Arguably, Google divesting Chrome would be great for the web. This piece seems to be looking at Google at large (and I think all of Alphabet would be better scope there).
Certainly this would be unpopular here but I would be all for aggressive trust-busting beyond what the DOJ has done historically, including vertical integrations.
Right now tech is a strange feudal state with hundreds of thousands of small teams anchored to a few hydra-like super-corporations on a consuming destructive rampage. Somehow, with the most advanced computer and technological systems to ever be known by man, we're looking to increase working hours and cut benefits, for "profits" that are not quite realized by the labor class or the end users.
Gonna be interesting to see what happens. I know Wall Street will place their bets for what they want to happen right along side what's obviously going to shake out once the market becomes 'rational.'
The administration doesn’t give a shit about the web, and DOJ is a fully political entity. They’ll extort Google for whatever concession they want, and Chrome will remain.
Things are going to get more heated as the voluntary economic downturn heats up. The current protests get some coverage but we’re starting to see even the loyalists realize that they won’t be spared, and that is likely to increase protests considerably.
Well now to be fair, total surveillance and suppression of any content they don't like is worth a whole lot more than rare earth deposits to a government.
I honestly don't see what the issue is. "Pressuring" in this case just means "asking". Nobody was punished for not fulfilling these requests.
And funding research grants into studying misinformation doesn't really bother me either. Maybe there are better ways to spend the money but you could argue that about almost anything.
Also, none of what you linked points to the Biden administration paying tech companies to remove content.
You are right my apologies. It only says we paid a quarter of a billion dollars to “study” which in this case meant paying for “non profits” to comb through a bunch of nobodies posts online in addition to paying for government employees to be on site at twitter specifically.
So you’re right it doesn’t say the directly cut a check. Only paid for people to find it. Paid for the people to communicate the offending posts to the social media companies.
In addition to all this the Biden admin “coerced and pressured”.
I won’t accept this if trump does it and I won’t accept Biden having done it. I cannot fathom how anyone would, given how quickly the winds have changed in America. It should be painfully obvious that the tools “your side” uses will be used by your political enemies.
There is still no evidence that SARS CoV 2 was leaked from Chinese BSL4 lab in Wuhan because evidence links virus to Russian BSL4 lab «Vector». For example, first report for atypical pneumonia with rate of 100 cases per day (700 per week) was on Oct 16 in Russia as reported by newspaper «Аргументы и факты на Енисее» №42. Many Russians medics had immunity to Covid19 already when epidemic started, as shown by their antibodies.
The constitution establishes that a core role of government is to provide for the general welfare of the people, and public health is part of that. I’m generally in favor with government efforts to combat misinformation.
I’m also fine with wartime propaganda within limits for similar reasons.
Can't blame Mexico and China for heart disease. So it's of little political value. A government will take on public health challenges whose root causes can be used to confer political value. Other public health challenges may be more serious, but they are worthless to a politician.
That's actually why politicians shouldn't be in charge of those sorts of things.
I am not fine with war time propaganda. I want to know what the government is choosing to do and why.
I am not against war and even the occasional puff piece about how sexy the latest military tech is sexy is fine. It still is necessary in this day and age to stomp those that strip others of human rights and lives, yet I cannot think of any military action since Vietnam I have felt comfortable that I have not been outright lied to about underlying causes, methods used, and the after affects.
My full adult life it has seemed the government is convinced it is the Illuminati with a mandate to gaslight the public. That bad decisions don’t matter and no one is responsible seems like a horrible status quo when lives, the environment, and our tax dollars are at stake.
9/11 turned wartime propaganda into an excuse to strip freedoms that certain parties have been lusting after and no promises were kept about timelines for them being returned. When trust is abused to that extent the government should lose any rights to do so again.
> Arguably, Google divesting Chrome would be great for the web.
Because then Chrome would slowly rot since there's no one to fund development, leading us to WebKit being the only engine, as Firefox is also defunded. I don't see how that's better.
The new owner of Chrome can sell it to the manufacturers of Android devices. Royalties.
They can even make it closed source or enforce a not for commerce license. That would make manufacturers choose between paying those royalties, installing Firefox, investing in their own browser (a fork of Chrome or their very own tech.) Some of them will pay royalties.
That’s assuming the divested Chrome would then proceed to lose its gigantic market share and thus the mind-boggling proceeds from defaulting to Google as the search engine. They might even be able to afford a bigger development team, if need be.
But what makes you think the DoJ allow Google to continue paying Chrome to have Google as default? Google is already not allowed to pay Apple to be default.
As long as OS vendors are allowed to bundle browsers with their OS then any paid browsers is at a huge disadvantage. Most people are going to pay for a browser when their OS comes with a free one that is good enough. Thats how Microsoft killed Netscape Navigator.
> aggressive trust-busting beyond what the DOJ has done historically, including vertical integrations.
Vertical integration was a huge part of what they went after historically, until a bunch of people "convinced" the US that the standard should be "consumer harm." The cool thing about consumer harm is that you can come up with any bullshit argument about how prices will go down and access and quality up in the future from some merger, and nobody can disprove it because it's a counterfactual (he said, she said.) And when prices go up, it's just <shrug>, who could have known?
I know what vertical integration is today, though. It's not a hypothetical, it's a selling point to investors. I can just tell you no. Any clear metrics or standards for antitrust action can't be tolerated. The goal is to force us to go on vibes. Then they say we have bad vibes.
Competition brings down prices. Laissez-faire leads to pseudo-Communism with royal families, courtiers, and technicians making up the top 10%, and everybody else gets to be a (debt) slave i.e. feudalism.
We should err towards breaking more things up than would be ideal, not less. If I make you divest from something, you sell it and get whatever future value out of it today. It's not a punishment according to SCOTUS when they're looking at TikTok (which is why they said the TikTok ban wasn't a bill of attainder.) We charter these companies, and they operate for our benefit, which is why we grant them limited liability and a whole bunch of other treats. What you divest is going to go to somebody just like you, but someone who is not financially entangled with you. The only reason you want to keep it all is to do things that I don't want you to do with it, I don't want you doing unproductive market manipulation, I want you to put that energy into competing.
> The only reason you want to keep it all is to do things that I don't want you to do with it
Surely, the reason you want to keep it is because owning and controlling thing A and thing B allows you to make more profit personally than being a controlling owner of thing A or thing B.
That said, I agree with your post and also think nations should err more on the side of breaking things up.
Concentrations of power distort markets and resist democratic control.
> Somehow, with the most advanced computer and technological systems to ever be known by man, we're looking to increase working hours and cut benefits, for "profits" that are not quite realized by the labor class
Somehow?? This is capitalism 101. Not a "strange feudal state" nor anything else.
Certainly this would be unpopular here but I would be all for aggressive trust-busting beyond what the DOJ has done historically, including vertical integrations.
Right now tech is a strange feudal state with hundreds of thousands of small teams anchored to a few hydra-like super-corporations on a consuming destructive rampage. Somehow, with the most advanced computer and technological systems to ever be known by man, we're looking to increase working hours and cut benefits, for "profits" that are not quite realized by the labor class or the end users.
Gonna be interesting to see what happens. I know Wall Street will place their bets for what they want to happen right along side what's obviously going to shake out once the market becomes 'rational.'