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Comment by glbrew | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a lawyer but the first amendment argument is a separate concern than antitrust violations. You can exercise your first amendment rights while still breaching antitrust law.

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Depends on what's being investigated here, if the government would actually want to compel Google to alter their search results then it's a first amendment case.

> Take a look at google AMP

The argument here is its unfair to bias ranking towards a preferred format. In this case, something about excluding competitors, except AMP is completely open-source[1] so...?

The counterargument is yes you can, because it's your pamphlet/newspaper/website and you're the editor, not the government.

[1] https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml

Yeah, if AMP is antitrust then so is Facebook's Open Graph. Despite the hate for both on HN, neither format is targeting competitors or hurting consumers in this case.

I think the antitrust argument against AMP is a bit more subtle. The argument seems to be that Google is abusing it's market dominance to push sites into using AMP. This in turn prevents them from using third party trackers, while the pages will be served via Google caches when accessed from Google search. Hence Google gets to track the visitor, while third party tracking from other providers is prevented. I.e. Google is abusing it's power to thwart competition in the analytics and ad-tech business.

Of course as a consumer, I don't really care whether it's some random company or Google who gets to violate my privacy, and I especially couldn't care less about lack of innovation in the privacy violation business, so I think the antitrust angle here is pretty slim.

Maybe - is Amp rendering blocking third party tracking from GTM tags?

Third party trackers are not prevented.

You can use Google Analytics through the <amp-analytics> element [1], but since AMP prevents third-party scripts that were not approved by Google, I'm not sure how you would include other trackers in an AMP site.

[1] https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...

You can easily use other analytics vendors https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/optimize-...

> You can exercise your first amendment rights while still breaching antitrust law.

Go on... example?

Here is the first example I came across:

https://www.rbr.com/six-broadcast-tv-groups-settle-doj-antit...

No one is saying these broadcast groups don't have 1st amendment rights, just that they were going about it in an anti-competitive way.

That's a price fixing/cartel case not a first amendment one.

Isn't that the point? What you prosecute is not related the first amendment, despite the actions being protected by it.

This case is clearly price fixing, not first amendment.

The radio stations weren't broadcasting their prices to consumers, but secretly communicating with competitors to form a cartel, which is forbidden. Doesn't matter if they were radio stations or grocery stores.

The fact that the companies in that suit were radio stations seems irrelevant to the facts of the case; they could have been hamburger restaurants and the legal question would not change.

Yes, the first amendment here does not seem to apply, except if the poster above, has something else in mind? That DOJ even considers going to court, hints that they have a strong case -- given how conservative the DOJ is to betting on a court case and not settling.

No one is reporting that the DOJ is considering going to court nor that they have any "case" let alone a "strong" one if the WSJ reports are to be believed it's very preliminary stuff.

Thank you for the correction!

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