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posted by chromas on Monday May 21 2018, @11:29PM   Printer-friendly
from the Goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle dept.

Mnuchin on Google and tech monopolies: 'You have to look at the power they have'

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin on Monday joined the growing chorus of government officials concerned about tech monopolies. When asked if Google is a monopoly, Mnuchin said, "These are issues that the Justice Department needs to look at seriously — not for any one company — but obviously as these technology companies have a greater and greater impact on the economy, I think that you have to look at the power they have," Mnuchin told CNBC's "Squawk Box." Mnuchin acknowledged that antitrust matters don't fall under his jurisdiction, but said someone ought to be looking.

His comments come on the heels of a "60 Minutes" segment on Google's unparalleled market share in online search. The Sunday night spot included an interview with Jeremy Stoppelman, co-founder of Yelp, which he said "would have no shot" if it were being built today.

Also at Bloomberg.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by idiot_king on Monday May 21 2018, @11:33PM (2 children)

    by idiot_king (6587) on Monday May 21 2018, @11:33PM (#682455)

    One capitalist pig doesn't like how big the slices of pie the other pigs are getting. Who knew? /s

    • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 22 2018, @12:51AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 22 2018, @12:51AM (#682477)

      Four smiling and laughing little girls - none of whom could have been older than ten - had dolls in their hands. Anyone could guess that they were playing a game of house. As the group of girls played, they heard the bedroom doorknob turn, and so they looked towards the door.

      Once the bedroom door fully opened, the looks on the little girls' faces could only be described as 'baffled.' If it had been one of their parents, they could understand. However, the one who stood at the door was a man that none of them had ever seen before. This strange man approached the children with a loving, angelic smile on his face...

      Later, when night had already descended upon the peaceful town, the man walked out of the bedroom the children were playing in and left the quaint little house. If one were to investigate the room, they could find the children. However, these children were very different from before; it was to the point where they could be described as shadows of their former selves. Yes, the girls were indeed different from their past selves; they did not play; they did not smile; they did not speak; they did not move; and they did not wear clothes. In fact, the only thing these children did was rot.

      Over the coming months, and in the name of men's rights, the maggot-filled children did the only thing they were capable of, leaving behind an odor so foul that it made one want to vomit...

    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 22 2018, @02:25AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 22 2018, @02:25AM (#682503)

      This kind of saber rattling by politicians often looks to me like a request for a hush money. Perhaps sometime later it will really come out...when some enterprising reporter follows the money and finds a contribution from a Google affiliate to Mnuchin or one of his relatives, or a related foundation/charity/SuperPAC?

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by darkfeline on Tuesday May 22 2018, @12:08AM (13 children)

    by darkfeline (1030) on Tuesday May 22 2018, @12:08AM (#682463) Homepage

    I think they have a hard case to make if they accuse Google of monopolizing web search. There is zero lock-in and practically zero cost to switching to a different search engine. How difficult is it for a hypothetical user completely locked into the Google ecosystem to switch to DuckDuckGo? About ten seconds of time, one time to switch their browser's default search engine, max. Also, Google can't really stop users from using a different search engine, other than, say, blocking it outright in Chrome (which would be legal suicide), like Microsoft did in the notable IE case. Google has to have done something anticompetitive (like Microsoft conspiring to obstruct the Netscape web browser from being installed), just being a monopoly isn't enough.

    They would have an easier time going after ads, maybe, but selling ads on your website which has huge market share isn't of itself anticompetitive. You'd have to show that Google was unfairly obstructing other ad companies through their dominance of web search, which will be interesting because I'm guessing Google web search is almost entirely AI driven at this point, so how are you going to prove whether the AI was unfairly biased against other ad companies?

    --
    Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
    • (Score: 2, Interesting) by suburbanitemediocrity on Tuesday May 22 2018, @12:32AM

      by suburbanitemediocrity (6844) on Tuesday May 22 2018, @12:32AM (#682473)

      I've been on DuckDuckGo for two years. I don't like google, but don't see how they are a monopoly.

    • (Score: 1) by suburbanitemediocrity on Tuesday May 22 2018, @12:38AM (2 children)

      by suburbanitemediocrity (6844) on Tuesday May 22 2018, @12:38AM (#682474)

      What are searches that show different results based on the search engine. AFAIK, everything that I've ever searched for would show the same results in any SE.

      What is the tele # to bob's best autoservice in Denver?
      imx219 datasheet pdf?
      arduino mega length width mm?

      • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday May 22 2018, @02:04AM (1 child)

        by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday May 22 2018, @02:04AM (#682498) Journal

        Well - I copy/pasted your bob's best autoservice question into duck, then into google. The results are dramatically different - you should try it for yourself.

        Surprisingly, though, the first two results on the Google page are for yelp.com. I thought yelp was "competition" for Google.

        Of course, I have to offer a disclaimer. I probably don't see the same results that anyone else sees. My computer doesn't load googleanalytics, among others. Virtually all ad servers are blocked. Further, javascript is disabled by default on all of my browsers. It would take a bit of work for me to see what the average user might see.

        • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday May 22 2018, @02:18PM

          by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday May 22 2018, @02:18PM (#682635) Homepage Journal

          That information that Google has about you to help it find results that are relevant to you could contribute to lock-in. Or in your case, it doesn't.

    • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday May 22 2018, @01:08AM

      by bob_super (1357) on Tuesday May 22 2018, @01:08AM (#682483)

      Pretty much this. People have been trained to expect the best results, but there is no barrier to switching.

      ISPs, on the other hand ... let's talk about the "competitive" nature of having to dig my own 1/2 mile trench, shall we?
      No wonder the R camp always rails about incompetent government, given how crazy bad they are at doing it.

    • (Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 22 2018, @01:16AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 22 2018, @01:16AM (#682484)

      First, you won't get the same quality of results.

      How difficult is it [...] to switch to DuckDuckGo?

      I've tried the alternatives and I'm thoroughly unimpressed.

      For starters, I keep a boilerplate link to Google[1] on my Personal Toolbar and drag that into an empty Address Bar then edit it.
      At a minimum, it saves me 1 needless pageload per search.

      Other search engines don't make that easy.
      In particular, when they return results, what's now in my Address Bar isn't something I can cut&paste into a comment nor use as a boilerplate for subsequent searches; it's completely useless.
      In short: they suck (JavaScripting idiots).

      [1] Actually, it's 4: basic; verbatim; by-date; images.

      In that Google URL, I can specify the number of items it returns per page of results (1 -100).
      I can also use e.g. start=4 to skip over the first few items, if they don't really apply.

      I can specify e.g. inurl or intitle which can really help with highlighting|spotting my actual search string in the results.

      I can specify only results from the last hour|day|week|month|year (h|d|w|m|y).
      In those, I can specify &tbs=qdr:w,sbd:1 (the ,sbd:1 part is optional and will line up the results most-recent-first); 1 week shown.

      Something I really like that no other has is the ability to use dots or hyphens in their Verbatim search to make phrases.[1]
      N.B. Google's basic search (then, their ONLY type of search--before they dumbed down their basic search) used to do this and do it even better (WRT wildcards).

      [2] S/N's comments engine is completely broken now WRT quote marks in hyperlinks, so the dots thing comes in handy here.

      The others -could- add this stuff, but mostly they're stuck on stupid (JavaScript required, no less).

      Now, add in Google's larger database.
      ...and don't even get me stared on Google's cached pages (where search strings can be can be highlighted) and chintz can be filtered out via strip=1.
      For me, it's absolutely no contest.

      .
      ...and if you're scared shitless about privacy, use a proxy ferchrisake.

      -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

    • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday May 22 2018, @06:59AM (6 children)

      And yes I know very well that DDG is just a front end for Google.

      Perhaps it's like Reynold's Wrap: the Reynold's Aluminum Company supplies foil to other brand names, but that foil is never as thick as the Real Thing(TM).

      I've never found a search engine that worked as well as Google does. Perhaps Google isn't supplying its entire index to competing search companies.

      --
      Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
      • (Score: 5, Informative) by b0ru on Tuesday May 22 2018, @07:34AM (2 children)

        by b0ru (6054) on Tuesday May 22 2018, @07:34AM (#682560)

        Except that google _isn't_ good, anymore, IMHO. Not since all of this useless machine learning nonsense, at least. Their search results are gradually getting much worse and less relevant. Searching for literal strings and the like returns completely unrelated terms and _not_ the literal string at all, for example. I think the utility of them as a search engine has long since gone, and the alternatives are much better. They're an ad company, now. Nothing more.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 22 2018, @08:27AM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 22 2018, @08:27AM (#682565)

          Google isn't a good search engine anymore, but that doesn't prevent them from being the best. All that takes is for the rest of them to be even worse.

          Sometimes I even wonder how much money Microsoft spends to deliberately keep bing worse than Google, because it seems Google has become so bad that it should be easy to beat them even by accident.

          (Not for you or I, of course, getting into the web search business requires a huge amount of servers and storage, but a search engine like Bing already has the servers and storage).

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 22 2018, @07:42AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 22 2018, @07:42AM (#682561)

        Perhaps? Lol, why WOULD they provide their data to the competition?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 22 2018, @05:56PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 22 2018, @05:56PM (#682731)

        no it's not, but startpage is. i try to use duckduckgo but the results suck pretty bad. startpage (when it's not having problems) returns google results without the spying.

      • (Score: 2) by toddestan on Friday May 25 2018, @03:21AM

        by toddestan (4982) on Friday May 25 2018, @03:21AM (#683872)

        Doing a few searches on both would reveal pretty quickly that DDG and Google don't return the same results. And my experience is that Google doesn't return any useful results that I can't find with the Duck. But it does return page after page of irrelevant and useless results unrelated to what I was searching for.

  • (Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 22 2018, @10:23AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 22 2018, @10:23AM (#682589)

    Hasn't Mnuchin got anything better to do - like keeping his wife off social media?

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