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Comment by mtaksrud | Hacker News Reader

Google needs to be split up and shut down. Why aren’t the American authorities using the antitrust laws that is already there?

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Basically because the current philosophy of the US justice department anti trust prosecutions is whether market dominance of the player harms ordinary people or causes them to incur higher cost. It is not really about actual monopoly power. Google has been pretty careful to stay consistent with this philosophy.

This wasn't always so in the US and it's not the same philosophy in EU. However, it is a valid and consistent view.

Corollary 1: You are legally allowed to kill all of your competition while not improving your monopoly product as long as you keep your product free.

Corollary 2: Human attention is considered equivalent to monetary value of exactly $0 by US government.

Corollary 3: You should never trust your government to be smart or do right thing for you.

Counterpoint: If you strongly want your government to change its approach, organize to change the government.

In US, it's very safe to do this without violence but even in significantly less safe places, people have successfully done this peacefully [1] [2] [3]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Delhi_Legislative_Assem...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_West_Bengal_Legislative...

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_2005_Bihar_Legislati...

Why would it need to be shut down.

Because they were reinterpreted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antitrust_Paradox

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