrary, MS is an excellent example of a large company being forced to
pivot (to cloud) after their existing business model (desktop software) looked
increasingly dead in the water. Year to year earnings showcase how much more
reliant MS was on desktop software two decades ago. Changes in technology,
user expectations and computing model forced MS to innovate, not regulation,
and that’s exactly my point.

------
martin_drapeau
When a country regulates Google, they raise borders. Google, like any other
global internet compnay, is across borders. I would hate to be blocked form
accessing US Google when I live in Canada. Putting up barriers on the Internet
is contrary to an open Web.

It does exist for content. For example Netflix content in Canada is different
than in the US. You just can't do that for web pages.

In addition, nothing prevents Google from moving outside of the USA. Assuming
the US wants to break them up, Google could just turn around and say "I'm
moving to another country". The loss of jobs, intellectual property, etc would
be too big. The government would back down. In the end the consumer decides
which search engine to use. Today, that's Google.

This leads me to this question. What do you do when FAANGs become larger than
some countries? Apple revenues for example are larger than the GDP of some
countries. Facebook has 2B users. More than any other country. It then only
makes sense to regulate them at a international level. Not possible today.
Maybe in 100 years. Until then, FAANG will continue growing and gobbing up
companies and industries.

~~~
cmehdy
I must be misunderstanding your example, because as a francophone living in
Canada, google still shoves English-Canadian and French-Quebecois results +
articles + maps my way when I search for information on Google.FR.. so I fail
to see how Google isn't already doing exactly what you would hate to see them
do.

~~~
martin_drapeau
It is but I can switch to Google.US. With borders that won't be possible
anymore. Here too Netflix is a good example. Content differs in US vs Canada
based on IP. There is a walled garden. It is not open. And that's fine because
it is paid for content. However web sites are not.

------
treis
I think their "hotels near" is a bad example. The first two results are
hotels.com and tripadvisor. These aren't organic results. They're the
champions of a fierce SEO battle. Actual sites for the hotels near X have
little chance of comepeting. They'll be buried pages deep behind aggregators
that are owned by a handful of companies.

Google killing those intermediaries is probably a good thing long term. Of
course not so good if they just take their place.

------
tomweingarten
One of the more obvious pieces of misinformation here: ChowNow does not charge
any per-order commission fee, it's right on their pricing page --
[https://get.chownow.com/pricing](https://get.chownow.com/pricing). ChowNow is
also not the only provider Google Maps works with, restaurants have options.

Did this author do any fact checking at all?

~~~
ryanb
The minimum price to be on ChowNow is $99/mo on a 2 year plan. It's not free.

~~~
tomweingarten
That's correct but your article says "which charges an added hefty fee to the
restaurant for each order", which is simply not true.

------
tetrometal
The last thing I want is for government to become even _more_ involved with
managing what information I receive or how I receive it. We need less of that,
not more.

Also, please use competitors such as DuckDuckGo. It's not hard, and they're
not bad. It's unconscionable to me that we would resort to government force
before taking the obvious step of just not interacting with Google.

~~~
jeffbee
That's how you can tell that the SEO people are lying about their motives.
They don't want you to switch to DDG, they don't want 1000 search engines to
bloom. They want Google to be the big gatekeeper with almost all of the
traffic, and they want the government to use regulatory powers to force Google
to drive that traffic to their sites.

That's their endgame. They want the EU or whoever to effectively force Google
to send flight search traffic to Expedia. They don't get that from a
competitive search market, they can only get it if Google remains dominant but
becomes subject to a lot of bogus regulation.

------
t0mmyb0y
Oh god. If google were regulated like a utility...we would be stuck with them
instead of letting them go away by themselves. And yes, one day google will
fail and bring a bunch of companies with them.

~~~
jakeva
I've heard this before but I'm not convinced. Not every big company fails and
goes away. Not every company is Yahoo.

~~~
qshqwudhoquc
This doesn't seem like an argument you can make since A) modern capitalist
companies have only been around for 400 or so years B) 'big' companies since
then have not lasted more than 200 years at the very high end.

There is literally not enough data to make the point you are trying to make.
All evidence available, which isn't much, shows big companies are destined to
fail if they keep expanding.

~~~
Nasrudith
It is essentially an incompletely defined argument that goalposts can be set
anywhere from absurdly near term (it won't die in the next five seconds and
thus is immortal) to the absurdly far (it almost certainly won't survive in a
millenia and is thus already dust). Shell has spanned slavery to fossil fuels
in commodities sold but the mortality curve shows only very few outliers can
survive historic terms, let alone grow over them.

------
ggggtez
This guy is clueless.

He's mad that Google has a partnership with some food ordering app that takes
a cut.

If that 3-5% cut he's complaining about was pure waste, then why does Google
partner with anyone at all? They could take that 3-5% themselves!

It's because it's not probably _not_ completely trivial. So having a
governmental agency in charge of this... It's complete lunacy. They are going
to be more cost effective than a profit-motivated company?

And who pays for the government to implement this "Google" public utility? How
many HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS in taxes are we talking about, in order to avoid
paying a 3% premium for people who don't want to talk to a restaurant on the
phone?

------
albacur
I realize the big tech companies aren’t perfect.

But it’s weird to me that when tech is one of the few bright spots of the U.S.
economy in our lifetimes, and one of the few industries offering a large swath
of employees a path to the middle class and upper-middle class that only
previous generations could aspire to, and there are so many people hell bent
on capping it at its knees.

~~~
Nasrudith
That is easy to understand - the old stagnation hates growth with an undying
passion and envy. They take what they think they are entitled to (customers)
that were never theirs and by doing better make them question their own worth.
It is just so much easier to hate than to try to do anything better. And that
applies to so many things at all walks of society and the crab-bucket
mentality.

The fact it is "nerdy" just ads fuel to the fire given the anti-
intellectuslism, that they already committed lives to their existing paths,
and that provokes envy far beyond say bankers. They imagine only a lack of
money stops them from being rich off of passive income (there are also
mentality changes involved including ability to evaluate them but they are
ignorant of them) but tech riches? To imagine changing would call for
themselves to imagine themselves degraded. Nerds being successful instead of
ones to look down upon are abomination to their social order and conception of
the world.

The hysteria against "monopolies" with a tortured definition is just an
extension of the crab bucket envy. Not wanting help but to drag others down
with them.

------
bloomingeek
We do understand that Google is a company, it will make profits at any cost,
even if it has to pay fines later? This is what regulation is for. If the
customers are harmed and have no recourse, there must be a way for protection
of some kind. I'll take a politician over a predator company any time!

~~~
tetrometal
> I'll take a politician over a predator company any time!

I don't understand this take. You can use DuckDuckGo right now, without having
to invoke a predator politician.

------
narag
Even if anticompetitive behaviour is clear, I wonder if a USA government would
take action against them. Has such a thing happened before? I mean fighting a
company that gaves the USA an advantage in a global market, as opposed to
local monopolies.

~~~
MereInterest
Yes.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Roosevelt#Trust_busti...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Roosevelt#Trust_busting_and_regulation)

~~~
narag
Could you be more specific?

------
eggy
I used to use Yandex back in 2012 and DuckDuckGo for a while. I had my browser
open up with all three at one point - Google, Yandex, and DuckDuckGo. If I
didn't find or feel the results showed what I wanted, I checked all of them.

Another thought, isn't YouTube the largest video streaming service? I think
Vimeo has 5% of the registered users, but it is ad-free. Wouldn't it make
sense YouTube shows up at top for most searches by sheer number of registered
users? Some of my more esoteric searches come up with videos that are only
found on Vimeo, and I click on them. Should a single video on Vimeo be given
more real estate than the 20 that popup on YouTube?

------
rayiner
The western world has just spent decades engaged in a vast project of
regulating fewer things "as a public utility."
[http://www.oecd.org/economy/growth/15172081.pdf](http://www.oecd.org/economy/growth/15172081.pdf).
Public utility regulation is hard and often doesn't work very well. Any case
for extending public utility regulation into new areas should tackle and
overcome those trends to explain why such regulation is warranted in the new
space accounting for all the reasons why we have been trying to reduce the
amount of such regulation.

------
bitxbit
Until financial institutions are regulated again, regulating big tech is a big
joke.

~~~
bloomingeek
This is true and FB is the proof. They gladly paid a huge fine and still made
billions in the process. This is what regulation is for!

------
Upvoter33
Regulation of all of these services - that affect literally billions of people
- is needed.

Trusting the senior citizen center that we call the Senate or White House to
get it right - now that's another thing altogether.

But, we've got to start somewhere.

------
rossjudson
It takes less than a minute of searching to find that the first argument
Bednar presents is factually incorrect.

Bednar: "Local restaurants, for example, are forced to use Google’s partner
ChowNow in order to have convenient “Order Pickup” or “Order Delivery” buttons
in search results for their own name, which charges an added hefty fee to the
restaurant for each order, hurting their already thin margins."

ChowNow is all about "unlimited, commission-free orders":

[https://get.chownow.com/pricing](https://get.chownow.com/pricing)

------
swalsh
I really wish google had public data for something like average page number or
something similar for a search term. We have data for what people are
searching for, but its hard to determine how successful people are in finding
what they're looking for. If you're searching for a niche, it would be great
to know what people want but can't find.

I suspect google already has this data, but it's too valuable for them to
share.

~~~
jeffbee
SEO industry publications suggest that fewer than 1% of all clicks come from
page 2 or higher.

------
hinkley
Earlier this week when we were talking about FOSS search engines, I thought:

How weird would it be if the Internet Archive expanded its mandate to include
search? No that’s dumb. Is it? I don’t know.

It might be good if search were regulated as a utility. And ad free. I don’t
know if regulating Google is the way to do it.

The problem is if the government gets too friendly with search then they’ll
want the data and holy shit will that be a dark day.

~~~
Shared404
^^This comment is a reminder for everyone to install the Tor Browser or set up
Tails, just in case.

------
haolez
There is no "public" here. There is only "government". It might do a better
job than Google at this. It might not.

~~~
drivingmenuts
I don’t think the government would be getting quality contractors to do the
work to sort this out. They would be getting the lowest bidders who have a
political axe to grind or an interest in inflating the contracts into a never-
ending project with little to show for it, and offshore workers with little
experience.

Just like every other government IT iniative.

Additionally, that would give the government direct access to a lot of
sensitive information that people don’t really want them to have. While it
probably has under-the-table access right now, do you really think having
overt access is any better?

If the thought of having the government running a search engine, even at arms
length, doesn’t leave you absolutely shitting yourself in terror, you have
issues.

------
eric4smith
Interesting theoretical case study, but moot point. America is a business, not
a country. Will never happen in our lifetimes.

------
supernova87a
The question I have about public policy in this realm is, "when does something
become a service the public has a certain entitlement to?"

Because, if I think about how long Google has been around (and been popular),
this is on the order of 15 years. You might even say just 10 years in terms of
when it became widely used. That's the blink of an eye in government terms.

If I were to be Google, I might ask, "where do you have the gall to take what
we built from scratch, that you didn't even know about 10 years ago, and
demand that it serve the public in the way that you want?"

On the other hand, the societal good in me says, "you've affected and changed
the world to something new, policies need to take that into account".

I guess, if Google had chosen to be a pay-for-service, private club that only
certain people could use, then they wouldn't be in this situation. You make
something private enough, and it'll never be so big as to attract attention.
But then they wouldn't be worth like $1T.

I guess, when do we have the right to demand that something turn into a public
utility? Or that it has changed to effectively become one?

------
download13
Yeah... But maybe first we should have a coherent system for regulating public
utilities. Like just having whatever president shows up appoint someone who
basically has full control of how things in their purview are managed...
well... there's probably room for improvement

------
LatteLazy
I actually like this article because it identifies specific, changeable
behaviors of google that could be corrected. I don't necessarily agree with
them all, but he has done some homework rather than just fill a page with
"herp derp google monopoly"

------
ggggtez
The internet should be a public utility. Google should not. This would be
insanity.

The article even mentions how the government regulates e.g. movie ratings...
Only that's a lie. The MPAA is not a governmental body. It's voluntary.

------
komali2
I'm not entirely clear why the answer is "regulate google" and not "the
government builds and provides an internet search mechanism for its people."
I.e., an actual utility from the start.

~~~
Shared404
I would not trust search provided from the gov, and I suspect most people in
the US would feel the same. I can't speak for anywhere else though.

~~~
komali2
But you do trust search from Google?

If Google decides that it wants the Libertarian party to supplant the
Republican party, and begins aggressively tailoring results to that end, what
consequences are there? Why _wouldn 't_ they do that if they could get away
with it? We didn't elect google executives, we have no recourse beyond
political theater like the recent congressional hearings.

~~~
Shared404
To be honest, I don't trust either. However, I think I trust government less,
if only slightly.

I also don't use Google.

~~~
komali2
Just curious, what do you use?

~~~
Shared404
Mostly DDG, along with a side cast of others if I can't find what I'm looking
for. I've got a list here [0]

[0] [http://a-shared-404.com/other-stuff/](http://a-shared-404.com/other-
stuff/)

------
jtlienwis
Well I just love my friendly neighborhood gas and electric utilities... NOT.

------
ArtDev
Let's get cable internet regulated like a utility first. Then afterwards we
can talk about competing services on the internet.

Anti-competitive behavior should be addressed but let's get our priorities
straight.

~~~
anoncake
Let's prioritize bickering about what our priorities should be.

~~~
Shared404
Well, I disagree. I don't think we should bicker about that, that seems like a
crazy idea.

Instead, lets prioritize building out our internet infrastructure.

------
chadmeister
Along with Facebook, internet and cell providers. That alone would add so much
value to society.

------
meh206
THANK YOU!! I have been saying this all along. Glad others feel the same way
as I do!

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HumblyTossed
I would argue we should regulate the internet as a utility first.

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maedla
Any company that becomes infrastructure should be nationalized

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arvinsim
Why not just make the internet a public utility?

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pvijeh
ive never seen any evidence of gov intervention resulting in a better outcome
for anyone other than special interest groups.

~~~
Shared404
Gov intervention _should_ be capable of doing so, but as long as lobbying is
still legal, it won't.

@freeopinion [0] brought up an interesting idea of setting up more special
interest groups, directly in opposition of each other. This may be an
effective method of handling this.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24105949](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24105949)

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m3kw9
I think wireless carriers should be

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adultSwim
Nationalize Google

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tempsy
I would argue Visa and Mastercard and payment processing at large as the top
priority by far.

It's crazy that we've given up control as a society of the only mechanisms for
electronic payments in an increasingly cashless world to unregulated private
entities who continue to jack up fees as often as they can get away with.

Makes everything 3-5% more expensive. Ridiculous.

~~~
shadowgovt
There is 100% nothing stopping the Federal government from offering a full-
faith-and-credit-backed "America electronic transaction system" for electronic
transactions, with those fees handled by taxes.

But much as there's nothing stopping the Federal government from greatly
simplifying the burden and toil of tax season by issuing 90% of Americans a
pre-filled-out "This is what you owe; sign this and return it or dispute it
with your own filing," we won't do that because fully half of Congress is from
a party that has, as a plank, that private institutions serve the public
interest better than public institutions.

~~~
chrisco255
Right, the same government that couldn't get a healthcare website going is
supposed to also power every single transaction from internal infrastructure.
There are hidden costs that are much higher than 3% to giving the government
full control over every transaction in society. It's a single point of failure
with no redundancy or decentralization, a large attack vector, and a human
rights nightmare. As a general rule, private institutions all too often do
outperform public institutions. I'm pretty sure Space X has bipartisan
support, for example.

~~~
elicash
I mean, government does GPS. Sends folks to space. You mention SpaceX, but
let's not pretend NASA doesn't exist. Yeah, there was once that website that
had a bad launch, but there's nothing inherent in government that wouldn't
allow this to work well.

I do think ideally this could be done by NY or CA first. We should test out
ideas in the states, where possible.

~~~
foobarian
Ah, yes, this government right: [https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-
us/products/gps.html](https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/gps.html)

~~~
Rapzid
With about 70% of their revenue from the US Government in 2018? Those defense
companies might as well be an extension of the government with the added
"benefit" that it allows individuals to get wealthy off them.

Edit: Further to that and the comment pointing out where GPS was researched
and developed, the Air Force still operates GPS block III and contracted these
services out to Lockheed. So yeah, ultimately any success Lockheed has with
GPS III is ultimately a success for the government..

~~~
foobarian
That's kind of the point though; would this whole arrangement work any better
if it was all directly under the DoD hierarchy? Vs. private contractors like
this? I was not intending to be snarky in the original comment. I've lived in
a system where a lot more of the economy was under the government in the org
chart and it was not magically better than the American system.

~~~
elicash
I'm not sure what point you're making. Yes, the government uses private
contractors, but they'd use contractors for this transaction system, too.

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Aunche
Both conservatives and liberals are convinced that Google is rigged against
them. I don’t trust American lawmakers not to shove their ideologies into a
search engine.

~~~
shadowgovt
If anything, perhaps agreement from these two segments of government indicates
that Google is serving public interest as a viable counterweight to the force
of government itself?

~~~
Aunche
They don't agree. The left uses Steven Crowder not being banned from Youtube
as an example of conservative bias. The right claims Steven Crowder being
demonetized is evidence of liberal bias. Right now Google has a profit motive
to remain neutral. The fewer people they alienate, the more money they make.
It's not perfect, but politicians have very little incentive to keep Google
neutral.

~~~
shadowgovt
They agree that their respective special interests aren't being served. And
they're right. Because Google is not in the business of kowtowing to liberal
or conservative political interests.

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jquery
Google is way too innovative to be relegated to public utility status. Much
better would be to consider an antitrust breakup.

~~~
Shared404
I don't know how innovative they are these days, it seems like a lot of
effective copying.

That being said, I would prefer an antitrust style breakup to them being
regulated outright.

maybe something like breaking them into: (GMail/Docs
etc.)/(Youtube)/(Search)/(Android/ChromeOS)

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12xo
On top of search, one of the real issues is that they set their ad prices with
no market forces at play.

$50 per click? Why yes, but only because they say so... Fake click? We say its
real, pay us...

~~~
shadowgovt
There are several other competing ad networks, as well as traditional
advertising models. Nobody actually _has_ to play Google's ad game; companies
continue to crunch the numbers and decide it works out best for them in terms
of dollar-per-value-add.

~~~
12xo
No there is not. There is no competition for Google ad words, just like there
is no competition for Facebook. They set the market prices, the middle-men add
to that cost and sell their services based on value add...

~~~
shadowgovt
But AdWords is only one advertising model.

[https://www.singlegrain.com/blog-posts/pay-per-
click/alterna...](https://www.singlegrain.com/blog-posts/pay-per-
click/alternative-ad-networks/)

~~~
12xo
The ad network game is a market. There are many competitors and of course,
inventory options. Search keywords are not.

