What's the goal or endgame for these antitrust cases...
If antitrust is entirely delegated to courts, it's hard to see how it ever becomes more than a "compliance" issue. Fines and/or mandatory adjustments to current MOs. That's hardly trustbusting.
The big pieces aren't a secret. Market share, the big competitive dynamics, income streams and overall structure of the search-ads "industry" and its adjacent, also Google dominated markets like android, youtube and chrome.
How is a judge supposed to decide what to do about all this... Seems like the wrong tool for the job.
SpicyLemonZest 1147 days ago [-]
The goal is to make Google produce evidence in a way that wouldn’t be appropriate outside the context of a court case. Antitrust lawsuits inevitably end with a policy-driven settlement between the target and the DOJ, although the court can in principle order a breakup as they initially did in the Microsoft case.
yawaworht1978 1147 days ago [-]
I think the government is requesting a date range simply to compare the data to what they already think to know.
williesleg 1147 days ago [-]
Yay data!
whatgoodisaroad 1148 days ago [-]
I'm torn between whether I should distrust this site because it's pretending to be associated with Bloomberg ... or if I should distrust this website because it may actually be associated with Bloomberg.
...Is there something factually questionable about this article that would cause you to have suspicions, or is this solely a desire to trash a media outlet you don't like?
Beyond the fact that it isn't "pretending" to be associated with Bloomberg, as another commenter points out, I hardly see anything controversial in the reporting that the DOJ has requested information from Google.
whatgoodisaroad 1148 days ago [-]
No, I'll grant you it's nothing about the content of the article, but rather I don't trust the Bloomberg brand after their handling of the Big Hack story.
iDATATi 1147 days ago [-]
I'm looking for some badass engineers to join our team to create something that is going to take over the advertising model. YES, its true and it has tobe done....
Want to be part of changing the world?
endisneigh 1148 days ago [-]
For the sake of discussion let's just say Google is broken up. Let's also say that it's broken up such that Google Search, Google Ads, and YouTube are separate entities (among others).
In this new broken up set of companies, what's stopping them from remerging like Bell? Also, what's stopping them from giving each other favorable partnerships?
Personally I find this entire exercise a waste of time - rather than break up Google we should just acknowledge that certain industries have certain types of attributes that result in necessarily "anti-competitive" behavior. In Google's case, since it's an internet company I would say the more users it has the harder it is to beat - with that being said they should just create some sort of progressive taxation as a function of users.
Your users in the USA equal 90%+ of the country, you are subject to rules A. Your users in the USA equal to <10%? You are subject to rules B and are subsidized directly by those whose users equal 90%+. If all companies are less than 50% than we use rules c, for example.
The same logic could be used for manufacturing, utilities, internet providers, and more.
AnthonyMouse 1148 days ago [-]
> In this new broken up set of companies, what's stopping them from remerging like Bell?
Continued antitrust enforcement. Nobody should ever have approved those mergers. We can learn from our mistakes.
> Also, what's stopping them from giving each other favorable partnerships?
Why would they want to do that once they have separate owners?
> just create some sort of progressive taxation as a function of users.
How does this solve the monopoly problem at all? It has nothing to do with taxation.
Retric 1147 days ago [-]
The bells merging was really quite reasonable as the market is vastly different. Breaking AT&T into local monopolies plus long distance backbone still left local monopolies in place. Today however VOIP, cellphones, and even internet has brought real competition to the local phone companies. And fiber has largely gutted the long distance call pricing.
Long distance calls where crazy expensive. During weekdays in 1980 AT&T charged $2.17 ($6 in today's money) for a five minute call from NYC to LA. Nights and weekends the same call cost $0.87 ($2.40). Today you can get unlimited nationwide for 34$ per month or pay 3$/month for service and get 10c/minute long distance calls anytime. https://www.att.com/home-phone/landline/long-distance.html
AnthonyMouse 1147 days ago [-]
The real problem with the Bell breakup is that last mile telephone service is actually a natural monopoly. The theory was supposed to be that the operators in neighboring states would expand to compete with each other. But that's just iterated prisoner's dilemma where nobody moves first because they don't want the competitor to respond in kind.
Breakups across verticals make a lot more sense. So separating last mile from long distance, and separating Unix from AT&T, those were actually successes.
viraptor 1147 days ago [-]
Or like the UK did it - separating the service from the infrastructure. Yes, it's not ideal and has issues of its own, but the rolled out infrastructure can be used by many competing providers in that model. Actually it's in the interest of the infra provider that it happens.
hvidgaard 1147 days ago [-]
In my opinion, a data connection to the home should be considered infrastructure equal to roads. A natural consequence of that is that the government creates and maintain said network, probably by contracting the work to private companies on a limited time contract that is put in public procurement procedures as per EU law. That way power infrastructure and other companies that solve a similar problem can make a bid that is significantly cheaper than it would otherwise would be.
Once physical connections is public infrastructure, multiple providers can pay for capacity and sell to the end user with great competition resulting.
edmundsauto 1147 days ago [-]
As someone completely unfamiliar with British telephone, can you explain the trade offs? I’m curious
The tradeoff is basically: If you don't split the infrastructure, you have people experiencing monopoly of ISPs. If you do, you get ISPs experiencing monopoly of Openreach-like organisation.
Neither situation is amazing, but I believe the second option is still better - and it was a way to prevent BT dictating everything. It's also possible for Ofcom (gov watchdog) now to monitor and slap either ISPs or Openreach for not behaving well.
Krisando 1147 days ago [-]
> Wikipedia has a pretty good overview of the whole issue
It doesn't really.
Openreach was not broken up from BT, it only created a seperate department within BT that continued to skirt various rules.
> It's also possible for Ofcom (gov watchdog) now to monitor and slap either ISPs or Openreach for not behaving well.
Ofcom broke up BT so that O2 and BT were seperate entities because allowing BT to have a dominant mobile network too was considered strongly wrong for competition.
Ofcom allowed the larger mobile networks t-mobile and orange to merge together to become a mega huge mobile network.
Turned around and said no to Three and O2 merging despite being a significant market disadvantage even after merger due to being smaller and having access to significantly less Spectrum. Unlike landlines, mobile networks are heavily restricted by needing radio spectrum to grow.
Allowed BT to acquire EE. Allowed BT to acquire one of the larger virtual ISPs PlusNET. Ofcom denied alternate infrastructure provider Virgin from setting up further competitive mobile network infrastructure and forces them to exist a MVNO.
Ofcom have ignored the fact that BT have been able to offer FTTH connections through their infrastructure to customers before any other ISP is permitted to use it over OpenReach.
"like the UK did it" isn't exactly great.
The OpenReach method however is not exactly unlike the FCC, they do requiring a certain amount of sharing through infrastructure via the Wireline Competition Bureau (WCB) and Wireless Telecommunications Bureau (WTB), but one significant difference to offer coverage of other services. Networks operating in the same area have a tendency to reuse the same infrastructure and mutually piggybacking on each other. There is one added difficulty that State laws do exist to frustrate the federal requirements in place.
Mauricebranagh 1147 days ago [-]
No BT sold off O2 to keep the City sweet (I was working for them at the tiem) - of course now they had to buy EE so they had a mobile offering.
And remember ofcoms #1 job is keep Murdoch and the other media barrons happy.
galangalalgol 1147 days ago [-]
I have fiber and cable run for data. When an introductory offer ends, I call them up to cancel and if they won't make me a deal, I call the other provider and move an rj45 from one jack to the one next to it until that introductory offer ends. Last mile doesn't have to be a monopoly.
toast0 1147 days ago [-]
Last mile doesn't have to be a monopoly, but there's a clear limit to how many overbuilt networks can be supported.
Very few organizations are willing to build a third network when an area is already covered by two networks; the cost to build is too high, and the number of customers you'll attract is too low; and the profit margins are too slim, given how quickly incumbent networks can be made competitive when there's a will.
Vanishingly few would overbuild a fourth network.
Often two, sometimes three, and almost never four competitors is not a healthy marketplace. There's no way for a regular person to say 'my ISP stinks, I'm going to go out and do a better job', like you could in the dial-up days by getting a T1 for data, and a T1 for users to call in on. Yes, T1s were expensive, but they weren't as expensive as wiring up to every customer. If we want competition in ISPs, we need local loop unbundling, but for realsies; the companies owning and operating last mile networks should be strictly separate from the companies providing Internet Protocol services on those networks.
mjevans 1147 days ago [-]
Where I live ( Suburbs around Seattle, NOT even close to rural ) for even the FFC's definition of broadband (25M bit down, I forget, like 1M bit up?), until VERY recently there has been exactly ONE provider.
Comcast.
Recently a real competitor opened up. Starlink. They're still more expensive but at least now I technically have a choice other than maybe 7M bit down not even 0.75M bit up DSL. (Century Link, formerly lots of other companies.)
d110af5ccf 1147 days ago [-]
> NOT even close to rural
In Washington you can sometimes do better in certain rural counties thanks to municipal fiber networks maintained by the local PUD. However, the rules surrounding them appeared complicated last time I checked and last mile infrastructure varies wildly by location.
mjevans 1146 days ago [-]
They are, and IIRC they prevent real PUDs, what you're referring to is probably a private co-operative not technically a PUD. I believe sources have attributed the laws to incumbent providers (Think Comcast, USWest and either GTE or Verizon at the time, and whomever those properties have been resold / bought out by since then).
toast0 1146 days ago [-]
My county (Kitsap) seems to have a municipal PUD. From what I can tell, the rules prevent them from providing retail service; but if they service your building, you can pick from a list of ISPs that provide service. There's some sort of fallback option, where if there's no retail ISPs, the PUD can provide retail service; but I suspect it's pretty easy to provide retail service to any customer on the network once you're an ISP on the network. Maybe if you didn't want to drive all over the county to get on premises.
What would be really nice (in my opinion) is if there was a way to share installation costs without organizing. I've got an installation quote where it's about $30k to build to my pole (and then $20k more to get from my pole to my building, because I have underground utilities from the pole and a long driveway). If I organize a bunch of neighbors along the route, we can share costs on that $30k; but if I just install for me, everyone else along the route can use it at no cost to them. It would be nice if I could pay the $30k now, and get some of that rebated later if other people use the line in some near term future. Although, probably the neighbors would just wait it out; Comcast serves most of them (but not me), and CenturyLink gets me 80/10 mbps on bonded VDSL2, so I imagine most of them can get pretty similar too.
1147 days ago [-]
1147 days ago [-]
wbl 1147 days ago [-]
How many nobel prizes did Lucent get?
AnthonyMouse 1147 days ago [-]
> How many nobel prizes did Lucent get?
How many is Google getting right now?
brainwad 1147 days ago [-]
> Why would they want to do that once they have separate owners?
Why or how would they end up with separate owners? The current owners of Alphabet would get equal shares in all demerged companies, I would hope. And presumably with the same 3-class stock system, so they would all be controlled by the same people, too.
peteretep 1147 days ago [-]
Alphabet is listed, isn't it? So on day 1 after the split, I buy a single share in Alphabet-Search but not in Alphabet-Video, and then sue Alphabet-Search for giving Alphabet-Video a sweetheart deal that's not in my interests as a shareholder?
pid_0 1147 days ago [-]
But it would be in your interest as it would help both products.
summerlight 1147 days ago [-]
> Why would they want to do that once they have separate owners?
Because the established business model is proven to be super effective and all the organizations and infrastructures are already optimized for the such model? The real question is, why would they deviate from the existing anti-competitive behavior if reforming the "Google cartel" with business partnership will give them a roughly same level of functionality?
You gotta understand that their incentive functions are already tightly aligned with each other because that's what network effect is precisely supposed to do, so it will naturally head toward anti-competitive regardless of whether they are separate entities or not. The only meaningful action to prevent that would be highly targeted and specific antitrust remedies.
bagacrap 1147 days ago [-]
Seems likely they'd ink deals that are long term and hard to break (both legally and technically), like switching cloud service providers can be.
nova22033 1147 days ago [-]
Continued antitrust enforcement.
how would you demonstrate consumer harm when youtube was giving away the product for free?...or instagram...or whatsapp..
mmcconnell1618 1147 days ago [-]
The enforcement of antitrust changed from market share to consumer harm. There is nothing stopping a court from changing the definition back. NPR has a really good 3 part podcast on the history of this and future implications:
It's not free. "You're not the customer, you're the product," right?
So the cost is the terms under which the product is offered, e.g. the conditions under which you can be excluded at the behest of advertiser sensibilities. If those conditions aren't that nobody is ever banned for any reason then the cost is higher than it could be in a more competitive market.
You also have similar costs as a result of algorithmic recommendation algorithms that promote things that aren't you over things that are you at the behest of the monopolist, and the amount content providers get paid by the platform (it could be higher or you could be not demonetized for nonsense reasons) etc.
stiray 1147 days ago [-]
Let me add the little detail as no one ever finished the sentence and I believe a lot of people are struggling with.
"You are not the customer, you're the product. The customers are advertisers, that are buying YOUR data from the google."
That should make it clearer, right?
endisneigh 1148 days ago [-]
> Continued antitrust enforcement. Nobody should ever have approved those mergers. We can learn from our mistakes.
That’s a nice thought but clearly doesn’t work in practice. I could be wrong though, are there any examples you can cite of monopolies being broken and staying that way in the USA?
> Why would they want to do that once they have separate owners?
They’re already familiar with each other.
> How does this solve the monopoly problem at all? It has nothing to do with taxation.
You don’t think a unavoidable tax that goes into smaller companies won’t hurt monopolies?
AnthonyMouse 1147 days ago [-]
> That’s a nice thought but clearly doesn’t work in practice.
It doesn't work if there is regulatory capture. But if the government is captured then you can't have your tax either, so then what are you proposing as a solution?
> They’re already familiar with each other.
Google and Oracle are familiar with each other. Apple and Intel are familiar with each other. Amazon and Netflix are familiar with each other.
> You don’t think a unavoidable tax that goes into smaller companies won’t hurt monopolies?
If they can keep abusing their monopolies to prevent there from being any competitors? There still won't be any competitors.
endisneigh 1147 days ago [-]
I don’t see the connection between regulatory capture and what I’m describing.
> If they can keep abusing their monopolies to prevent there from being any competitors? There still won't be any competitors.
Which monopolies are you referring to have zero competitors?
> Google and Oracle are familiar with each other. Apple and Intel are familiar with each other. Amazon and Netflix are familiar with each other.
I don’t understand your point here, you’re listing pairs of competitors. Are you really not aware of large companies helping each other out?
AnthonyMouse 1147 days ago [-]
> I don’t see the connection between regulatory capture and what I’m describing.
In order to pass some kind of tax, you need regulators to pass some kind of tax. If the government is captured by the companies, they don't pass any kind of anything the company doesn't want, so you lose. If it isn't captured by the companies, you can do antitrust enforcement.
> Which monopolies are you referring to have zero competitors?
Apple and Google each have a monopoly on app stores for their respective platforms, for example.
Note that "monopoly" for antitrust doesn't mean that there are exactly zero competitors. It only means that one of them dominates the market and has market power.
> I don’t understand your point here, you’re listing pairs of competitors. Are you really not aware of large companies helping each other out?
Google and Oracle hate each other and are constantly embroiled in bitter litigation. Apple just jettisoned Intel's processors in favor of their own. Netflix has used Amazon (AWS) for hosting and it didn't stop Amazon from going into competition with them for content production (Amazon Prime Video).
Companies do what they like. What they like is to make money. One of the best ways to do that is to go make the money that some other company is currently making, or "commiditize your complement."[1] It isn't to altruistically help out competitors for no reason.
For the sake of discussion, suppose your rules existed, I foresee dumb loopholes like creating a competing product (a la Google subsidizing Firefox) for the sole purpose of avoiding a now codified definition of monopoly. With regards to tariffs, we see this exact dumb thing happening with cameras only being able to record 55 seconds of video because if they record 1 minute then they are considered video cameras. Because the companies know their customers, inevitably they will just outcast the least productive users to the shoddier service.
endisneigh 1147 days ago [-]
I completely agree - I’m not saying my proposal is ideal or even perfect, but rather there are alternatives to attempting to break up large companies in generals.
toast0 1148 days ago [-]
> In this new broken up set of companies, what's stopping them from remerging like Bell? Also, what's stopping them from giving each other favorable partnerships?
The terms of the consent decree or judgement that gets issued. In terms of partnerships, the terms should require that all deals between the babyGs should be public, and a non-discriminatory, non-exclusive basis; along with requirements for some of the babyGs to not own or operate in some areas, or to only own or operate in some areas.
I think that could go a long way towards making things competitive.
lumost 1147 days ago [-]
Arguably, breaking up AT&T still forced competition into the telephone space for ~30 years. By the time AT&T had remerged to form at&t they were both a smaller portion of the economy and still had real competition in the form of Verizon, level3, StarLink and others.
If Google was broken up it's entirely plausible that by the time it re-merged search would either be a commodity service or just not that important.
adamcstephens 1147 days ago [-]
Yes, this is very important. We need to break up and regulate the large firms to make room for competition. Many of the benefits of capitalism are actually destroyed by monopolies.
We also need to continue to regulate monopolies, because if we lapse again and let the mergers flow we’ll be right back where we are again. And again.
stonogo 1147 days ago [-]
They never did remerge to any monopolistic effect. I think you're strongly underestimating the degree to which the Bell System monopoly affected telecommunications. You couldn't even plug your own telephone into the wall; you had to give it to them and lease it back from them -- and pay an installation fee along the way, or you did without telephone service. Several of the Baby Bells got huge again, but none of them were in a monopoly position ever again. Many of them never even participated directly in the services market again, like LSI or Lucent.
The other piece of the Bell breakup that people always overlook is that the federal directive did not merely break up the corporation. It also mandated that all Bell System patents be made available for use without fee by possible competitors. The result was an explosion of innovation and technological development (including within Bell companies!) and the consequences were massive.
xapata 1148 days ago [-]
It's important to note that there are a handful of negative externalities created by market dominance. Even if it's not anticompetitive, it still creates systemic risk. The blast radius of an AWS outage is quite large. The tax should be proportional to the systemic risk created.
This holds for tariffs as well. If we are overly reliant on imported facemasks, we should tax them to subsidize a small amount of domestic production in case of catastrophe.
runeks 1147 days ago [-]
> The blast radius of an AWS outage is quite large. The tax should be proportional to the systemic risk created.
I disagree. If in a certain industry we cannot accept the risk incurred by being reliant on AWS we should legislate against that by requiring insurance.
xapata 1147 days ago [-]
> requiring insurance
That's effectively a tax, outsourcing collection to insurance companies. I'm fine with that, too.
latch 1147 days ago [-]
AWS is a poor example because they aren't remotely close to having the market dominance of Google. They are more like McDonalds: a huge fish in an ocean.
AWS is huge in a segment (cloud) of the industry, but that segment represents a very small % of the overall industry.
xapata 1147 days ago [-]
Both AWS and McDonald's are good examples, because we should have a policy that applies at all levels of dominance with no discontinuities. Just as in programming, special cases are (legal) code smells. If the policy can't cleanly handle industry segmentation, it's probably going to fail.
leoh 1147 days ago [-]
Agreed. We should focus on passing legislation around the behavior that we don't like as opposed to trying to break up these companies. There's a good chance that in the process of passing such legislation — for example, the kind that limits significant user tracking — that monopolistic effects would begin to fade.
adamcstephens 1147 days ago [-]
We already have the legislation that makes what they do illegal. We just need to enforce it.
chiefalchemist 1147 days ago [-]
Breaking up the Ma Bell monopoly did create new opportunities. It also showed, at least to some extent, to those considering such opportunities that the gov was (semi) serious about the situation.
Mind you, the Baby Bells were allowed to re-merge too quickly. We still lack competition in many areas. Imagine if there was no breakup at all.
snarf21 1147 days ago [-]
We really just need the SEC and FTC to do their job. They have completely failed us in the 21st century. And this is not just in tech. Look at media, banks, etc. It is no wonder the stock market is irrational, regulatory capture is a powerful multiplier.
choppaface 1147 days ago [-]
What’s the probability that users could “choose their ad provider” for Google Search and ditch adsense? Would the break-up be like how Microsoft had to offer alternatives to IE? Perhaps more likely is that the auctions and search index material get regulated.
ppf 1147 days ago [-]
I thought the accepted solution to entrenched incubents was "disrupt!".
1148 days ago [-]
unyttigfjelltol 1148 days ago [-]
Does this mean the content of Google searches now will be sent directly to the U.S. gov't and state gov'ts? It seems like the kind of privacy intrusion that would concern everyday people.
gruez 1148 days ago [-]
>The Alphabet Inc. unit is being asked to share data on how and where users searched in those periods, the quantity of different types of ads, revenue from those ads and what the underlying bids were for them, among other details. The government told the company it wants the information within 30 days.
doesn't seem like it.
testesttest 1148 days ago [-]
> search results and related ad from Feb. 2, 2015 to Feb. 8, 2015 and from Feb. 3, 2020 to Feb. 9, 2020
It's a very specific date range to help build the case. The article was very clear about this.
generalizations 1148 days ago [-]
It certainly sets a very bad precident. At the very least, it will be far easier to ask for more, once the basic premise has been established.
prepend 1147 days ago [-]
Precedent of meeting discovery requirements? The data delivered should only be used for specified purposes so it’s not like the antitrust prosecutors can just comb through it.
Antitrust cases are rare, so even if they did do inappropriate things, it would only happen every antitrust investigation.
Plus, these data are already given to NSA in total and large chunks to law enforcement.
Cthulhu_ 1147 days ago [-]
Google set the bad precedent by appearing to abuse their monopoly on the search market.
ggggtez 1147 days ago [-]
The article seems to imply that it's just aggregated data about what ads were shown and stuff.
stjohnswarts 1148 days ago [-]
I'm sure they (governments of any sort) like this as a side effect
charcircuit 1147 days ago [-]
>It seems like the kind of privacy intrusion that would concern everyday people.
Privacy is dead. Everyday people are not concerned about privacy. They don't care that someone will potentially see their "How do I cook a hotdog" search.
zo1 1147 days ago [-]
I'm a tech person that regularly wears the proverbial tin-foil hat and I for the most part also don't agree with a lot of the privacy items. I see a good chunk of it as a sort of religious tech-age form of "luddism", whilst the other chunk as a conspiracy being pushed by large-tech companies precisely because "privacy" suits them.
grep_name 1147 days ago [-]
How can you wear a tinfoil hat if you don't think privacy is important?
IncRnd 1147 days ago [-]
That's been happening for a long time. You can see this has happened through programs such as PRISM.
3131s 1147 days ago [-]
HN is filled with spooks downvoting the truth.
andy_ppp 1147 days ago [-]
I wonder about this too, I’m sure there are centres shaping online communities out there if there are programmes like PRISM etc. still about.
valvar 1147 days ago [-]
It's a common line of thought that often surfaces and it is listed in the HN guidelines as one of the things that should not be insinuated. So that's why your parent is getting downvoted.
BrianOnHN 1147 days ago [-]
Common enough that there's something behind it.
However, @dang suggests there is nothing HN can do to insulate us from "sufficiently smart manipulators." [1]
In the first article they claim to never "broadcast" with their sock puppets in English language, which was a legal barrier set by the Smith-Mund Act at the time, a barrier that was officially removed in 2012: https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/14/u-s-repeals-propaganda-...
Tbh I wouldn't be too surprised if those US and Five Eye programs are the first of their kind, yet they have a very easy time flying under the radar because for the most part it's a home-match for them: No Reddit, Twitter or Facebook will ban a bunch of US IPs for allegedly running "propaganda operations", yet with Iranian, Chinese, Russian and whatnot IPs that's a very regular thing.
Makes me wonder if Chinese or Russian platforms like WeChat or VKontakte ever banned a bunch of American IPs for similar reasons?
bagacrap 1147 days ago [-]
I imagine the data will be aggregated/anonymized.
Cthulhu_ 1147 days ago [-]
If that does not exempt them from the antitrust allegations it's going to cost them dearly.
esperent 1147 days ago [-]
Why do you think that? Is data usually anonymised in private court orders in the US?
bagacrap 1147 days ago [-]
because the data is useless if not aggregated. Does the government really want to sift through billions of individual search queries with tons of metadata attached to each? No, they want to see trends from which conclusions can be drawn.
Anonymization is partly a result of aggregation, but also I can't see how and PII is relevant to the case here.
esperent 1146 days ago [-]
However, the government may ask for all the unaggregated search data so they can perform statistical analysis on it themselves... and "coincidently" gain access to a huge trove of personally identifying data. This is the US government we're talking about here - they do have a history of overreach in this area.
Romanulus 1147 days ago [-]
I can't imagine proof (or the worth of proof) for something imagined.
ses1984 1148 days ago [-]
They aren't already?
TheSpiceIsLife 1148 days ago [-]
Only if you consider The Government a homogeneous whole.
Now some more bureaucrats and sys admins can take a peek too.
1148 days ago [-]
stjohnswarts 1148 days ago [-]
No they aren't, and unless you have proof that they do it's a conspiracy theory on the level of aliens and the Rothschild Illuminati.
barbacoa 1147 days ago [-]
Under prism google gave direct access in real time to all their data to the nsa including search history.
ggggtez 1147 days ago [-]
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't PRISM done without the knowledge of Google? Wasn't the whole scandal that the NSA was wiretapping everyone including Google's internal corp network?
barbacoa 1147 days ago [-]
The government has the ability to issue national security letters using its expansive surveillance power granted under section 215 of the patriot act. These also have very restrictive gag orders against disclosure. Rank and file employees would be unaware of these searches. If a big tech company went full nuclear with their lawyers it's possible that they could have gotten the whole patriot act ruled unconstitutional. But they didn't. They all cooperated. PRISM took this one step further and was a project where google (and everyone else) gave the government direct searchable access to their databases.
There is no reason to think this isn't still going on.
mda 1147 days ago [-]
This is also a myth.
Proziam 1147 days ago [-]
Citation needed
juanani 1148 days ago [-]
PRISM should be enough proof, doubt we will see anymore. What's all this concern about the Annunaki?
gens 1148 days ago [-]
Room 641A is a similar thing.
_jal 1147 days ago [-]
Is true. And there is more that can't be proven.
But it is also true that Google and ATT are very different companies. The Snowden leaks lead Google to encrypt internal links, once they realized NSA were tapping them; ATT built NSA Room 641A.
But this is rather more complicated than that; I'd bet money there are are people employed at Google who wear more than one hat[1], as there have been at tech companies throughout the history of Silicon Valley. And practices at Google makes NSA's life easier - Organizing the World's Advertising Targets is actually a remarkably compatible goal.
thatguy0900 1147 days ago [-]
It's funny, it even has an ominous name and everything, fits perfectly in a list with aliens and illuminati
IncRnd 1147 days ago [-]
That's ludicrous, misleading, and extremely unhelpful almost to the point of dishonesty. Look for the documents leaked by Glenn Greenwald and informatin on PRISM.
im3w1l 1148 days ago [-]
Do you want some real paranoia fuel? Foreign governments are likely to have moles with log access.
Black101 1148 days ago [-]
It seems like it would be temporary because an antitrust case seems like a slam dunk?
VirgilShelton 1147 days ago [-]
Uhh what have you been searching for?
brainwad 1147 days ago [-]
If Google is prohibited from paying for default search engine status, because it is judged a monopoly, will that condemn us all to default Yahoo or Bing, like Firefox tried a few years ago? Google should at least be able to match the top bid of its competitors, so that device manufaturers / browser developers can make a pro-user choice (i.e. Google) without losing revenue.
eejjjj82 1147 days ago [-]
you mean .... will that condemn users to manually switch their default search engine to Google? if so, then maybe that's a good thing.
also, with Duck Duck Go (and I assume others) I think it's more than debatable that Google is the defacto "pro-user" choice
1147 days ago [-]
killingtime74 1147 days ago [-]
You’re asking a question that will only be answered at the end of a long sequence of litigation by judge(s). That is if it is not settled first. Most likely we will never know.
xiphias2 1148 days ago [-]
I have problems with many things that Google is doing, but making Google the default search engine everywhere is not one of them.
jeffbee 1148 days ago [-]
LOL 30 days. Even a Googler who wanted that data would be waiting a minimum of half a year before anyone from the logs access rotation even glanced at their ticket.
Plus, one wonders if Google even holds the data the US government is requesting.
Plusplus, I hate it when "granular" is used as if it has a direction, which it does not. Are the feds asking for fine-grained data, or coarse-grained data?
detaro 1147 days ago [-]
> Even[!] a Googler
It's an interesting world view where being a random Googler apparently suggests higher priority than a DOJ request.
erhk 1147 days ago [-]
They left out the caveat of with business and production need and VP and driector approval but it kills the theme of the message to enumerate all of the classifiers.
Moving that much sensitive data is a big task with invokves many interested parties.
maximente 1147 days ago [-]
nah, the DC office's tech talent ain't bad, although like most engineers they're not the best at efficiently communicating technical stuff to, say, staff lawyers
Black101 1148 days ago [-]
> Plus, one wonders if Google even holds the data the US government is requesting.
lol... I don't wonder this at all... but either ways, the government could potentially get it in real time (like the NSA, today).
fdcvcx 1147 days ago [-]
“Even a Googler who wanted that data would be waiting a minimum of half a year before anyone from the logs access rotation even glanced at their ticket.“
Good for the Googler, patience is a virtue.
A US Judge [1] with an order outranks Schmidt and the bratty twins. The logs folks get 30 days to comply or they get thrown in jail for contempt of court.
[1] unfortunately just the US. And China. China doesn’t even need a judge’s order. A rude tweet from a minor official at the San Fran consulate and Alphabet bends over.
Rendered at 13:53:04 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
If antitrust is entirely delegated to courts, it's hard to see how it ever becomes more than a "compliance" issue. Fines and/or mandatory adjustments to current MOs. That's hardly trustbusting.
The big pieces aren't a secret. Market share, the big competitive dynamics, income streams and overall structure of the search-ads "industry" and its adjacent, also Google dominated markets like android, youtube and chrome.
How is a judge supposed to decide what to do about all this... Seems like the wrong tool for the job.
Beyond the fact that it isn't "pretending" to be associated with Bloomberg, as another commenter points out, I hardly see anything controversial in the reporting that the DOJ has requested information from Google.
Want to be part of changing the world?
In this new broken up set of companies, what's stopping them from remerging like Bell? Also, what's stopping them from giving each other favorable partnerships?
Personally I find this entire exercise a waste of time - rather than break up Google we should just acknowledge that certain industries have certain types of attributes that result in necessarily "anti-competitive" behavior. In Google's case, since it's an internet company I would say the more users it has the harder it is to beat - with that being said they should just create some sort of progressive taxation as a function of users.
Your users in the USA equal 90%+ of the country, you are subject to rules A. Your users in the USA equal to <10%? You are subject to rules B and are subsidized directly by those whose users equal 90%+. If all companies are less than 50% than we use rules c, for example.
The same logic could be used for manufacturing, utilities, internet providers, and more.
Continued antitrust enforcement. Nobody should ever have approved those mergers. We can learn from our mistakes.
> Also, what's stopping them from giving each other favorable partnerships?
Why would they want to do that once they have separate owners?
> just create some sort of progressive taxation as a function of users.
How does this solve the monopoly problem at all? It has nothing to do with taxation.
Long distance calls where crazy expensive. During weekdays in 1980 AT&T charged $2.17 ($6 in today's money) for a five minute call from NYC to LA. Nights and weekends the same call cost $0.87 ($2.40). Today you can get unlimited nationwide for 34$ per month or pay 3$/month for service and get 10c/minute long distance calls anytime. https://www.att.com/home-phone/landline/long-distance.html
Breakups across verticals make a lot more sense. So separating last mile from long distance, and separating Unix from AT&T, those were actually successes.
Once physical connections is public infrastructure, multiple providers can pay for capacity and sell to the end user with great competition resulting.
The tradeoff is basically: If you don't split the infrastructure, you have people experiencing monopoly of ISPs. If you do, you get ISPs experiencing monopoly of Openreach-like organisation.
Neither situation is amazing, but I believe the second option is still better - and it was a way to prevent BT dictating everything. It's also possible for Ofcom (gov watchdog) now to monitor and slap either ISPs or Openreach for not behaving well.
It doesn't really.
Openreach was not broken up from BT, it only created a seperate department within BT that continued to skirt various rules.
> It's also possible for Ofcom (gov watchdog) now to monitor and slap either ISPs or Openreach for not behaving well.
Ofcom broke up BT so that O2 and BT were seperate entities because allowing BT to have a dominant mobile network too was considered strongly wrong for competition.
Ofcom allowed the larger mobile networks t-mobile and orange to merge together to become a mega huge mobile network.
Turned around and said no to Three and O2 merging despite being a significant market disadvantage even after merger due to being smaller and having access to significantly less Spectrum. Unlike landlines, mobile networks are heavily restricted by needing radio spectrum to grow.
Allowed BT to acquire EE. Allowed BT to acquire one of the larger virtual ISPs PlusNET. Ofcom denied alternate infrastructure provider Virgin from setting up further competitive mobile network infrastructure and forces them to exist a MVNO.
Ofcom have ignored the fact that BT have been able to offer FTTH connections through their infrastructure to customers before any other ISP is permitted to use it over OpenReach.
"like the UK did it" isn't exactly great.
The OpenReach method however is not exactly unlike the FCC, they do requiring a certain amount of sharing through infrastructure via the Wireline Competition Bureau (WCB) and Wireless Telecommunications Bureau (WTB), but one significant difference to offer coverage of other services. Networks operating in the same area have a tendency to reuse the same infrastructure and mutually piggybacking on each other. There is one added difficulty that State laws do exist to frustrate the federal requirements in place.
And remember ofcoms #1 job is keep Murdoch and the other media barrons happy.
Very few organizations are willing to build a third network when an area is already covered by two networks; the cost to build is too high, and the number of customers you'll attract is too low; and the profit margins are too slim, given how quickly incumbent networks can be made competitive when there's a will.
Vanishingly few would overbuild a fourth network.
Often two, sometimes three, and almost never four competitors is not a healthy marketplace. There's no way for a regular person to say 'my ISP stinks, I'm going to go out and do a better job', like you could in the dial-up days by getting a T1 for data, and a T1 for users to call in on. Yes, T1s were expensive, but they weren't as expensive as wiring up to every customer. If we want competition in ISPs, we need local loop unbundling, but for realsies; the companies owning and operating last mile networks should be strictly separate from the companies providing Internet Protocol services on those networks.
Comcast.
Recently a real competitor opened up. Starlink. They're still more expensive but at least now I technically have a choice other than maybe 7M bit down not even 0.75M bit up DSL. (Century Link, formerly lots of other companies.)
In Washington you can sometimes do better in certain rural counties thanks to municipal fiber networks maintained by the local PUD. However, the rules surrounding them appeared complicated last time I checked and last mile infrastructure varies wildly by location.
What would be really nice (in my opinion) is if there was a way to share installation costs without organizing. I've got an installation quote where it's about $30k to build to my pole (and then $20k more to get from my pole to my building, because I have underground utilities from the pole and a long driveway). If I organize a bunch of neighbors along the route, we can share costs on that $30k; but if I just install for me, everyone else along the route can use it at no cost to them. It would be nice if I could pay the $30k now, and get some of that rebated later if other people use the line in some near term future. Although, probably the neighbors would just wait it out; Comcast serves most of them (but not me), and CenturyLink gets me 80/10 mbps on bonded VDSL2, so I imagine most of them can get pretty similar too.
How many is Google getting right now?
Why or how would they end up with separate owners? The current owners of Alphabet would get equal shares in all demerged companies, I would hope. And presumably with the same 3-class stock system, so they would all be controlled by the same people, too.
Because the established business model is proven to be super effective and all the organizations and infrastructures are already optimized for the such model? The real question is, why would they deviate from the existing anti-competitive behavior if reforming the "Google cartel" with business partnership will give them a roughly same level of functionality?
You gotta understand that their incentive functions are already tightly aligned with each other because that's what network effect is precisely supposed to do, so it will naturally head toward anti-competitive regardless of whether they are separate entities or not. The only meaningful action to prevent that would be highly targeted and specific antitrust remedies.
how would you demonstrate consumer harm when youtube was giving away the product for free?...or instagram...or whatsapp..
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/03/20/704426033/anti...
So the cost is the terms under which the product is offered, e.g. the conditions under which you can be excluded at the behest of advertiser sensibilities. If those conditions aren't that nobody is ever banned for any reason then the cost is higher than it could be in a more competitive market.
You also have similar costs as a result of algorithmic recommendation algorithms that promote things that aren't you over things that are you at the behest of the monopolist, and the amount content providers get paid by the platform (it could be higher or you could be not demonetized for nonsense reasons) etc.
"You are not the customer, you're the product. The customers are advertisers, that are buying YOUR data from the google."
That should make it clearer, right?
That’s a nice thought but clearly doesn’t work in practice. I could be wrong though, are there any examples you can cite of monopolies being broken and staying that way in the USA?
> Why would they want to do that once they have separate owners?
They’re already familiar with each other.
> How does this solve the monopoly problem at all? It has nothing to do with taxation.
You don’t think a unavoidable tax that goes into smaller companies won’t hurt monopolies?
It doesn't work if there is regulatory capture. But if the government is captured then you can't have your tax either, so then what are you proposing as a solution?
> They’re already familiar with each other.
Google and Oracle are familiar with each other. Apple and Intel are familiar with each other. Amazon and Netflix are familiar with each other.
> You don’t think a unavoidable tax that goes into smaller companies won’t hurt monopolies?
If they can keep abusing their monopolies to prevent there from being any competitors? There still won't be any competitors.
> If they can keep abusing their monopolies to prevent there from being any competitors? There still won't be any competitors.
Which monopolies are you referring to have zero competitors?
> Google and Oracle are familiar with each other. Apple and Intel are familiar with each other. Amazon and Netflix are familiar with each other.
I don’t understand your point here, you’re listing pairs of competitors. Are you really not aware of large companies helping each other out?
In order to pass some kind of tax, you need regulators to pass some kind of tax. If the government is captured by the companies, they don't pass any kind of anything the company doesn't want, so you lose. If it isn't captured by the companies, you can do antitrust enforcement.
> Which monopolies are you referring to have zero competitors?
Apple and Google each have a monopoly on app stores for their respective platforms, for example.
Note that "monopoly" for antitrust doesn't mean that there are exactly zero competitors. It only means that one of them dominates the market and has market power.
> I don’t understand your point here, you’re listing pairs of competitors. Are you really not aware of large companies helping each other out?
Google and Oracle hate each other and are constantly embroiled in bitter litigation. Apple just jettisoned Intel's processors in favor of their own. Netflix has used Amazon (AWS) for hosting and it didn't stop Amazon from going into competition with them for content production (Amazon Prime Video).
Companies do what they like. What they like is to make money. One of the best ways to do that is to go make the money that some other company is currently making, or "commiditize your complement."[1] It isn't to altruistically help out competitors for no reason.
[1] https://www.gwern.net/Complement
The terms of the consent decree or judgement that gets issued. In terms of partnerships, the terms should require that all deals between the babyGs should be public, and a non-discriminatory, non-exclusive basis; along with requirements for some of the babyGs to not own or operate in some areas, or to only own or operate in some areas.
I think that could go a long way towards making things competitive.
If Google was broken up it's entirely plausible that by the time it re-merged search would either be a commodity service or just not that important.
We also need to continue to regulate monopolies, because if we lapse again and let the mergers flow we’ll be right back where we are again. And again.
The other piece of the Bell breakup that people always overlook is that the federal directive did not merely break up the corporation. It also mandated that all Bell System patents be made available for use without fee by possible competitors. The result was an explosion of innovation and technological development (including within Bell companies!) and the consequences were massive.
This holds for tariffs as well. If we are overly reliant on imported facemasks, we should tax them to subsidize a small amount of domestic production in case of catastrophe.
I disagree. If in a certain industry we cannot accept the risk incurred by being reliant on AWS we should legislate against that by requiring insurance.
That's effectively a tax, outsourcing collection to insurance companies. I'm fine with that, too.
AWS is huge in a segment (cloud) of the industry, but that segment represents a very small % of the overall industry.
Mind you, the Baby Bells were allowed to re-merge too quickly. We still lack competition in many areas. Imagine if there was no breakup at all.
doesn't seem like it.
It's a very specific date range to help build the case. The article was very clear about this.
Antitrust cases are rare, so even if they did do inappropriate things, it would only happen every antitrust investigation.
Plus, these data are already given to NSA in total and large chunks to law enforcement.
Privacy is dead. Everyday people are not concerned about privacy. They don't care that someone will potentially see their "How do I cook a hotdog" search.
However, @dang suggests there is nothing HN can do to insulate us from "sufficiently smart manipulators." [1]
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-op...
https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/4ylml3/reddit...
In the first article they claim to never "broadcast" with their sock puppets in English language, which was a legal barrier set by the Smith-Mund Act at the time, a barrier that was officially removed in 2012: https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/14/u-s-repeals-propaganda-...
Tbh I wouldn't be too surprised if those US and Five Eye programs are the first of their kind, yet they have a very easy time flying under the radar because for the most part it's a home-match for them: No Reddit, Twitter or Facebook will ban a bunch of US IPs for allegedly running "propaganda operations", yet with Iranian, Chinese, Russian and whatnot IPs that's a very regular thing.
Makes me wonder if Chinese or Russian platforms like WeChat or VKontakte ever banned a bunch of American IPs for similar reasons?
Anonymization is partly a result of aggregation, but also I can't see how and PII is relevant to the case here.
Now some more bureaucrats and sys admins can take a peek too.
There is no reason to think this isn't still going on.
But it is also true that Google and ATT are very different companies. The Snowden leaks lead Google to encrypt internal links, once they realized NSA were tapping them; ATT built NSA Room 641A.
But this is rather more complicated than that; I'd bet money there are are people employed at Google who wear more than one hat[1], as there have been at tech companies throughout the history of Silicon Valley. And practices at Google makes NSA's life easier - Organizing the World's Advertising Targets is actually a remarkably compatible goal.
also, with Duck Duck Go (and I assume others) I think it's more than debatable that Google is the defacto "pro-user" choice
Plus, one wonders if Google even holds the data the US government is requesting.
Plusplus, I hate it when "granular" is used as if it has a direction, which it does not. Are the feds asking for fine-grained data, or coarse-grained data?
It's an interesting world view where being a random Googler apparently suggests higher priority than a DOJ request.
Moving that much sensitive data is a big task with invokves many interested parties.
lol... I don't wonder this at all... but either ways, the government could potentially get it in real time (like the NSA, today).
Good for the Googler, patience is a virtue.
A US Judge [1] with an order outranks Schmidt and the bratty twins. The logs folks get 30 days to comply or they get thrown in jail for contempt of court.
[1] unfortunately just the US. And China. China doesn’t even need a judge’s order. A rude tweet from a minor official at the San Fran consulate and Alphabet bends over.