Somewhat related, last month there was an 'antitrust and competition conference' at chicago booth school of business, and their videos came up last weekend.
FB's free basics implementation in Brazil is free for facebook-owned properties (e.g. whatsapp), but not for general website usage. Claire Wardle argues this creates a problem where free basic internet users are less motivated to fact-check things ( https://youtu.be/Wu9q5fb6MO0?t=1231 , specifically https://youtu.be/Wu9q5fb6MO0?t=1340).
Barry Lynn of Open Markets had an interesting quote I'm still trying to think about - https://youtu.be/Wu9q5fb6MO0?t=2523 - "The issue is not that the price is free, the issue is the price is imposed outside the market. The issue that price is a function not of competition, but a tool of power. Without a public price, you don't have a public. Without a public, you can't protect democracy."
Facebook Free basics also suffers the Tom's Shoes problem [1] - basically by giving away the free service in a developing country, it kills the local economy for the same service and sets it back, not forwards. By saturating the ISP market, Facebook is hindering ISP development in Brazil.
This would be less of a problem if Facebook offered net neutral internet service but they're not - FB is only offering free access to theirs and a handful of partners websites. It's charity message of bringing "free internet to people who don't have it" is a red herring to the problems it presents.
If they were motivated by altruism, wouldn't they offer full web access instead of limiting it to Facebook & Wikipedia? What motivates them is finding their next billion users in any way possible.
But wouldn’t that also be a factor for an service starting up in a region after Facebook enters.
Forgetting that FB is so large that starting a completing service is a hard enough battle by itself, now you got to sign a deal to get at least a low rate if not 0 rate deal with the cell providers.
Facebook. Google will point to facebook's news feeds and internal mechanism as evidence that Google is not alone in terms of news and information linking. Similarly, there are many legitimate competitors in search. DuckDuckgo is a minor player, but microsoft's Bing isn't.
I think that Google is far too big, but I just don't see an antitrust case in the areas of news or search. Oldschool advertising would seem an option but that is a decreasing area, not the place to make real change going forwards imho. I'd like them to break up youtube, but there too Facebook's video sharing is a valid competitor.
> DuckDuckgo is a minor player, but microsoft's Bing isn't.
DuckduckGo, Qwant, and Bing are all the same player.
DDG and Qwant just pull Bing results.
Bing is the only real competitor to Google.
>or search.
Erm. I think it's absolutely there on search. The existence of competitors doesn't negate monopoly status.
And the accusation can be legitimately claimed, that they use their monopoly status in one market (search) as leverage to give other services in different markets a leg up over the competition.
MS can't leverage Bing for the same - no matter how integrated Bing might be into other products.
If Google tells people to use AMP or be de-ranked, that's monopoly power. Flat out.
It there a source for this? People keep saying that DDG is just Bing, but I can't find any indication of that actually being true. Sure, they may be using Bing results, but they're seem to be mixed with result from other sources.
The only post I ever found on the subject is Gabriel Weinberg saying that DDG is not just Bing.
DDG use a combination of Bing, Oath (previously Yahoo), and their own crawler [1], although I believe their own crawler is only used for “instant answers” and knowledge cards.
Qwant has their own crawler and use Bing to help build their results, at least for now [2].
The internet is huge.
Flashcards/instant answers is a tiny rounding error compared to the information in the searchable web.
DDG uses bing for the actual search and their own stuff for flashcards.
For example, DDG says they aggregate search results from Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex. Well, Yahoo switched to Bing search results about a decade ago, and Yandex is only really useful for Russian websites. So unless you're searching in Russian, you're getting Bing search results.
DDG also claims they index hundreds of independent sources - by which it means individual web pages. By that logic, Google and Bing index billions of sources compared to DDG's four hundred or so, which end up being redundant to Bing's indexed results anyways.
The only activity I've seen from their crawler is fetching home pages to source the favicons of the site - which they display next to results. They don't appear to crawl the web to index it.
If there aren’t laws damning this style of business there should be. The amount of power focused in such a few people can only have catastrophic effects on society.
>DuckDuckgo is a minor player, but microsoft's Bing isn't.
Bing has 5% market share of search.
You also don’t see Microsoft leveraging the 5% market share to create competing businesses and then self bidding on search engine keywords to bid up the costs to existing customers.
The problem is google has a dominate market share and unfairly leverage its dominate market position to the determinate of other businesses and consumers. Say I’m an airline and use google ad words and pay $2 pay per click for the term “x”, google knows I can afford to pay more, so they create a spin off company and they bid up “x” to force me to pay google more for the same AdWord or lose out to Google’s new flight aggregate business. Either way this drives up costs to consumers and is unfair to a competitive business landscape.
I think it's important to remember that when we talk about competition, it doesn't mean pick between two companies, one if which is much stronger. Strong competition would mean dozens to hundreds of sustainable entrants. The competition in this (and many other) markets is anemic.
A free market is one where prices are set based on supply and demand without restrictions on competition due to monopolistic powers, market reserve regulations, etc.
There are always limits to competition, some due to scale, some due to market size, some due to availability of resources. None of those prevent a market from being free.
Even antitrust regulation doesn't necessarily prevent a market from being free.
To add, Adam Smith's original postulation of a free market was an explicitly regulated market (for example to prevent monopoly influence).
There are all sorts of ways we aren't in that world (for example a free market requires a fully informed set of buyers, which practically speaking never exists).
But a market where exorbitant costs of regulation drive up the minimum efficient scale to the point that no new entrants are possible is also not a free market.
I don't think the dictionary definition is useful here. A market can be "free" while granting inordinate decision making power over the population to a few people - the opposite of a democracy. The prices can be here or there, but the relationship between people is what matters. Who has power and who decides how to use it?
A Google whistleblower today released internal documents and helped Project Veritas obtain camera footage:
> Google Exec Says Don’t Break Us Up: “smaller companies don’t have the resources” to “prevent next Trump situation”
If a single company believes they have the informational monopoly needed to control national politics, isn't that an admission of anti-trust liability?
This is nothing new, given the statements made in the Google 'all-hands' immediately after the election, for which complete footage was leaked as well. Some leadership was less explicitly partisan, but one or two were more openly so, to the point that they were amenable to being more proactive in future elections.
The problem is not so much that a corporation has political opinions (or rather that the executives have political opinions and don't keep work and politics separate.) None of that is particularly unusual.
The problem in this case is this particular company believes they have enough power to decide the outcome of elections. Or more accurately, the problem is that they might be right.
> Or more accurately, the problem is that they might be right.
This has been true for a long time - it was true for multiple Murdoch companies since the 80's. Hearst declared, in 1898 "You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war"[1]
edit: to be clear, I'm not condoning this reality, but it is not a new phenomenon.
Both Murdoch and Hearst ran publishing entities, whereas Google and other social media sites claim to be neutral platforms. This distinction is important because certain protections given to neutral platforms don’t necessarily apply to publishers. (For instance, Reddit can’t be held accountable for libel posted on their site by someone else since they’re just a platform. )
This is an oft-repeated falsehood. There is no such distinction between platforms and publishers as far as online websites go. The law is very explicit about this, google section 230.
Very specifically, if a site has applied editorial discretion like a publisher does, it is then liable for what is said. If it just reposts content provided by others, it has a safe harbor. By my lay reading, automated filtering intended to support a specific point of view would seem to be a grey area.
> Google and other social media sites claim to be neutral platforms. This distinction is important because certain protections given to neutral platforms don’t necessarily apply to publishers.
It is false. There is no such "distinction" in terms of protections applied to online platforms.
1. No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
2. No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—
2.a any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or
2.b any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1).[1]
The law makes no stipulations or caveats regarding supposed "neutrality" of the platform.
Of course it's not a new problem, which makes the failure many people have to recognize the problem this time around rather disturbing. Evidently the general public cannot be counted on to learn from history.
>believes they have enough power to decide the outcome of elections. Or more accurately, the problem is that they might be right.
But if so, they already spectacularly failed to prevent a Trump election. Or maybe they failed to predict it, but aren’t they uniquely positioned to do so? How does this paint a picture of dangerous political influence?
They actively discussed taking more steps to prevent it, instead of relying on failed predictions to justify inaction. As for why they failed to predict it in the first place: worldview bubbles strongly affected perception. No need to really examine data on something you and everyone around you believes is an impossibility.
That's all part and parcel of what that All-hands meeting discussed; I'd highly recommend finding it and listening to it.
I'm not sure that's true. There's a leaked email between two developers joking about it, but that's far from proof the organization was considering it.
They've demonetized/dropped ads for satire news websites, which also includes The Onion, but that was a response to the criticism that they are enabling fake news to become more prominent.
Veritas completely misunderstands and twists what 'fairness' and 'cognitive bias' in AI is. AI can only learn what you feed it. Choices in what data is given to AI can bias the outputs, and then bias people who become blinded that the inputs are biased.
So for example, if I only ever feed an AI training data about doctors and nurses in which the male examples are only ever used for doctor, and the female examples are only ever used nurse, then when you or anyone else ask's what a doctor or nurse is, the output has a gender bias. This is Google Search becoming an unwitting amplifier in cognitive bias and stereotypes.
Now you might counter that "most" doctors are male, and "most" nurses are female and that's reality, but when I ask for the definition of what a doctor is and what it does, I'm not asking for demographics.
These guys are taking concerns that are openly discussed in AI conventions among experts and ethicists as a worry, and twisting it to fit their own scared political agenda.
We've had examples of this already with image classification networks classifying dark-skinned people are gorillas, which is clearly because the training dataset itself is unconsciously biased.
How do you detect when these biases occur? You need a diverse group of human evaluations to review the outcomes to make sure the AI hasn't learned the wrong biases. Or at the very least, you need that group of people to construct a good integration test set to look for misclassifications.
Seems what's going on, is someone taking complex technical issues, twisting them, and feeding them to politicians like Gohmert who clearly won't understand any nuance.
If Veritas wants government to regulate AI to protect conservative viewpoints, he may end up regretting getting the government involved.
"they already spectacularly failed to prevent a Trump election."
They were not trying to prevent it. Google was just a search engine, trying to do their best. Since Trump, their view on information has changed from 'neutral' to 'fairness'. Their view of 'fairness' is politically loaded, and examples are given in the docs.
There is no doubt that Google can change the outcome of elections - this is for sure. If they really wanted to put their finger on the scales hard, they could.
I'm very concerned about the recent revelations, and I don't think that their 'fairness' policy is actually fair, but I wonder how much effect it will actually have. It's so hard to measure.
As they should be. Google, Twitter, and Facebook were in unique positions to see how heavily Russia worked to influence our elections. They should've been screaming from the rooftops about that.
But wouldn't it be better for everyone if those companies weren't in those unique positions? Can't your point about them not "screaming from the rooftops" about fake news be used to argue that we can't allow these companies to have such power when we know that they will only ever act in their own self interest?
Playing as devils advocate; does decentralization of that power actually improve the situation of dealing with manipulation from nation states? And if that's not what you're saying, is it a proposal that the government manages our news diet, or what do you view as the solution?
It would seem possible to me that if power was distributed widely over competitors it might be even harder to defend against, as fake news drives clicks which drives market share, everything about combatting fake news has been extremely polarizing (see this thread) and might drive bad PR to companies that take it seriously, a more diverse landscape might lead to a much more complicated regulatory landscape across competing products, and just a basic bystander effect of each executive team being more able to shirk responsibility because other people are too.
Decentralization would make it a little harder for the nation states to spread their messages, but you're right that it would probably make it much harder for us to stop them. I AM NOT and WILL NEVER BE proposing that the government manages our news diet. I guess I don't really have a solution to propose, and the point of my comment was more to suggest that we should try to change SOMETHING so that these companies don't have such great power, rather than let them continue and hope they don't (continue to) abuse that power.
If I could propose anything, it'd be that we stop letting outrage and clicks drive our political machine, but we all know that will never happen.
Yes, but it requires a populace that understands and acts on the risks from single sources of information.
A centralized source of power means a single target is all that is needed for manipulation to be effective. This is the basic premise behind decentralization in the first place.
Widely disturbed power is difficult to manipulate consistently without the manipulation becoming more easily visible, usually in the form of uncanny movement of many independent units as one, which most people can detect as suspicious.
I had never watched the leaked video so this was a good time to check it out and see what the Google leadership did say. The focus was not about fake news or anything close to a "unique positions to see how heavily Russia worked to influence our elections".
The topics they brought up were left vs right, democrat vs republican, Conservatism vs progressive, women vs men, white vs black, poor vs rich, Hillary vs Trump, immigration, trade policy, globalization, brexit, Hillary campaign points, polling data and the failure of accuracy in it. A bit about net neutrality, regulations and taxes.
Project Veritas video directly say that Google executive Jen Gennai want to influence the next US election. The leaked 'all-hands' video from the Google leadership show that their political position is internally stated as democrat. Combined it gives us a very strong implication that Google might try to influence the next election.
National elections would be better off with less outside influence, be that other nations or companies that holds so much power, money and influence to rival nations. It would be great if Google, Twitter, and Facebook worked on removing information bubbles, bots and trolls, but I would not cheer if they simply replaced Russia as a force that influence national elections all over the world.
Sergey Brin was born in Moscow, so yeah, that counts as Russian influence. He supported the candidate whose husband got paid in Russia, supposedly for a speech. This is Google.
Aside from that, Russians spending $100,000 in a presidential race that cost $2,000,000,000 is just 1-part-per-20000. It's less than Bill got for his speech. It's just 0.005% of the total. That could be the personal project of a sufficiently dedicated non-wealthy individual. It's lost in the noise.
"Google, Twitter, and Facebook were in unique positions to see how heavily Russia worked to influence our elections."
Wasn't that the main job of the FBI and CIA, two agencies with budgets that dwarf reason? These agencies' responsibilities are completely lacking from the public discourse.
CEO's tend err on the side of hubris, and it'd seem they all have strong political views. I think power maybe does that. So in a more informal 'TGIF' setting, I'm not surprised to see some of it come out, however uncomfortable (whether or not I disagree with the position is different, but I definitely disagree with political dialogue at the office by CEO's).
But today's revelation indicate more broadly material policy, i.e. 'not just off the cuff CEO's remarks'. Also, there's some information regarding the efforts of AI to 'rebalance' information, it's downright scary.
I don't believe that their activity is remotely 'neutral' and given some of the statements it seems they are blissfully ignorant of how people could possibly disagree with them. It's definitely a bubble.
Today's revelations have crossed the rubicon for me, I'm putting Google effectively in the 'bad company' camp.
I used to trust Google's goodwill and talent more than government, but now I don't.
I want Google to be broken up, and for there to be some kind of transparency and oversight into their algorithms.
I agree. I'm just laying the foundation that the Veritas leak today is not merely an unprecedented statement, but rather that it has strong precedent in the company's leadership itself. Even if doctored to make some statements more damming, we have this initial point to shed some light.
That said, I would caution against taking Veritas at face value. Sometimes their claims match what is said, sometimes a bit more context tones down the severity of the comments. For example, I have seen them take someone making a hypothetical quote, and then make it seem as if that was the person giving their own opinion, something made clearer when they posted the full video later.
A large chunk of Google is non-American, and a large chunk of their US offices are immigrants or the children of immigrants. Brin and Pichai are immigrants. At the time of Trump's victory, many employees of the company were probably rightly worried from the campaign rhetoric, and that worry actually turned out to be right as one of Trump's first actions as President was to sign an executive order (the travel ban), that ended up stranding people outside the country, including say, Canadians who had dual-Iranian citizenship IIRC who simply returned home to visit family.
There's a difference between everyone being rightly concerned with the apparent rise of fascism/nationalism, which doesn't mesh with the culture of a global cosmopolitan company. But the fact that people are concerned about it doesn't meant they're engineering outcomes.
Almost all of the suggestions post-2016 that have been discussed in the tech sector have been around 1) stopping foreign interference from hacking, IRA/50-cent army, etc and 2) stopping the spread of outright falsehoods using the platform. Conservative movements are freaking out as if this has something to do with censoring posts, say, of calling for deregulation or tax cuts.
Some of those boil down to deliberately labeling videos or articles that are paid for and funded by foreign governments (e.g. Chinese or Russian government "news" networks on YouTube) and some of those boil down to checking arguments against known fact checking databases.
Is fact checking "anti-Trump"? Is trying to block online political bot spam "anti-Trump"? or is this anti-forces-that-undermine-democracy-with-propaganda?
Should Facebook not vet foreign political ads which try to stir up a racial confrontation by using false claims that Antifa or BLM activists are going to appear and do something which they weren't?
Because what I see is, attempts to block these activities are read as anti-conservative. And if I were a conservative, frankly, I'd be embarrassed if the way my party wins is that I have to defend the right of Macedonian spammers to spread fake memes about pedophilia dungeons.
We are entering an era with Deepfakes that are going to make determining what is true and what isn't 10x harder for the average person. Trying to combat this, and activities of the IRA for example, should be seen as something that needs to be done on a large scale.
Otherwise, there's a large Denial of Service attack coming for Democracy itself.
The flip side of all of the conservatives whining about Google censorship, is the vast criticism from the left that YouTube is a platform for the spread of alt-right extremism. So which is it? If I go on YouTube right now, there are ample left-wing channels calling for Google to be broken up because it's a platform for the spread of hate.
Both sides are claiming victim hood, and asking for the other side's content to be ranked below theirs. What are we going to end up with, a Fox-news like Google? When the big-3 news networks were broken up lots more cable news channels, are we better off, or worse off?
Now partisans of the left can watch MSNBC all day, and partisans of the right can watch Fox news all day, and the 'filter bubble' has become more extreme now that media has been fragmented into 500 "news" channels. Thus breaking up the large media and tech could make things worse, could make combatting foreign propaganda injection much harder.
Thanks sonnyblarney, BTW, for taking the time to write a thoughtful response. There's too many anonymous downvote cowards on HN who won't take the time to dispute facts or arguments.
I don't think anyone is concerned about Google trying to get past fake news (or rather, surely there are few voices there)
The issues are more disconcerting, like senior executives trying to make sure that 'Trump never happens again', the assumption being either 'voters were so deeply misinformed' or that 'Trump is illegitimate because of who he is'.
If the former, well, ok, possibly, but I feel that G will end up leaning on the bias to try to tell us 'how bad Trump' is. If it's the later, well, this would be deeply anti-democratic.
The new policy sheds light on how they'll go about this - in the article they reference to how, when people type 'Clinton emails' that there should be no reference to the ostensible scandal. This is possibly problematic as Hillary Clinton was asked to produce emails by the Feds and decided to delete most of them: this is a legit scandal. Arguably, G is suppressing this information because they don't deem it factual? Or newsworthy?
More extensively, they gave examples of how they are going to move from 'truth' to 'fair' in an intersectional manner by offering ups suggestions that 'balance historical injustice'.
Open google.com right how, if you type 'women can' you get suggestions such as 'vote, fly, do anything'. If you type 'men can' you'll get as a first suggestion 'have babies'.
While the former is uncontroversial (i.e of course women can vote and fly), is this really Google's place to start to suggest such things unless they are material to historical searches? And the male suggestion, doesn't really line up with the female example. 'Men can have babies'? Well, this a very narrow and specifically intersectional ideal, while maybe it's technically true, I don't see how bringing up that issue in the context of someone searching is relevant to anything at all (again, unless it fits some kind of algorithmic purpose i.e. it's a popular search).
The notion that Google, the manger of the world's information, is going to 'right historical wrongs' is in some ways very good, I mean, who doesn't want to make 'wrong things right'? But of course it's utterly Orwellian in practice, with a small group of ideologues deciding what we should see and not, based on their unique worldview.
The implications of this new 'right the wrongs of history' worldview on search results is beyond scary.
So yes: getting rid of fake news, trying to point out narrative, calling out lies - sure.
Problematic: trying to feed people content that Google deems 'more appropriate'.
Scary: modifying search results and suggestions to be consistent with their worldview and to 'right the wrongs of history'.
I don't trust the talent and overall goodwill of Google anymore, I think they need to be regulated and there needs to be more transparency.
I also think it would be ideal to end the monopoly and try on actual diversity, i.e. real competition.
>The issues are more disconcerting, like senior executives trying to make sure that 'Trump never happens again'
That's not what she said, she said "Trump situation", and by situation, one would assume, the massive abuse of social platforms to spread false and misleading data about Clinton, which we know from scientific studies, that false stories were reshared far more by Trump supporters than vice versa, and that a non-trivial chunk of these fake gifs came from overseas.
Isn't that a situation we don't want to repeat?
Also, I'd argue the definition of a Doctor is genderless, so if I ask Google what a doctor is, I don't want it telling my daughter "A doctor is a male human being who..."
This isn't "social justice", this is fact.
You can call for breaking Google up all you want, but AI ethicists at every company are concerned about cognitive bias creeping into machine learning, and correcting that bias will be perceived you as putting your finger on the scales to 'correct the wrongs of history'
I'm just telling you, this view goes beyond Google, and pretty much any honest data scientist is going to be looking to combat bias in his training data.
Anti-social justice warrior people arent going to like it, but the genie is out of the bottle government isn't going to stop the march towards unbiasing our databases.
> That's not what she said, she said "Trump situation", and by situation, one would assume, the massive abuse of social platforms to spread false and misleading data about Clinton, which we know from scientific studies, that false stories were reshared far more by Trump supporters than vice versa, and that a non-trivial chunk of these fake gifs came from overseas.
1) Can you please cite those "scientific studies"?
2) Even if what you said is true. I am not sure how much it has anything to do with Google. Most of influences happened on Facebook or other social media platforms. How can Google prevent things from happening again on Facebook?
That was certainly the most vague and easily re-interpreted statement she made. Hoping for fuller context of the conversation so we can get some better understanding of her intended use.
>>> ""Trump situation", and by situation, one would assume, the massive abuse of social platforms to spread false and misleading data about Clinton, "
I don't know how one would assume the term "Trump situation" would imply "all the lies about Clinton on social media".
A more direct interpretation of her statement would be "we don't like Trump".
Now - of course you could be right, but I don't see how her words communicate that fact at all.
If the exec was concerned about 'all the lies about Clinton' - why didn't she just say that?
I don't think that 'getting rid of lies' is counter factual, nor is it controversial.
If this exec was communicating something along the lines of:
"There was some interference and misinformation in the last election, and it possibly affected the outcome, we want to make sure people are well informed"
That'd be great! There would be no scandal, nothing to talk about. This would be Google just 'doing their job' in a fairly conventional manner. But she didn't use that language, she went much further.
>>> "I'd argue the definition of a Doctor is genderless,"
Nobody is going to argue that.
But what does that have to do with offering up as a 'first suggestion' when people type 'men can' ---> 'have babies'?
Making sure the world is informed about that very specific 'fact' that does require some contextualization, is an ideological problem, and this has nothing to do with 'un-biasing' our databases': it's projecting a whole set of ideals.
So the 'first problem' with the 'Social Justice search algorithm approach' is that it will extend far beyond 'un-biasing'. It will go straight into ideology and narrative.
But the more subtle problem of 'un-biasing our databases' is the fact that it's going to be difficult to determine what bias is.
So instead of 'Doctor' how about - 'Truck Driver'. About 6% of Truck Drivers are female. Is this a 'bias' problem in society? Do we need to 'unbias' our data to make sure that every representation of 'Truck Driver' is 50%/50%?
What about race? In Sweden, there are almost zero Black Doctors, mostly by virtue of the fact there's very few Black people in Sweden of course. So, in Swedish search results, how do we represent the image of 'Doctor'? 15% Black? 50% Black?
What's the 'unbiased' racial representation of 'Doctor' in a country that fairly ethnically homogenous?
So the very mention of 'un-biasing databases' is a frightening, Orwellian concept, again, because it'll take a considerable amount ideology for someone to determine what 'unbiased' even is.
>>> "Anti-social justice warrior people aren't going to like it,"
"Anti-Social Justice Warrior" people are not generally not 'Anti Social Justice' - and they are not likely opposed to having search results showing a Female, or Black Doctor, or Pilot (or even Truck Driver), but there's a very legitimate concern about the extent to which information is manipulated, and how it's manipulated.
The examples given in the reference article I feel go beyond issues of 'getting rid of fake news' and go far beyond merely showing a 'female Doctor' on a search for Doctor.
The terminology she used was along the lines of 'correcting for historical injustice'. Terminology like that, and more directly 'un-biasing our databases' I interpret as 're-writing information to suit my view of the world and how it ought to be' - which is surely 'Social Justice' in the minds of those tampering with the data, but it's not to others.
Given the magnitude of the influence of Google, this issue has to be addressed in a more open and transparent fashion, and it probably needs to be regulated (and publicly communicated) - and in any case there needs to be more competition in search.
Edit: I should add, doing things like carefully altering AI training data so that the tech doesn't erroneously and in a 'biased' fashion identify 'black people' as more likely to be criminal is totally fair game (as we learned with MS's 'racist' AI). But we should be thoughtful and deliberative about such things.
>A more direct interpretation of her statement would be "we don't like Trump".
How about we just not make any interpretation until Veritas, known for deliberate -- to be charitable -- "creative" editing in the past, releases the full unedited exchange without cherry picked statements out of context?
"So, in Swedish search results, how do we represent the image of 'Doctor'? "
How about a GAN-generated of an doctor with randomized features? The issue isn't really imagery, past instances of bias in machine learned text results has translated for example, gender pronouns according to historical bias, so if you translate foreign language text containing doctor, sometimes even female doctors, it'll end up replacing with male pronouns.
>I interpret as 're-writing information to suit my view of the world and how it ought to be'
How about rewriting it so it fits categorical definitions? The definition of a doctor does not specify gender or race, so any automatically generated extracted knowledge should not leak cultural bias.
> mostly by virtue of the fact there's very few Black people in Sweden of course
Geo-centric thinking. Google is a global service. People in Africa search for doctors. People in Asia search for doctors. So why should every query return a white, male, doctor? Shouldn't a global service either a) be localized to return culturally relevant results for the context of the region or b) be internationalized so that it returns unbiased results that can be applied anywhere?
The problem is when a Swedish engineering office ships a feature to Google globally, and all of a sudden, their own cultural biases turn up globally. This isn't just social justice, it's bad for business!
This is a classic example of why there is strength in diversity hiring, and monoculture is bad if you're a global brand.
Please don't downvote (I saw someone downvote this), just because you disagree. Downvote people for being abusive, for being disingenuous or dishonest, or for being lazy and adding noise (writing a 1-liner joke response)
But if someone takes their time to write several paragraphs of point by point response, using proper grammar, and non-hostile or personal attacks, they should be rewarded, even if we don't like what they're saying.
This particular video discusses how all of these individual issues (such as Jen Gennai's comments) point to a growing and worsening trend of the collapse of civil discourse in America, and where that could potentially lead us.
The collapse has been happening for a long time as media fractured. And as Andrew Yang points out, the collapse of the middle class from automation has largely lead to a mindset of scarcity, of us vs them, that made it easy for political forces to manipulate people into scapegoating each other and hyperbolizing others.
No one who is living pay check to pay check wants to think about climate change or doing anything which doesn’t immediately benefit their economic situation in some quick fix way.
Our political system lacks any generosity now as well. Losers don’t accept their loss and do their jobs according to procedure. Mitch McConnell for example, or the Oregon example of denying a quorum instead of just voting no. The general strategy of just not allowing government to function if you know you’re going to lose is a bad precedent.
"The general strategy of just not allowing government to function if you know you’re going to lose is a bad precedent."
Agreed. I really think the two-party system will lead to long-term strategic paralysis of the US government. I'd say it's already undermining our ability to implement infrastructure re-capitalization programs or maintain consistent international relations/foreign policy with anyone other than the UK, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Israel (the last two spend a TON of money bribing our politicians from both parties).
If we get into a shooting war with China this century (which I fully expect), only then will we see the folly of these bi-partisan obstructionist tactics.
It was obvious as daylight that Google supported Clinton through various algorithm tweaks in the search engine, not just against conservatives, but also against other Democratic candidates in the primary.
There was even a paper released after the election showing that Google favored Clinton over Trump in about +20% of the searches.
But nobody ever believes this stuff, because:
1) The vast majority don't pay attention/or are too biased for a certain political candidate to care/believe it
2) "The Algorithm™ can only ever be objective and true" (i.e. Google would never tweak the algorithm for its own interests; ignore the antitrust cases saying the opposite)
3) Google can do no evil. Google can only ever be the good guy in the story
Surely, given the stupendous number of leaks over the past three years coming out of Google that somebody would have provided evidence of this if it were true. Especially since we've already seen at least one Googler post regular leaks on Medium under his own name.
> There was even a paper released after the election showing that Google favored Clinton over Trump in about +20% of the searches.
Could you possibly link this? It would be highly appreciated. The issue that most of these comments are usually coming from right-wing conpriacy theorists like Alex Jones etc. This means that although, the comment might actually be true, but the reputation that they have built up leads to it being instantly denied.
I would love to read the paper and see how they found that out. Whether its the algorithm favoring Clinton or is it simply the case of their being more results favoring Clinton.
Project veritas has repeatedly shown itself to be untrustworthy, but if the commentary they have appeared to capture in this case is accurate, it is a disgraceful embarrassment for google if not actually illegal. I am betting she'll be fired over this.
> Project veritas has repeatedly shown itself to be untrustworthy, but if the commentary they have appeared to capture in this case is accurate, it is a disgraceful embarrassment for google if not actually illegal
Uh, what commentary, specifically? Everything seems to be hanging on the single phrase "preventing the next Trump situation", which of course we don't have the rest of the conversation to know what that's referring to.
Could just be the whole fake news/algorithmic gaming situation in the election talked about conversationally by someone who obviously didn't vote for Trump? Seems like much less of a stretch than secret plans to interfere in elections, especially considering all the other "evidence".
Everything else seems like it's talked about here all the time. Bias in ML, prioritization of news sources, re-clustering youtube recommendations, etc. There's literally nothing here they haven't outright said that they're doing, and sometimes even published papers on.
I didn't say that google was planning a conspiracy to oust the president, I said the commentary is embarrassing and disgraceful but not illegal. It is ok if you disagree with my opinion.
> Elizabeth Warren is saying we should break up Google. And like, I love her but she’s very misguided, like that will not make it better it will make it worse, because all these smaller companies who don’t have the same resources that we do will be charged with preventing the next Trump situation, it’s like a small company cannot do that
Google shouldn't be speaking in such a cavalier fashion about Trump. The exec didn't say "the fake news situation" she said "the Trump situation" and in google's position combined with the context of today's political environment it is unacceptable to speak in a fashion that suggests a specific candidate is a problem to be solved. Personally, I regard Trump as a criminal who deserves to be impeached and jailed, but google shouldn't be speaking in a manner that suggests they are laboring with intent to stifle Trump.
> I didn't say that google was planning a conspiracy to oust the president
I didn't say you said that, I was referring to the site's accusations as they try to drum up a narrative.
> Google shouldn't be speaking in such a cavalier fashion about Trump
Well Google didn't, this person did in a private conversation, and as long as we're being precise, she didn't refer to Trump, she referred to companies being "charged with preventing the next Trump situation".
> it is unacceptable to speak in a fashion that suggests a specific candidate is a problem to be solved
I mean you're saying that devoid of context, a bad interpretation is just as likely as a good interpretation, which is at least "embarrassing and disgraceful" on her part. Which is the whole issue with project veritas and context, isn't it?
We don't actually know what she was referring to, but I'll refer you back to your own "Project veritas has repeatedly shown itself to be untrustworthy" comment for where we shouldn't be putting the benefit of the doubt.
And again, that ambiguous clause said by someone in casual conversation is all that's going on here. There's nothing else revealed in this "case".
> Google shouldn't be speaking in such a cavalier fashion about Trump.
Google isn't. A loose private conversation involves context clues. "The Trump Situation" clearly refers to content manipulation not "the election of Trump".
Perhaps all Googlers should forever speak in formally verifiable language to avoid any ambiguity lest their words be weaponized.
"This machine designed solely to lie and mislead in order to drum up and target hatred and rash action cannot be trusted, on account of its history of doing nothing except lying and misleading. However, if this machine designed solely to lie and mislead others is telling the truth this time, that makes me very upset!"
You should post this on reddit too; it'd get more upvotes.
In all seriousness though, this isn't a helpful comment. The comment you're replying to makes it abundantly clear that Project Veritas should be taken with a yuge grain of salt. An explanation of your own position is a much better discussion that mocking the position with which you disagree.
That said, I don't think "taken with a grain of salt" takes it nearly far enough. Project Veritas is not an unreliable news source. It is a propaganda agency led by criminals. I don't know of a single completely true news story ever produced by them.
Beginning an argument with the antecedent "If Project Veritas is telling the truth about this" brings us into the realm of fun and fancy. If someone said "If unicorns are real and produce large quantities of greenhouse gases, then man man may not be responsible for climate change," it'd be a reasonable logical statement, but it's still not useful in a serious discussion about anything.
No problemo; I appreciate the response. But I have to say that it's a pretty yuge red flag for me when someone makes claims as bold as "It is a propaganda agency led by criminals" and doesn't provide a single link to back it up.
Project Veritas is the name of the organization run by this guy: James O'Keefe. His modus operadi is to set up some sort of meeting with a liberal target under false pretenses, secretly record video, and then edit the video as much as possible to make them look bad. He made a name for himself doing this to ACORN back in 2009 (which successfully destroyed ACORN but also led to O'Keefe later paying the poor defamed ACORN worker $100,000).
Examples of his recent work include having his employee try to convince the Washington Post that Roy Moore raped her, for the purpose of discrediting the Washington Post's other stories about Roy Moore.
I'm not so arrogant as to assume that everything I think I know is absolutely true. Just because O'Keefe is a criminal doesn't mean it's impossible for him to ever discover something untoward. Your unwillingness to consider the nuance of the situation actually feeds into O'Keefe's strategy of disinformation.
As a general rule, give them a few days after the initial sensational posting to see if they post the full interviews in context. They like to stagger releases of footage.
Is that out of the norm of how daily television news and late night shows present their content? The only difference I see is the Veritas muckrakers’ tactic of going undercover as a sympathetic listener.
During filming Jim Jefferies attempted to rile up a Jewish activist named Avi Yemini. Which included Jefferies "drawing Mohammed in front of Yemini on a small white board" and saying anti-semetic things (kippahs "look dumb"). Then edited the interview to make Yemini look like a fringe alt-right figure, typical of those who inspired the NZ shooter. Even though the Avi told Jefferies team he wished to have zero association with those people before and during the interview, correctly suspecting that might be their intention.
> Project Veritas has edited the video to make it seem that I am a powerful executive who was confirming that Google is working to alter the 2020 election. On both counts, this is absolute, unadulterated nonsense, of course. In a casual restaurant setting, I was explaining how Google’s Trust and Safety team (a team I used to work on) is working to help prevent the types of online foreign interference that happened in 2016. Google has been very public about the work that our teams have done since 2016 on this, so it’s hardly a revelation.
They have a track record of splicing together videos to make it appear that people have admitted to nefarious things which they never actually said, yes.
I heard this defense when the PP-selling-baby-parts video came out and had to see for myself. On watching the unedited video, I came to the conclusion that the accusation that Project Veritas is fabricating or otherwise manipulating these videos is a complete lie.
In that case, they tried to prod the PP representatives into joking, and then edited down those jokes to look like serious statements. The idea was to present a false image in which PP is making a fortune out of body parts, instead of the reality, which is that they will give fetuses for research, but receive nominal compensation for the cost of doing so.
It costs them money to preserve fetuses for research. They're allowed to be reimbursed for that cost. The law allows them to do so.
Maybe you don't like the idea of fetuses being used in medical research, but that's a different issue. If Project Veritas were to argue that fundamental point, then that would be honest. What they did, which was dishonest, was to try to present a false picture in which Planned Parenthood was somehow getting rich off of selling fetuses. As usual, there are honest and dishonest ways of trying to argue for political change. The former relies on accurately depicting what is going on and arguing against it, while the latter relies on lying about what is going on, because one believes that one's lies serve the greater good.
Do you mean like mainstream television news does? The reason I ask is because I have not noticed any big or even significant shifts in context between whatever snippets they release and any raw footage that makes it out afterwards. That's just me, and I'd like to think I'm being reasonable in looking at this.
I don't think 'mainstream television' tries to bait staffers into committing voter fraud, fabricates accusations of underage sexual assault, or dresses up as Bin Laden to make some point about border crossing in Mexico. This "whatabout mainstream media" falls apart as a deflection because the laundry list of things that James O'Keefe has done puts him pretty far into his own camp as being a professional troll.
How is paying a woman to lie about being sexually assaulted as a teenager (and getting paid to abort the following pregnancy) actually investigative journalism?
> How is paying a woman to lie about being sexually assaulted as a teenager (and getting paid to abort the following pregnancy) actually investigative journalism?
You do understand that on the other side of the political spectrum there are people (in large quantities) who don't believe that the teenager who is sexually assaulted should be directed towards abortion?
You're rhetorical statement is as ridiculous as someone saying "How is going to baker after baker and trying to find a hard working god fearing Christian baker and forcing him to bake a cake he doesn't wanna bake, investigative journalism?"
Do mainstream television news stations in your area plead guilty to disguising themselves as telephone repairmen and sneak into U.S. Senate offices "to investigate complaints that she was ignoring phone calls?"
They consistently release the full unedited footage afterwards, for years now. That’s significantly better than the large TV news outlets, and the selectively edited videos paraded nightly on Oliver, Colbert, Late Show, etc.
Every investigative journo program selectively edits their interviews.
If you see some 'behind the scenes' from 60 minutes, CBC, BBC ... it's all edited to elicit the 'prime moments' and often in the favour of the narrative they're trying to present.
I suggest Vertias is definitely worse, I think they are seedy, I don't trust it outright, but there's unavoidably real material there.
So - low journalistic standards, but sometimes access to key information.
the difference between 60 minutes editing and veritas (epic name, "truth", lol) is that 60 minutes doesn't edit a clip to the point of changing the apparent meaning of what's being said. That's exactly what veritas does.
> Project Veritas has edited the video to make it seem that I am a powerful executive who was confirming that Google is working to alter the 2020 election. On both counts, this is absolute, unadulterated nonsense, of course. In a casual restaurant setting, I was explaining how Google’s Trust and Safety team (a team I used to work on) is working to help prevent the types of online foreign interference that happened in 2016. Google has been very public about the work that our teams have done since 2016 on this, so it’s hardly a revelation.
You can't even trust 60 minutes to tell you how long their show is; it's 45 minutes at best!
Seriously though, I honestly don't get why that show is so popular. Maybe decades ago it was the best thing on TV, but that's damning with faint praise. It's such a short format they never cover anything beyond the surface details of an issue. It gives people the sensation of being informed without actually having to do the hard legwork being informed actually requires. And of course, anything shorter is almost certainly even worse; video is generally a problematic format that lends itself to surface level details chosen to not confuse the lowest common denominator.
Wiki states (about the ACORN incident, which I guess is what you mean)
The videos were heavily edited. The sequence of some conversations was changed. Some workers seemed concerned for Giles, one advising her to get legal help. In two cities, ACORN workers called the police. But the most damning words match the transcripts and the audio, and do not seem out of context
This seems to be about a (possibly over)aggressive sting operation. The current Veritas stuff isn't a sting, it's all leaks from insiders who are clearly very concerned about what's happening. I don't see how Veritas/O'Keefe could edit these things deceptively, as they'd only be provided with what the leaker wanted them to see anyway. Moreover the leakers are probably all Google shareholders or at least have no incentive to damage their own employer beyond taking the moral high ground.
So - this seems unlikely to be an issue here. Especially as, just like before, the words being spoken are damning and very clear. It's hard to imagine what sort of context might mitigate them beyond something like "this particular executive isn't actually very important" ... but that context would have no real impact if it wasn't backed by actions, like firing.
To put it bluntly, Veritas has a covert video of a Google exec who might or might not be senior, but who seems to at least be well informed. She says:
"We're also training our algorithms, if 2016 happened again, would we have, would the outcome be different?"
"People who voted for the current president do not agree with our definition of fairness"
"Certainly on top of my old organisation, Trust and Safety, top of mind, they've been working on it since 2016, to make sure we're ready for 2020"
They also have a screenshot of a document saying, "If a representation is factually accurate, can it still be algorithmic unfairness? Yes." and then goes on to say that an image query for CEOs shouldn't show primarily men because even though that's accurate, it might "reinforce harmful stereotypes".
Stuff coming out of these leaks isn't really news though, in the sense that it aligns perfectly with all the other leaks that have been happening and also some of their research publications. So there's little reason to doubt anything here - it's all entirely consistent.
It's incredibly sad how an organisation that was once so committed to simply giving people the most relevant and accurate answers has gone full blown Machiavelli; they've been utterly corrupted by internal social justice activists who share none of those original values. I worked there for many years and it's a crying shame what has happened there since 2016. It looks from the outside like they've collectively lost their minds. And taking a corporate position of systematically manipulating their own userbase at scale, in order to control elections, is not only stunningly dystopian but also stunningly bad strategy.
I haven't watched the videos or looked at the materials Project Veritas posted but none of these quotes seem all that unreasonable (speaking as somebody who did not vote for Clinton or Trump in 2016). They seem to be talking about Russian election interference in 2016 and combating that so it does not happen again/is not as effective in 2020.
We should really trust the openly left-leaning search monopoly on it's self certified neutrality - that's just common sense. If we start doubting the neutrality of our monopolies, how will they even gaslight us into submission?
> What matters is that the American people had better believe, almost to an individual, that the process was fair and there was no cheating. That falls not just on voting matters directly but on the attempts by the media, whether old or new, to skew results, to steer people and to play psychological games with them whether through some "AI" or via in-person interference.
> You have weeks, maybe a couple of months, before the window slams shut on this opportunity. Beyond that point all you're doing is packing powder into a tinderbox with a lit fuse.
> [Jen Gennai's admission] is flat-out, without question, the most-dangerous admission I've ever seen and a very high-risk predicate for outright dirty civil war within the next 18 months. It only takes 0.1% of the American Population to decide they'd had enough of this crap and are willing to spend their life. If that happens you suddenly have three hundred thousand people committed to destruction who are utterly convinced that they are staring down tyranny and are willing to do whatever they can to stop it. They will be uncoordinated, you have no way to know who they are before they act, and once they do you can only sentence someone to death for a murder once; the facts, whether you like it or not, is that all the rest are "free, and always will be."
It seems incredibly risky for the bottom line and unwise to make such politically risky moves against half the US people. The action seem to assume that the reigning silicon valley ideologies are 1) right and 2) will win.
By assuming corporate and regional dominance will last through violating some peoples trust in favor of placating others desire for power, it is just a matter of time before you open up a weakness that someone elsewhere can exploit. Or as they said in Detroit: "People will still need cars". To which you can answer "Yes, but that doesn't matter if you loose your competitive edge"
“Corporations” are useful abstractions, but leaky. Google
exists as a collection of people, most of whom are shielded from the profit motive. It’s also not terribly controversial to note that, on average, Google
employees don’t like that other half of the US people.
The upshot: it’s not very hard for a corporation to end up doing things that are right or good for the members, but bad for the corporation’s survival.
Yes, but the trust and safety team that per the Veritas video enforce the political agenda unto the user base are departments and therefore there as part of normal operation. These are not vigilantes operating on their own.
> If a single company believes they have the informational monopoly needed to control national politics,
There are other ways to interpret this statement. You have, without context, chosen to interpret it in the least charitable way possible.
For example, supposing that:
1. You believe that there was illegal foreign meddling with Facebook during the next election. [1]
2. Instead of one Facebook, there were many competing social networks.
3. They would adopt, with highly varying degrees of effort and success, institute compliance and controls to deal with #1.
One may reasonably and intelligently postulate that in such a parallel universe, #1 would be a bigger problem then it will be in our next election. (Because, thanks to economies of scale, and only having to implement it once, Facebook might do a better, more consistent job of being compliant, then 15 tiny social networks would.)
[1] I am of the opinion that that it is irrelevant, and that the whole bloody purpose of campaigning is to 'meddle' with public opinion, but that doesn't seem to be a popular position here. For some insane reason, we're convinced that foreign enemies of the American people should not campaign in our elections, but domestic ones should. Somehow, through some tortured interpretation of the First Amendment, one is protected speech, and the other isn't.
Every time there's a discussion about tech antitrust (google, fb, amazon, ms) people point to each of these as being their competitors, therefore, there is no monopoly or antitrust issue.
Perhaps we need to rethink antitrust in the context of the internet however. These laws were written in the late 1800, and early 1900s, long before Google existed. I think there should be some evaluation on needing a new framework of what is antitrust for tech companies.
The laws are fine, what we need is to not tailor laws according to selfish political whims or to the whims of publishers and all other inferior competition.
It’s not just their enemies. We would have been happy to continue being a customer of Google if they hadn’t massively jacked up prices with little notice when they recognized their monopoly advantage in maps. So now we’re happy to be on board the anti-trust train.
Yeah what is it with people throwing "monopoly" at everything? Just because they're an industry leader doesn't mean they're anything close to a monopoly.
Being a monopoly justifies action, hence people who want action against popular companies will try to rationalize it being a monopoly as a premise for their disdain.
This monopoly/monopsony misclassification is seemingly a bi-weekly occurrence on HN with regards to FAANG companies. Don't get me wrong, there are reasons to criticize these tech companies, but calling them monopolies in markets they are not is not the right way to do it.
Oh for sure. Antitrust law is very nuanced, even by geography (e.g. US requires market dominance, EU does not) but GP claimed monopoly in maps, which is more to the point of miss-attribution.
I do not think this will go well for Google. They are not dealing with one or two companies going after them - we're talking about dozens companies building out cases over years that show potential anti-competitive behavior. Google will have to address each of these individually, and as long as one sticks, I think the dominoes start to fall. Think about all of the industries Google has entered over the years - travel, retail, real estate, news - these are all industries that have players with deep pockets, and mountains of data. It's totally worth the cost of going all-in if it means either they get a settlement, or Google has to make fundamental changes to their products, and/or ad network.
I have a lot of mixed feelings on what this could mean for the other tech companies.
But I hope something is done about Google. While they have done some good, they have too much power over the internet. Looking at AMP as a prime example of something that seems universally hated, but basically forced on users and publishers or risk your placement in Google.
Seems like Google is starting to do some work on trying to fight it.
Few days ago went on Google play store and was greeted with a modal telling me I can install other search bars and it gave a list of Google, Bing, Yahoo and DDG.
After that it tells you there are other browsers available to download and it gives a choice of Chrome, Firefox, opera and some others.
Good move but will it be enough in a high profile case? We shall see
1) Does Google have a monopoly sized market share in search or ads? People argue it does while using metrics to show it.
2) Does Google use this position to suppress competition? It is often argued they do. Sometimes with reasoned cased. I've heard there are data based cases, too.
This second part is what's triggering a lot of people to not appreciate the monopoly.
They've already been sued by the EU and found guilty in the case was on Google Shopping. The second part is not much hypothetical at this point.
I think antitrust is not just based on the principle of monopoly or not at this point, if I'm not mistaken being in a dominant position is enough for a number of cases.
The Google Shopping case was really nuanced. Google argued (with data) that they took actions in the best interests of the public, both individually and collectively.
The other side didn't contest that, but instead argued that those actions were not in the best interests of those spammy comparison shopping websites. (you know the ones which always advertise what you're looking for for a really low price, and when you go there they redirect you through about 30 banner ads before finally telling you they couldn't find the price they advertised earlier unless you get 30 friends to sign up to 10 credit cards each, but here it is anyway for double the price on amazon).
While there are lots of things Google was doing wrong, not promoting those scummy sites was 100% in the public's best interests...
> Google has come up with many innovative products and services that have made a difference to our lives. That's a good thing.
> But Google's strategy for its comparison shopping service wasn't just about attracting customers. It wasn't just about making its product better than those of its rivals. Instead, Google has abused its market dominance as a search engine by promoting its own comparison shopping service in its search results, and demoting those of competitors.
While it’s nuanced, “instead” doesn’t feel like agreeing did a good job at this.
Also I’m not arguing Google can design good services, more that they’re proven to abuse their position in documented cases.
PS: to get back to classics, I feel like hearing back discussion about how IE4 was way faster than Netscape, and was arguably a better browser. Or that windows was effectively better than the competion and they bribed vendors just to get better numbers.
Sure, we could agree on the individual products merits. It still harms the market as a whole, and the customer in the long term.
Luckily for Google in the US the grievances of a company's enemies/competitors don't count for much.
I'll credit the WSJ for counting themselves among those enemies, but what I find vexing with all these reports is the constant and casual mentions of "breaking up" these companies as though it's a viable and realistic outcome which it isn't and any self respecting publication should present things in the proper context.
Is youtube still being operated at a loss? If google runs a video sharing platform at or near a loss, funded by cash they get from search ads, then how can any other company possibly compete with them? By also running a video sharing platform at or near a loss? There is a very small number of companies that could conceivably do that.
This is precisely why google needs to be broken up.
In it's current form, no, and I'm fine with that. I'd like to see what a self-sustaining youtube alternative looks like. The status quo is not divine providence.
The thing is, according to current antitrust law, there isn't much of a case to be made.
I personally do think the US should be more aggressive in reining in what I personally consider to be certain abuses (e.g. using your leadership in one area, like search or app store, to favor your own items over others, regardless of whether you're a monopoly or not).
But the problem is there aren't laws against that.
If we want to change things, change the laws first.
As someone who majored in political science including constitutional law... it's not that simple.
The courts have the ability to "legislate" via precedent when choosing between different conflicting laws or conflicting rights, and have an extra-wide scope when it comes to interpreting the constitution, because it is so short and intentionally broad/vague.
But when it comes to non-constitutional issues (e.g. antitrust), and a situation is clearly covered by existing law (not at the "boundary" of a law or between conflicting laws), the judicial branch can't do anything.
I mean, that's just not how courts work. And if a court did, it would be overturned in appeal.
So, no -- I absolutely would never acknowledge the judiciary as legislators now. That would be a complete constitutional and democratic breakdown, so thank goodness that's not the case.
Don't confuse gridlock (slow lawmaking) with an unconstitutional usurpment of power.
Why would the government allow Google to buy all these companies and then just end up blowing Antitrust smoke everywhere?
It’s weird the Obama administration allowed them to buy so many companies and the Trump administration’s DOJ is talking about antitrust. I would’ve thought the opposite.
yeah, I agree. But, OTOH, Democrats portray themselves as the "party of ideas," intellectuals and academics, and socially tolerant/liberal people and that's who Silicon Valley and Google are, so there was a natural alignment between Obama and Google/SV. Also, it didn't hurt that most of Google's employees were relatively young and probably voted for Obama. And Obama was younger and his organization was more internet-savvy. Also, campaign contributions were no doubt involved.
I‘m probably wrong, but at this point only a real (benevolent) super intelligence can solve our biggest problems and questions (climate change, pollution, energy, deep space travel, chronic and terminal diseases, mass scale decision finding, consciousness).
Futurism aside. The only thing that will happen happen if Google is broken up, is Microsoft/Amazon/Tencent/Baidu taking over their share. The internet is not quite like other industries. The biggest possible scale will eventually assimilate almost everything.
It's about time they broke Google up. Google alone has too much power on our news and information. How do we not know they are not abusing their power?
Traditional TV news channels actually have too much power and nobody to question their outright bias. This situation is so bad in India. Nobody questioning them for fake news, doctoring content etc.
And in what way,G has "too much power on our news and information.". In my case, the articles in my Google Feed have actually helped me discover many different articles etc. Yes they have too much power but not in News, imo. For news,info it would be Facebook.
yes, I think you're probably right. And there are small business owners who'd love to eliminate Yelp or heavily regulate Yelp to make it behave quite differently. Oracle has a pretty mediocre product and a really old school, back-room style of doing sales, but at least there are some reasonable competitive alternatives (some are even free).
but, the call, from some corners of the national political scene, to focus on breaking up Google strongly suggests that Google is a much, much bigger problem than Yelp or Oracle. even a little bit of problematic, biased, anticompetitive or evil behavior by Google has a giant impact.
Google is a juggernaut to be sure, but I just don't see that it's behaving all that badly towards consumers, compared to their competition (which they do have). Oracle, to me, is a much more evil company, and very clearly screws over their own customers, plus there was that whole evil thing they did with trying to copyright the Java API. I just don't see Google trying to shut down competitors like that, or treating customers horribly. They could do a better job with customer service (lots of horror stories about people not being able to get errors fixed in Google Maps for a long time). But as I showed in that article, Yelp was outright extorting restaurant owners, and nothing is done about it. Google Maps has their own reviews, and I've never heard of such blatantly evil behavior there.
Also, it's hard to see how breaking them up would even work. Many of their products are free, and only available because of their money-making ad business. I guess you could make them divest YouTube; that's self-supporting with its own ads, and doesn't really need to be integrated with the rest of their offerings. But things like Google Photos wouldn't survive on their own.
>I don't think these are Google's customers or users.
Think about how both yelp and TripAdvisor both built out their websites to comply with Google SEO rules (for organic search) and used Google AdWords (to pay for keyword ads to drive traffic and convert sales).
Google used their market dominance to learn everything about these markets and created competitors to both yelp and TripAdvisor. Google’s spin off companies then bid up the same adword keywords (so where yelp and TripAdvisor May have paid $1/click now google is bidding them up to $2 and these businesses can either pay or lose out to these new google businesses).
Google shouldn’t be able to use their market position to enter new markets in order to drive up costs to their existing ad customers and ultimately the end users.
Yelp got really butthurt when google started de-ranking first page result spammers (yelp, about.com and other trash) because this effectively zombified their whole business. And now their ceo is on a wild goose chase to stick it to them.
Oracle and Google are currently what may be the biggest tech-related legal battle of the decade. It is up to the supreme court now. To put it simply, Oracle claims that Google hijacked Java for its Android ecosystem.
There may be some other areas where they compete, particularly when it comes to cloud services, but I think Java is the big one.
But Google switched to OpenJDK a while ago, and since that has become the reference Java implementation, how could Java be monetized nowadays for mobile devices?
Weren't they in fact forked Java the platform? AFAIK you were not allowed to create your incompatible Java version, Microsoft tried it withe their Embrace Extend Extinguish tactics and lost in the courts.
What is weird in the Oracle vs Google is that they are debating copyright over the APIs and that for me seems unrelated.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wu9q5fb6MO0 is one of the panel videos with some interesting arguments:
FB's free basics implementation in Brazil is free for facebook-owned properties (e.g. whatsapp), but not for general website usage. Claire Wardle argues this creates a problem where free basic internet users are less motivated to fact-check things ( https://youtu.be/Wu9q5fb6MO0?t=1231 , specifically https://youtu.be/Wu9q5fb6MO0?t=1340).
Barry Lynn of Open Markets had an interesting quote I'm still trying to think about - https://youtu.be/Wu9q5fb6MO0?t=2523 - "The issue is not that the price is free, the issue is the price is imposed outside the market. The issue that price is a function not of competition, but a tool of power. Without a public price, you don't have a public. Without a public, you can't protect democracy."