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posted by janrinok on Thursday February 22 2018, @09:04PM   Printer-friendly
from the how-find-you,-m'lud? dept.

The Case Against Google: Critics say the search giant is squelching competition before it begins. Should the government step in?

[...] might have been surprised when headlines began appearing last year suggesting that Google and its fellow tech giants were threatening everything from our economy to democracy itself. Lawmakers have accused Google of creating an automated advertising system so vast and subtle that hardly anyone noticed when Russian saboteurs co-opted it in the last election. Critics say Facebook exploits our addictive impulses and silos us in ideological echo chambers. Amazon's reach is blamed for spurring a retail meltdown; Apple's economic impact is so profound it can cause market-wide gyrations. These controversies point to the growing anxiety that a small number of technology companies are now such powerful entities that they can destroy entire industries or social norms with just a few lines of computer code. Those four companies, plus Microsoft, make up America's largest sources of aggregated news, advertising, online shopping, digital entertainment and the tools of business and communication. They're also among the world's most valuable firms, with combined annual revenues of more than half a trillion dollars.

In a rare display of bipartisanship, lawmakers from both political parties have started questioning how these tech giants grew so powerful so fast. Regulators in Missouri, Utah, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere have called for greater scrutiny of Google and others, citing antitrust concerns; some critics have suggested that our courts and legislatures need to go after tech firms in the same way the trustbusters broke up oil and railroad monopolies a century ago. But others say that Google and its cohort are guilty only of delighting customers. If these tech leviathans ever fail to satisfy us, their defenders argue, capitalism will punish them the same way it once brought down Yahoo, AOL and MySpace.

[...] There's a loose coalition of economists and legal theorists who call themselves the New Brandeis Movement (critics call them "antitrust hipsters"), who believe that today's tech giants pose threats as significant as Standard Oil a century ago. "All of the money spent online is going to just a few companies now," says [Gary Reback] (who disdains the New Brandeis label). "They don't need dynamite or Pinkertons to club their competitors anymore. They just need algorithms and data."

Related: Microsoft Relishes its Role as Accuser in Antitrust Suit Against Google
Google Faces Record 3 Billion Euro EU Antitrust Fine: Telegraph
Antitrust Suit Filed Against Google by Gab.Ai
India Fines Google $21.17 Million for Abusing Dominant Position
Google's Crackdown on "Annoying" and "Disruptive" Ads Begins


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  • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday February 23 2018, @04:59PM (3 children)

    by tangomargarine (667) on Friday February 23 2018, @04:59PM (#642460)

    Hey, I didn't say I buy their logic. I just try a bit harder to figure out what they're trying to say ;)

    It's true that we're not consulted at birth about what sort of government we personally want to have. You can take the last of the boxes (moving box) to object, I suppose.

    There's the old saw that these Randians who seem to love the idea of anarchy, should try moving to Somalia and see how much they like it then. I'm a middle ground sort of person, in that with *no* regulations, companies will bend us all over, but the government should only impose enough regulation to protect the public interest (prevent dangerous products being sold, that sort of thing). If the feds would just stop giving monopolies to ISPs and such, competition would work out a lot of the problems we have on its own.

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  • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Friday February 23 2018, @06:40PM (2 children)

    by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Friday February 23 2018, @06:40PM (#642541) Homepage Journal

    Hey, I didn't say I buy their logic. I just try a bit harder to figure out what they're trying to say ;)

    And I didn't mean to imply that you did. If I came across that way, my apologies.

    I was just a little taken aback by the concept of "intellectual violence" as I think I made pretty clear.

    It's true that we're not consulted at birth about what sort of government we personally want to have. You can take the last of the boxes (moving box) to object, I suppose.

    A fair point. However, I'd say we also (as we've seen over the last couple centuries) have the choice to work toward *changing the way our government works* in addition to the choice to leave.

    There's the old saw that these Randians who seem to love the idea of anarchy, should try moving to Somalia and see how much they like it then. I'm a middle ground sort of person, in that with *no* regulations, companies will bend us all over, but the government should only impose enough regulation to protect the public interest (prevent dangerous products being sold, that sort of thing). If the feds would just stop giving monopolies to ISPs and such, competition would work out a lot of the problems we have on its own.

    How much and what kinds of regulation government (at *all* levels) puts into place is, IMHO, a reflection of those who vote to elect representatives to act for them.

    There is a relatively new (more than half a century, but short in terms of the life of our current form of government) tradition of writing laws to be intentionally vague (and this is not a partisan thing either), and leaving the details to "regulatory agencies." This allows elected folks (who we can complain about all we want, but *we* elected them) to take "credit" for passing "laws to "protect us" while being able to decry unpopular stuff by blaming "regulation" by agencies that those same people created with those laws they trumpeted as so wonderful.

    I'm sure we agree on the necessity for certain laws/regulations and disagree on others. That's normal, as we are different people with different ideas about what's appropriate.

    That's what politics is *supposed* to be about. People who disagree making good-faith efforts to work together on things we *can* agree upon for the benefit of us all.

    It's not the idea that I'm right and you're wrong, so unless I get my way, all the way, I'll make sure nothing gets done, or at least do my best to discredit and demonize those who disagree with me.

    As to your point about ISPs, I agree that we need much, much more competition. However, the federal government's involvement in granting monopolies there is pretty much non-existent. It's state and local governments that grant those mono/duo-polies.

    This isn't directed at you, it's just appropriate in the context here, that state and local governments generally have much more power to impact our daily lives than does the federal government. And state/local governments tend to be at least as (often much, much more) corrupt than the federal government.

    It's often much easier to strike out at national government figures, especially on media (radio, TV, "social" media, and even sites like this one), as most people will know who they are.

    However, your city councilman, state assemblyman/senator, mayor/town executive and governor have enormously more power to impact your daily life than does the federal government. Going after Nancy Pelosi, Paul Ryan, Donald Trump or Barack Obama in those fora has much more impact than calling out Greg Wren*, Bill Postmus*, Rod Tam*, Sheldon Silver* or any of the other of the *dozens* of state and local officials who have been *convicted* of bribery, theft and corruption.

    *Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_state_and_local_politicians_convicted_of_crimes [wikipedia.org]

    --
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    • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday February 23 2018, @06:59PM (1 child)

      by tangomargarine (667) on Friday February 23 2018, @06:59PM (#642554)

      You didn't come off as confrontational. I've just been spending too much time on Reddit lately, lol.

      I don't even have the foggiest idea who my local reps are, as I don't follow local news really either. My interaction with the gov't is pretty minimal other than renewing driver's license etc. I did get called for jury duty last summer, which was a very interesting experience (almost ended up on the jury but not quite).

      Dunno if "Intellectual Violence" is an actual term in those spheres; it was just my layman's word.

      --
      "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"