Gab is suing Google for allegedly violating antitrust laws
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Railroad law and regulation from a century ago is worth studying when trying to figure out how to deal with monopolies with strong network effects. Railroads had even stronger networking effects.
[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=sU0sAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA202&lpg=...
Tagging everything as a "utility" and demanding they be regulated as such is as far removed from the conservative ethos as the altright apparently.
They ran atop the same network that everyone else had access to and achieved, the accurate analog to the railway example is the ISPs and not these companies.
Where do we draw the line between a company "abusing" its network effects and a company avoiding being abused by other companies? (e.g. Imagine a app store that distributes only free software backed by a big corp, then a small proprietary app maker complains that they don't want to accept their app because its proprietary).
Is the size of the company the criteria that decides if they are in the right or in the wrong?
Yes. That's the whole point of antitrust law.
I don't think the app description of Gab is an appropriate content. Google seems to assume that the content of the Gab app will be innapropriate. Given this is about freedom of speech I'm not sure they should be the one deciding this. Are they also removing Gab from their Google Search results?
Were Google just one of many available app stores for Android, would this be a weaker case? (Or: would railways have been regulated as common carriers were there several parallel railways next to each other, or if the track owner was not the only person operating trains on the line?)
What if OS + Store integration was done at the cell phone manufacturer level? What if they all ended up settling on the same default store (say, Google's?)? Would it depend on why they had selected that one? Would it depend on how many others existed? (And same question if OS + Store integration was done at cell network operator/phone reseller level.)
What if there was a plethora of app stores that various phones came with, but they all or almost all independently decided an app was not representative of them, or distasteful, or inappropriate?
Yes. See US vs. Microsoft.
What if Microsoft had never made a browser, but 90% of manufacturers chose to make Netscape default over Opera, and Opera sued them for it?
Also, why only comment on one of the scenarios?
This is going to be fun. I hope they're forced to clarify what exactly they mean by "sufficient level of moderation". If that's going to be their angle I have to say it sounds wobbly. I'd be more comfortable with a, "It's our platform, get bent!" approach.
EDIT: Could the downvoters please explain what they disagree with or why this post is low quality, if only for my edification? Is it controversial to think Google's control over the Android app store constitutes a monopoly, deserving special regulation? Or maybe that we should be nuanced about which services should be regulated as a utility? I'm open to persuasion here.
But maybe I should hedge this position by learning to write malware so I can have a leg up when the floodgates open. :)
EDIT: Animats makes a great point above in his comparison to railroads. Very apt-sounding comparison. Slides my thoughts around to consider that the difference today is how low the stakes are for would-be content creators - in the past you were much more likely to need a business case to justify, today things are so cheap you might just write an app to troll. If there are policy changes needed, seems like that shift is where they would come from, and that we haven't really talked about it from that side much.
I have much more problem with forcing someone to distribute things than I do with forcing them to allow other distribution methods.
I think we have decided the answer is yes.
Buggered if I have a solution, I just know these sorts of things are problems.
When did we decide this? To my knowledge it's still a debate.
And IMHO, we shouldn't force anyone to sell/buy anything from/to anyone.
should a Muslim bakery be forced to bake a cake for a gay couple? genuine question.
Which phones are these?
Walmart and other large retailers have alternatives available in most areas, and it's incredibly easy to choose to shop in one of these alternatives as well.
Microsoft was convicted on an antitrust charge, while "anyone" still could install Linux on their computer, or buy a Mac.
Something has to give. Ideally it would be the CFAA and copyright synergy that makes online incumbents virtually impossible to beat (right now, the oft-cited "network effect" has little to do with the difficulty of competing with a major player, as there are much more significant legal barriers at play).
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Reply to sibling comment from majormajor which I typed up but am not allowed to post:
"Because Walmart isn't sitting in your pantry and throwing non-Walmart items off your shelves. Google is doing the digital equivalent of this on Android devices."
Posting this here because HN classifies content critical of running database clusters on Kubernetes as a "flame war". Correspondingly, they throttled my account for holding a professional, calm, and even-handed discussion on that subject, and I can't post replies any more for some hours.
The thread that got me throttled can be found at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14453705 ; judge for yourselves whether this constitutes a "flame war".
Really kind of appropriate to hit this issue in a thread about lumbering tech monoliths abusing their control over user attention.
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Triple-edit: it's interesting that comments that point out HN's censorship tank so quickly. Is the intent to get the score so low that they can "flag" it off the page and keep it safe from other readers' attention? You wouldn't think HN would do that, but then, you wouldn't think they'd limit an account for expressing skepticism over Kubernetes either...
Facebook posts are not. They're much closer to print or broadcast media, which has long been regulated differently and not in an "anything goes regardless of the publisher's thoughts" style. And same with digital stores corresponding much more to physical stores than telecom infrastructure.
If you have a counterexample of a business being forced to act as a public distributor of any anonymous person's content, I would appreciate it, because I can't think of one. Having the right to share your opinion is not the same as others having to help you propagate it. EDIT: see above updated comment referencing railroads link from Animats
Not being a lawyer, I don't know what the legal consequences of proving capriciousness of policy enforcement would be. Maybe nothing. But IF it's legally consequential and actionable, then it would be easy to prove.
If Gab.ai is built upon the premise that it does exactly ZERO curtailing, then it isn't going to get very far by trying to throw twitter under the bus in order to claim it is being treated inequitably.
It's not. They censor child porn and a few other things that are broadly illegal.
Okay. Lets be more precise. Does 'Zero curtailing of hate speech' work for you?
I guess the important part is whether they, in their terms of service, police hatespeech in the legal sense. Which I'm unsure of.
> If Gab.ai is built upon the premise that it does exactly ZERO curtailing, then it isn't going to get very far by trying to throw twitter under the bus in order to claim it is being treated inequitably.
This is the assertion I was challenging - Gab does not promise "zero curtailing" as they censor content that is illegal in the jurisdiction in which they reside.
For what it's worth, I think Google has every right to put in place whatever policies they want, so long as they are equally enforced. The complaint here seems to be that the rule that Google is accusing Gab of breaking is not enforced against other customers. I have no idea if that's legal or not.
I think you've skipped the key point here.
>Google's position doesn't need to be that twitter is free from hate, but rather that it does enough to curtail it.
The implicit premise of Gab and it's explicit stated position is that it will not curtail hate speech. Absent other indications, words in contracts are interpreted to have meaning. Accordingly, significant has a 'non-zero in some context' meaning.
Zero =/= Non-zero. Accordingly Gab is in breach.
Trying to compare them to twitter and other platforms that do moderation isn't a like-for-like comparison in the contractual framework this is being analyzed under.
Pro-bono I could see firms taking it, lots of press and the chance of being defined as a top tech-related litigation company. Or Google's many enemies could finance this.
There is zero chance that a law firm would take this pro-bono, regardless of the perceived marketing benefits, because it's simply too expensive.
It will not be financed by Google's enemies. If it's financed, it will be by a litigation financing company like Burford or Bentham IMF or something.
It's an important question that might define the future generation of programmers. Hacking used to mean something specific: it meant you were free of channels. It didn't matter if you owned a channel when people were tinkering in their basement on something they owned.
Now it's all interconnected, and questions of ownership are critically important. I respect Stallman, but he was hard to take seriously. Then, suddenly, even his outlandish ideas seem pescient.
https://www.idc.com/promo/smartphone-market-share/os 80+% market share in shipped phones, although that probably includes Android forks with non-Google Play stores (in China maybe?)
Can you explain in greater detail what you mean by this?
For consumers this new world meant the same choices everywhere, but only a few of them. When I grew up there were only 2 or 3 of most things, and since they were all aiming at the middle of the market there wasn't much to differentiate them.
One of the most important instances of this phenomenon was in TV. Here there were 3 choices: NBC, CBS, and ABC. Plus public TV for eggheads and communists. The programs the 3 networks offered were indistinguishable. In fact, here there was a triple pressure toward the center. If one show did try something daring, local affiliates in conservative markets would make them stop. Plus since TVs were expensive whole families watched the same shows together, so they had to be suitable for everyone.
And not only did everyone get the same thing, they got it at the same time. It's difficult to imagine now, but every night tens of millions of families would sit down together in front of their TV set watching the same show, at the same time, as their next door neighbors. What happens now with the Super Bowl used to happen every night. We were literally in sync.
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Android's Play Store, iPhone's App Store, Reddit and HN are all channels that define our generation. When you point out someone's project to a coworker and they say they already saw it on HN, that means you're both being influenced by the same channels. It molds you far more profoundly than most of us like to admit to ourselves.
Hacking was, briefly, a respite from this. When computers weren't synonymous with business, you had to love it. You invested your time and money into it because it fascinated you, not because it was a good investment.
You also had access to the entire ecosystem. You could see what everything was doing, and how everything worked. If you didn't like something, you could just change it.
In return, you owned everything. You were free to take whatever you needed and to contribute however you could. Ideas and skill alone determined the outcome.
It wasn't quite that simple; ideas still had to be promoted. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-paper.html
But they could be promoted and they could win against the objection of any higher authority. In fact, it seems strange that any authority could ever have been in a position to decide Emacs' fate.
Yet that is our present world. Apple doesn't like you? Gone. Ditto for Google. These are the authorities you answer to. You obey masters; we all do.
Missed it while I was on a "no media" diet during school, but we do seem to watch the same channels.
It strikes me that their argument on iOS might be even stronger given the relative unpopularity of jailbreaking devices these days and the complete lack of sideloading functionality for non-developers.
He has critiziced what he calls "extreme capitalism" in the past. But I highly doubt that he would support a regulation that could potentialy undermine freedom (not only economic freedom) and harm not only big companies but also small players.
In my humble opinion, I don't like the precedent the gab lawsuit is trying to set. I'm for free association, but against active collusion. They're only suing Google and they're not alleging collusion between multiple parties (like Apple).
The registrar thing is a whole other ball of wax. One company has a monopoly on domain registrars. That's going to prove to be a big problem for people who are not on the Right one day very soon.
I'm hoping the courts can see the difference when judging "free association" and just throw this out.
Recently a popular thread here discussed a child murderer whom had been admitted to Harvard, but they later renegged. Many people echoed the argument that: 'if someone isn't allowed to participate in society like a normal person, then why even let them out of prison, because it only otherwise encourages them towards crime?'
What should we do about people who are not allowed to participate in society like normal people, but have committed no crime? If we want to remain logically consistent, shouldn't we lock up the Trump supporters with the baby killers?
That's a serious claim to make without evidence. Perhaps you have evidence and you're not sharing it. If that's the case you should ask yourself why you're not comfortable sharing that evidence, and if that discomfort should apply to making the claim at all.
Alternately and more likely, you have no evidence, in which case you should certainly not make such a claim.
No, we should let them participate in society. Political discrimination is the same as religious discrimination: bad.
What is the difference between these two statements?
1) Muslims shouldn’t be allowed to run social apps
2) Republicans shouldn’t be allowed to run social apps
Same shit different religion.
This is especially true with economic policy, which really has little to do with religious belief, but even with a lot of social policy its true.
That is, while there probably aren't many devout Catholics who support late stage abortion, the opinions on things like LGBT rights, the environment, refugee and immigration policy, homelessness, access to education, and more will vary wildly between devout Catholics. That second part is also true for devout Protestants and Jews and Muslims and Buddhists.
Sure the means might not sit in exactly the same places, but that's very different than the political spectrum in the US, which is essentially bimodal.
Case in point: US imagery invokes a lot of God stuff and Germans still pay church taxes. Most religions in most of the modern world are also tax exempt organizations etc.
Andrew was kicked out among other reasons for saying "Build the wall" to a YC alum who was expressing concerns about Trump's proposed ban on immigrants (and how the ban might affect their life directly).
Your point is an important one and worth serious discussion. Ultimately, people have always demonized some subset of the population; it's what people do no matter the century. It's certainly traumatic, but what's to be done? Even scientists give up, and they're a stubborn bunch: http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3376
He was doing a pretty good job of not being particularly nice to someone in the screenshots I saw. I won't go out of my way to witch-hunt him or anything but implying he was kicked out strictly because of his political viewpoint is a really tall claim to make without evidence.
If someone is going to get punished and excluded anyway, why would they care about the fine points of what gets called "racism" and adjust their behavior to stay in line? Once people aren't following the rules, the rules cease to be an effective way to modify behavior. Drug dealers don't pay taxes, and alt-right pariahs don't care about how offensive they are.
But there's also the impact of anonymity and zero-cost (dollar wise) widely-spread speech. Both of these are major recent changes compared to how things had been for decades previous. Maybe you're expressing it in the most extreme terms in part just for the reaction—this is obviously generally not productive from a societal perspective, but used to be restricted to a much smaller set of people who didn't mind the public blowback. Now you can do it for free with a throwaway identity. This also contributes to moving people further and further away from each other.
He murdered a child. If Harvard doesn't want to allow a child murder into their institution, it's not a crime against that person. That person can have a normal life, just at Grand Junction State (or I'm sure there's a million other colleges other than Harvard that will accept him).
There are consequences to actions. If the consequence of murdering a child is you don't get to go to Harvard, it's not a tragedy. Go do something useful with your life, other than going to Harvard or killing kids, yeah?
The thread that immediately precipitated his removal is still online; you can just go look at it:
https://www.facebook.com/garry/posts/10102671732962523?pnref...
(It's buried under Anisa Mirza's reply).
Unless it's your claim that trolling is a political stance deserving of protection, in which case we can all just agree to disagree about our definitions and move on, his support for Trump was not the problem here.
>He was removed for hostile trolling of other YC founders.
Precisely, the words used by YC were "threatening and harassing" comments. To my knowledge this is the exact comment YC cited:
>All of you: fuck off. Take your morally superior, elitist, virtue signaling bullshit and shove it.
>I call it like I see it, and I helped meme a President into office, cucks.
I certainly see how this speech can be viewed as rude and disagreeable. But I don't really know how you can say that he made any serious threats or was honestly harassing anyone.
It's probably not worth litigating this further, though.
>While Torba paints this as a free speech issue, YC told BuzzFeed that he was kicked out for “for speaking in a threatening, harassing way toward other YC founders” — particularly in this Facebook comment:
>All of you: fuck off. Take your morally superior, elitist, virtue signaling bullshit and shove it.
>I call it like I see it, and I helped meme a President into office, cucks.
[1]: https://www.buzzfeed.com/nitashatiku/trump-supporting-startu...
Being proud of "meme"-ing Trump into office, wow. Torba repeats how his right on free speech is violated, but is an outright dick to everyone around him because they have another view on some topic...
> We don't allow apps that advocate against groups of people based on their race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, age, nationality, veteran status, sexual orientation, or gender identity.
Gab is simply a platform, like Twitter and Youtube. As well as a communication channel, like Whatsapp.
Without a doubt more 'hate speech' passes through Whatsapp and Twitter each day than appears on Gab's platform so it's hard not to see this as unjust and inequitable.
Jeez, you'd probably find all that in a single rap video. In addition to that, have you ever read Youtube comments?
There's clearly bias against Gab in this instance.
You don't gotta feel persecuted or fit into any of those groups to see the obvious double standard there.
The idea that 'whites' are a homogeneous "powerful" group is as naive is it is prejudice. The standards apply to everybody or they don't apply at all.
You tolerate hatred because it's against the right people, and one day some innocent person is gonna die because that hatred is no big deal. Hate is hate, let's be done with it.
The measure of offence is not based on how 'fussed' you, an individual, feel. Nor is it based on a myopic view of history in which 'whites' have never been victims and everybody else has.
Is the same standard applied to Twitter and Facebook? How long does it take for Twitter and Facebook to take down such content?
Should browser's be required to censor the web to meet this standard?
Apple was applying this standard to Web Browser software in iOS in what had the affect of being a deliberate ploy to exclude all non Safari web browsers from the iOS App Store.
So I won't be able to find hate speech, racist speech, and speech inciting violence on Facebook and Twitter?
You'll be able to report it, and have a reasonable chance of action being taken on it.
Anecdotally, when I tried Gab, the ratio of violent racist content to normal content was way way higher than on other platforms (even if the absolute amount is much higher on twitter due to popularity, the ratio is lower).
The big companies are really limiting speech. You can't have separate black/white bathrooms, in many places your business can't allow indoor smoking, you can't limit employment based on certain things if you want equal opportunity employer benefits, yet we have no protection for speech.
Daily Stormer (which is honestly so crazy I couldn't tell if it was a parody) can't be hosted by any major or minor providers. No one will give them space to speak. When that many companies gets to control all the platforms, when Google can fire a guy for a well thought out opinion, they effectively censor dissenting idea.
I'm not saying I like gab. It's seriously full of voat type users, but they should have a place where they can speak.
Then let's not even bring Progressive WebApps into the mix...
I agree completely. The alternative is that the bad ideas get hidden away, and not seeing the light of day, they begin to fester sort of like social rot. Or worst, people turn to violence. Free speech is not only about being heard, but about weeding out bad ideas.
A great book on the subject is Kindly Inquisitors by Jonathan Rauch. He can explain the importance of free speech much gooderer than I ever could. :)
If you examine the Nazi ideology, it really is at a psychotic level of cynicism. They don't care if you are a true believer, or if you're doing it for the lulz, or if you're a psychopath whose incentives happen to align. So long as you go along, it's fine.
If you go far enough left on the political spectrum, you arrive at the same place. (The rapists and murderers were made into bosses in the Gulag.) However, for some reason, speech that is almost as vile from the left is given a softer treatment.
This horseshoe theory is widely disputed.
It's true that it's a false equivalence between neo-Nazis and Antifa. But crapping on individual human rights in one's political interest is wrong either way, and both groups do that. It doesn't matter if steam is at 220 degrees or 440 degrees. It's going to scald you either way. It doesn't matter how bad, so much as that both are bad!
I guess we should be glad that Google wasn't founded by militant fundamentalists. Otherwise they would ban mentions of homosexuality, abortion, inter-racial relationships, etc.
Since Google was found on more "liberal" standards, we just get left-wing oppression instead of right-wing oppression.
Apple Store/play is not a new concept. It's a closed off, propriety version of a Linux or BSD package repo or ports tree.
All either company had to do was allow third party repositories. You get a nice list, choose which companies you trust, have a nice interface where you could download an app.repo file, view it's cert and add it to your phone. 90% of people wouldn't use it, but for power uses and beta testers, it would allow a single easy software update system that could be free for all. I wrote about this a while back in a post I did on OSS philosophy:
http://penguindreams.org/blog/the-philosophy-of-open-source-...
F-Droid does support this fully automatic app installs and updates, see:
https://f-droid.org/wiki/page/Installing_F-Droid_as_a_system...
https://f-droid.org/wiki/page/org.fdroid.fdroid.privileged
If you say "most people won't bother" - that's true, but most people will gladly tick the unknown sources box too for pre-release or pirated apps already.
You can still install Gab.ai on any Android phone. You can also use a non-Google app repository with automatic updates, if you want.
You cannot unless you've rooted your phone. F-Droid as an example cannot actually install or update packages without a system app connector.
Amazon's app store can't do automatic background updates unless you're on an Amazon/Fire device. F-droid can (which I just learned from other comments on this thread) but it takes a little extra work to give it that system privilege.
I'm saying you should be able to add a 3rd party repo to the stock Google system, without needed to root or mod the phone. Even for F-droid to do automatic updates, you need to give it special privileges (which I just learned about from another comment in this thread -- honestly didn't think that was actually possible).
Is this a legally sound statement? Specifically the last part about "essential facility or resource." I'm not at all a law expert. I personally don't believe in the implications of the claim, hence my question
I have a feeling that the Internet Explorer default-browser antitrust fight will have to be had again, although gab might not get that far.
Sure they have.
* You have to convince your users to go into their security settings and check the scary box with the even scarier warning. If Chrome started only trusting Google's CA with no option to add others you wouldn't be arguing that 'it's not so bad you can still click though by adding a security exception'.
* 3rd party app stores are incapable of actually installing or updating apps -- they're basically glorified downloaders. There's no way to 'trust' another app store so that it can perform these actions on your behalf unless you root your phone.
In my case I would like to put F-Droid there but unless I root my phone the best it can do is download the APK and notify me to install it manually.
And Google Play only really has that privileged position because they develop Android. I think it's honestly pretty clear cut here.
Also I don't remember having trouble with the Amazon store keeping apps up to date for me.
Uh... how? They're literally each other's major competitors. Each is good evidence the other is not a monopoly... and Android, unlike iOS, permits third-party app stores like the one Amazon put together.
Encourage users to side load gab, then you have a dedicated core audience who wants to support your platform. In app purchases could make them a ton of shared revenue. Apps, stickers, MAGA hats.
If Gab succeeds in replacing Twitter, they could generate further revenue by front running Wall Street with gabs. I can't imagine how Twitter has money problems when they have the POTUS making market moving tweets regularly.
Is there a utility that makes side loading easier?
I really could care less about Gab but I would like to mark the packages from F-Droid as trusted and still distrust others.
The main issue is not security, but trust - whether you trust the developer and source of the app. Security (via public key crypto) is still enforced. The real security issue there is lack of automatic updates.
Yeah, it's called "The Play store banned my favorite app." Like youtube downloaders and ad blockers. That's a good way to make users ignore the scary "unchecking this box could damage your device" dialogs. Once you get a sizable base off the Play store, that can be used to promote all the valuable things the Play store doesn't permit.
I don't think they care about winning this either. The kind of people who use gab would already know how to sideload an Android app or use alternative app stores. Besides, you don't need an app, the website does the job too.
If we want to protect speech that travels through semi-private networks, I think we need some new laws written.
The fundamental reason these apps were pulled was related to their content, not competitive.
Their attorney: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Randazza
Those posts are easy to spot and even easier to dismiss. I'm asking about the article specifically - is there something in it that Breitbart is misrepresenting?
For example, the New York Times featured a piece [0] stating President Trump will "erase from the annals of life on earth" several species of animals, including the Hawaiian Honeycreeper, the Joshua Tree, the Horseshoe Crab, and more. Why? Because President Trump exited a 1 year old environmental accord.
Still other mainstream outlets reported, "Donald Trump will have his own version of Hitler's Reichstag fire to expand his power and take full control of the government."[1]
That is reporting on political drama in misleading ways.
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/21/opinion/the-planet-cant-s...
[1]: http://blog.judahgabriel.com/2017/06/the-sky-is-falling-docu...
Whatever else you think of Breitbart, in this case their article actually contains some interesting information not included in the WaPo article, including comments from Gab's lawyer about why he thinks the case has merit.
The WaPo article is clearly slanted towards Google and against Gab, and the Breitbart article is the reverse. If you're interested in a balanced view you should probably read both.
Breitbart's article is 90% quotes of Gab's press release and statements from their management. Google's pov is completely absent. Instead, they add some speculation regarding Apple in the last paragraph, but it only serves to make a point, not to convey any information.
There are many smaller problems with Breitbart's writing: "suddenly suspended" doesn't make sense, because you can't be "gradually suspended". The scare quotes around hate speech make a cheap political point, the headline adopts Gab's self-aggrandising description as a "free speech social network" etc.