So what exactly is your solution? What law do you put in place, precisely? Google has to provide consumers with whatever information they want, whenever they want it, free of charge? Because that seems to be what you're gunning for.
Google does not have the right to avoid being regulated in the public interest.
It's one thing to talk about anti-trust. It's a completely different thing when you're on the same team as the government that would be bringing the case against you.
If anti-trust is your concern, make Google smaller. Regulate what % of marketshare they are allowed to control. Don't allow them to purchase any more competitors. Do things that are actual anti-trust prevention. Saying that the solution is to regulate all these little edge cases is ineffective and inefficient, because you need a different regulation for each concern that are all rooted in the same sentiment: Google is too big.
This is one method, but the massive natural monopoly over search and 'gateway to the Internet' isn't something that is particularly well served by market competition, as we can see here. If we break up google, another monopoly will develop. If we prevent monopolies from developing through strict marketshare percentages, companies will hover at the brink of these %s and lobby and bribe politicians to remove the rules. Which is what they have just done in other media markets, recently. So long as you allow the organizations to be driven by private profit, you will have to struggle against the natural market impulse for every company to exert absolute dictatorial control over as much as possible and expand its power, every moment, every year, every election, at all costs.
You should address the root of the problem (capitalism) not all the little symptoms. Require that companies that provide these public goods be run democratically, transparently by their workers as a public co-op. Nationalize them and make them all open source. There are other solutions.
In addition to everything else wrong with this, what do you do when the workers decide that your niche interest is terrible, horrible, and shouldn't ought to be available to anyone at all?
Using a competing product isn't an option because, in your world, there would be no competition, just the state-owned product and nothing.
Only this time, companies will be lobbying the employees to vote certain ways on issues which could affect search ranking and so on.
How? Because this...
> Don't allow them to purchase any more competitors.
...doesn't achieve that end.
Google could have a thousand competitors and 99% of the marketshare, because just because a competitor exists doesn't compel, or even slightly persuade, anyone to use it.
I'm all for antitrust laws. I just don't see how the usual remedies would work here.
There are also plenty of cases where regulations have greatly improved outcomes by curbing capitalistic eventualities.
I'm personally conflicted about this particular case, and have no idea which will result in a "better" outcome when choosing between non-regulastion and regulation.
However, I strongly believe that limiting Google's overall power is a better solution than regulating particular ways that Google could abuse their power, as I think the former is a better route if regulation is the route you choose.
I dont think Google is quite there yet to be regulated. You have alternative like bing, and you have Duck Duck Go, and the latter actually provide pretty decent results.
Which, however, has nothing to do with the article's point -- disappearance of a single entry with competitive advantage over Google. No statistical significance for search, but instead wielding its enormous power to squelch a small competitor. IMO, if true, this is the case for the government to address via rulemaking, courts or some other means.
An advertiser might care if there were another, more impartial search engine that was drawing those eyeballs away, but that seems vanishingly unlikely given the current ubiquity of Google as a household name and company.
Sure, DuckDuckGo or whatever might draw some of the more tech-literate or paranoid crowd if Google started aggressively filtering results (which, for the record, I don't think they are doing or are likely to do), but why would advertisers care? Those people represent a tiny fraction of their eyeballs, perhaps so small as to be lost in statistical noise. Besides, many/most of the tech-literate folks use adblockers anyway, and the paranoids probably don't want to transmit their personal information online to buy things.
> ...advertisers who operate on the assumption that the users see Google searches as mostly efficient and impartial.
I do not believe that is factually accurate. I think advertisers don't have a compelling reason to care whether or not searches are impartial for the reasons I expressed.
Agreed completely. But users will (eventually) run away if they do not perceive the search as efficient. There are now options in search. People use google exactly because they consider results good enough. If googling "photos from X" starts returning most pictures from Google-associated resorts and this gets coverage from first tier news agencies Google will see non-negligible defections.
I also do not think Google is likely to do aggressive search filtering, not because this is "not right" but for pure self preservation -- aggressive filtering would be cutting the branch they sit on.
Enforce antitrust laws.
Sigh - anybody remember when this was pretty much a given?
Forced (inter-)nationalization of Google under the control of the UN.
>Google has to provide consumers with whatever information they want, whenever they want it, free of charge?
Pretty much yes. Charges should be bared by the Global Federation of Essential Services.
I guess someone's been reading Picketty ..
And even more important than 30% perhaps, culturally, business-wise, etc.
Would this apply to all of google, or just specific product areas (ie, would you only nationalize Search, or Search & Ads, or something else)?
If yes, do tensorflow development now fall under the purview of the UN? Is Android now a partially closed-source, world-government administered, operating system, used by a significant fraction of every human being?
If not, how does one manage infrastructure for the now government administered search system, and corporate everything-else? Do they share the datacenters (and thus give government employees access to the datacenters full of user data), or do they split the datacenters up somehow, and give some to the government, and keep others?
What happens to my existing Google Account? Does the government get access to any of my user data, and if so, which subset? Do we do away with search personalization, or start it over from scratch?
I'm very honestly curious how you would orchestrate this, or expect it to work.
Mostly search. We'll drop the ads. People will be subsidising search already, so no need for ads.
>If yes, do tensorflow development now fall under the purview of the UN?
No, that Alphabet can keep.
>Is Android now a partially closed-source, world-government administered, operating system, used by a significant fraction of every human being?
Yes.
>If not, how does one manage infrastructure for the now government administered search system, and corporate everything-else? Do they share the datacenters (and thus give government employees access to the datacenters full of user data), or do they split the datacenters up somehow, and give some to the government, and keep others?
Every piece of data will be queryable by a simple RESTful API for everybody, including everybody's else search history. We'll call it "radical transparency". This is include the data of government members.
>What happens to my existing Google Account?
It remains as is, only better.
>Does the government get access to any of my user data, and if so, which subset?
Yes, all, see above.
>Do we do away with search personalization, or start it over from scratch?
We kill that. It never worked well anyway.
I'm partly joking, and partly imagining what a sane humanity, that could build and coordinate stuff on a global scale without letting them to the markets, in other words a "Star Trek" like government, would do.
Will UNGoogle have the "one box" answers (eg, music lyrics, weather) which give real information from the search results, or just ten blue links?
Will the employment contracts of existing staff (SWEs, SREs, PMs, lawyercats) be transferred to the UN as well? Will employment be maintained on the current terms?
Will the UN employ more "customer service representatives"? What would staffing levels look like, across the UNGoogle?
Will UNGoogle maintain the existing data relationships as Google? Will UNGoogle purchase eg, Geo data from third-parties, or will it just be their privilege to submit their data to UNGoogle?
What will the process look like at UNGoogle for making changes to the ranking algorithms? Will there be an appeals process if a ranking change is detrimental to your business or national interests?