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, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 10 2019, @03:39PM (7 children)
I approve.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday September 10 2019, @10:15PM (6 children)
Are they those creatures with nose above their thin forehead and the third worst poetry?
Nope, those are the vogons; meh, wasted metaphor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 10 2019, @10:43PM (5 children)
There is a very special corner of hell for those who dare to compare voltron to vogons.
Enjoy the poetry. Death is too good for you heathens.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday September 10 2019, @10:52PM (4 children)
Attorney generals are public servants, aren't they? How come they aren't vogons then?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 10 2019, @11:03PM (3 children)
Yous from the penal colony probably are not aware, but state attorneys generals are mostly elected - they are lizards, not vogons.
Pipe down and stop proving your ignince.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday September 10 2019, @11:12PM (2 children)
Since when is this an impediment for a vogon?
Being downunder, I can't be piping anywhere else but down, innit?
As for ignince... is that a typo or a vogon figure of speech?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 10 2019, @11:30PM (1 child)
I can only guess in your penal colony, even a vogon manages to get elected. Shit don't work that way in other places, not even in the Trump land.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday September 10 2019, @11:38PM
Yeah, you have a point.
In other places (as those you mention), shit doesn't work at all, it just spontaneously happens.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday September 10 2019, @04:02PM
Most of Google is already accustomed to alien anal probing. The aliens actually have a word for the probe. "Google". Have you been googled, lately? http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-c8Q3YriQD_Y/Ta7r9S1n5wI/AAAAAAAAMm4/lE4c-rdw0K0/w1200-h630-p-k-no-nu/anal-probe.jpg [blogspot.com]
(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.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(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.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(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.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(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?
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 10 2019, @04:48PM (2 children)
As soon as the government goes after a company on antitrust laws that company was about to decline anyway.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 10 2019, @05:43PM
Pretty much. The time to do something about Google was when it was buying up the competition and giving itself a massive advantage in the ad space.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday September 10 2019, @09:09PM
In about 1999-2000 Microsoft was getting so powerful it was scary.
Google and Facebook are powerful. Remember when the internet pages went dark to protest SOPA ?
Google might decline if they can't maintain existing products instead of killing them and introducing new products that do the same thing. But so far it doesn't seem to hurt them.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by ilsa on Tuesday September 10 2019, @05:24PM (1 child)
Considering the results of the last few anti-trust probes they've done, and the completely and total ineffectiveness thereof, I have difficulty believing that this is just a bunch of posturing designed to make them look like they're doing something useful and justifying their jobs.
I have no expectations that anything useful will come out of this apart from some meaningless "oversight" reports, at best.
(Score: 3, Informative) by DannyB on Tuesday September 10 2019, @08:08PM
The Microsoft antitrust circus didn't go too badly. Only two things seemed to go wrong at the very end:
1. The judge foolishly spoke to the press before formally announcing the verdict.
2. A Republican administration being elected. After the government fully proving their case: Ashcroft dismissing it because it was "without merit". Much like the Regan dismissing the IBM antitrust for being "without merit". But see the book: "Big Blue: IBM's Use and Abuse of Power". But then, the 1980's weren't kind to IBM.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by shortscreen on Tuesday September 10 2019, @06:42PM (2 children)
If these states are concerned about goog's anticompetitive behavior (they should be), maybe they could start by REMOVING all of the google-analytics, googletagmanager, google-apis, and recaptcha shit from their own GOVERNMENT websites?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 10 2019, @06:59PM
this just shows that they are only fighting over the slaves.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by barbara hudson on Tuesday September 10 2019, @07:19PM
No Javascript and no links to external scripts, external css, external html, external images, is the way to go.
It should be possible to access any government site using a text browser such as links or lynx. Requiring all this other crap means the site doesn't comply with the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act).
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday September 10 2019, @08:58PM
Why are congress and prosecutors so into probing?
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 10 2019, @11:44PM
Send armed police teams (with shoot to kill orders on anyone not cooperating) and confiscate their records of illegal activity and arrest all those present at the premises.
Shut the thing down until an investigation can be complete, or use government employees and contractors to run the thing under complete supervision of the judiciary.
Google has been guilty of killing competition by sending their infiltrators to other companies and destroying them from the inside (Yahoo! etc). Google contains conspirators who want a world different from what the people of the world want.