If we ignore all this culture war bullshit for a minute there's a really fascinating issue here.
The concrete issue is flight search. When you google "flight from a to b", rather then seeing search results linking to websites for flight search, the first thing you see is the results of Google's own flight search. Is that wrong? What about image search? When you search for "skyline berlin", you'll see images of berlin's skyline, before you see links to other image search sites.
Same is true for a lot other stuff. If you search "timer", you'll see a timer, not links to various timers that look ugly as shit.
As a consumer, I love it. So much easier.
On the other hand, google could take over almost any business like this. At least, any business that is "functional" in the sense that the only thing you really want is to get some output based on your input.
There's a clear tradeoff here between what's good for consumers, and concerns about democracy, the concentration of power, etc.. And also innovation. Why start a new company, if google can just take over everything?
There are only two clear, non-arbitrary rules: Search engines are only allowed to show a list of links, or search engines can show whatever they want.
google could take over almost any business like this.
That didn't happen to travel companies. Google added flights, but Booking Holdings (aka Priceline) continued to grow each year to 15B in revenue for 2019. (Huge drop for 2020 obviously.)
If I type "<city> weather" google will show me the weather, but which weather company has shutdown because of that?
Google news is in the search results, but there are a lot of news companies. Those info panels often come from wikipedia, but wikipedia is doing great.
This is something that sounds true, but I'm having trouble thinking of an example where it has actually happened. Examples appreciated.
> Google added flights, but Booking Holdings (aka Priceline) continued to grow each year to 15B in revenue for 2019. (Huge drop for 2020 obviously.)
But did advertising on Google become more expensive for competitors once Google entered the market (e.g. did Google Flights also bid on Google Ads) and were those additional costs passed along to customers?
So while your example shows a competitor survived, it over looks the many start ups that did not, it overlooks the increased advertising costs, it over looks the increased cost to consumers and the chilling effect on potential new startups that might have been able to enter the market.
We do not even need to question any of this because before Google acquired the startup which became Google Flights the acquisition was reviewed and only approved under very strict Chinese firewalls between Google flights and Google search…but those restrictions only sought to restrict Google flight’s complete takeover of the market and ignored how it is being used to increase ad costs to the remaining market competitors.
The same has been seen with Google shopping, where Google essentially acquired a startup, it flopped, then Google positioned itself ahead of organic results and began systematically burying competition in the Google results. The fact you can’t name any of the travel or shopping startups that had thriving businesses that fell once Google entered the market is more telling of how Google has dominated the market rather than evidence Google hasn’t actually put anyone out of business.
Though to correct myself I just used Google Flights for the first time in over a year and they do in fact list intermediaries in a price comparison list.
For the specific flight I searched for, the 3rd parties were listed as having cheaper prices than the airline itself, but upon visiting the sites and going through the optionals etc those prices turned out to be misleading, and eventually it was cheaper to book directly through the airline.
I think the whole argument is setting up the presupposition that Google kills non competitive businesses, and that's not what antitrust law is about. It's about protecting consumers, not competitors.
Take Android for example. Did Google kill Blackberry with Android? Or was it other factors like the Blackberry CEO cannibalizing their R&D budget, and stubbornly refusing to give consumers what they wanted?
Research in Motion thought the Blackberry keyboard was their killer feature for business professionals. They were wrong. The iPhone killed Blackberry, not Android.
The 3rd hand story I heard ~2011 from a former RIM executive who was there at the time of Steve Job's demo of the iPhone was that Mike Lazaridis' (co-founder of RIM) reaction to seeing the demo: "It's impossible! The whole thing would have to be a battery!"
He's right, it is impossible for the iPhone and clones to match the blackberry's batter life. It turns out any (certainly not all but few enough to keep blackberry in the market) prefer 60FPS scrolling to having the battery last a week.
In terms of marketshare, Blackberry's began to decline in late 2010, during the meteoric rise of Android. For context, Android eclipsed iOS just 6 months later.
But that's also my point - Blackberry killed Blackberry, not iOS or Android. Should Blackberry have been protected from it's competition?
I tend to think it was Blackberry killed Blackberry, not Android or iPhone. Not willing to change and adapt is the recipe for disaster in tech industry. I am not aware of any other industry that moves as fast and at such scale where the whole industry shift.
RIM definitely killed RIM. The sad result of decades of computer/phone market reports using "market share" leads to people misunderstanding "installed base". As the iPhone and Android took off BlackBerry's market share dropped. As in their share of the total smartphone market sales per quarter dropped. Their unit sales (at first) didn't drop much. The installed base of Blackberries also didn't drop (at first).
Android and iPhone initially ate into the unit sales of feature phones. RIM had pathetic consumer offerings. I replaced a Pearl (8100) with the first iPhone with iOS 1.0. For all the issues that combination had it was a far far better phone than my BlackBerry.
RIM didn't understand the consumer phone market at all, and frankly neither did other smartphone vendors outside Apple and Google. RIM assumed their Enterprise moat (Exchange integration, BES, etc) and a fucking hardware keyboard was enough to halt R&D and just sit on their hands. Meanwhile Apple and Google added Exchange support to their existing (ok but not great) POP/IMAP/CalDAV/CardDAV support, good app stores for third party software, and maintained their vastly superior web browsing capabilities. Their software keyboards also improved significantly with just better keypress accuracy and better predictive type.
So Apple and Google killed feature phones and then got the features people wanted/needed for Enterprise sales. They were already good enough for a majority of "business" uses since a lot of SMB users of Palms, WinMo, and BlackBerries used zero "Enterprise" features. They needed e-mail and SMS which feature phones didn't support and iPhone and Android had from the outset.
So Apple and Google crossed RIM's moat and RIM had nothing to offer as competition. Everything about BlackBerries was firmly fixed in 2005. This was 2010/11 and iPhones and Androids were the state of the art. Instead of trying to meaningfully compete RIM doubled down on the 2005 phones.
No one should feel any pity for them. Their management seemed trapped in some sort of "we'll just MBA our way out of this" fantasy land.
I remember back in the day, I saw what android was about to do to the market, the writing was on the wall for palm and blackberry. My only thought was that it would be nice if blackberry rebased itself as a business+security focused flavor of Android devices. Sad to say, I've almost never seen a blackberry since.
I'd agree that providers are ceding too much control to Google for short-term wins, maybe without even realising the power they're handing over to Google.
Google is quietly inserting themselves between the customer and the business in all sorts of industries. They're not fully utilising that power which only makes them a benevolent (for now) dictator.
Interesting that no one mentions that Google also runs the backend flight/hotel search used by most trip planning sites. They bought it (ITA) over a decade ago.
So all these providers already lost this power years ago and are just providing a fancy UX over Google's backend travel search service. Now Google is merging the two search engines and cutting out the middleman.
The hotel /travel industry is probably the worst complainant as those industry's do a lot of sketchy stuff.
As does the insurance industry ever wonder why the UK insurance industry went all in on cuddly mascots - one factor was googles clamp down on black hat techniques simples
> If I type "<city> weather" google will show me the weather, but which weather company has shutdown because of that?
I don't know the answer to your (rethorical?) question but what I know is that weather sites and apps were once nice and useful and now are basically a placeholder for advertisement, sometimes even scammy one.
If you’re in the market for a replacement, I like yr.no. It’s a little more graphically polished than weather.gov, but no ads.
Although it is a joint project between the Norwegian Meteorological Institute and Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, it has forecasts available for the whole world in English, Norwegian, and Danish.
Bringing bookings in to google maps has been a huge challenge for hospitality. This is flowing through to search as well. I recall someone from the industry doing a great breakdown of changes to the maps UI over time, and tying it to bookings & ad revenue, but can't find it offhand. This article can probably get you started https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2019/06/30...
> If I type "<city> weather" google will show me the weather, but which weather company has shutdown because of that?
I have noticed recently that the Weather.com app has added huge advertisements at the top and has roughly doubled the number of ads within the page. It honestly feels like desperation to me and I’ve been wondering if something bad is happening to the company.
It has no reason to exist in the first place. All the data for weather comes from government agencies anyway, and weather.gov does the same job. They’re a relic from when we did not have internet and there might have been some utility in a middleman producing a TV channel to get people that information.
To be fair, NWS does a poor job at presenting their own data. Some services do add their own models to NWS but the vast majority just re-wrap NWS forecasts. NWS data visualizations and the websites aren't the snazziest things but they do work.
While weather.gov does serve that purpose, someone else could provide a much better UI -- sort of like what Simple did with banking (I know they shutdown...haha, but they did create a better experience over traditional banking). Why give one website a monopoly?
I am not saying they should be restricted from existing, but I do not see a business case for it, at least certainly not as big of a company as it used to be.
I switched to almost only using Google Flights. I try to use Skyscanner because I want to support the underdog, but Google Flights gives me better, and more results.
For hotels, Google started displaying results from other search engines like Agoda, so I just use Google for that too and clickthrough to whatever is the cheapest. They could also just stop displaying agoda from one day to the next.
At least in Europe, Skyscanner has more airlines than Google Flights, which makes the latter kinda useless if it misses the cheapest/shortest flight. That said, at least GF lists Rynanair & Wizzair now, but through Kiwi.com OTA which I'd rather avoid (direct is cheaper and less issues with changes).
I remember reading a comparison on how the hotel search features impacted others vs booking.com and the conclusion was that booking.com has alright because it's more of a destination of its' own rather than driven by search traffic.
> Google added flights, but Booking Holdings (aka Priceline) continued to grow each year
OTAs keep growing, because travel in general keeps growing. But Google takes more and more space there. Right now the "book now" button on Google hotel page takes you to selection of OTAs. But one day it can take you to Google's room selection page and eventually to Google's checkout page - the actual booking can still be done with some external party and they'll handle the customer service etc., but your money will go to Google first.
This is interesting because I always thought Matrix from ITA Software, a company Google acquired in 2010, was quite useful.
Wonder if links to Skiplagged get subjugated in Google SERPs.
If Google thinks it can replace other websites by providing better alternatives, that's great. But then the company should get out of the way and let users have a neutral source for a comprehensive inverted index of the rest of the web. If there is nothing else better out there, then let web users determine that for themselves. The index should be a public resource not controlled by one company that can see what users are searching for and engage in "front-running". (Websites that allow crawls by Googlebot, sometimes exclusively, are of course enabling the Google monopoly.)
1. Google bought Frommers in 2012 and nearly killed it. Thankfully the founder reacquired the rights.
I’ve used a number of those others, and at least via my personal scoring system, google flights is still by far the number one. Your link prioritizes very different things than I do, for example one of its top scoring sites has as a con that you can’t filter out 10+ hour layovers).
"We also ignored any itinerary that would be hell to fly-basically anything increasing total travel time by more than half through excessively long layovers, too many stops, or flying way out of your way just to change planes. Airlines may think that makes for a viable plan, but we don't."
Am I reading this wrong or does this indicate Frommer also prioritises avoiding long layovers.
(I dislike the inclusion of the long layover options too but I have always thought the reason the sites include them is that they actually sell. I once met someone who took these long layover flights on popular routes that always have many shorter options, so I know such people exist.)
Occasionally I am actually looking for the longest possible layover. Having a couple of days in another city along the route can actually be pretty cool - you get 2 holidays for the price of one, or a free holiday on the side of a work trip.
>” The index should be a public resource not controlled by one company that can see what users are searching for and engage in "front-running".”
The thing is, it’s the index they built with the technology they built. Google is not the only index. To build a public index, you’d need to have public crawlers, which would bring a whole boatload more questions / regulation / debate. Google’s search ranking is part of the secret sauce that they try very hard to obscure, while hinting at how to be good at it; basically: provide something valuable to visitors, and you’ll rank highly, at least in theory. Get caught cheating and get blacklisted.
Flight info is already public. Ticket prices are not, and vary tons based on all the deals and schemes out there. That’s not Google’s fault, but the fault (if one views it that way) of the airlines playing pricing games. Their business model relies on getting everyone to pay the highest price per seat they can get from a customer, so they benefit from not being open about pricing. Their goal is also to fill flights with paying customers or paying cargo, or the most profitable mix, depending on many factors. Again, not Google’s fault.
Google is in a position to front-run results and provide an experience that other companies cannot by virtue of users already being on their site using their search. It doesn’t seem reasonable to compare Google to a travel site, as it’s pretty clear that one wouldn’t expect e.g. Expedia to list Travelocity results alongside their own with equal priority.
I’m usually really against monopolistic behavior, as many companies use it to screw users and maximize profits (e.g. Comcast). Google isn’t in the same league IMO because they behave a lot more charitably — if it were Comcast running Google, I would wholly expect them to completely de-list every competing travel site and work on lobbying the government to get those competitors shut down, while channeling tax dollars paid to build infrastructure into their own pockets.
It’s a dumb lawsuit that will go nowhere. The lawsuit is disingenuous as they know it will fail. The true purpose is political lip service — accomplish nothing while claiming to be doing something against a perceived enemy.
Google flight search does just as good as Skiplagged for the routes I tend to fly and the UI makes it easier to find the cheapest dates.
If I am doing complicated international stuff I will check multiple locations for prices but for my simple domestic routes the ease and speed of google flights makes it the best option.
Edit: That said, I don't use google as my default search engine as I switched all my devices to DDG a long time ago.
> On the other hand, google could take over almost any business like this.
I have never worked with a technology company that would in danger of being taken over in this way. The examples you list are all free information you can find on the internet, which is precisely google's business. To run afoul of monopoly laws they need to do things like build their own restaurants and route searches to them rather than the other local restaurants the user was looking for. I assume they are doing this in some cases. But the last thing I want is to do a search and find the result list giving a bunch of new pages of lists, with yet more ads of course, to sift through next.
Software engineers are enjoying a nice run, where one can make lots of money applying basic software skills anyone can learn, grabbing free info anyone can get, and utilizing libraries everyone gets with their computer/phone OS but has not been provided access to by their hardware vendor. Hopefully technology will keep changing so fast the run will last forever (as long as you keep hopping to the newest bleeding edge). But this seems like borrowed time to me, access to free info and your own computer's clock or whatever is a commodity anyone can provide, whether it's someone earlier in the chain selling the hardware, or just millions of hungry programmers in developing countries.
Yes, that's true, the info is free in a sense that someone published it on the internet. But taking the weather companies as an example, someone has to measure the weather, and then compute the predictions. That'a real cost someone needs to pay. And that I think is the reason some people don't like what Google is doing - they are displaying the temperature, while someone else paid for it to be measured.
TBF though, weather is like the worst example of rent seeking. The people that provide the most value to weather reporting and prediction is the federal government through the a National Weather Service. Private companies usually just repackage the free government provided reports, or they do some analysis on top of the government provided data.
That’s what has always made AccuWeather’s attempt to “privatize” (in reality stop having the government publicly publish forecasts, but continue the hard work of data collection) the weather service transparent rent seeking.
Agreed. weather.gov is maybe a bit ugly but works great, and is mobile optimized.
Although I disagree with other point, spokeo and fastpeoplesearch is the absolute worst example of digging through private info of millions and "only consolidating it". SWEs working on this type of stuff are either immature or have no soul in my opinion
Google Search weather data is provided by weather.com in a commercial relationship with Google, so either Google is paying for the data like everyone else, or weather.com is providing it at their cost for their own reasons.
> When you search for "skyline berlin", you'll see images of berlin's skyline, before you see links to other image search sites.
Not to defend Google, but to be fair,
1) when searching for images, you're searching for images, not "image search sites." To search for image search sites, you'd search "all" (not photos) for "image search," which mostly returns Google image search and Google image search help pages as top results, burying other image search engines on subsequent pages. Google's search algorithm does seem biased against competitor image search sites, but maybe Google search is really finding only articles. Searching "all" for "image search sites" returns links to articles listing image search sites. Searching for Yahoo images returns Yahoo Image Search as the top result.
2) the images search results are actually thumbnails, and also links, so you see the thumbs precisely at the same time that you see links to the sites that host each image search result.
> There are only two clear, non-arbitrary rules: Search engines are only allowed to show a list of links, or search engines can show whatever they want.
I want companies to be able to design products that best serve customers, not ones limited by narrowly scoped product definitions. Google's search page has advanced beyond query + results, offering interactivity and shortcuts. I'm not saying we shouldn't be vigilant if they start abusing their position and dominating too many markets, but let's take that case by case.
I also disagree that Google can simply take over other businesses so easily. They've failed so many times. You'd think Youtube Music would dominate, but Spotify is still more popular. YouTube TV? I cancelled that a while ago. What am I surprised about is that we don't have a really strong YouTube competitor. Twitch, TikTok, and Instagram have made some in-roads, but nothing I'd call a strong #2.
I don't see any problem with having arbitrary rules so long as they roughly capture the spirit of the outcome people want. The eight-hour workday is an arbitrary rule. The age of majority is an arbitrary rule. Zoning boundaries are arbitrary.
They all capture something we (most of us) fundamentally want, but the specific lines are approximate or convenient or customary.
Yes, people often don't see the benefit of a discrete boundary - if everyone draws the line in the same spot, even just legally speaking, then everyone can
coordinate their action whenever someone steps over it.
> There are only two clear, non-arbitrary rules: Search engines are only allowed to show a list of links, or search engines can show whatever they want.
Those rules are just as arbitrary as all the possibilities in between.
> There's a clear tradeoff here between what's good for consumers, and concerns about democracy, the concentration of power, etc..
Actually, you can just leave it as tradeoffs between what is good for the consumer short term and what is good for the consumer long term.
Sometimes there are wider issues that affect democracy (e.g. social networks and information silos), but usually it's just an economic issue that people aren't looking at thoroughly enough.
The reason we try to stop monopolies before they happen is not because they are hurting consumers at that point. Often they are underselling competitors to achieve their monopoly so consumers benefit and love them. We stop them because after they have that monopoly they no longer have good incentives to keep being beneficial for the consumer, so we avoid the problem before it is one.
The funny part is that the flight search portion comes from their acquisition of ITA, which I was a part of (worked at ITA when it was acquired). The airlines contract with that system for their own internal search - so who is the real customer there?
As a content creator rich snippets are such a bugbear. If you don't play the game then someone else's content and name shows up. If you do, there's a huge chance people get what they need and never visit your site. It's a Google wins, consumer wins, creator loses situation.
I would argue that bad behavior (“bad” = existing more to get ad revenue than to deliver valuable information to users) made this a viable business model for Google. I don’t love snippets, and sometimes they’re hilariously wrong, but I’d rather get wrong info from a snippet vs having a site waste my time and beg me to sign up, blocking the info from view, forcing me to “open in app”, only to find that it was bad info anyway…
Do companies exist to make things that are valuable for users, or do users exist to make money for companies?
If the information is valuable, why aren't we paying for it? That's the problem we still haven't solved. It's why you are Google's product, and it's why companies use that "sticky" behaviour. You need to be a user, a member, a customer - that way you might eventually give them a few dollars instead of glean a little information and forget they ever existed.
I really don't know what a good customer-centric endgame looks like. Maybe a self hosted AI assistant that knows what I need, coupled with a micropayment infrastructure to apportion funds based on where I visit? No idea.
> If the information is valuable, why aren't we paying for it?
Several reasons:
1. You often can't judge the value of the information before purchase.
2. The downside of having to decide whether or not to purchase is often larger than the value of the information.
3. Microtransaction costs (time and otherwise) are higher than the value of the information.
4. That information is often available for free somewhere else (sometimes people just want attention or to inform others rather than money). The top results are just the ones that spent the most money on SEO (and hence have the most intrusive ads).
Ugh like recipes. With the damn recipe 10 pages down. I don’t care about your grandma’s life story. I just want to know how much flour to eggs ratio for pasta dough.
Perhaps you wouldn't have found that recipe in Google if they didn't include all that bullshit. Are you frustrated because you rarely get shown links in Google that are just the recipe, no fluff? Maybe they exist but you never get to see them.
They're playing by rules they didn't invent. The belief is this content gets indexed better than just recipes (which, when well written, are terse) and it should be placed above the recipe so it has higher priority. They might be mistaken but with the limited amount of information Google gives, and the fact that most places I stumble across on Google are doing it, I'm ready to believe it works.
I dislike the content-spamming recipes for another reason -- they're an accessibility nightmare. I seem to get eye strain more easily than most, despite having normal vision when my eyes aren't hurting, so I use the screen reader a lot.
Any of those recipe sites? they'll read through several minutes of navigations, links, ads, and story before getting to the site. I feel badly for anyone who must listen to that, i.e. who doesn't have an option to read it visually, what a horrible experience.
Many queries are relatively simple questions, and you won't get placement if you don't answer that question. And if you do, they have no need to click through. People care more about the answer than the justification. I've done it myself plenty of times.
> Why start a new company, if google can just take over everything?
It seems more and more common these days that people start companies specifically with the sole intention of being acquired by Google (or another large tech company).
Regardless of legal aspects it's hard to ignore that Google is now very much in the business of putting to sleep innovative products. Either they acquire the startup and no longer invest in it, or drive it out of the search results, or invent it first in their "moonshot" division and file patents with no intention of executing on them. (Note that the innovators themselves may not fare badly if they get acquired and/or employed by Google. But their product will at best stagnate, at worst be killed shortly.)
In the last decade Google has no longer brought to the consumer anything major like Gmail, Google Maps or Chrome. I doubt it's because of inability to execute - they can and will hire large numbers of very smart people. It seems more like a conscious decision to err on the side of maintaining the ~2010 status quo.
Crucially, I went to Googles business first to look for things.
In the olden days, if I went to AAA for travel advice, I'd get their partners and such recommended, not generic all-encompassing information. But I went to AAA for it. I don' see how this is any different. I can chose to go to not-google and Google then doesn't impact me.
Does Walmart have to put anybody's stuff where they want in the aisles?
> Does Walmart have to put anybody's stuff where they want in the aisles?
That could be an incredible boon to the ecoconomy.
As a younger man I gave up on the idea of making simple consumer products on realizing that the large supermarket chains around here could dash my work on the rocks by just a middle manager arbitrarily saying 'no' to stocking what I had made.
So yes, I think those companies should be forced to work with local businesses.
On the one hand it seems Google is unstoppable. Google can do everything. But I think iPhone showed an alternative path. Now most people are actually using apps (not Google) on mobile for different functionalities. I guess this is the argument that Google has been making but I buy that. My guess is 20 years from now Android, YouTube, Google Maps, etc. would be more valuable for Google than search.
Google having to pay $10-$12B a year to Apple just for being default search engine. All while Apple is working on stopping cookies and now VPN that takes away all the information Google could use for Ads. And Siri Search being Apple's default recommendation results means most of the valuable ads search term revenue are now out of reach for Google. That is ~1.4B Apple Active Devices. ( Apple TV or other Appliance being counted or not is a rounding error ) and Growing.
If App Store spendings are any indication Apple user tends to spend twice as much than Google Play.
Basically Apple is squeezing Google left and right. ( Incidentally they are also what they are doing it to suppliers and developers )
That's known as "tying" - an illegal use of a overwhelming market position to leverage the market position of other products of the same company. That's the key thing that determines illegal monopolistic practice.
That's true if you define Google as a link search engine, but what if you were to define it as a "solution finder"? This way it just fits into the definition.
> Why start a new company, if google can just take over everything?
If your company is defeated by Google turning it into some widget then you don’t have much of a business, you just have a feature you monetized and isn’t really a long term source of revenue. You need rigorous innovation and a clear advantage over your competitors.
Same with sports scores. I’m surprised the various sports websites have not made a cry about this as part of anti-trust investigations. Maybe because those sports sites are still reliant on Google for their other page views? Which only makes it worse.
There is more at stake here, though: If folks cannot easily look up scored and things, who will they blame? Probably the sports sites and team owners. It would be similar to the companies disallowing sports scores to be printed in newspapers.
False dichotomy; when it comes to flights, they could show general information with links to flight companies. When it comes to images, they could limit themselves to small image previews / thumbnails.
Of course, one reason why I for one prefer to stay on Google Images (and have an addon to go directly to an image file instead of the site it's on) is that the sites themselves have so much cruft on them. And they kinda have to, because there's no money to be made on a minimalist image hosting site, while there's plenty of expenses - wouldn't be surprised if the brunt of expenses is abuse prevention.
Those are great examples of how a search engine works better at offering some services than any web site that might be surfaced by the results. It's more useful, more ... utilitarian one might say. That to me is why this lawsuit to declare google a utility is most interesting. Like electricity or natural gas these useful widgets turn a search engine into a substrate that people don't even realize they're using until it breaks.
> There are only two clear, non-arbitrary rules: Search engines are only allowed to show a list of links, or search engines can show whatever they want.
Ohio is asking for a third option; common carrier status. Search and other monopoly infrastructure would be run at arms length from the rest of the business, and anyone could pay (the same as google) to integrate it into their own offerings.
Luckily, search results are getting progressively worse, and these "value add" features also. Maybe there's a time for a web 2.0 (or, 3.0?) that can integrate APIs without HTML/markup specific to do so?
I really just want to send out a query to various search caches, and get back results that are then merged into one dataset and shown in a native GUI. Forget this website shit.
I agree with you on how interesting the issue you raised is. I'm just cynical and I happen to think that won't be the issue that gets decided. I wonder aloud if this will boil down to a question of whether utilities can exist as services on non-utilities, given that we don't presently classify internet service as a utility.
I think that some other example is needed to explain "As a consumer, I love it. So much easier."
Please watch this, it is about not well known company called Luxottica that holds majority of world market for eyewear. There is a good posibilty that if you have sun glasses, they made them. It is not something technical, just simple merchandise, simple to understand:
Since the video came out, they have also bought (actually "merged") one of the largest companies creating perscription lenses.
Now, do you like what you see? Is it "so easy" and "good" for the customers? Do you love it? How is their status impacting you wanting to buy eyewear?
Same is with google, amazon, microsoft, just name it. But yes, until they get a vast majority of market, they will not start to milk the users. As they want majority of market first.
"99% believe they buy an American brand!" she says with horror in her voice. That i so.... American.
While a monopoly is bad this is a very poor source to use to prove a point, even though they do admittedly have a point (like the broken clock being correct twice a day). The problem has absolutely nothing to do with it being an Italian company but that is of course a big point in any 60 Minutes video (US good, others bad) and I highly doubt it would have been made had it been Walmart instead of Luxottica.
But to comment on-topic: I believe Google and/or search engines should be put under the same rules and laws as the EU did with Microsoft. Search engine is searchengine, not search/travelplanner/hotel finder/translator/whatever. It strangles competition and innovation. Google should include those other things from other services if another service will sell the service to Google or keep clear.
Edit: In short, as the EU is already working on, Google and the likes that are gatekeepers, needs to be stopped or broken up.
What if Google did not develop flight search but acquired it by buying someone out. What if they did not develop image search but acquired it by buying someone out. What if they did not develop the good-looking timer but copied it from someone else.
If Google was 100% responsible for developing everything they offer to consumers, then perhaps there is an argument that Google is good for consumers. However the truth is that Google Search is what they developed, it became the only search engine that most people use, and being a gateway tot he web and having the ability to spy on the world's web use is an unfair advantage that virtually no one else has.
Anything that becomes popular Google can gobble it up. Consumers cannot get superior direct benefits from non-Google companies for long. Google will acquire any such companies sooner than later.
Not meant to be sarcastic. A single, web-based company could offer wonderful coveniences for web users if 1. they know what "all" people are searching for on the web 2. they are enabled (by finance) and allowed (by law) to acquire any other company that aims to serve the needs of "all" people searching for stuff on the web. #1 is a capability held by no other company on the planet, except Google. The point is that a single, all-knowing company offering such wonderful conveniences is not necessary responsible for creating them. First, they had to 1. spy on peoples' searches to determine what stuff people were looking for on the web and 2. acquire other companies that had already worked out how to best provide that stuff. If the all-knowing company did not exist, the other companies providing the stuff that people were searching for would still exist. The all-knowing company is initially just a middleman. In some cases this middleman has not been content to simply connect people with the companies providing the stuff and take a cut (through selling advertising services). Rather, the middleman seeks to acquire the companies and provide the stuff itself (enhancing its spying capabilities).
My initial thinking behind any business idea was more often than not preceded by "what if Google clones my idea???!?!? :((((". Two things wrong with this line of thinking.
First it assumes Google can execute on said idea better than me and that I can't innovate. Here's the thing though; the bigger a company is the slower it gets. Sure, they can implement processes but big always gets more complex. Being small gives you an edge. What you do with that edge will determine whether FAANG apes your idea or not.
Secondly, big tech isn't immune to market forces. The more features they add, trying to please every last potential user leads to bloat. At some point their search experience is bound to get degraded from adding way too many features in pursuit of every last user. This adds more bureaucracy. More tech debt. More uncontrollable variables.
Search in 2021, especially on mobile, is vastly different from even 5 years ago. There are more ads, more tracking, more fraud, more shady back dealing, more user hostile anti-patterns. Yes, users currently enjoy their product but at some point surveillance capitalism will get its reckoning (see Apple, Europe, regulation in general) and for all the various products they have, search is the only relevant one. Without Search, how 'threatening' is Google really?
Same goes for Facebook and that hot mess of an app. News feed, groups, pages, dating, marketplace, messaging, watch, etc. All this reeks of a co. that's lost focus in pursuit of not ceding users to competitors. This just means when they fail (which they will!), they will fail spectacularly.
My advice to you and myself is focus on a niche. Try to do things that will be hard for FAANG to reproduce by making your users love your product more.
Competing head on with these behemoths is foolish, but a moat is possible nonetheless given proper execution.
Yes, obviously, you as a user are free to find another search engine.
However, you as a creator are not free to find another universe in which the leading search provider does not use their position of influence to squash any competing products by ranking their own products higher.
But that’s not an argument for making Google a public utility. That’s an argument that they are being anti-competitive. That’s a whole other discussion. And even then, the question isn’t are competitors being harmed, but are consumers being harmed. So long as their products are free, it’s hard to argue that consumers are suffering harm.
(I haven’t heard privacy brought up as a legal measure of harm to consumers, which would be an interesting angle, but I’m not sure how that plays with current law…)
> So long as their products are free, it’s hard to argue that consumers are suffering harm
Well, that is the (Borkian) dominant understanding of antitrust right now, but it hasn't always been, and I think that view is under pressure again.
It has never been clear to me why we must limit our view to consumers when looking at antitrust - there is always much more going on than how much things cost. It effects competitors (actual and would-be), the environment, related industries, available jobs, sometimes national security - monopolies can have huge impacts on lots of things. Why exactly is this super-reductive, artificially crabbed view the only measure of a monopoly's harm?
Medium-term, I think the pendulum is swinging back.
A sea of comments and this one is the only one mentioning Bork. Well played. Hopefully we can swim closer to looking at things in the round rather than this very narrow and very conservative view of the structures in which we live and operate.
> So long as their products are free, it’s hard to argue that consumers are suffering harm.
Is it? There's an increasing antipathy towards the amount of data Google collect, many people on this forum, if not so much in the world at large, would consider that harm. If Google's hiding from me a better service that's also free, or even has an acceptable cost, I'd consider that harm.
It's only hard to argue there's no harm if their product is identical to its competitors, which is basically never true.
> So long as their products are free, it’s hard to argue that consumers are suffering harm.
It kills competition since most of them are financed by an unrelated service (Googles ad network) and without competition we get such nice things like randomized automated life time bans, non existent customer service, products that are randomly killed, overly anti competitive licensing agreements (Android apparently cannot survive on its own merits) etc. . Privacy is just one of many many issues.
Yes, and maybe they should be regulated too. They enjoy dominant positions in the market and blatantly rip off successful products down to the color and bottle shape.
But any idiot can figure out which are the successful products on those search engines. They are literally there trying to be found and broadcast their popularity.
The patent system is for protecting ideas which the law allows to be protected.
But any idiot can’t get Walmart or Amazon to prominently place their copycat product on shelves or in search results. Only these retail behemoths can guarantee the competitive placement of their products in the market.
OP is not arguing the consumer is restricted in choice, more that Google can dominate the market of any information based business by coding a widget because they have a huge amount of data at their disposal.
Much like if you make a good product and sell it on Amazon, Amazon can simply use their might to dupe your product and sell it as AmazonBasics.
So innovation is stifled because the second it becomes profitable a giant can pluck it from your hands and use their power to squash you whilst making money from it.
I am not sure what mechanisms within Capitalism are supposed to protect people from the simple power asymmetry of companies having far more resources money and lawyers doing what the fuck they like.
There should be antitrust lawsuits against all of the giants abusing their power but, because of said power asymmetry, they of course have a huge amount of lobbying power in comparison to anyone else.
No one is forcing you to use an electrical company. You could always power your house with a bicycle generator. Therefore, electrical companies shouldn't be regulated as public utilities.
Yes, you have to use the municipal electricity. You cannot lay your own power lines, it's illegal. And in most urban areas, you can't run your own generator for emissions restrictions. You also can't power your home with a bicycle. Even champion bicyclists output 50-100 watts.
Using Bing, DuckDuckGo, or other Google alternatives are incomparably easier than not using utilities like electricity and plumbing. I struggle to see how one can honestly make this comparison.
You can do everything with water with rain-barrels and buckets. As others have said, you can do power with candles, bike generators, and wood fire.
Is that a realistic solution in a modern society? Hell no.
I struggle to see how anyone honestly can lie to themselves that it is somehow absurd to label something a "utility" just because the technology has advanced beyond cave-man level.
Google deserves their status as a utility - monopolies, effective or otherwise, we have consistently found to be actively harmful.
Furthermore, if a company wants to be a "be-all-everything technological solution", it is actively attempting to usurp the role of government. And when that govt is un-elected, that's a despotic oligarchy, at best. We may well be forced to storm Google HQ and put every Google CEO's head on the chopping block if we want to preserve our liberty.
Or, y'know, maybe just support getting them regulated instead, bit more of a humane solution, dontcha think?
You could just create battery trailer to power your house and drive to the next Tesla charging station with it whenever it runs low. No need for power lines or any power generation in your backyard. Maybe someone should propose that trailer idea to Elon? Tesla already produces everything necessary to take yourself of the grid, it only needs to be bundled up right.
No need for a trailer, since a typical EV already has more capacity than most home battery solutions. Example: A 2021 Tesla Model 3 Long Range AWD stores 82 kWh[0], while a PowerWall 2 only stores 13.5 kWh[1]. So a single Model 3 is the equivalent of up to 6 PowerWalls. All it's missing is official support for vehicle-to-grid connections.
Only as a technicality. Domestic electrical power use varies worldwide from “none” to “tens of kilowatts”. This, for example, is what it takes to run a UK household on bicycle electricity: https://youtu.be/C93cL_zDVIM
You can make that decision in rural areas. It costs a lot of money to get wires run to a new house. You might use solar instead with a generator as backup.
In many urban areas you may not even be allowed to opt out of utilities meanwhile. I once delayed paying for the water bill in a new house for a month till I moved in and needed, got a big late bill finally because the fees are mandatory for the house.
Creating your own power plant, lugging gallons of oil for power generation, or hiring someone to 24/7 power you home via bicycle all cost a few orders of magnitude more than paying the utility company for service, and creating a competing utility company wouldn't make sense competitively in any way, so naturally there's a monopoly. For search engines, it's both easy to switch to a different one as a consumer and it's easy for someone new to come in and create a profitable competitor (see bing, ddg).
And, just as naturally, the government actually owns a lot of the distribution network. The producers provide into the distribution network, the customers receive from the distribution network, and the government regulates fair (by some definition thereof) access.
> creating a competing utility company wouldn't make sense competitively in any way, so naturally there's a monopoly
So how come there are countries without a natural monopoly and with competing utility providers?
Also running your own generator with oil isn't a few orders of magnitude (i.e. at least 100x) more expensive. I wouldn't be surprised if it's not even one order of magnitude more expensive, but maybe just twice as expensive.
I also don't think GP's simile is good, but some of your arguments against it are just blatantly false.
> So how come there are countries without a natural monopoly and with competing utility providers?
Local governments own most U.S. utility lines and pipes, so a competing for-profit utility would have to go against the not-for-profit public service, leaving low to no room for profit and no reason to even compete.
Fiber/cable/dsl lines are one of the few U.S. utilities with competition because the performance/reliability/features of the service can vary greatly and because almost no local governments ran their own ISP before private companies came in and ran their lines. I can bet that any area with a municipal ISP has a very low chance of seeing xfinity/att run their own fiber if they're not already servicing the area.
> When you search for "skyline berlin", you'll see images of berlin's skyline, before you see links to other image search sites.
What's next, should they also show Bing and DuckDuckGo search results when you search for an arbitrary query too?
The goal of Google isn't to link you to websites, it's to get you to your information as quickly as possible. Said information could be a website, just as it can be an image, a flight or a single sentence pulled into an Answer Box.
But I have multiple choices for email, search, video hosting and browsers. I don’t have any choice for water, electricity, sewer, on any other public utility.
I am sure there are a bunch of people on here that don’t use any Google products and are using DuckDuckGo, Firefox, ProtonMail, Vimeo. There are many choices.
I'm surprised I haven't seen much in the responses to this comment that the issue isn't so much that consumers have other options (though given how high Google's search reach is, how relevant is that if hardly anyone does), it's that for most businesses your option is either have a strong search presence on Google or go out of business. There is just no viable path to avoid Google as a business when they control 80+ percent of search market share.
And you not only need to play the SEO game, you have to pray that Google just doesn't decide to get into your business and start returning their own results instead (which is exactly what this lawsuit is about). Especially since Google has had the chance to suck up all the data that you've provided in optimizing your site to provide the most relevant results.
Yes, reading through so many responses it's clear that even on HN in 2021 we need to remind people that you are NOT Google's customer. You are the product!
That cliched sentence is bullshit. Google is an aggregator of supply, and profits off this position. The users are not “the product,” the products get commoditized for the users by Google, and it is this process that makes them money.
As a user, I am quite happy with this status quo. The quality of the service is pretty good, and there isn’t much user-facing rent seeking. Compare this to the app stores, which are a true public utility monopoly in Apple’s case, and you’ll immediately see the difference of true monopoly.
> ...most businesses your option is either have a strong search presence on Google or go out of business.
Your perspective is a bit skewed here towards the software world. There are businesses on every street-corner in the US, and for that matter world, without any meaningful internet presence or need for great search engine ranking. And for that matter, consumer products and consumer-facing businesses are only a subset of the $20T+ economy of the US.
Do you Google shoes to find shoes,some workout shorts or any consumer product line? Search is irrelevant for any consumer brand from a discovery standpoint point. What do you Google from a consumer perspective?
> Search is irrelevant for any consumer brand from a discovery standpoint point.
I can't believe this is a serious comment. Literally hundreds of billions of dollars would say otherwise. I search for consumer products on Google all the time.
It's definitely hyperbole to say "irrelevant", but I think the overarching point is right.
When I'm looking to buy something, I'll usually start my search on Amazon or Pinterest or Walmart or eBay or Etsy. Google is definitely a search of last resort.
Everyone's behavior is different, but while Google may "own" search for knowledge, it absolutely does not "own" search for consumer products.
I think they are right. Even personally with the Google/DDG split I use, I almost never search for products on them. I go to Amazon or any other retailer. If I don't know what to buy and I need reviews outside of Amazon then I might search for it on Google/Youtube or browse some specific site like WireCutter.
For me and for people I know, even the general search is now more and more served by new search engine platforms like Alexa/Siri which are the only search engines on products like Echo and have a monopoly.
With vertical search platforms coming up, looking at just a general search engine is the old way. Search is no longer just the traditional old style search engines from 90s. Alexa/Siri haven't been monetised yet, but you can see the dominance of Amazon in product search space by their rapidly growing ad revenue.
Nobody give a flying flitwick what products you buy - there are only products to buy on the major exchanges (Amazon/Walmart/<InsertGroceryStore>).
No, this has directly to do with stealing ideas on a mass scale, and then not really being able to cope without handing your sht over - if your business is to sell e.g. lift truck systems to big box stores, and you spend time, energy, effort, going through all the systems to figure out what you need to do properly build systems which those big box stores want, there NOTHING STOPPING GOOGLE FROM STEALING ALL THOSE IDEAS VIA SEARCH RESULT AND PUTTING THAT BIZ OUT OF BIZ.
Now yes you can argue some of it might* be covered by Patent - thing is lawsuits cost time and money, big biz like Google? It can hire a lot of fancy lawyers and spend a lot of time wasting your money while you try to litigate it's IP theft. Meanwhile, because it dominates search results, your revenue streams drop to zero and you can't afford the fees to win...patent becomes irrelevant.
Or worse, because patent's need to be complete ideas/concepts, it auto-files the patent before you ever get done dusting off the cobwebs on your concept.
"Just hire a patent lawyer" - don't be ridiculous, that's exactly how you kill/stifle innovation. Nobody's innovating by first hiring a patent lawyer, that's what you do after the fact or if you just have buckets of money to throw around... (again, killing innovation by reducing 'innovators' to rich fuckers versus anyone who has a good idea and can implement it).
I’ve built two multi-billion dollar consumer retail companies where we didn’t focus on SEO nor was organic or even SEM traffic a significant source of new customers. If you want to dump your money into SEO/SEM go for it but that’s not how the retail startups are spending their money.
You have multiple choices for water, dig a well, buy it from the local grocery store. Same for sewage because self composting toilets exist. Also electricity isn't a utility just use a stationary bike as a generator or buy solar panels...
Just because you have multiple choices doesn't mean something is/isn't a utility. Its pretty arbitrary. They also aren't talking about Google products (most of which are completely irrelevant aside from their ability to help Google sell ads) they are focused solely on search. Not saying they are "right" just that Google's search dominance is a thing and they use it support their own stuff. Eg: You can buy our electricity but it only "recommends" appliances we also sell
Wells dug with modern equipment are a perfectly good alternative to municipal water - they can free one from over-regulated or poorly managed utilities. Even in the outskirts of California metros it's sometimes the only option without shelling out hundreds of thousands for extensions.
DuckDuckGo, on the other hand, is just Google with bangs, an insignificant spec compared to the latter.
Edit: DuckDuckGo US market share: 2.5% [1], US population getting their water from a well: 13% [2]
> Wells dug with modern equipment are a perfectly good alternative to municipal water
... in certain geologic areas. And this doesn't work if you live in an apartment. I do feel like this is a big example of the "why don't you just" discussion from last week.
"Why don't you do something that works for over 40 million people all over the US" is a very far cry from "why don't you build your own power plant, datacenter, and networking infrastructure." It's a far better argument than DDG which - if my usage is anything to go by - is just a frontend for Google with convenient shortcuts to specialized searches like Github.
If you live in an apartment, you live in a multi-family building built by a developer with a lot more money than a single family can spend. They're exactly the ones who can afford alternatives, like paying the city to tear up roads and lay down a pipe to municipal water.
The point is that a well supports a tiny number of people compared to a municipal water system, but it's a real alternative. In the search engine space, DDG is just token opposition and there is no one analogous to a property developer that can afford a competitor to municipal water so it's Google or nothing.
Water (or mineral) rights are often not included when you buy property within a city, too. "Just dig a well," is often literally illegal. Water rights are notoriously complicated and obscure.
Then you can also play a tragedy-of-the-commons aquifer game with all the commercial users of water in your area. Can you afford to keep making your well deeper than theirs? There are a few towns in California engaged in the resulting endgame.
> So how about this, the upfront cost and effort of typing in a different URL is at least a few orders of magnitude easier than drilling a well.
That's missing the point.
Regardless of whether you personally type google.com or duckduckgo.com, most people use google and so they get directed to other Google products and don't see competing products, and that hurts competition in those spaces.
> People talking like drilling a well in your backward is on par with typing in a different URL.
So how about this, the upfront cost and effort of typing in a different URL is at least a few orders of magnitude easier than drilling a well.
You talking like BUILDING A POWER PLANT is on par with drilling a well in your backward.
So how about this, the upfront cost and effort of DRILLING A WELL is at least a few orders of magnitude easier than BUILDING A POWER PLANT.
It's relatively simple and easy to change your default search engine and/or type in a different url, in fact, it quite literally costs you $0 (as in - it doesn't cost you any more to use ddg over google), so digging a well, and the further cost of routing your pipes to pull from that underground water is infinitely more expensive to do. This is the principle behind utility companies being regulated: it's insanely expensive to do the alternative of using that utility company. Now, Apple and Google (in terms of Android) might need to be considered some sort of public utility (eg. providing an app store) since it would cost competitors tens of billions of dollars to match the existing ecosystem, but Google Search is far from being considered a utility.
The point is neither drilling a well or building your own power plant are realistic alternatives for 99% of the people. Whereas switching to ddg is a realistic alternative for 99% of the people.
There are at least a dozen companies you can buy water from and have it delivered to a giant storage tank made by at least 5 different companies. Or you could use a number of companies to dig a well for you.
Many people don't have access to municipal water and when I didn't, this is what I did.
The main, monopolistic solution of municipal water certainly is. The point is that options can still exist in a monopoly. Google still has a monopoly despite the existence competitors.
Firstly it's not structurally practical to store giant tanks of water on private property. So the comparison makes no practical sense anyway.
But more, there is a significant market for private water in other properties. It's a non-trivial market which serves a significant proportion of the US population.
There is no significant market for private/non-Google search. Not only is DDG a footnote, but Google's dominance forces businesses to take steps to optimise their Google rank - or face penalties by losing access to potential customers.
Google can also remove businesses who aren't even customers from its rankings on a whim, with no redress.
When I lived in China, I didn't have the luxury of having access to Google, so I used Bing instead. It was actually quite reasonable for most of my needs, I'm not sure why more people don't give it a go. Of course, now that I live in the states again, I use Google, but most of my searching is on YouTube anyways (which was something else I didn't have access to in China).
I'm pretty sure those same apartment buildings wouldn't let you set up the large scale server farm required for you to set up your own search engine alternative to Google either.
I disagree, wells are equal to or better than municipal water, and can often be cheaper while being higher quality. the inverse can be true. the analogy holds imo.
I would like to learn more. Why is a well cleaner or higher quality than a big city municipal water supply? Is it because city water requires harsher treatment because it comes from a huge pool of waste while a well comes from a clean watershed?
Untreated borehole water is often unsafe to for humans to drink, at least that's usually the case here in Australia.
As for cities, it depends entirely on the specific city.
The city I grew up in was supplied by a river that was unsafe to even swim in due to agricultural runoff and high levels of heavy metals from volcanic activity. Our drinking water was so heavily chlorinated that you practically needed a water filter to make it drinkable.
The city I went to university was supplied by an aquifer and modern, high quality piping. The water was such high quality, it required no treatment at all.
It’s not. There are a ton of variables that determine the quality of your water. In many cases, well water will be significantly worse (my childhood home being a great example).
Are those the right categories? Utilities are built (at least partially) and maintained using taxpayer money. Google acquired dominance by collecting user data. In both cases users, as a class, get access to essential services that what wouldn't have been possible without their contributions.
Utilities were also originally private competing companies and then they consolidated and the gov decided to make them regulated monopolies bec it made more sense then 10 different companies running their own electric lines. It’s possible to argue that one good search engine makes more sense vs 10 different small ok ones, the gov should step in and regulate.
You can also go buy books and search for information without using electrons but the analogy is flawed. Your rainwater tanks do not have the economy of scale necessary to produce a natural monopoly until you build a tank and distribution system large enough to supply fresh water to an entire town, at which point it makes it difficult or impractical to compete.
To a certain extent, utilities differ in that they are regulated monopolies protected by the government. Any competing water company, for example, can’t just start running water mains without government approval. In exchange for that protection, the existing water utility incurs additional regulations, like needing approvals to raise rates and bring required to provide services to areas where it may not be profitable by itself.
Regarding your electrical example, that only works in isolation. You cannot just decide to tie your solar or generator to the grid, for example, because that utility is a regulated public good.
In general by government protection we just mean that they are receiving property protection from police and from local governmental offices for like water quality inspections, park maintenance, general public services like the post office, etc, right? not that the government decides anything of note for the utility/company of people who are doing their best to run things based on merit and performance and team cohesion and actual delivery of objectives? not any political shit? I ask because I'm truly afraid at what people are starting to think when they talk about government's role, at least from my age or younger and I'm probably on the younger side on this forum so I want to know what the more experienced people here think about this kind of thing.
It’s hard to answer completely because it varies by municipality and I’m not an expert. But the public utility commission does regulate quite a bit, potentially ranging from where a utility can build, how much renewable sources they must have, how much they can charge, etc.
In exchange, the utility can essentially be guaranteed that competitors will not be allowed to enter the market. In the past few decades, there has been more movement towards deregulated markets but not without issues. (See the documentary “The Smartest Guys in the Room” if you aren’t already familiar with the story of Enron).
With tech (from search to ISPs) there are monopolies. Do they break them up or regulate them like utilities or something else? Our politicians are starting to tackle some real issues and we'll have to see how this shakes out.
That is a terrible argument. "Go sh*t in a chemical toiled" is not a reasonable alternative, the cost alone is ludicrous. Just have the decency and maturity to admit when you are wrong instead of arguing that you should "go dig a well" in the middle of the city. This is why we can't have reasonable conversations anymore.
You completely misunderstood the comment you're replying to. He's saying that the mere existence of alternatives does not preclude something from being a utility.
Thank you! I am also not even saying Google _should_ be a utility just that the standards for what makes something a utility candidate are not standard but rather arbitrary. Most utilities came about through lobbying one way or another not through some clinical application of rules.
I am concerned with Google's search dominance and its ability to use that to suppress and manipulate even if it is just to get me to buy something.
Even if you do move to alternatives to public utilities, many areas will not allow you to disconnect from them and have a required minimum bill.
For example, If I got many solar panels and backup batteries to power my house, I would still be required to pay $5 a month to the local electric company and would not be allowed to disconnect from them.
> If I got many solar panels and backup batteries to power my house, I would still be required to pay $5 a month to the local electric company and would not be allowed to disconnect from them.
That may be true for water and gas, but is usually false for electricity.
People need to stop acting like the law is the same everywhere. "X is illegal, period" is probably only true for murder and theft, and even then, with a lot of regional variations.
> You have multiple choices for water, dig a well, buy it from the local grocery store.
This is a false equivalence. Comparing Google to a municipal water system and other search engines to purchasing bottled water eliminates certain key features of the service, like water conditioning and infrastructure. I use DuckDuckGo and it is no where near the inconvenience implied by "dig a well".
Digging a well would be creating your own search engine. You can pay someone to come in an drill that well for you that doesn't exist a paid search engine.
Ddg would be like taking the water from a public fountain.
More like using the "free" fountain with a DDG logo on it with water being transferred from the nearby Microsoft fountain (but with a promise that they add their own magic sprinkly stuff to the water).
It might be out off topic, but this reminded me of one of the songs that gets recorded and released with every new version of OpenBSD[1], when we're talking about water. It's fun.
1) Google isn't carrying anything. It's your ISP that's actually carrying the bits to your house/work/phone/implants.
2) What google search is providing is literally content that they've created. I really don't see how this suit won't get dismissed on first amendment grounds.
I am not saying the suit has merit or will or won't get dismissed. I am saying Google's dominance in search and its willingness to use that to suppress/influence should make everyone want that to be a more competitive market.
It is not good that you need to pay "protection" money to Google so that your business shows up when your exact business name is searched (if your competitors buys your keywords). That is of course ok because its Google's business decision. What is less ok is that there are no new search companies making any headway in regards to market share. It is a stagnant sector of what should be a dynamic industry.
I want an endless corporate bar fight of companies trying to be better at search that works incredibly/game-changingly with any tool I have (not just Google apps).
Businesses HAVE to use Google for ads. Only placing ads on DuckDuckGo is not a viable strategy when more than 80% of all search traffic is via Google.
Google prioritizes their own products. Sometimes they even copy ideas and implement their own version of a product, and then they bump the competitors below themselves in the search results.
THAT is the problem, and why the lawsuit might hold water.
I am not aware of any city or town that has utilities and allows property owners to opt out and dig a well or put in a septic,
Maybe you could use composting toilet however you would still be required by law to hook up and maintain a connect to the public water and sewer system or the city would condemn your home
And if you are currently on a well and your municipality brings sewer or water service down your street, you are usually required to connect to them and decommission the septic system and well.
(I've heard that you can sometimes keep the well for irrigation purposes, but the house cannot be connected to it and the water cannot go down the drain.)
Is there a single internet savvy person besides stallman who is able to 100% avoid google? Even if you don’t use gmail, almost everyone you message does. You lose access to most online videos. Google domains, fonts, and maps entangle a truly massive number of websites, including healthcare sites. In Covid, lots of clients or employers use google video calling. Schools almost but not quite make you use google drive. If you don’t optimize your website for chrome, you worsen the experience of 90% or more of your users. If you don’t play the seo game, nobody will know your site exists. It’s not a realistic choice for 99% of people
> But I have multiple choices for email, search, video hosting and browsers.
Not video hosting you don't. If you want to build a significant English speaking audience, your only real choice is YouTube, because that's where people search from. Seriously, who has a "Vimeo" app on their phone? On their set-top box?
Same thing if you want to watch interesting videos: most of the content is on YouTube.
Agreed, but that's a technicality. What matters is, if you want to make a living, you have to host on YouTube. (You can host elsewhere, but over 99% of your revenue will come from your notoriety at YouTube, if not YouTube directly.)
And if you want videos, they're all on YouTube. You can search for them elsewhere but most of the content is on YouTube, and you won't avoid it even if your search started from a general purpose search engine like DuckDuckGo.
One notable exception of course is porn. But that's such a separated segment that it's pretty obvious I meant "non-porn videos" all along in this thread.
What kind of living are you making just posting videos to youtube?
A random example but most stage hypnotists sell their shows via vimeo. If you ever go to a show and want to buy a copy they will send you there. The stuff they post on youtube is mostly highlights or lower quality video. It would take them 100,000 ad views (1,000,000 regular views) to equal one copy sold.
Youtube could get you some views but you need to make your money elsewhere. In the case above the additional revenues are from vimeo. Youtube's role is to hopefully get someone to book the event but you would be better off having good word of mouth than hoping someone sees your videos on youtube and lives in the same area and tries to book you for a corporate gig or faire.
> Youtube could get you some views but you need to make your money elsewhere.
Yes of course. But YouTube will still be responsible for most of that money: want a sponsor to pay you? You need to have enough viewers in the first place. Want donations? You need enough viewers for donations to flow in. Selling swag? You need enough viewers to know about your store.
Even your stage hypnotists: why people go see their shows in the first place? I bet many learned about those shows from YouTube. Also, stage performers are a bit different in that their main activity happens offline. If all your activity is online, you're back to YouTube being the only point of entry.
When talking about the concept of monopoly, it's quite relevant which part is under discussion. For example, a lot of video content I consume is from Instagram or TikTok. This stuff is real and it counts. Creators there often have little to no YouTube presence, and are relying on their platforms for the same question of discovery, and your claim about 99% of their revenue simply isn't accurate. This is a quibble, except for the fact that when we're talking about monopoly, every exception counts.
"If you want to make a living, you have to host on YouTube." If you want to short-circuit a lot of the work of audience development by having a recommendation algorithm point a firehose of eyeballs at your stuff, you have to host on YouTube or a comparable platform. However, that is a very different thing, and not a technicality at all! The business model of a YouTube creator is precarious and contingent, because their relationship with their audience is so thoroughly mediated by the platform that the platform's whims give and take away. ("Hit the bell so you don't miss a video") Essentially, there's a risk of taking the dependent-on-platform-aspect of this business model for granted in a way that obscures the alternatives people really do use these days. (E.g., I know we probably all hate those Wordpress sales funnel things, but from the perspective of "how do I make money from my content" they're genuinely an option we should be contrasting here)
Another exception would be gaming videos where Twitch is rather popular. Sure, many Twitch users will re-upload their streams on YouTube (no reason not to, YouTube is a popular platform still even in gaming), but most of the revenue will actually come from Twitch. That said, for most videos YouTube is realistically the only choice.
Video discovery in itself is not monopolyish either. It is the vertical integration of video hosting + video discovery that makes the monopoly.
Hence the solution being a break up; separate youtube-the-video-hosting-infra from youtube-the-recommendation-engine, allow market access to infra, allow competition on video discovery.
Discovery and hosting are the exact same thing right now. People don't open up their RSS reader to find new videos, they go directly to youtube. If you aren't on youtube then you won't be seen.
Except me, if I open up my RSS reader, I'm usually looking for something new. I turn Youtube videos into audio podcasts using a service, and put them in a podcast client that's separate from my RSS reader.
These are things that are done locally. You can find a smartphone for under 250 at any phone store. Or by calling a number. I got one by text the other day through my carrier. I can't find an iphone 12 for that online or locally legally and I would have better luck getting a stolen phone cheaper locally.
Small business are finding success through facebook and other social platforms. Not sure google is a player here. Remember google+? I can't believe they shut that down with a decent userbase because it didn't reach some scale meanwhile any startup would have called it a big success and built on it.
>You can find a smartphone for under 250 at any phone store.
These phones all run android or have no features which are required in the modern age. The OP point is that avoiding google is a privilege many do not have.
>Small business are finding success through facebook
Your competitors are advertising on facebook and google. If you want to compete you have no choice but to do both.
I have no idea where you get the type of iphone you describe online for $250.00. If I was an apple guy I would want to buy new and pay full price so apple had more money to make the products I love.
I didn't upgrade since 2013, and since getting my new phone I found no new features important or even that useful. Having more memory allowed me to download more. Bigger screen doesn't fit in the pocket. Features like split screen or shake twice for the camera ti show up or the new ways to lock and unlock your phone don't really matter.
This is exactly the point. There is no $250 iphone. So unless you can afford a much more expensive phone, your only option is a privacy invasive google phone.
Being able to chose not to use google is a luxury here. Therefor google is a monopoly for these low income people and also a utility since having a phone and the services that come with it are essential.
And if you are bigger than local it doesn't matter if you are forced to do business with google? It's pretty easy to come up with a number of ways people are forced to use google products and how they should be treated different to small services.
Right now it would be completely within googles right to block an individual from using youtube at all. You would have no legal recourse against this and it would massively impact your life. Almost all video on the web is on youtube. Even government information videos are hosted on youtube now as well as countless general information videos and health/safety videos.
It's pretty easy to make a case that everyone should have a right to watch videos on youtube because of how important the content on youtube is. This is what making google a utility means. If some random forum bans you, you get on with your life. If Google does something it can have serious impacts on your life where you have no options for alternatives.
Used phones exist, and even more are out there if you are willing to do things like replace a screen at home.
Facebook and instagram exist for advertising: Small businesses aren't going to get much traction on google anyway without specific searches for it, though android is finally catching up and I now get local places in game adverts.
If they're hard to avoid, it's because lots of people are voluntarily choosing them because (in their estimation) they provide the best value for cost.
I personally find it rather annoying that the mumbly trap influence has infiltrated a lot of popular rap, and if I'm going to hang out with other hip hop fans, I end up hearing some stuff I don't personally love. But it's popular because a lot of people like it. It's not impossible to avoid -- there's just a cost to avoiding it because of its popularity.
My elderly parents are unable to make the switch from Yahoo to Google. I’ve walked them through it multiple times. It’s just not possible for them. They don’t have the knowledge and skills.
They are smart. Advanced degrees in STEM. Multiple languages. Doesn’t matter.
I can’t imagine the transition from Google to DuckDuckGo/Firefox/ProtonMail being easier.
What step were they unable to complete in the process of changing their browser's default search from Google to Yahoo? (With your walking them through it, I mean?)
I set up pinned bookmark shortcuts on the 'tab bar' (had to enable the 'show bookmarks bar' option).
Now they have a button for 'mail', one for 'search', one for 'maps', and one for 'facebook' etc. Those buttons are always visible, no matter how far they venture into the internet. Solved the problem for them (or rather, for me, lol)
I imagine you can inject the necessary buttons via userscripts, if this is truly a “hard requirement.” The bookmark bar is, of course, the standard solution to this.
No stake in this, just a suggestion and also a little curious. Could a shortcut pinned to the tab or nav bar work? I keep my email in a pinned Safari tab.
> My elderly parents are unable to make the switch from Yahoo to Google. I’ve walked them through it multiple times. It’s just not possible for them. They don’t have the knowledge and skills.
How old are your parents?
Is it search you're referring to or the email platforms of each?
Now put yourself on the other side of the equation. As a business you rely on Google Search because it's effectively the only search engine anyone uses. As a video content creator you rely on Youtube because no one is searching Vimeo for your product, nor are they relying on Vimeo recommendations to find it. As a developer you primarily target Chrome-based browsers because that makes up four fifths of your user base.
Google-avoider checking in! It's actually really easy to avoid it. DuckDuckGo's search quality is better, Firefox is deteriorating daily but still looks and feels better than Chrome does, email should really be avoided but there are dozens of really good email services, and their ad service doesn't need a replacement for obvious reasons (just block it).
Except it's actually not that easy. Most of the web uses google analytics, so its unavoidable when you visit a website. Most of the web's emails are routed through google; I remember reading a post about a guy who set up his own SMTP server and everything, but then realised that everyone he was contacting was using gmail anyway (can't find the post). Every time you see an add that's served by google, that means that there's a google embed in the page your looking at. Also, what alternative is there for YouTube? there isn't a realistic competitor. If you have an android phone (most of the world does) you're forced to use google play services.
In today's world, they're unavoidable. That being said, making them a public utility is a bit forward...
"Most of the web uses google analytics, so its unavoidable when you visit a website."
I actually mentioned that. Just shim GA connections; this happens with most ad-blocking software, and I believe happens in Firefox's "strict" mode by default. It's really trivial.
"Most of the web's emails are routed through google; I remember reading a post about a guy who set up his own SMTP server and everything, but then realised that everyone he was contacting was using gmail anyway (can't find the post)."
Only true if the majority of people you converse with over email are boring.
"Every time you see an add that's served by google, that means that there's a google embed in the page your looking at."
Again, why would you ever look at an ad? That's a ludicrous idea.
"Also, what alternative is there for YouTube? there isn't a realistic competitor."
Bittorrent.
"If you have an android phone you're forced to use google play services."
Completely false. Android works fine without Google Play Services.
I think it's more possible than others are suggesting, but I think there are exceptions.
There is no good competitor to YouTube - there are a lot of bad ones yes, but no good one. I'd argue this is objective fact.
I use fastmail and my own domain, but most people use gmail - I don't think that's that big of a deal though.
It's odd they'd target Google in the OP - telecom providers like Comcast and Spectrum are much worse in how they treat their customers and in those cases there really isn't another option most of the time.
RE: YouTube alternatives there's also PeerTube which also can use p2p delivery.
Can confirm that Android works great without Google Play Services, I don't have it. Most Play Store apps break but most of my apps are from F-Droid anyway.
PeerTube is not a serious alternative to YouTube.
Almost all of the most popular content is missing and there are no reasonable alternatives. It claims to have over 400,000 videos on the site; YouTube gets 700,000 _hours_ of video uploaded each day.
Android without Google Play, unless you live in mainland China, does not "work great" the way most people want. I've done it and it was basically like not having a smartphone at all.
You cannot use banking apps, social media, games, streaming/Chromecast, maps (yes, I know OsmAnd exists; it has next to no information about businesses or landmarks and takes several minutes to plot a route that Google Maps or Waze calculates in less than 5 sedonds). Firefox is a reasonable alternative to Chrome and K-9 mail is good but that's about it. Unless MicroG suddenly became good in the past two years it's not a feasible solution even for people who are technically-minded.
> (yes, I know OsmAnd exists; it has next to no information about businesses or landmarks and takes several minutes to plot a route that Google Maps or Waze calculates in less than 5 sedonds)
OsmAnd, unlike Google Maps free tier, will always draw you an actually optimised route (though without considering traffic congestion).
Torrenting is not a crime. Piracy is a crime and a popular use of BitTorrent, but BitTorrent is also used for distributing non-criminal things like Linux ISOs and some app and game updates and art dumps (I have friends who release via torrent monthly) and datasets (for research and AI) and many other things.
Now try advertising your business while avoiding Google. Keep in mind that if you don't buy ads under your Company's Name from Google, Google will allow your competitors to buy those placements and make them the top results anyone searching your company on Google will see.
"non-consensually forcing anything into anyone" You have a perverveted view of "forcing" if you think sharing information is, as it sounds like you seem to be saying, the equivalent of rape.
If I say something you disagree with... I'm not violating a "Non-Aggression Principle" - unless you think that opinions make you weak (I believe diverse thought makes you stronger - can't get new ideas without communication).
And if you think communication REALLY is "aggression"... how do you pair the fact that you "forcing" your opinion on me about my opinion on advertising goes against your own principle? Isn't it kinda... a hypocritical blackhole of an opinion?
Sharing info isn't itself immoral... it's LITERALLY the bedrock of civilization, free will, free speech, self defense, etc - all start with communication. The right to say stuff others don't like or even GASP saying stuff that make them uncomfortable - like pointing out your paradoxical opinion. (HOW you share CAN be immoral... but not sharing/communication itself)
Advertising, at it's core, is sharing information. Without freedom to communicate? without the ability to share ideas? We'd be afraid of fire. we would be monkeys in caves...
"You have a perverveted view of "forcing" if you think sharing information is, as it sounds like you seem to be saying, the equivalent of rape."
Something doesn't have to be rape to be non-consensually forced upon someone; consider slavery, or compulsory schooling, or non-free Javascript. A well-documented method of torture is obscuring a captive's vision and looping a single song on repeat.
"how do you pair the fact that you "forcing" your opinion on me about my opinion on advertising goes against your own principle? Isn't it kinda... a hypocritical blackhole of an opinion?"
You asked for me to share the opinion, and as such, have given consent. Wider, though, this is a message board. The point is to share on-topic messages. This includes opinions, but does not include ads.
Advertising at its core is manipulation, not sharing information. Most advertisements grant the viewer net-negative information.
What do you do when you have a job interview that is scheduled as a Google Meet meeting? Or when a friend shares a Google Photos album of their newborn's pictures?
I guess you are a Google-avoider, so presumably you still have an actual Google account.
I think you can just talk to the person at the other end and ask for accomodation. I use Zoom for interviews, but if someone emailed me and was like "can we use Google Meet" I would be happy to change. Similarly, if someone texts me "I can't open that link to the photos you sent", I can just email them the photos.
It's not really a big deal, and I don't think that your unwillingness to talk with your friends or business partners makes Google a public utility in a regulatory sense.
> I don't think that your unwillingness to talk with your friends or business partners makes Google a public utility in a regulatory sense
I mean, the tautological definition is that the regulators will decide whether Google is a public utility, or perhaps too big and needs to be broken up (a question separate from this particular lawsuit). All of us are just on the sidelines discussing it, and perhaps trying to influence our elected representatives.
The fact that courts and regulators are at least considering it does mean that there is some merit to the argument that it may not be practical to live Google-free these days. It's probably not just me being unwilling to talk to my friends and business partners.
If you need a google work account I guess choices need to be made. It is rare that hr wouldn't have another option available for the interview. But many employers use it.
Newborn's pictures could be obtained another way if you were a close relatives or friends. If you are not close enough then the desire to see them decreases anyways.
You always have the choice of creating a new google profile and disreguarding it later.
"What do you do when you have a job interview that is scheduled as a Google Meet meeting?"
Unlikely scenario; the companies that overlap with my set of skills either have their own offering or use a libre one. I will admit, this might be harder for other people (my skills hover around RTC heavily).
"Or when a friend shares a Google Photos album of their newborn's pictures?"
My friends range from "Too young to be using a 'boomer' service like Google Photos" to "Too old to be doing anything technical that isn't just texting photos via SMS," and most of them in the 25-30 child-having age either also avoid Google or would just show the pictures in person. I don't live in the Valley, though, so this could be a regional thing.
"I guess you are a Google-avoider, so presumably you still have an actual Google account."
Mozilla cut a bunch of jobs and the servo team was one of the teams cut. The servo project is not officially canceled but there is no clear future for it.
I believe it depends on people. For some DuckDuckGo works perfectly, and they rarely go back to Google, if at all. For others it just does not work.
This reminds me of the dream of displacing Microsoft Word. Can we make a better product? No we can't. Only Microsoft can, through upgrades. The competition is stuck with making the same thing, and therefore not better, or something different, which is always "worse" because people are used to Word.
Also note that DuckDuckGo has a fundamental disadvantage: by not tailoring its searches to your history, it cannot possibly guess what you want to see as well as Google. Sure you're not trapped in your own search bubble, but you don't feel that. You only feel that the damn search engine can't find that website you are searching for for the fifth time already.
Pro tip: to get back to a web site, type its URL, or use bookmarks. Somehow I've seen many professional programmers fail to do that. I give them a URL, and they type it on the freaking search bar. (The more modern version is failing to type or auto-complete an actual URL in the omni bar.)
Yeah, it's certainly unfortunate. It gets just a little worse with every single update. The last one removed compact mode, which was the only thing making the UI somewhat bearable on-screen. It is now terribly large and unappealing.
What do you use a search engine for? Depending on your set of interests, turning off or on localization might have helped.
FWIW, I've used Firefox on a daily basis for years, and I have no complaints about desktop Firefox. (Firefox Android does leave some things to be desired, but also functions just fine as a web browser.)
I imagine you avoid Google because you don't want to get locked into their centralized closed source ecosystem and don't want them to track your entire online presence.
So I'm surprised to see you say email should be avoided, as a completely open decentralized communication protocol.
Your stances on these two topics just seem to be in contrast with each other, would you care to elaborate?
I don't care about centralization or their tracking particularly much on their own. I don't like to use bad software. It bothers me, fundamentally. I naturally ended up far away from Google by virtue of not liking things that waste computational resources, which all of their software does, and has for years. This is the same reason I stopped using Windows and OS X. I like to use software that makes me feel good, and megabytes being wasted by tracking scripts and terrible Javascript frameworks does not make me feel good, so I avoid their standalone services and block their parasitic services.
However, email isn't really a good decentralized protocol. All federation fails at being meaningfully decentralized given enough time. There are great decentralized protocols; email is not one of them.
It’s insane how fast a barebones linux desktop system feels these days. Even an rPi 4 can be really snappy with the right desktop environment and window manager. It makes one realize how slow and inefficient all these modern web technologies have become in practice.
It’s been happening for decades, but while computers get orders of magnitude faster, software gets slower at a faster rate, consuming all of the gains and then some.
Edit: here’s an interesting example just looking at input latency: https://danluu.com/input-lag/ if you take the browser into account as part of the system as well, I’m sure it’s much, much worse.
Using a proprietary web browser would be like using a blowtorch that claimed to be powered by "magic." While I might use, say, a "magic" recipe, or a toy that claimed to be magic, I certainly wouldn't use a real, combustive tool that claimed to be magic.
I don't use google products much anymore, but the transition takes a long time, especially getting off of gmail.
I'm also not sure it would even be possible to transition if you don't have access to your google account anymore. You would just be literally completely shut out of many of your online accounts.
And for watching online videos there really isn't any viable alternative to youtube.
Other alternatives are fine, but Vimeo isn't alternative for viewer (or even uploader). YouTube is a platform that hosts many unique contents with many worldwide viewers.
How about duck.com? Though it's an extra letter compared to just google). Alternately, setting it as your default search engine sidesteps the issue just as well :)
especially given that they don't seem to be concerned about having internet service providers declared public utilities.
Which is why it will obviously fail at actually doing anything useful.
However, the intended purpose may not be so much to do anything useful, as it is to score some points for incumbent politicians. In that, it could succeed brilliantly. It's actually a very smart move if you consider the political benefits accrued to politicians.
It's a service with which essentially every person living in present-day America needs to interact on a day-to-day basis. And yes, they need to. I think it is hugely disingenuous to pretend otherwise.
We can talk all day about how DuckDuckGo and ProtonMail exist. But for a huge, huge majority of people, Google simply is the internet.
The material point is that an ISP is what you need to get to Google. You don't need Google to get to the ISP.
You need electricity to get television, you don't need television to get electricity. You need electricity to get the internet, you don't need the internet to get electricity. Now whether or not television or internet are more useful than electricity is an entirely separate question. But which of the three is the baseline utility is a bit obvious.
But again, the intended purpose is probably not to make Google a utility, it's to score political points. So none of these arguments are really relevant to the calculus that a politician would work through before taking an action like this. This is still a brilliant action from a political perspective because it will undoubtedly win incumbents some votes.
I'm not American but I find it worrisome that some of the largest companies in the US (and the world) are so "obviously" partisan and willing to exert their power in a partisan fashion, as people accept this reality uncritically - whether it's in favour of their allegiances or not.
That's what a dangerously broken society looks like. The common folk should never be openly supportive of "robber baron"-style political activism and it's unprecedented AFAIK.
It is not "obvious" to me that for instance Google is particularly partisan. Most big companies donate to both USA parties in large quantities, because they know they need to buy the politicians whoever is in power. I haven't looked it up, but I assume Google is similar in it's lobbying.
The largest companies are almost always mostly looking out for their own profits, and use their not inconsiderable power mostly to that end. And that's not unprecedented. I don't know if it should be less worrisome that we accept that uncritically!
(Btw, to say something is unprecedented and call it "robber baron style" is a bit confusing, since the term "robber baron" as applied to industrialists/capitalists is over 100 years old! Whatever the "robber baron style" is, it originated in the 19th century! so not unprecedented)
Actually that is what is known as a red herring argument. Bringing up something unrelated saying that the original argument is invalidated because the same reasoning wasn’t applied to it is a common informal fallacy. Most legal documents have something related to severability which states that even if one part of the document is found to be unreasonable/illegal/illogical, it does not invalidate the rest of the document.
Outside of certain protected class situations, Freedom of Association allows anyone to terminate service irregardless of legality of political statements made on their own privately-owned platform.
And no, political stance is not a protected class.
Except search engines are not a necessary service for the public, which is what a public utility is.
Reclassifying a privately owned business to restrict their freedom of association because you think they threaten your political views is autocratic behavior, not democratic.
They absolutely do? ISPs frequently rate the top of most hated companies lists, and many Americans do not have access to more than 1 ISP offering (>=30mbit) high speed internet.
Well then go after them too. And most importantly, go after banks, payment processors and money/infrastructure people in general so they aren't allowed to kick people off just because they don't like someone.
I don't think I've seen anyone get banned from any major platform for their political beliefs. It has always been for hate speech, inciting real-world violence, or spreading blatantly false misinformation that lead to incitements of violence (such as the unfounded claims that the election was stolen).
Funny how none of the Republicans pushing this censorship narrative batted an eye last summer when Facebook was taking down local BLM groups that called for violence.
I got banned from Facebook for swearing basically. Someone took it as 'cyberbullying' or whatever nonsense. I tried to appeal explaining my intentions, but they basically told me that my intentions don't matter.
By the way, spreading misinformation like the infamous lab leak theory? Facebook fact checkers are a joke, they're fact checking stupid memes.
It was just an old meme and it was in my native language so you wouldn't get, but the offensive part of it is simply 'bitch'. Not as a direct insult, but kinda like in "surprise, bitch".
Another thing is that I got suspended for butting in to a conversation about homosexuality where someone was saying that homosexuality is natural, and I said something to the extent of "rape and murder is natural too" to point out the fallacy and they sent me on a 30-day vacation from Facebook for that.
First off, a 30 day vacation from Facebook sounds wonderful, it'd be a great excuse to leave it all together.
Second, not that this was your intent, but that's such a poor example to use in pointing out the fallacy that I can see why someone might see it as "hateful", which is against the TOS, whether or not it should be is a separate discussion.
As a side-note, pointing out a logical fallacy doesn't invalidate someone's argument, ironically this is itself a fallacy.
> a 30 day vacation from Facebook sounds wonderful, it'd be a great excuse to leave it all together.
I left Facebook few years ago. I can't really back it up with anything, but I have a suspicion that this is the main reason why people are leaving Facebook. Not concerns about privacy.
> that's such a poor example to use in pointing out the fallacy
That's a really common example to show the flaws in appeal to nature argument and pretty much the best you can make, because not many people support rape and murder. That's the point.
> I can see why someone might see it as "hateful", which is against the TOS,
And that's the problem. Just as I said, your intentions don't matter and if someone interprets it as hateful then you're out. It's completely arbitrary.
> pointing out a logical fallacy doesn't invalidate someone's argument, ironically this is itself a fallacy.
Sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it does. Depends on what the argument and the context is.
The definition of hate speech can be made to fit whatever political agenda you seek to promote. For example, you will get banned from Twitter for saying "feminism is cancer" on the basis that the statement is hate speech against women. However, saying "white lives don't matter" will not get you banned from Twitter, nor will saying "#HitlerWasRight" in regards to the Israel/Palestine conflict (both exact quotes from racist twitter users who are still on the service).
This is the reason that is given, that you have chosen to accept.
The catch is, they label their own violence as speech, and their opponents speech as violence, conveniently.
Hidden camera interviews with numerous employees of the multiple tech monopolies in question reveal that not only do they in target people for censorship based upon their political beliefs and political speech, and in the service of the political parties to which they also overwhelmingly donate, but they do so with glee.
The actions of Facebook, Google, Twitter in their selective banning, deplatforming, and other algorithmic weaselry is often indistinguishable from an in-kind donation directly to the DNC.
Let's say the electric company wants to start a restaurant. So they shut the power to the competing restaurants in the neighbourhood. Everyone agrees it would be outrageous.
Now, what about Apple dictating payment policy on apps in the app store?
Google premiering their own services in the results? Forcing their own apps onto all Android devices, impossible to remove?
These platforms turn themselves into natural monopolies, and therefore they can not be treated as "private companies". Decentralisation would be a technical solution, but meanwhile I think regulation is what will happen.
This analogy seems way off to me. It completely misses the fact that Google is doing what it's supposed to do which is giving the user the information they're looking for.
I don't think cutting power is giving the customer (restaurants) or users (not clear in the analogy) what they want.
It's true that with flight search, competitor results are de-emphasized, but as far as I'm concerned Google could even drop them entirely, showing only their internal results if they want to. It's answering the user query, and if the user is unsatisfied they can trivially switch to another source of information.
To make a better analogy, consider that flight search is a specialized version of what Google does more generally. So:
Electric company "EC" wants to start providing DC current to interested customers, so they show the option prominently in their communications with their customers.
This is a tragedy for the existing DC industry because "EC" has the best reputation (highest reliability) in the general electricity industry so most people will first consider them for a DC contract even if they're not necessarily the best for DC power. Still, unhappy customers can easily switch to another DC provider.
> It completely misses the fact that Google is doing what it's supposed to do which is giving the user the information they're looking for.
It used to work that way in the beginning. Now it steers you to whatever the highest bidder wants, whatever their massive opaque ad-revenue-optimizing AI thinks is best, which incidentally seems to be SEO-optimized, pre-digested and ad-laden portals into a whole other ecosystem of in-your-face click farms and garbage results stabbing you in the eyeballs.
Were you not aware of the massive conflict of interest that a search engine with ads represents...from the very beginning?
Making the App Store a public utility instead of preventing Apple from forcing their users to do things is absolutely the wrong response because it ensures Apple will be in power forever.
They have the capacity to be bad, but for example Apple (who are in a similar place WRT this) started with apps you can’t remove and has now made most of them removable; and last time I looked (a while ago now) many unremovable Android apps came from the phone vendor.
I’m all in favour of keeping companies under a close eye to make sure they don’t become an abusive monopoly — my naïve political philosophy is that power should be conserved, so the more e.g. economic power you have the less e.g. free market choice you should be allowed — but I don’t see in Google[0] what you see in them.
Also? If they can easily become a natural monopoly, decentralisation won’t solve anything in the long term.
[0] nor Apple, Netflix, Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter, or Microsoft; but that is how I see Facebook and Amazon.
How do these services turn themselves into natural monopolies? There are many non-Apple phones available. There are also non-google search engines. What makes these natural monopolies then?
I'm not GP but a monopoly doesn't mean "we own the market everywhere" or "we have close to 100% of the market-share". We have this same discussion every time someone says monopoly..
Apple for example is a 100% monopoly in the app store. Likewise Google can be a monopoly on their search result page. It would have sounded insane some years back but today, when google search is a gatekeeper (like Facebook), they absolutely can.
You use the example of there being many non-Apple phones (while strictly true there are really only two players, iOS and Android). Can Apple use their power to kill your new innovative Fitness-From-Home app? They are absolutely in a position to do so. There's really not much else to it than that. Can Google strangle travel planner sites by showing flight plans in Google search results? Yes they can and a court would likely see this as abuse of a monopoly no matter if Google have 70% or 99% of the search engine market.
Or use the grandma test: Can you sell your Travel Planner Service to Grandma if Google starts adding the same info to Google search for "free"? Can you sell her a Fitness App for her iPhone if Apple shuts you out because they are going to launch their own iClone fitness app?
If Google goes from Search to Search/travel planner/hotel reservation/translator/and so on they are (ab)using their power to move into other areas and by shutting out competition they get more users thereby becoming a natural monopoly.
And as always happens when "The M" word is used and someone explains something we will have replies yelling Apple's AppStore isn't a monopoly, you can just use Android and we go around in circles.
> Apple for example is a 100% monopoly in the app store.
Every physical store is a monopoly in their own space. It is hard to see that specific point being important.
The fact that Apple gate-keeps their store is also a major selling point of the iPhone. I don't want random people to be able to load random apps onto the phones of my family members. Having a programmable combined GPS/microphone/wallet/photo repository on hand all hours is already quite bad enough, there is an argument for curation here. If Apple ever starts making decisions that are unacceptable/grossly inferior to an alternative then there are other phones.
> Can you sell your Travel Planner Service to Grandma if Google starts adding the same info to Google search for "free"?
That isn't monopolistic behaviour, that is simply competition. Monopolistic is when Google won't allow your Travel Planner to enter their search index, or deranks it in favour of their alternative. If the competition is head-to-head then there isn't anything special about the situation.
>Every physical store is a monopoly in their own space.
This comparison is disingenuous. There aren't only two big physical stores (and maybe a handful small stores hardly no one knows about) in the entire world. If 99% of all physical stores were a Walmart or Costco you could compare but luckily this isn't so.
>The fact that Apple gate-keeps their store is also a major selling point of the iPhone.
That is beside the point. Just because something is a feature you (or most) like doesn't mean it is legal or not, monopoly or not. I'm not going to discuss if it is a good or bad feature because it would be off-topic.
>Monopolistic is when Google won't allow your Travel Planner to enter their search index, or deranks it in favour of their alternative.
Consider this: You have 100.000 result on Travel planners today with your site being number 3 and tomorrow you also have 100.000 results with your site being number 3 but now there's a big box above all the results that tells you what you were looking for (and the data might even come from your site). This is way worse than being de-ranked. That's not fair competition.
Another example:
You have one of many Fitness Apps for iOS. For years Apple can see data on just what people search for, install, etc. and then one day they use all this data to create their own fitness app. Quickly your app would be irrelevant. Add to that that we have proof that Apple abuse their position by offering to buy a successful app and if refused they harass the publisher in different ways and create their own.
You say that, but then you make a completely different argument for why Apple is a monopoly. I'm just responding to what you've said, without using my well developed psychic powers to divine what different point you meant without saying.
You started your post with a point that is so weak that it is indefensible. Apple creating a virtual store and having a 100% monopoly in it simply isn't remarkable. That is how stores work, the store owner has near total control what is in the store to their benefit.
If your argument is that it is incomparable to a normal store then well ok, but you're going to need to argue that. A reasonable person could see Apple's store as comparable to an actual store. Apple very likely does.
Well, a public utility also doesn't have the right to do this: "You did something wrong, we won't tell you what it was, there's no chance of appeal, and you are now banned from receiving water service again, ever, for the rest of your life, no matter where you move. And don't try moving in with someone else who's still receiving service, because they'll get banned too."
This is a direct result of their monopoly, which is why Google should be broken up. Because they have such a huge monopoly, they can afford to ignore customers and have a draconian approach to people, and can get away with it. If there were better competition, they wouldn't have been able to ignore their customers. Breaking them up will alleviate this by ensuring that each company needs to be able to survive on their own, of which one aspect is having better customer support and service.
> ...their monopoly, which is why Google should be broken up.
Not denying their monopoly position, but how could Google meaningfully be broken up? It's really just a single business (advertising) with a gaggle of loss leaders adding up to less than 20% of revenue. Even pushing advertising down to 80% took a huge amount of effort.
It's not like Standard Oil which was a vertically integrated trust of several points in the value chain, or the bell system which could be broken up geographically (and manufacturing spun out). Or FB which could divest business units like Instagram and WhatsApp.
> It's really just a single business (advertising) with a gaggle of loss leaders adding up to less than 20% of revenue
A better way of looking at it is that Google is a collection of traffic drivers (YouTube, Gmail, etc) and monetizers (ads).
If you break the monetization into a separate company, the traffic drivers aren't profitless: because a large part of the ad profit was created from their traffic.
If Google Ads had to buy space / share ad revenue from Google YouTube, Google Gmail, etc then economics would look a lot more reasonable.
And I'd frankly be shocked if that isn't what they do internally, albeit more in the sense of "How much ad traffic do you drive, from your corner of the company?"
I think it could be done depending on how you slice it. For example you could definitely put YouTube as its own separate entity YouTube and google play together, as an entertainment company. Gmail plus drive and calendar as a productivivity company, web search as it’s own company. One thing that could make this easy would be to remove the google identity as a single company for SSO into all types of services. Then all the other companies could have sign in with FB Microsoft LinkedIn etc. google maps could be a standalone company. Nest/google home could easily be its own company. Especially if they spin off google identity as a separate product. Oh and google shopping could be it’s own company. Lastly all these things could still feed into google search results using APIs from all those services. I think we could benefit from a break up.
The parent's point was that breaking up Alphabet in any way that leaves Google Ads contiguous is insignificant. When you go to the barbershop and get a haircut, you've broken up your person into 100,001 individual pieces, but that hasn't solved your weight loss problem, because the 100,000 bits of hair are only a few hundred micrograms each and the one piece that is your body still weighs 90 kg.
Google Cloud is big enough to be significant in terms of revenue, but AFAIK is only maybe breaking even in terms of profit. If you break up Alphabet into 26 or more different companies, you haven't broken up the monolith into non-problematic small companies 1/26th the size of the original, you've got 25 irrelevant companies and then one subsidiary that gets Ads which is almost as big as the original. Google even says as much in their financial statements, most of those listed companies are listed as 'other bets' and are a tiny fraction of the main line item that represents ads.
> Google Cloud is big enough to be significant in terms of revenue, but AFAIK is only maybe breaking even in terms of profit.
Google cloud gotten profitable enough that they only spent $5B to earn $4B in revenue last quarter. After a dozen years that's the best ever (classic case of monopoly leverage to get into a different market).
Advertising is "only" 81% of revenue but almost 100% of profit.
Some other commenters have proposed that properties like YT and Android drive ad traffic but when I looked at the last 10Q it looked like YT was about 10% of ad revenues. I believe Android is a net loss but worth it in that it's an offset to reduce payments to Apple. But I just skimmed the filing because this is just an HN comment.
Isn’t the problem also that they use the massive profit in search to go into other areas and distort the market there by being able to subsidise losses with search income?
It would also stop them favouring their own products in search results
> I think the suggestion is breaking up alphabet, which is quite literally loads of companies.
Few, if any of those companies would be viable on their own. They require monopoly support. For example Google Cloud loses a billion a quarter (they spent $5B last quarter total in $4B).
As far as the cloud market goes there's really only one player, the profitable, pure play AWS. Everybody else is losing money, and mostly fudging the numbers (Google "cloud" includes Gmail, Google Workspace etc; MS's cloud includes running Windows for big customers, Office 360 etc etc).
And it will have literally zero impacts on its business practices. They can simply form a "Google/Alphabet cartel" via preferential treatments, and will be structured and operating effectively in the same way and then eventually get merged together. If you want to attack Google and other big techs' monopoly, you need to design a precise regulation on very specific anti-competitive behaviors.
it'll be 'easy to break up' because that's what Alphabet was created to do - back in 2015 they knew antitrust and a monopoly break-up was going to happen at some point, so they made these companies largely operationally separate so that they have very little hiccup when it is required. The only one that'd be hard is YouTube where they might require spending some millions reworking the ad model, but otherwise they'll have little issues continuing business as usual. YouTube is likely profitable[0], so it's not like their monopoly over free video content is going to cease.
The simplest split with potential to start addressing concerns in this particular lawsuit is to break the index that results from google's web crawling out into a utility.
With competing "engines" (defined as a ranking algorithm and frontend to query said algorithm) building from the same, high-quality index competition in the search space could get much better.
Engines such as DuckDuckGo relying on Bing for the majority of their index is a decent example of how this might work.
To break it up effectively, you'd want to separate out at least a few different business units and restrict the businesses the units can enter as well as the relationships between the units.
Big things would be Advertising separate from other things and bound to only advertising, and require it contract with the other units on public and FRAND terms. Web Search would be another unit, and it would be barred from developing its own advertising platform and need to use a mix of advertising platforms based on public criteria, probably with a cap of say 75%? AdWords. You'd have at least one more group for communications (mail, the 7 messengers, etc) which maybe includes the document tools too, and might include G Suite; this group could develop its own ad platform, but not to sell ads on 3rd party sites. Android would need to be a separate unit, it could either require a per device fee or FRAND terms for search etc bundling (similar the what they do in the EU); Chrome maybe fits in this group, or may need its own group. Google Fiber would probably get shut down or sold to an incumbent telco, but maybe just spun out. Waymo and other research stuff would probably need to be spun out, not sure if that can live on its own though.
Cloud services would be its own group, perhaps providing services to the other groups, possibly requiring public pricing, but I don't know if that's really an issue.
I think that's most of it. Lawyers from DOJ and Alphabet could work out the details. Getting a competitive ad market out of the deal would be hard, but at least it could be more transparent, and eliminating cross-subsidization of Google businesses is definitely possible.
Start by cloning the whole source repository for each company, and prune out the things that don't need to stay; if in doubt all successor companies get access to all of it.
It's a business unit now, but it would need to be a separate company in my proposed breakup. AFAIK, Google doesn't operate Android as a wholy owned subsidiary, it's just part of Google, Inc which means any separation is at the whim of management; in a wholy owned subsidiary, there would be some structural barriers at least.
Even for Facebook, I don't think forcing them to sell whatsapp or Instagram would stop the fury at them on this forum and others.
Most people are angry at Facebook for reasons like not understanding their business model (they sell my data! is one I hear often) or because Facebook allows a platform where average people can speak their thoughts.
That's an argument for the break-up, not one against it. If Google is using their monopoly powers to create wholly unprofitable endeavors, then they are likely choking out competition. There can be no Youtube Killer if Youtube does not have to make money.
You really think someone couldn't build a business out of YouTube independent of Google? Just because it is hardly profitable _now_ as managed by Google in support of ads doesn't mean there isn't another model there.
Maybe break ads up into two or three businesses then break the loss leaders up into a dozen different companies. You don't have to own the ad company to sell advertising, let them place ads from google or whomever else just like everybody else on the Internet, alternatively let them start leaning more on paid services instead of customer-as-product.
> It's really just a single business (advertising) with a gaggle of loss leaders adding up to less than 20% of revenue.
I mean, yeah this is exactly the point. They have locked competition out of the loss-leading categories by undercutting them. Breaking them up forces the loss leaders to compete on an even playing field, which will mean more competition.
GSuite/Gmail, YouTube, Search, Android, Google Shopping, Google Maps -- all of these could become separate software companies. Not saying they would enjoy that, of course, but those are some of the divisions that immediately jump to mind.
That doesn't do much to break up the effective monopoly these services have in their respective markets. You split off Google Search into it's own company and they will still have 90% of the search market share when you're done.
Except that this behaviour shows up in non-monopolistic markets as well. Apple does it. PayPal does it. Heck, our European banks have started doing it despite there being ample competition. What the competition did, is made sure EVERY competing entity does that because it's cheaper and costs were brought down with race to the bottom.
I don't get where this bizarre belief that "moar free market" will solve issues. Let's setup proper legal framework where these companies must have a good reason to terminate contract instead - and properly explain it with the ability to appeal.
"Sorry Mr. Jones, we've decided your, ahem alternative lifestyle and beliefs are fundamentally incompatible with the views of our company. Your electrical service will be discontinued in three to five business days."
I may be misunderstanding this. Does this mean "You [a business] shouldn't have to do business with people you don't want to"? If so, why should rights of people extend to businesses? People already have the freedom of association of employment that seems to cover this. ie: if someone doesn't want to associate with someone else as an employee of a business, they can simply not work at that business.
Businesses aren't people, they're legal fiction. The individuals who make these decisions do and should have the right to do business with whomever they want, based on any criteria they deem appropriate. This constitutes the distinction between the private and public sphere.
>should have the right to do business with whomever they want, based on any criteria they deem appropriate.
There's a subtle distinction where you may have layered your own individual beliefs onto this statement by using the word "should", rather than indicating what is actually the law. While you may feel they "should" have that right based on your own feelings and personal morality, there are specific laws that say they do not. In many jurisdictions within the U.S., for example, businesses generally do not have the right to refuse business to a person based on that person being part of a protected class.
Credit unions frequently have exclusive membership, typically a certain geographical area though many started out specifically for members of certain unions.
That’s why selling as a private individual is different to setting up a company, in the first you can choose not to sell to whomever for whatever reason with no legal comeback. Try denying service to someone in a protected class if you’re in the second and you may well end up with real legal problems.
You need to find the person whose KPI would be effected by you leaving as a customer.
Go find them on LinkedIn, message your experience and statement that you're leaving.
When corporations put up higher and higher walls around their official channels of communication, you either need to get louder or go around the wall.
I am working for a big e-commerce corp., we are made to read/go-through customer feedback occasionally. That is just to find a %1~ of potential conversion improvement we can make.
Companies do care about conversion/retention. Problem is only the communication between the customer and the right team of people inside.
Senator Herb Kohl: But you do recognize that in the words that are used and antitrust kind of oversight, your market share constitutes monopoly, dominant -- special power dominant for a monopoly firm. You recognize you're in that area?
Eric Shmidt: I would agree, sir, that we’re in that area....I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding of monopoly findings is this is a judicial process.
In short, dominant market share in web search. Though I think you could argue other things, like dominance in affordable smart phones. Android is effectively a monopoly for people that can't afford an iPhone.
Being a monopoly means having sole control over the supply of a market (conversely, Monopsony is demand). When people say Bing, Baidu, DDG, Yahoo, DDG, etc. are all a click a way, that means Google does not control the market supply.
Just because the majority of people choose to use something on an open market doesn't mean that thing has a monopoly.
Schmidt seems concerned they are in that territory. Also, the document I linked to, presumably written by people with deep expertise on the topic, has several relevant sections. One excerpt:
===
A. GOOGLE HAS MONOPOLY POWER IN RELEVANT MARKETS
A firm is a monopolist if it can profitably raise prices substantially above the competitive level. [M]onopoly power may be inferred from a firm's possesion of a dominant share of a relevant market that is protected by entry barriers. Google has monopoly power in one or more properly defined markets...Staff has identified three relevant antitrust markets...
===
I think it's at least fair to say that some people with expertise in the space feel like Google could have monopoly control over one or more markets.
Also, a half-redacted document written by an anonymous person that was accidentally released almost a decade ago does not change the definition of a monopoly.
Yes, you can assume that it's written by someone who knows what they're talking about, just as much as you can also presume they were wrong because it was squashed. That's a moot argument.
None of that changes the fact that being popular does not make something a monopoly.
I did mention market share dominance. But that's often related to things like "A firm is a monopolist if it can profitably raise prices substantially above the competitive level.".
I'm not saying they are "for sure" a monopoly. I am saying notable numbers of reasonable people with expertise in the space think they are. It's not as clear cut as you're saying.
You gave an example of monopoly, one of which is definitively not a monopoly.
This entirely new example you are giving is an example of partisan posturing, not evidence of a monopoly. Look at the political affiliation of every single person who signed the letter, and look how many days it was filed before the last federal election.
Again, being popular doesn't make something a monopoly, neither does being a popular target for Republicans.
Google would argue that web search is not their market. They are in the business of online advertising in which they most definitely do not have dominant market share.
Google controls the vast majority of the web search market. More than 90%. What exactly a monopoly constitutes is something that people can disagree about, but "has 90% market share" is not by any means a crazy definition of a monopoly.
Just having dominant market share does not make one a monopoly. Google would have to control the supply of all the search engines to have a monopoly (which they don't).
Maybe a lawyer can say that with a straight face, but I'm a human being.
Google ad revenues mostly come from 3 services: Gmail, which holds a disproportionate share of all email for what started out as a federated network. YouTube, which basically holds a monopoly on video sharing. And Google search, which basically holds a monopoly on regular web searches.
I count at least 2 monopolies here, both held by Alphabet. The fact that Facebook is able to make advertisement in some other part of the web is immaterial, the same way TV ads are immaterial.
Markets are not necessarily based on money; they are about exchange. In the web search market, users exchange their attention for search results.
I don’t know whether this kind of market dominance factors into the legal determination of monopoly, but conceptually I think it makes sense to say that Google has a monopoly in the web search market.
If a business gets deindexed by Google or its search ranking drops, their income plummets. It's pretty obvious they are a monopoly and have monopolistic power.
Yes. And Google is engaging in monopolistic behavior by getting rid of any semblance of customer service. This is a direct result of their monopoly because businesses and customers have no viable alternative. So they can save billions by cutting customer support to near zero. That's the same as raising prices with impunity.
The government decided that phone numbers are important enough to create regulations that allow phone number portability between carriers.
Email addresses need the same regulation. The arguments that lead to phone number portability apply to email addresses as well. And I would argue that email addresses are even more important than phone numbers at this point (it's the single key to all online accounts, most bills, documents, statements are emailed as PDFs, a lot of government services expect a working email address).
Email addresses have become critical and portability needs to become a requirement for all email services. There are technical issues, for example if someone cancels Gmail service, how can the @gmail.com address be moved elsewhere? It's not as simple as phone number portability. Maybe a regulation that any email service must provide forwarding service to another email address even if the service is no longer active? Or maybe a trusted mapping that exists outside any single service, kind of like a DNS for email addresses.
It would be interesting to have domain-free personal email addresses.
The domain is useful to signify membership in an organization. But for individuals, why should our addresses have hotmail or gmail or yahoo or anything else appended to it?
Although I understand what you're saying, email and YouTube access is not the same as water. Depriving someone of water would be the same as depriving them of life, which is not true of email, YouTube, and whatever g-services.
But Google isn't the only provider of email addresses. In contrast, water utilities typically hold monopoly over their region.
EDIT: Many people are replying with some variant that the problem is that Google can block the email account that people have tied to their financial and government services.
But the same is true of any other email provider. If Google is somehow turned into a public utility, how does that solve the problem for those that are locked out of their email accounts by Fastmail, for instance? Make Fastmail a public utility too, or somehow regulate it? But it's an Australian company, so kind of outside of American jurisdiction. Or regulate the addresses themselves? Put up a law that says that only US public utilities can administer emails on the .com domain? I don't really understand what people are proposing.
Or is the proposal just to regulate gmail.com addresses in particular? Treat them as the exception and incentivize more people to use that one provider so they get the protections offered by the proposed regulation.
I don't know where I stand on the public utility argument, but to make the strongest possible case for this analogy: most peoples' online lives (including their financials) are tied to a singular email address. That email address forms the ground truth for their identity, including being able to access services that they've lost their credentials for.
Google's ability to unilaterally revoke access to the account that ties you to your banking accounts, your state's online service portals, &c. gives them the kind of power that we'd normally only see in regional monopolies like water utilities.
You can get the email address attached to any irl accounts reassigned by presenting yourself to the bank branch in person with ID. Probably there are mechanisms using certified mail as well for places that don't have nearby branch offices. It would be inconvenient but Google does not have the ability to unilaterally separate you from your financial accounts on any kind of permanent basis.
It occurs to me that I don't have an exhaustive list of all of the accounts that I've signed up to over the years with my email address.
If I'm banned by my provider, I won't have any recourse for many of them except to discover at some point in the future that I've missed an important alert, billing statement, or notice of action. And that's even before I know that I need to go to a physical location or mail in some kind of identification!
You can as easily have the same problem with physical mail, but that doesn't confer an indefinite right to a particular physical address. I do encourage keeping backups of your email to reduce this risk -- at least you can search your records that way.
> You can as easily have the same problem with physical mail, but that doesn't confer an indefinite right to a particular physical address.
Of course not! But the USPS has (virtually) free change-of-address forwarding[1], and we have an entire set of social and governmental institutions pre-built around the impermanency of physical addresses. No such institutions exist for digital addressing.
I agree, re: backups, and I keep them for myself. But it occurs to me that the average non-technical individual probably doesn't know how to make a backup of their GMail account. I use GSuite, and the last time I checked I had to explicitly enable IMAP and then set a custom "app password" in order to set up IMAP access for my backup client. Oh, and there was some Google-specific TLS weirdness; boundaries abound.
> No such institutions exist for digital addressing.
I do think it would be optimal if there were a fallback option for all types of digital accounts. It is not Google's fault, though, that there isn't, as they are not the cause of the assumption of email address permanence. You need to lay your blame at the feet of the service providers.
I do also think it might be ideal if Google would forward emails to an address of your choosing in the event they closed your account.
Let's follow that argument to its logical conclusion. There is nothing special about the property you've described here. My high school, university, half a dozen previous employers, and several ISPs also gave me email addresses. I did not get to keep any of them when leaving those institutions.
What about smaller webmail providers? Yahoo and Hotmail gave me email addresses back in the day, and then deleted them for inactivity. Your argument applies equally well there. How about those Fastmail accounts that people are paying for? Should they get to keep them even after terminating service?
Clearly all of this is completely absurd. The "important stuff is tied to a single email address" case is extremely weak.
My university sheltered me and gave me a physical address, during which time that address formed an essential part of identifying myself to my bank(s) and the US Government.
You'll note that I haven't said anywhere that Google (or anyone else!) is obligated to provide indefinite email service to anybody who happens to sign up. What I've observed is that, unlike my physical address, there are virtually no formal recourses proportional to the role that my email has in my official identity. I can request an address change with USPS, I am guaranteed delivery service, and federal law protects my mailbox from tampering and snooping; nothing requires Google to provide anything resembling these safeguards.
What do physical addresses have to do with this? The discussion was about email.
I understood your argument to be "email addresses are important" + "Google provides email addreses" -> "Google should be regulated as a public utility". But like I showed, the same applies to basically every kind of organization providing email addresses.
So either you are asking for basically every single organization to be a public utility, or there is some discriminating function you're not stating.
> I understood your argument to be "email addresses are important" + "Google provides email addreses" -> "Google should be regulated as a public utility". But like I showed, the same applies to basically every kind of organization providing email addresses.
It's getting a little muddled, but the observation was this: email addresses increasingly serve the same role as physical addresses. We have an entire social and legal framework around the guarantees of physical mail because of how important it is to our ability to transact our daily lives; no corresponding framework exists for email.
> So either you are asking for basically every single organization to be a public utility, or there is some discriminating function you're not stating.
The discriminating function, as I said in the very first response, is the necessary role of a service in identifying ourselves to essential services (read: utilities, financials, government). My belief is that email satisfies this condition. But also, as I said in the first: I don't really know if I commit to the public utility argument; I merely wanted to point out that email serves a role tantamount to the canonical public service (public mail). If that's the case, we ought at the very least to have similar entitlements with our email providers.
> gives them the kind of power that we'd normally only see in regional monopolies like water utilities.
No access to water from the only provider in your reach, especially if you're kind of broke, really doesn't seem equal to having your email account blocked, when people have very accessible choices of email providers and what they tie to it.
The situation sucks, but looking at this from a public utility perspective seems like an XY problem.
> when people have very accessible choices of email providers and what they tie to it.
I think this point might have been true 15 or 20 years ago, but I suspect that it no longer is on either front:
* E-mail is increasingly non-federated and subject to Google's dictates w/r/t delivery guarantees, origin identification, &c. These aren't bad things; e-mail was a mess before Google started taking it seriously! But it does result in a sort of natural dominance: smaller providers have to play by Google's rules to ensure delivery; large institutions are less likely to debug delivery issues to smaller providers. In other words, I have to be willing to accept a certain amount of second-class treatment.
* It's been my experience that my ability to not tie things to my e-mail has diminished over the years. More recent government systems and financial accounts require a valid e-mail; e-mail + password is now the default setting for creating an account on most services. Even when my e-mail is strictly optional for a service, it frequently operates as a safety net (recovery codes, poor man's 2FA, &c). Put another way: my inbox is treated as the high-availability, high-reliability delivery mechanism.
Regarding your first point, is that from experience? Have you known of a case where a large institution sends a legitimate email to a small provider, the small provider rejects it, and the large institution does nothing about it?
If you're paying for your email provider, I would think opening up a ticket and asking to let their email through would not be much of an issue, if this ever happens.
> Have you known of a case where a large institution sends a legitimate email to a small provider, the small provider rejects it, and the large institution does nothing about it?
It's usually the other way around, in my experience: I'm sending something from a relatively small provider (or a institutional mailserver), and it's rejected (sometimes silently) by a larger receiver. The reasons tend to be opaque, and support is nonexistent (presumably because the overwhelmingly amount incoming mail is illegitimate).
It's a hard problem, and the reality is that Google has made the average user's email experience radically better. But the drawback of that is that they rule the ecosystem by fiat, and that there are relatively few entities that can play keep-up with Google's (unpublished?) standards for reliable delivery. Getting booted out of Gmail increasingly means being left out in the cold, especially as institutions (like the company I work for!) use GSuite for mail.
> People opted in to that. You don't opt in to the water pipe monopoly.
I accept this argument for social media, but I don't think I do for online identities that are tightly integrated into financial and government services.
I happen to be sufficiently positioned to cause a big stink if Google arbitrarily bans my GSuite account; the average person probably isn't, and would have to spend weeks reidentifying themselves to essential services (my power bill goes through my email!) to ensure that their material welfare isn't disrupted. Is that acceptable?
You opted in to G Suite by pointing your domain there, as well. You can opt out just as quickly.
Every time you smash that "log in with google" button, you're opting in to letting Google serve as intermediary for access to your account at a third party.
People are fools for doing this, but it's not Google's fault.
> You opted in to G Suite by pointing your domain there, as well. You can opt out just as quickly.
I won't deny that I opted in to a particular service, or that I can opt out just as quickly. But cf. the other threads about my formal recourses, quality of service, and others' expectations around reliability of delivery should I choose to leave the Google bubble.
Google's fault or not, I don't think this is an acceptable situation.
No, but Google holds monopoly over that email address that you've been using and passing around for years, and all the data associated to it. Losing access to it can prove to be a major issue.
Of course this is nowhere near as critical as water, food, or shelter. But in the modern world losing access to your long time email address, like a phone number, will cause some pain. I see no reason not to put such a responsibility on Google or companies of similar size which are so tightly integrated with the critical modern infrastructure.
I think we need to look at the utility of the service in the world and society we live in. Things change, 400 years ago a mill was the first utility in the US. That doesn't quite fit the definition anymore these days.
If a monopoly over your essential email address is the motivation, then every single provider no matter the size has a monopoly over your email address. There's no reason to limit your judgement to "companies of similar size". Would you argue that ProtonMail and Fastmail and so forth are equally responsible for your email address?
Let's go further. Is Apple a public utility? If I buy an iPhone and it's painful to lose it, doesn't Apple have a monopoly over my iPhone given that they have kill switches and update privileges?
Is Hertz a public utility? If I rent a car and it becomes very painful to lose it, doesn't Hertz have a monopoly over my essential car?
I appreciate the time you took to come up with the examples but I hope you can see they're not quite comparable. An email address, like a phone number, identifies you uniquely. But unlike phone numbers there's no "portability", you can't take your gmail address with you to yahoo. Losing access to your email is more akin to losing access to your name than to an appliance of sorts.
A phone or a car are nowhere near that level of uniqueness. People don't need your IMEI or VIN number to identify you. You can still have a backup of your data which for all intents and purposes will turn any other phone into the one that was taken from you. And if Hertz somehow just takes back your car full of your personal stuff you have plenty of recourse. Most other critical industries were either regulated as utilities or self regulated.
The problem is that companies like Google give you the service ostensibly for free and use this to justify being able to completely cut access to your account with absolutely no recourse and no explanation. You didn't pay anything so you can't expect anything. On the other hand they do monetize your data which invalidates the "for free" premise. They also don't give you any possibility to transfer the ownership of those uniquely identifying elements.
Perhaps any mail provider like ProtonMail or Fastmail should also be regulated as utilities. When electricity was deemed a utility it was probably used by fewer people and it was less useful to them than mail is today. At the very least companies like Google, Apple, and the rest of the bunch should be very tightly regulated.
You can use maps or youtube without an account but you will never receive that job offer without your email. And you may not be able to access your other critical accounts since they rely on email.
Let's put it another way: maybe an email provider should not be allowed to be used for critical services like banking, utilities, public services, etc. unless they themselves accept to be regulated as utilities. The point is to not have critical services relying on ones with a proven low quality of service track record.
I wasn't talking about a phone number or IMEI or VIN, I was talking about an iPhone. An iPhone can identity me if I setup iMessage, which is based on a phone number but effectively takes it over so that Apple receives all texts sent by other iPhone users on my behalf until I unregister it in some way. It's a common complaint that just switching to an Android phone can result in lost messages and is a notable switching cost.
People use my address to identify me too. Does that make my rented home a public utility? I can't take my home address with me. I guess my landlord should be forced by law to renew my lease indefinitely otherwise I'll lose my geographical name.
> You can use maps or youtube without an account but you will never receive that job offer without your email. And you may not be able to access your other critical accounts since they rely on email.
Of course you can receive job offers without a specific email. You can update your job seeking profile and inform companies you've applied to of a new email. It's also entirely up to you to share additional forms of contact like a phone number when you apply.
Any account critical enough to be considered a public utility like banking, utilities, public services, etc won't be solely based on email and will have non-email recovery mechanisms, usually based on your actual identity.
A phone number is less of a problem as you have portability. Or you can have it. In the UK for example, regulation means that you can automatically transfer your number between providers at no cost. It's a painless process.
That's going to be a lot more difficult when your email address is tied to a certain domain, like gmail. I think there has to be a different kind of solution there, that is more accessible to the layman than setting up your own domain and dealing with MX records and stuff.
In some countries water distribution companies are not the same as the commercial suppliers, and you can freely contract your supply with any company you want.
The issue isn't that people are free to choose any email address. The problem is that Google effectively holds people hostage once they get involved with its ecosystem. And due to its sheer size and power, no one can afford to be banned by Google. And there's no real way to appeal. It's a rights regression of sorts.
However, even with an email address, what are the chances you eventually try and email someone who has gmail. If you get put on the spam list, youre as good as not existing. In concept thats not that different than having an internal account shut down. You still dont exist to google, or any of their patrons.
It could be very difficult or impossible to access some accounts that use the email address for two factor authentication. And these are typically the most critical accounts.
Not if you're allowed to build a well, which is a lot of places. Install a pump. Same for electricity - solar and huge ass batteries for the night. Definetly not only providers despite being classified as utilities.
Actually they can. Someone i know has a restraining order from ohio dmv (bmv) for getting into argument there and can’t get dl there. Hilarious regulation coming from the state that completely privatized their dmv services
And I thought Louisiana charging a fee for using a debit card at state dmv (OMV) offices instead of cash [1] courtesy of Bobby Jindal was something. Sad to see my state of origin has outstripped that.
[1] I should also mention the time I looked at my driving record in Louisiana and discovered the remnant of their pre-1981 practice of putting race on driver's licenses. Under my ethnic category (which I had never filled out or been asked) was 'O'. I turned to the clerk and asked "What does this stand for?" She replied "Other." I said "I thought maybe it would be Oriental" (since I am Pakistani-American). She replied "That would be too politically incorrect." I said, "My expectations for this state in that regard are not high."
I suspect that has more to do with AML programs becoming significantly more automated/data-driven and the increased information sharing between financial institutions. Twenty years ago one bank would ban you. Now they all do.
You are aware that public utilities CHARGE FOR THEIR SERVICE A LOT? Ask Texans and Californians about their power bills in the last months. The level of entitlement of people like you using a free service and expecting to impose the rules as they see fit and getting all angry at the company giving them an absolutely world class amazing service for free because they don't want to piss off the advertisers that pay for the whole deal is very hard to understand.
The level of entitlement of thinking you can exploit private data of millions of people for profit and be above the law, undermining our democracy and paying no tax while cozying up to horile regimes, dictators and tyrants.
Hm. Here's Ohio's definition of a public utility.[1] It might be argued that Google is a telephone company or a messenger company, but that's a stretch.
Regulating Google as a common carrier would make more sense. Common carriers (which, by the way, UPS and FedEx are not, but Union Pacific is) are required to accept and deliver cargoes for anybody who ship according to their posted rates and terms.
But that concept of common carrier implicitly assumes that carrying for party X doesn't harm party Y. You can put a lot of stuff on a train, and if you need to you can run a lot of trains. Shipping is non-rivalous or whatever the economics term is.
But Ohio is pointing out that _ranking_ of results in response to a search (e.g. for flights) is giving preferential placement for Google's own offerings. And only one thing can be shown at the top of the page for "flights to chicago" or whatever. Ranking kind of intrinsically means rivalry.
And further, the common carrier idea is based around serving any customer that pays a posted rate. But the point of search results (as versus ads) is that it's not supposed to be the case that sites need to pay a fee to appear anywhere in the rankings.
I think maybe if the existing laws and categories don't describe this situation well, then we should make new laws and categories.
Seeing what the electric utilities did in terms of essentially buying passage of referenda and laws to their satisfaction in Ohio [1], I'm expecting Google to just open its wallet.
While Google is functionally a public utility, it's not something that I want to be regulated like a public utility. If the government can't be trusted to law lines on a map that aren't blatantly rigged to favor their own political party, I can't trust that they won't tamper with search results the same way.
Unfortunately that skepticism is warranted today. American politics were always somewhat broken in the past, but the blatant partisanship today makes any kind of progress almost impossible.
At least with government we have the powers of oversight and political organizing. It seems like a better bet then a corporation who's accountable to a bottom line, or owners.
I would rather be governed by a public actor with constraints than the arbitrary interference of a private actor.
This is the core republican (as in the political philosophy: Discourses on Livy, Philip Pettit, etc.) insight. If you want a stable society, you cannot leave space for arbitrary private individuals to become domineering forces on the rest of society. It's literally textbook how civilizations will fall, yet as a species we seem incapable of avoiding our own mistakes.
I'm confused, do you not believe there is "political organizing" outside of the guise of astroturfing? And even when political organizing is just astroturfing, isn't the motivator just the same as Google's profit interest?
Whether you believe it or not, you have a lot more power to influence government (locally at least) than you do to affect what Google does. That was my only point.
Could you explain this take further? I’m tempted to write this off entirely, but I’m curious if you actually have some reason to associate corporatism with monarchy.
Corporatism in practice is an oligarchy. The people at the top decide the fate of everyone lower than them. In some companies it is effectively a monarchy, as a sole person is driving the decisions.
The cost-per-search is negligible even if every user had to pay. Instead of running the search the government could implement policies that make search advertising illegal and thus forcing another business model.
Pay-per-search would be cheap enough for municipalities to negotiate subscriptions for their entire broadband network as a part of broadband service.
What an awful idea. A municipality would probably only have one search engine, search engines would serve municipalities which could pressure them to suppress stories, there'd probably be one search engine targeting republican municipalities and one targeting democrat ones, there'd be pressure groups trying to get municipalities to use another search engine that doesn't show results they don't like and it would be incredibly hard to start a new search engine.
A big problem with software and people who write software (often) is that software doesn't like all the ways that human beings misbehave, change their minds, don't have immutable states, and don't fit into the categories you build for them.
So any system that has a duty to serve everyone eventually ends up with an operational component that has almost as much human interaction and problem solving required as the software side of it. Or the software has to be really smart or complex.
Tech companies don't like that because that increases a lot of costs. For some companies, they manage to convince their users to behave well enough to fit into the box. Other companies have to reduce their profits, or go kicking and screaming down the path of accepting the cost of business.
Example: Public electric company wants to switch people to smart meters to reduce the cost of going to read every meter, more reliable operation, easier billing, turn on/shut off, etc. Reduce the number of legacy billing systems. People turn out to irrationally not want smart meters. Now utility needs to maintain 2 systems, and an exception list of people who don't want the smart meter system, and still have to run trucks and meter readers, and procedures for people with old meters.
If something is to be declared a utility, the tech company had better gulp in fear of what's required. But we better as well, if we're thinking of wanting our software to be turned into something that involves those obligations and costs too. There's a reason that Google (well, maybe other tech companies) bring you new things, and the electric company doesn't. It's not all roses.
There are plenty of rational reasons for not wanting a smart meter. Don't let the irrational people detract from the fact that there are many real problems with smart meters. Especially lots of privacy issues.
In the UK, I report my own meter readings and the electrical company probably only really ever goes out once every few years when tenancies change. So I actually don't see what money it saves them asides from the money lost from chasing up issues where people are trying to cheat the system.
In this example it really makes me wonder if replacing all the meters in the country with non-intercompatible smart meters really saves that much money. So you have to start asking what else is in there for them to do this. Probably money for the data I would have to imagine.
Also, given how absolutely atrociously shite the security of these smart meters is (and you'll have to trust me on this, I don't know how public this information is) I wouldn't want that crap anywhere near my house in the eventuality that someone hijacks it to make it look like I'm using more electricity when they're using less (while keeping the overall books balanced so to speak) or some other nefarious purpose.
Certainly these meters won't give you 5G cancer, but they're really a horrible idea as they stand and I don't recommend anyone install them, at least not in the UK.
Sure, but those not-irrational reasons are locale-specific. I've never heard of someone self-reporting the meter reading here in the US. The meter still keeps a local log of how much energy was used, so worrying about being framed for using too much energy still feels a bit irrational to me.
OTOH, smart meters allow the utility to charge TOU rates, which helps even out the load on the grid. It benefits the utility, of course, but also customers. For example, it is minimally inconvenient to set my car to charge or my dish washer to run at night instead of day, but I might not bother to do so unless the utility charges me below average rates to do so. I calculate that I am earning several hundred dollars per hour for the time spent taking advantage of TOU rates.
As for selling the data... the solution to that is banning such sales, not banning smart meters.
If a smart meter gets hacked it's not unreasonable to imagine the local logs are compromised. This is a bit like all the arguments against voting machines but in a less concerning setting.
TOU rates are a thing you can get with pre-programmed meters. They may not benefit the utility company as much as tailored rates but they probably have 90% of the benefit while having 0% of the privacy implications.
The companies don't even have to sell the data, they can just mine it for information, such as which rate to automatically put you on once your contract finishes to make the most money out of you etc.
I just don't want the timing of my electricity consumption to end up being used as evidence against me for growing cannabis. Feels pretty rational from my perspective.
In Australia, in the state of Victoria all meters are smart meter for few years now. They are also growing in number in other states. There has been no hacking incident. in fact it makes peoples life easier by allowing them to track energy usage at every 15 mins interval with historical data using an app from the utility company. This data cannot be sold either. In fact under the Govt. Open API scheme very shortly you will be able to give access to your own data for comparison to select the best plan for you (just like open banking).
So sounds like Australian smart meter companies are better at security than British ones.
The energy usage tracking can be done without smart meters, in this country electricity companies (and lots of private companies) offered induction clamp based electrical usage logging devices. These may not have been quite as accurate as onboard measuring but this could have easily been solved with some kind of serial protocol exposed on the meter which a third party datalogger could attach to. The ability to track energy usage is not a feature of a smart meter, it's just a feature of having access to the meter's data, this data could always have been made available even if the meter wasn't networked.
Open banking is a complete disaster that I seriously don't think deserves the name "open". I still don't understand how an API which requires you to be a BANK to be able to interact with can remotely claim to be open but having tested some of the implementation for banks it's some horrific over-engineered mess.
Let's hope the data access API for your meter doesn't require you to be an electricity company to access it. As it stands, in the UK, meters are not intercompatible between utility companies so if you switch providers (which I do annually) the old smart meter just becomes a dumb meter again.
Arch-TK I absolutely agree with everything you are saying, and I don’t intend to get a smart meter myself for as long as possible.
However, you are incorrect that meters are incompatible between utility companies. You are right that SMETS1 meters _are_ incompatible. However, all new meter installations are SMETS2 and these are fully compatible between energy companies.
SMETS2 has been the standard for a number of years now. There are still old SMETS1 installations still active though.
I'd like to point out that ever since SMETS2 new (and some firmware updated) smart meters are compatible in the UK, although I do acknowledge they didn't used to be.
The big benefit imo is the load smoothing; statewide, power is cheaper and cleaner than it would otherwise have been.
Right now it’s factories and a few early adopters like me, but anyone can sign up for it and it’s substantially cheaper assuming you don’t mind turning things off at peak times.
Power consumption correlated with commercial breaks tells you what show somebody is watching. Power consumption correlated with 9-5 tells you if somebody is working from home. Power consumption correlated with a specific time in the morning tells you when somebody wakes up and subsequently turns the heat on. Lower power consumption over several days tells you when somebody is on vacation.
Are these relatively minor invasions of privacy compared to what advertising companies perform? Yes. But that's no reason to pretend that they aren't privacy-hostile moves on their own.
Yes, they absolutely can. Like with any surveillance technology, there are things you can do to obfuscate your patterns, but that doesn't mean that a broad rollout of the technology won't have a negative privacy impact on most customers.
It’s not obfuscation, if you are concerned about privacy. You can completely hide your usage patterns with a battery or solar/wind generation.
Are you honesty making the point that: knowing you used 5 units of power in 1 month (where someone has to walk onto your property and read a number, as is the case in most dumb metered scenarios) is less of a privacy concern than knowing you used .3 of unit of power in the last 15 minutes (without needing to walk onto your property).
> knowing you used 5 units of power in 1 month (where someone has to walk onto your property and read a number, as is the case in most dumb metered scenarios) is less of a privacy concern than knowing you used .3 of unit of power in the last 15 minutes (without needing to walk onto your property).
Personally, I think so for most people. But that depends on how much privacy your property provides from pedestrians and where your meter is located.
However, that is orthogonal to the debate since there are other options. Some places allow self reporting and Automated Meter Reading can be done without a smart meter that reports live power usage.
I am unsure why you are so vested in arguing that nobody has a legitimate reason to be concerned about this. It is fine if it doesn't bother you, but it is really necessary to paint those with different concerns as irrational?
> no, it’s always worth pointing out irrational reasoning though.
You haven't done that though. You've made accusations of irrationality without ever once backing them up.
> So far I’ve only heard made up, theoretical, what if, privacy concerns.
I think engineers have am ethical duty to consider "theoretical" privacy concerns when they are working on new technology.
Given the history of data mining and brokerage in the US, I would be willing to make significant bets that, (in the absence of a new law being passed to prohibit it,) consumer power usage patterns from smart meters will be sold to data brokers. Pretending this isn't going to happen belies either your knowledge of the existing markets for data or your own rationality.
Irrational premise: smart meters have privacy concerns over normal meters.
Me: how so, there is way too much noise (generation and storage) to get signal (usage correlation). In real life smart meters allow for all sorts of benefits/innovation (time of use charges, time off user feed in)
You: you haven’t said anything, just wild accusations of irrationality. Privacy is a concern, data harvesting!!! Pretending this isn’t going to happen is crazy.
Wtf? Smart meters exist, and this hasn’t happened. Show me one instance. Time of use charges are a thing, look them up. Using electrical usage data to gather private information is not a thing. Look that up too.
It is a matter of degree, but that degree is not small. Anytime you decrease the interval, you need to justify the commensurate loss of privacy. You can't just handwave away these concerns like posters in this thread are doing.
A rough inference of which months might involve vacations (data about which is probably already being sold from other sources) is far less invasive than a daily record of your sleep cycle.
With the lack of privacy laws in the US, it is pretty much a given that this data will be sold as soon as the private utility companies in the US start collecting it.
You can also bill users for peak usage times when electricity is expensive or requires falling back on non-renewable resources for production with hourly data.
When it comes to smart meter security and privacy (and perhaps in this day and age diversity and equity) concerns let's discuss them when there's an evidence that they have caused problems.
There's not that many things about the smart meter that are much worse than the vulnerabilities of the plain old spinning disk meter. There were many problems with old meters too. And the benefits far outweigh those issues. Smart meters are not being hacked left and right.
And your privacy concerns are just a matter of granularity of time. You report your usage monthly -- that is also private information. Smart meters just do it on a finer timescale. Not a fundamental difference.
The vulnerabilities of the plain old spinning disk meter may have been bad but they couldn't be exploited remotely from someone else's house.
Yes, granularity of the measurements IS a problem. If these things only reported the readings when I pressed a button, I would not be so concerned about privacy (that is if the companies could prove to me that the meters did not report the readings outside of these times).
I don't think your argument supports the second conclusion in your penultimate sentence. Seems like a big leap. Power and water “just work” and the utility companies can’t abuse people. As an “end user” I don't get crappier power or worse water because my neighbor is spooked out by smart meters. I highly doubt the savings would be passed on to me anyway. I would 1000 times over rather live in a world where internet utility service providers were required to substantiate service terminations the details of which are governed by civil law not by an abusive EULA written to protect tue company not the user. If it means email costs $1/month so be it. I pay for email on principle anyway.
Then isn't this an argument that tech companies are not utilities because the things they supply don't "just work" and have no nuance to them?
Electricity and water "just work" because you deliver it, you're done. You have no obligations aside from not failing to deliver it, and not exploiting your monopoly market.
Tech companies are not utilities because they're not just something you buy like a commodity and have a right to not have complex terms of usage?
You want the best of both worlds. Maybe that's not possible.
Bullshit. Delivering power and water are incredibly complex. Water has to be sourced from God knows where, you have to do planning on building reservoirs. You have to manage run off (hey, your horses can't keep shitting near that stream!). You have to treat the water and manage it's acidity. You have to keep mains running. If a leak springs and the system goes under pressure, the whole supply can become contaminated! So now you have to notify your users that they need to BOIL THEIR WATER! you have to detect leaks in the last mile of delivery so that you can protect the system. You have to keep your pumps from getting flooded. You have to manage subsidy programs and different user classes. You have to integrate with federal and state water authorities.
Utilities are complicated. There's no such thing as delivering and not failing to deliver.
> People turn out to irrationally not want smart meters.
Some people may be irrational, but smart meters are a huge privacy concern - the electricity company can figure out your patterns from the power usage and the "shape" of it.
This is the reason why I don't want a smart meter.
Disclaimer: I actually was involved in building firmware and management software of smart meters.
Not only the electric company, anyone with a hint of ambition. I can read my own meter, along with 60 of my closest neighbors if I so chose (I don't) because every meter emits unencrypted packets several times for each reporting interval (5 minutes in my case)
How do you defend against the argument that it's just a matter of degree?
I can tell from your old spinning mechanical meter that you're at home and not on vacation. That's personal information. Why is a smart meter so different?
Why would you assume that increasing the effect of something by orders of magnitude is harmless? Chugging 1 glass of water is great, but 100 will kill you; the only difference is a matter of degree.
A spinning meter can be manually checked to find out if someone is on vacation, but doing that is slow and isn't very worthwhile for criminals. Being able to monitor 100,000 meters at once for empty homes might suddenly be very economical for criminals.
One is connected to the internet and sends data every second of the day (hopefully only to authorized recipients) while the other provides only one monthly datapoint and is quite a pain for bad actors, or anyone really, to collect. It’s like the difference between showing someone you have $X in your checking account vs showing someone all of the transactions you’ve conducted in the account over the last month. One is far more invasive because it’s a window into your daily habits.
You cannot tell from your old meter because it does not submit meter readings every minute (or whatever the configuration is) because it does not have an internet connection.
Usage patterns seem extremely important for building out a renewable power grid. Meanwhile, what is the privacy concern with the “shape” of your usage?
A change in your usage pattern could be used to ID any number of private things that could then be used against you:
- When you’ve gone on vacation and your home is unattended.
- When you have an additional tenant, a long-term houseguest, have a new significant other or even have a baby.
- Whether or not you’re actually working when you’re working from home.
- Homes that use greater than X amount of electricity are at greater risk of Y and so your home owners/rental/car insurance premium goes up.
- People who play computer/video games late at night are at higher risk for health issues is your health insurance premium goes up.
And I bet there are other, much more subtle things they could figure out once given the opportunity to vacuum up your data: like estimate what temperature you set your AC to and determine whether or not someone in the house was awake at any given moment of any given day.
I am not sure why I ( or you for that matter ) am forced to defend my stance on privacy by listing things I want to stay private. The objection is that I do not want to have my every move monitored with ever-increasing accuracy.
This seems to be an annoying issue. Any serious proponent of privacy is already taking steps to hold on its vestiges, which include not taking a public stance on it.
At my house, I have a meter that I get a feed from. So I look at the graphs. From the graphs, you can learn about what is happening in the house. You know when someone is showering, left home for work (arrived home), doing laundry, went to bed/got up, used the microwave and so on. Some of that you could determine by watching the house, but that requires constant surveillance. A smart meter provides all this data with no effort and at mass scale. If I can glean that level of information just by glancing at the graphs, I'm sure someone better equipped could determine even finer grain details of what is going on in the house.
I am disabled and I was considering growing my own medicine in the event of losing job or not having funds for filling my prescription any more - hopefully that will never happen, but knowing that I have a smart meter, that would add a lot of anxiety that I don't need.
If the electric company sends someone out to read your meter every day is that objectionable? Every hour? Every minute? At what resolution is energy usage too invasive? Why?
Not just humans can misbehave, machines can also. I work in industrie automation and there is often the question should we produce just errormessages or should or machines produce a product. If you wanna catch ever error, every low or high temp, every whatever, no machine can even start to produce a product ever.
An Example for your Example. Yes i'm one of those people who tried to keep his old electricity meter the longest time possible. I have 36 solar panels installed on my roof and the old disk meter just rotated backwards when I was not using all that electricity during the day. The new meter, that i could only delay a year or 2, is electronic and does not give me anything when I push energy to the net all day. The government in my country can give you money for that energy but that would be the raw price without any tax and the energy you use later on the day still has tax on it so that does not really help, The tax is also 80 to 90% of the price.
So I hope that gives some perspective why people may prever to keep an old system around and not be forced by a big company to change it.
In the UK the government imposed a quota to the utility companies for smart meter installations. Hence they are desperate to boost adoption, recently they have drafted Albert Einstein into their all-out advertising campaign. The government is clearly anxious to push this change which is precisely why i'm not rushing.
Earnest question - Why does the utility have to honor the request of the owner? Doesn't the utility own the meter and is allowed to make changes to it as it sees fit?
The large utility in my state provides the meter, the customer provides the meter socket and everything downstream of the meter.
For 400A (really 320A, 80% of 400) and larger services (commercial) the customer supplies everything beyond the transformer (service disconnect and CT cabinet, typically), but the utility will provide meters or CTs depending on how it’s being metered.
one reason I've heard against smart meters is that it would make it easy for power companies to start charging non commercial users for apparent power rather than real power, as a way to indirectly raise prices.
because it's remotely updateable, and an analogue meter cannot measure apparent power (when the power returns to the grid the wheel would spin in the other direction)
Remote updating doesn't provide apparent power measurement, a power measurement chip does - this does require an upgraded meter, yes, but does not necessitate a smart one, although the economics of upgrading a fleet of meters probably dictates that they be smart meters for other reasons.
yes, but my point is that being remotely updateable means you can switch over to charging for apparent power remotely (which smart meters can already measure)
So Republicans have completely flipped on the sovereignity of private companies?
Or is this just posturing to please the number one of the GOP (Dave Yost filed a “friend of the court” brief in support of invalidating 2020 votes in Pennsylvania)?
Every state that is not deep blue is not Alaska levels of red.
Ohio and much of the mid west is moderately red or moderately blue depending on the policies in question so you get middle of the road policy like this that isn't hard-line one way or the other but appeals to the tons of people on both sides of the isle who think big tech is f-ed up right now.
While this move might alienate people on the far right for being a violation of a business's right to freely associate and far left for failing to go far enough, it's kind of a no brainier if you want to appeal to people who want something done and don't care which side of the isle that something is from is as long as it's not too extreme. Big tech is getting out of control according to many on both sides and utilities are an existing legal framework for regulating big but essential consumer facing business.
I don't know exactly how the Ohio state government is formed but it's also highly likely that this is political maneuvering by the AG or the executive branch and they expect it go nowhere.
Mike DeWine in Ohio is fairly reasonable and was among those whose lips were not attached to Trump's behind, but now the Republican base in rural Ohio is angry at him about that.
His great crime was that he listened to a medical doctor, implemented pretty reasonable common-sense strategies, and for a while did a pretty good job keeping Ohio's pandemic rates low.
Ohio GOP have really ramped up their rhetoric in the last year or so, including their attacks on their own like the infighting with Dewine over how he handled the states response to covid.
Except we don't really have politicians anymore - just parties. Politicians vote in unison now more than ever. So even if the voters of the state are pretty evenly split politically - whichever party is in power of the state is pretty much all that matters.
Regulating monopolies is a bipartisan issue isn't it? The fact is that three companies in the same or adjacent zip codes have a monopoly over the online square, which means that especially during times of a pandemic, if they take away someone's voice their free speech is effectively null and void.
Even republicans are opposed to anti-competitive behavior done by firms with large amounts of market power.
You would be hard pressed to find a modern day Republican who thinks that all water, electricity, and telephone services should have their common carrier status changed.
Common carrier laws are uncontroversial, on both sides of the political spectrum. Few people would argue in favor of cutting off power and water, to their political opponents.
Maybe on net neutrality, but the point still stands. You are not going to be able to find many modern day republicans who think that it would be OK for electric companies, or water companies, to cut off power from their political opponents.
There are lots of common carrier laws, and anti-monopoly laws that are uncontroversial. Few people would come out in favor of the standard oil monopoly, for example.
This is the beginning of the Republican rebrand to be the people's party again, since democrats have abandoned that cause long ago. They simply seek to be the in charge political force, and they are winning, as evidenced by every major corporation seemingly overnight bending over to satisfy democratic candidates and democratic voting blocs.
> the Republican rebrand to be the people's party again
Or at least the party of some people. If they thought they had the majority on their side, they wouldn't be afraid of the popular vote, or need to gerrymander every map they get their hands on.
Not that I want to get into politics on HN but care we seriously forgetting which party didn’t vote to pass a stimulus bill for the people a couple a months ago?
Also not to get into politics, but this one is near to me -- Is anyone in our ___ing government ever going to actually care about this insane debt we've accumulated? Do you know how long HN made fun of Uber for burning through investor cash? What about our Government? Are they beyond critique? What's wrong with not passing a stimulus bill?
It was the correct move in my opinion. What in god's green earth are we doing adding trillions more to our deficit when we are rapidly approaching 30 trillion in the red? We are sacrificing many future generations. No one has stopped to think if the long term trade offs are worth it. No one stopped to think if all this damage to the mental health of our young ones, our future, is worth it, if the isolation is worth it. No one stopped to think at all. Arguably if the federal government would stop being everyone's baby sitter, it may push states and local governments to do their own jobs instead.
But alas, no one thinks like this anymore. They just think there's an infinite well of money, and big daddy government is always going to be there to give me a loan, and it will always continue to be this way, when there are many, many examples of this not being the case. Rome will fall.
I feel like this highlights a disparity between the users on Hacker News and the common people. For the majority of us , our work was easily transferable online or we we’re (for the most part) essential workers. This was not true for a good chunk of Americans who struggle to make ends meet and lived in states were unemployment benefits were so inaccessible that people had to write their state politicians to push the backlog along. For people like this the stimulus and other just as important things were crucial to their survival.
What’s an absolute joke is that the Richest Country on this planet showed the most embarrassing display of helping it’s citizens while our neighbor up above was able to. I cannot see the how states on their own would be able to help their citizens when they have no ability to print money. This was absolutely the role of the federal government and it botched it in the most insane way possible.
You're expecting Republicans to be consistent libertarians? It seems to me that as practiced, the intersections between the two philosophies are rare and ephemeral and much more common in word than deed.
Republicans are a coalition party, just like the democrats are. It's really important to remember just how broad of a group those 2 parties cover. AOC said it correctly in Jan 2020[0]: "In any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party, but in America, we are."
So while there are free-enterprise republicans, there are also those that worry about how companies behave. At this point, there are D's and R's in Washington that agree on how big-tech should be treated (Josh Hawley and Elizabeth Warren for example[1]).
Not sure why the downvotes. A consequence of our two-party system is that both parties end up being uneasy coalitions of many different "parties."
The Republicans have long been an uneasy coalition of the religious right, paleoconservatives, fascists, economic libertarians, right leaning neocons and neoliberals, and mid-century centrist "Eisenhower conservatives." Major fault lines have been between the libertarians and the religious right and between the neocons and the paleocons and nativists.
The Democrats have long been an uneasy coalition of left leaning neocons and neoliberals, social libertarians, anti-war activists, minorities who feel threatened by Republican tolerance of racism and nativism in their "big tent," atheists and minority religions who feel threatened by the religious right, and socialists. Major fault lines have been between the socialists and the various economic centrist or libertarian factions, between socially conservative minorities and the social liberals, and between the neocons / neoliberals and the anti-war / anti-empire factions.
Each party contains at least three or four other parties within.
A shuffle seems to be happening right now where the nativist, paleocon, and fascist parts of the Republican Party have gained power at the expense of the neocons and neoliberals after the latter discredited themselves with the Iraq war disaster and the 2008 financial bailout shitshow (which can technically be blamed on both parties since Obama presided over some of it).
Another shuffle occurring is that libertarianism has really taken a hit as a result of anxiety over wealth distribution and issues with globalism and neoliberalism. Many libertarians on the right have been converted to the alt-right/fascist side, and on the left quite a few have gone further left economically and joined the AOC wing of the party.
> the lawsuit seeks a legal declaration that Google is a "common carrier," like phone, gas and electric companies, which must provide its services to anyone willing to pay its fee.
How can something on the internet be a common carrier when the internet itself is not a common carrier?
I'd lean into this. Instead of trying to defend Google as not being a utility we should be calling for utility regulation for both web services as well as residential access providers.
You're forgetting what a Common Carrier is, by definition:
"A common carrier in common law countries ... is a person or company that transports goods or people for any person or company and is responsible for any possible loss of the goods during transport..."
So, a _company_ can be a common carrier. An abstract notion describing interconnected physical entities and organizational entities related to them cannot be a common carrier (nor, in fact, any carrier).
Not defending Google, but it's because the analogy does not hold. You can be hardly banned from receiving water, because the interaction with it is pretty limited and it does not allow you to directly interact with other individuals.
> How can something on the internet be a common carrier when the internet itself is not a common carrier?
The internet isn't a thing. It's not a single entity (or even a single idea).
It was different in the days of Ma Bell, when there was one entity for the entire U.S. with phone service (could we define that in today's age? is VOIP phone service? mobile? Whatsapp?), and it was even different later, when the baby bells blanketed the U.S. without overlapping areas.
What makes this more challenging is that by regulating "ISPs" (if someone could please define that, or even what the Internet is, in a legal sense), we might then be strangling new and interesting startups that might not conform to the definition of an ISP from a decade prior.
when people talk about the "the internet" being a public utility, they mean internet access. which is "a thing", and is a single discrete idea.
public utility status for the internet means that every packet delivered over internet protocol (aka "IP", which again, is a thing) must be delivered by the carrier/ISP without discrimination.
Yes. If my service was declared a common carrier I'd experiment with creating my own ISP and banning people at the ISP level, which also happens to be the only ISP hosting my service.
This is why this doesn't make sense. Some internet companies can arbitrarily block you and others can't?
It doesn't make sense if your goal is to create a fair internet for everybody, or to build a consistent set of rules based on reasonable principles.
it makes perfect sense if you are a politician looking to hop on the anti-google bandwagon enough to make it look like you're doing something without actually doing anything.
The problem is that the Republicans trying to declare tech companies "common carriers" pretty much lied through their teeth 4 years ago when they argued that ISPs are absolutely not common carriers, in opposition of overwhelming popular opinion to the contrary.
Am I "censoring people" if I ask a customer to leave my restaurant and never return while he is in the middle of a loud racist rant?
Facebook and Twitter are not critical infrastructure. Nobody has to use them. They are private platforms their owners invited you to. I choose not to use these services, and anyone else who doesn't like them is free to do the same.
People do not have the choice to avoid using telephone or mail services, which is why they are regulated as common carriers. It is nearly impossible to function in modern society without access to mail and telephone service. The argument for net neutrality rests on the idea that general internet access is also a requirement in order to be a functional member of society.
How exactly is Google.com different from a phone book in 1990? Phone books, to my knowledge, were not prohibited from advertising Southwestern Bell or Ameritech junk at the beginning, they were just incentivized not to do so because selling ads was more profitable.
I don't have a great answer for you, but I have another question: if Google isn't different than a phone book in 1990, why were phone books never a top 10 business in the United States?
Too hard to monetize, too high costs, competition by the phone company.
Everyone had one, they were ubiquitous. Without the internet ads are much harder to sell, huge barrier to entry for customer acquisition compared to google. Without real time auctions and targeting ads are worth less, i.e. you can't target search terms in a phone book, only prefixes, let alone things like demographics. The cost to distribute a book to everyone is a lot higher than the cost to serve some traffic. I suspect ad density was too low too.
The status of Google, and additionally AWS and Azure, is feeling very reminiscent of the early days of electricity companies, and the early days of (in UK at least) telco. Bit by bit the world is realising that the global economy and system is now at the mercy of these businesses to a defacto point where there's no option any more. I believe it's a responsible direction for governments to legislate to control them, if nothing else then purely to guarantee risk management and sustainability for the population at large.
Suspending for a moment how unlikely it is to happen, imagine if Amazon decided tomorrow they were shuttering AWS. Or Google was ceasing providing search. These things are so essential to everyday life now the impact would be staggering.
Governments should be looking at these threats with open eyes in the same way they have had their eyes opened to global pandemic prep.
Actually, a common carrier, which is a private utility.
If they wanted Google to be a public utility, they’d have to seize or buy their assets; the former of which is prohibited by the 5th Amendment, and their ability to compel the second is absent because the relevant assets aren't within Ohio’s reach for that purpose.
Yes, shaking my head here. If they don't have the willpower to manage Comcast, market cap ~$250B, how in the world will they be able to do anything with Google, worth ~$1600B?
I wish so much they would care about something they could actually change.
I think Google can bribe just as well. The difference is politicians feel like Google and its business model are more actively disliked because the media is very focused on it, particularly the more left-leaning and right-leaning media. I think outside of hacker news and politics bubbles, people actually still have a positive view about Google's services though
How is google a global monopoly, there are other search engines out there, other mobile operating systems, other cloud providers, etc.
EDIT: not even trying to bicker, there are multiple comments calling Google a monopoly, but I have no idea what market they dominate, or perhaps I’m misunderstanding what I monopoly is.
So, for one, "monopoly" doesn't technically concern "literally only one", but that it has a "dominant market share". Monopoly is a term that feels a bit too narrow, but it's understood to apply to the issue a bit more broadly in law and legal discussions. In many cases, you're understood to be a monopoly if you have say, 70% of a market or more.
Google is over 85% of all search traffic. Now, you might argue as Google has, that sure, anyone can change their default search to Bing. However, the issue with dominant companies is the network and second order effects of how they impact everything else.
For example, Google's search data is primarily refined by "the fact that everyone is searching with Google". So the more popular Google becomes, the better it's data becomes... and the less possible it is for other search engines to compete. It's not a talent problem, it's a data problem.
But another big aspect is the other side of a search transaction: The websites you find with Google. Since Google is 85% of search, Google search rankings determine if businesses survive, pretty much singlehandedly. It doesn't matter if you're first on Bing, because people who find you on Bing aren't enough to sustain your business. You must be findable on Google.
Often, that means businesses must do business with Google: The first "search result" on Google search is almost always a paid advertisement. Businesses are forced to do business with Google to exist, and the fact that other search engines exist is... mostly irrelevant to them. This also means Google can dictate what websites can and can't display, what technologies they must and must not use, etc. AMP is terrible but Google was giving preferential treatment to websites with AMP, so AMP is understandably all over the place now.
Mobile operating systems is an intriguing one, because believe it or not, if you understand the market they're in Android is a total monopoly. Android is 100% of the mobile operating system market. The default question to ask is "what about iOS", and the answer is simple: iOS isn't on the market. Because the market isn't consumers, it's phone manufacturers, and Apple iOS is only available for the Apple iPhone.
If you're Samsung or HTC or Lenovo or Huawei or ZTE or Motorola, you have one option to sell phones: Sell Androids. Sure, Huawei has forked Android because it got banned by the US, but it's still Android. The only competitor in the mobile OS space that had any traction at all was Windows Mobile and it's dead. If you go into a cell carrier store today, they'll sell you an iPhone, or they'll sell you two dozen phones that all run the only operating system on the market: Android.
Android has an "other side" aspect too: App developers. Even if iOS exists, businesses have to develop Android apps to reach consumers on mobile devices, and that means they have to do business with Google. And not just app development companies either. Imagine if Allstate Insurance said their app was only available on iOS: Pretty much every business in every category of industry ends up having to do business with Google. And that's a monopoly.
Google isn't a monopoly in cloud providers, it's actually in like fourth place. Apparently they're just... not good at everything. *shrug*
This is exactly what needs to happen, and not just because Google is steering people towards their own products preferentially. All the big technology companies are providing services that are fundamentally necessary to live and operate in our modern society. Their ability to act outside the laws that constrain public agencies or other regulated private organizations is simply not acceptable. I am specifically thinking of their role in information exchange - whether that is books sold on Amazon, results shown on Google search, social media accounts/posts on Facebook, or other examples.
These companies are simply too big and powerful to be allowed to continue operating as unregulated private companies. They are more than just another random company, given that they have billions of users and control the public square as it exists today. The fact that they have massive network effects with billions of users limits their exposure to competition - for example, it's not possible to make a viable competitor to YouTube given that Google has an existing platform with a large number of content creators, advertisers, and users. The same network means that Google's decisions (to ban content, demonetize content, lock user accounts, etc.) are as impactful as a government agency or any other utility making such a decision, because there isn't a good alternative. And in many ways, the tech companies are more powerful than governments because they have more users than most nations have citizens.
In comparison, a power utility can't just arbitrarily turn off your electricity because they disagree with your speech or political position. The water company can't withhold service without explanation. Virtually all laws that companies have to abide by constitute "regulation". There's nothing stopping us from tweaking how companies like Google are treated.
I don't want more utilities, I want more competition, failure, and new players to fill spaces where old players died. Crony protectionism, and lax acquisition constraints are why we have a lot of these companies at where they are.
When the seeming majority of exit plans for companies is an acquisition by a larger existing entity you have a problem. If our laws were better, people would be able to compete against <FAANG HERE> because they wouldn't have a hand in a crazy amount of markets and able to easily fend off good newcomers without a good amount of resources being expended. I heavily disagree with making things like Google a utility when the reason they're where they are today is largely artificial. They are not a natural monopoly they just took advantage of a weak government and pulled up the ladder behind themselves.
The world is increasingly winner-take-all, so its hard to do that. Very few people want to use the second best search engine instead of the best, or constantly use multiple search engines. Seems like a natural monopoly to me. How can you complain about a weak-willed government in a post showing the opposite anyways?
It could be a natural monopoly if Google is able to use their user's click traffic to out-manuever SEO spam and their competition is unable to reach the necessary scale to obtain sufficient volume of user click traffic to compete with Google on quality.
Can anyone point to any Ohio legal precedents where something not regulated by PUCO has been considered a common carrier?
Per the original "An entity can be a common carrier and/or public utility under Ohio common law,even if it is expressly excluded from regulation by PUCO"
I'd be curious what precedent makes Google a common carrier in Ohio law. From a US federal standpoint individual websites appear to me more akin to radio broadcast stations, which according to Ronald Coase had a failed attempt to be declared common carriers.
I am not a lawyer, so I'd be happy to be corrected on that.
Why can't we all collectively show an attitude of humble gratitude to an organization that has done so much to advance our civilization and improve our quality of life?
Can you expound on your opinion about what Google has contributed?
Not that I don't think they have, but I can think of a lot of corporations that have contributed more to civilization and quality of life, yet we are okay regulating them. So I'm not sure that's the best barometer for this discussion.
Can you point out exactly when they crossed this line? Seems to me like they're pretty much doing what they've always done, and being punished for being the best at it.
It surprises me that a lot of the comments here seem to be oblivious to how Google's PageRank algorithm ranks search results. [1]
PageRank works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is. The underlying assumption is that more important websites are likely to receive more links from other websites.[1]
The results of a Google search may not be as one expects because PageRank is the primary algorithm used to return Google search results. If owners of a website want to improve their Google result ranking, they are really required to tune their website to show up in Google search, but more importantly, they need other sites to link to their site, and presumably, the more popular the site, the more links there are to it.
Backing up just a bit, what right does a state have to declare a web application a public utility? The jibber jabber about how Google might affect Ohio businesses seems just a distraction from the basic issue. A public utility is generally a business within the state that delivers essential services, like water and power, to areas in which there is no reasonable alternative, i.e., as local monopolies. If the internet itself is not considered a public utility - and indeed companies like Comcast and AT&T that deliver the internet as mostly local monopolies are not regulated as public utilities - how can a mere application on the web be considered a public utility? Even if it were, this would seem to be a matter for federal, not state, jurisdiction. The lawsuit seems more a publicity stunt than a serious action.
While I'm not sure that a lawsuit like this is the right venue, companies like Google arguably deserve to be treated at least something like a public utility. The power and phone companies are allowed to dig or put up poles and wires where they want to - that's necessary for them to do their business.
Companies like Google (and Twitter) require special rules to function - a generous view of fair use, and things like section 230 for exemptions to copyright liability. I think they should probably get those - I'd argue that both companies improve the world, in the same way that having power lines does. But it's worth considering if stipulations should be attached.
Given the use of information search, and its importance as the tool for gather factual data, conventional search indexing should be a public utility.
Like rail road, motor road, electricity, which were started as private enterprises, and eventually turn into public utility. Information search appears on the same route.
But, the catch is that "Internet" the physical infrastructure should be turned into public utility first. And then we can discuss the fundamental services running on Internet.
So I support this direction. But I think the focus of the effort to be on turning Internet into public utility, right now.
Public utilities generally have regulation commensurate with their status as local monopolies. There are constraints requiring they offer service because if they refuse service, a consumer can't just walk down the street and get water from the next water company over.
For this reason, it's going to be difficult to argue this case in the affirmative when google.com, bing.com, and duckduckgo.com are exactly as far away from the end-user in terms of "digital distance."
Reminds me of Snowcrash, the novel by Neil Stephenson. Technology was so far ahead of conventional people that the US govt became vestigial and largely ignored.
The big tech giants have grown too big for Governments and Lawmakers to regulate. Adding to this problem is the lobbying that runs around these premises. The following article highlights how big tech remain untouchable.
>Google said Google Search is designed to provide people with the most relevant and helpful results and the Ohio lawsuit would make it harder for small businesses to connect directly with customers
Why do multi billion dollar companies keep pulling the "small business" card. Does anyone actually fall for this?
I fail to see how it is possible to present a good faith argument about how Google is a public utility when the required infrastructure that Google is built on is not.
If ISPs aren’t a utility then Google can’t be. I also don’t think this is being pursued in good faith which is the sadder part.
Do states have the power to file antitrust actions against companies, or is that only a federal power?
It seems like an antitrust suit would have much better chance of success than this. Is this just meaningless political posturing or is there actually chance of success?
Ah, yes — at best, politicians playing dumb, at worst politicians actually being that dumb.
Also, the railroad companies have been actively screwing with transportation in the US for over a century, so it's pretty rich of AG Yost to use them as an example.
It's interesting when they use examples like Google Flights. You can certainly make the argument that Google Flights is just a flight-specific results page for Google Search.
The lines between search and many other Google products are pretty blurry.
How do people not see Google search as an advertising platform? Google search may act like an advanced dewey decimal system, but it is not at all the same thing.
Google is not the same as railroads or electricity companies.
Nobody pays for Google, and it's not owned by a government.
I see the anti trust issues because of Google dominance, but the answer to that is not to make Google a public utility.
If governments care about protecting local businesses, they should make their own directories so good that people go there to search instead of Google.
Google is a private company which has made a great product for over 20 years. And now it's benefiting off of it.
That's what private companies do
Pretty hostile of Ohio. I feel like the governor and other state leaders are out of touch with tech. Don't know how this could help the state or Columbus attract tech. They should try to learn a lesson or two from Texas or Utah. Idiots running the state will continue the brain drain problem.
Agreed. This was my biggest reason for leaving Columbus as soon as I could. Most of the folks who "talk tech" have no idea what they're talking about. Just a sea of Professional Services Consultants configuring software for "clients".
right ... ISPs are not a public utility but a web service provider is? If you want to tackle this, best to start with the most common sense place, the ISP
Sincere question, are most utilities even treated as public utilities in Ohio? When I was a kid in Montana, the very popular statewide public power utility was deregulated by conservatives and it ceased to operate in the public interest at all. It was quickly replaced by even less scrupulous businesses after it bankrupt itself pursing telecom.
this stupidness always ends up lost in people's lack of understanding about what Google is, how the internet works, what SEO is etc. Waste of time and Google's right, not grounded in any kind of legality.
Good on them - even if they may be totally hypocritical in doing that. Search should be a public utility. Perhaps even an international public utility.
Google's statement that "Google Search is designed to provide people with the most relevant and helpful results" is untrue. Google Search is designed to benefit Google (or rather Alphabet) Corporation. That involves providing relevant and helpful results - to some extent, but it also involves promoting results Google favors and demoting or filtering out results it disfavors. For example, political content which Google does or does not approve of, respectively:
this includes explicit conscious censorship of specific news and commentary websites (such as the World Socialist Website, AlterNet, etc. and sites on the political right as well, IIANM).
this is pretty dumb, does anyone actually think public utilities provide quality service? Im baffled why anyone would want to create more of these zombie organizations.
This is simply g*rbage.I wish all my utilities were as cheap and amazing as google. Why don't we go the other way and make a law demanding that?
- Google services are free. If they are a utility they should charge you like any utility, go ask Texans and Californians about their recent power bills.
- There is an endless amount of comparable alternatives to Google, here you have 17 https://www.searchenginejournal.com/alternative-search-engin.... The idea that google is just as important and monopolistic as you power provided is just incredibly stupid. Sorry about been rude but I have heard from the same crowd that "facts don't care about your feelings" and that door swings both ways.
- Nobody forces you to use Google, its not the first option installed in a Windows computer, that would by Bing.com and I don't see any complaints. Users go out of their way to go to that site because is the best option. It's a perfect example of the free market. And even in the case of android phones the different brands like Samsung or Motorola make that call. Google gives you an amazing OS completely free.
What do you mean by "nationalize"? It doesn't seem like Ohio wants Google to be owned and/or run by a government. Most utilities in America aren't nationalized. Why would this be any different?
They don't have to win it. They have to make Google think carefully about what boundaries exist for them, politically, and make sure that they don't cross them to the point that Ohio (or whoever) can win. And if that restrains Google's behavior, Ohio may have in fact won, even if they don't win the lawsuit.
There already exist paid search services which you can compare Google to. I use infinitysearch and it costs US $5 per month.
It's true that their coverage isn't as good as google, but around $1 per week feels very cheap. And the decreased coverage is at least partly compensated by being treated like a customer instead of a product.
I don't not use DDG. I also don't not use Google. I tend to mix it up depending on what sorts of results I'm after and how private the search should be.
One thing I like about IS compared to DDG is that DDG is still funded by advertising. This means that people are still paying to bias the results I see.
By paying money to a search engine which doesn't rely on advertising at all, I have more trust that IS are really vested in showing me the results that I think are best. (They don't always succeed, but I trust that it's not about the results being undermined by third parties, it's just that they are still fairly small.)
Not saying I agree with it but, per the article: "In lieu of a fee, Yost argues in the complaint, Google collects user data that is monetized primarily by selling targeted advertisements."
Guggle has little place in my life.
Android phone that has been heavily
fiddled with,no pay store,no jeemail,etc.
This is hard to maintain ,as so many services are interlinked and
useing heavy duty add blockers ,etc
breaks a lot of sites.
Living in a low population rural
area,mobile intetnet is the by far
best choice for me.
And so I am in the process of choosing a new phone that will be
my main device,it will be very tame
and to my liking,and my current phone will get a talk and text sim
with no data and be reset to factory level awfulness and used for those occasions where its just
much easier to let the algorithyms
play with each other and hold my nose untill its switched off.
I will delay getting an actual guggle account as long as possible.
So here I am a hardcore lemyalone
Ill mind my own buisiness type,doing all the workarounds ,and
just finding that non viable and costing me what has become basic access to goods and services.
The concrete issue is flight search. When you google "flight from a to b", rather then seeing search results linking to websites for flight search, the first thing you see is the results of Google's own flight search. Is that wrong? What about image search? When you search for "skyline berlin", you'll see images of berlin's skyline, before you see links to other image search sites.
Same is true for a lot other stuff. If you search "timer", you'll see a timer, not links to various timers that look ugly as shit.
As a consumer, I love it. So much easier.
On the other hand, google could take over almost any business like this. At least, any business that is "functional" in the sense that the only thing you really want is to get some output based on your input.
There's a clear tradeoff here between what's good for consumers, and concerns about democracy, the concentration of power, etc.. And also innovation. Why start a new company, if google can just take over everything?
There are only two clear, non-arbitrary rules: Search engines are only allowed to show a list of links, or search engines can show whatever they want.