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Get ready to be probed by the Antitrust Voltron, Google: Attorneys general combine from Texas, New York, Maine, Arizona, Missouri...
From IRC we get the following story:
The attorneys general of 50 US states and territories are teaming up to probe Google for possible antitrust violations, Ken Paxton, the AG for Texas, announced on Monday.
The bipartisan push involves 48 states, with only Alabama and California – the latter being the home of Google and Silicon Valley – declining to take part. Washington DC, and Puerto Rico, a US protectorate, have stepped up, though, bringing the total number of prosecutors to 50.
California Assemblyman member Jordan Cunnigham (R-San Luis Obispo) expressed disappointment that California's State Attorney Xavier Becerra isn't part of the monopoly probe. "Attorney General Becerra's refusal to join the bipartisan investigation into the tech giants is embarrassing. California deserves to be at the table," he said.
Paxton will be leading the probe, described as "a multistate investigation into whether large tech companies" – cough, cough, Google – "have engaged in anticompetitive behavior that stifled competition, restricted access, and harmed consumers."
"Now, more than ever, information is power, and the most important source of information in Americans' day-to-day lives is the internet. When most Americans think of the internet, they no doubt think of Google," said Attorney General Paxton.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 4, Interesting) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Tuesday September 10 2019, @04:09PM (12 children)
Really though, I think the question here is about power.
I have been thinking a lot about this concept I am for now calling 'slimy trust abusing lateral power grab'.
A small example would be if you took your coworkers by your house and one of them freely wanders the entire floorplan ahead of you unsupervised all the way back to your bedroom closet. (true story)
A big example would be the rape of the etruscan women, the red wedding etc. Hitchikers, babysitters, boyscot troops, priests, accountants, financiers, azure executives....our world has a huge problem with this.
Google by being a well funded company with a breakthrough technology was able to use this thing called 'leverage' to make around ten thousand slimy trust abusing lateral power grabs to the point at which they are within only 20 years as powerful as a branch of government and the performance of their networks is as important to the short term performance of the global economy as the weather itself.
Do you guys know about the 'multi stakeholder whatever' that is the basis of the governance model for the global DNS? It's literally a fuzzy wuzzy morphological field of words, there is no there there. The same can be said about google except it is completely private and has no public responsibility, and therefore operates actually like a vast conspiracy with a PR department. It's the same model as all of these companies, near complete integration with the police state, executives selling data to the highest bidder and saying it was leaked if caught, purchasing any possible competitor or just stealing their ideas if they don't have lawyers.
At this part it looks to me, conceptually, like a katamari damacy game. This has total historical precedent though despite all the new bells and whistles, this happened with railroads, telephones and emf waves. And we always came to a conclusion that merged corporations and the state in some kind of predatory balance that was just tolerable enough to the population.
These software platforms are something different though because the global transfernce of bits is inevitable and because they replace all the previous modes of the informal forums that are the basis of human political governance. And now a handful of multi stakeholder fuzzy wuzzies holds them in the palm of their hand, and I am having difficulty seeing congress at the moment as anything more than a begger grabbing onto the shirtsleeve of the terminator, trying to shake him down for nickels or some other piece of the action.
I will however hope they close google, arrest the executives, repurpose the money to build something better, destroy the data that violates everyone's rights by making a global map of what everyone is thinking at any given time, and then selling it to be twisted more precisely, and open source their search algorigthm minus the ad suggestion part. The public has suffered enough, but good luck expecting their google search results to report that to them.
When a company gets rid of it's 'don't be evil' motto, that's not a sign of them 'growing up' that's a sign you should probably start running. Or convene hearings, so yeah in true american form this would have been a great idea 10 years ago or at least before 2016.
thesesystemsarefailing.net
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday September 10 2019, @04:54PM (6 children)
You had me until
- if you want to do the soft sell, you need to avoid the cliche' trigger phrases.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday September 10 2019, @08:03PM (3 children)
Alphabet could branch out into private for profit prisons. (that force 24/7 ad viewing on all four walls of your cell)
Alphabet could also become a defense contractor. In fact, with Boston Dynamics, they almost might have been. But alas B/D didn't produce practical killer robots quickly enough for the military's taste.
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(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday September 10 2019, @08:13PM (2 children)
And they may have managed to somehow do this, and more, without disclosing it on their public financial statements because: "national security."
However, the same evil, nefarious, potential futures await almost any sufficiently large organization, from IBM to Dow Chemical to JPL to Hasbro toys...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday September 10 2019, @08:53PM (1 child)
At least I can take comfort in the fact that Google won't be evil. They said so. And they wouldn't lie because they're not evil.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday September 11 2019, @01:09AM
Why do you think they had to spin off Alphabet?
You really know for sure when they spin off a company called: "Google, dark mode."
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Wednesday September 11 2019, @11:29AM
what if I told you google was started by a DARPA project? How are you so easily triggered? How is this a cliche? Do you know the meaning of that word? Or Soft sell?
do you not think any usa police officer can get access to any gmail account without even having to ask? And all 50+ spy agencies that are active in the domestic united states? And all shared with several foreign countries? That epstein could have read your mail if he wanted?
do you not know the people who opted out of tracking were being tracked the whole time?
are you really arguing against my point or are you just uncomfortable that is either correct or will *sound* like an overstatement?
do you really not think spy agencies are not trying to not just infiltrate but actually own all of the major software platforms? do you really expect any of these organizations to create any actual privacy solutions?
to do so it would seem to me would be making a huge number of wild assumptions, far wilder than the questions I am making, which should be indicative of which attitude is more accurate.
What is the world going to be like when nation states can simply sabotage the operation of all software they don't like and pretend it wasn't them, that their IT staff was just incompetent. Effectively a massive ideologically based DDOS fired from *the inside* of the software, just because they want you to shut up.
Certain recent events come to mind, mozilla's certificate renewal failure, SN being taken offline because no one here believed the obviously psychop veritas story about a fake google employee leaking something that distracted from epstein? NSO group pretending they weren't just handed the iphone bugs to exploit by the designers? What do you think those windows 10 "updates" are really doing? Would you buy the brooklyn bridge if I offered it to you if you just installed my software on your bitcoin miner?
That last one I'm serious about, because if you get all of the other answers wrong, you're going to get that one wrong too.
Face it, government(s)/nwo/tptb/whateveritis really, really, really does not want you to have a functioning cpu that they cannot readily monitor. This is the line which is being drawn and moving rapidly in the direction of crass totalitarianism, evidenced I think quite handlily by the likelihood the reader has probably never considered these ideas until this very moment and it's f*cking 2019.
People who advocate for this privacy and/or are capable of actually building it can expect doubleplusextra attention from miniluv as recognition for our wrongthink, and may be featured in an upcoming 2 minutes hate.
And once they have me/us out of the way, guess who they are coming for next. So you're being, I think, pretty anti-intellectual by trying to remove some of the most important phrases from the discussion. This is not the soft sell, we are in hard sell territory, what is going on is not extremely dangerous to democratic and even republican or federal institutions, and the entire concept of humans being able to have rights.
thesesystemsarefailing.net
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 11 2019, @02:48PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 10 2019, @07:47PM (2 children)
That's not Google, that's the DNC!
(Score: 3, Touché) by DannyB on Tuesday September 10 2019, @08:04PM
Reality is indeed a vast left wing conspiracy.
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(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Tuesday September 10 2019, @10:24PM
Not like the DNC has monopoly on vast conspiracies, is it?
I mean... if they did have a monopoly, the attorney generals of 50 states would investigate them, right?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0, Redundant) by Ethanol-fueled on Tuesday September 10 2019, @10:41PM (1 child)
The TL;DR of this is that law hasn't kept pace with technology. I don't give a flying fuck about the antitrust issues as much as I do the search manipulation. Hell, I don't even believe that Google needs to be splintered, but it does need more political diversity in its ranks.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday September 11 2019, @02:41PM
It seems to be just fine to create your own news outlet to suit your tastes for facts. FoxNews
It seems to be just find to create an alternate encyclopedia with facts adjusted to taste. Conservapedia
Why not create an alternate search engine?
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