Notice that no Googlers have a good response to this or the Eric Schmidt / Hillary Clinton connection. Google’s ties to the Obama administration were deep.
Anti-trust is about companies using their market power to exclude rivals, raise prices, and hurt consumers. It's not about consumers overwhelmingly choosing a product because they like it more.
Can anyone really say that Google's practices are more anti-competitive than, say, the dominant players in broadband or health insurance or wireless telecom or household appliances?
Google's close ties with the Obama administration makes the Trump administration suspicious!
So, there is no swing in policy, at least among the career officials.
The Obama administration shut down and buried the previous FTC investigation. I'd guess not just because of lobbying, but also because google was nice enough to allow a ton of google employees to take some "vacations" to work for the Obama campaign for a bunch of months, and the likes of Eric Schmidt being chummy with Obama[1].
The current investigation is probably motivated not just by those career bureaucrats who had their previous investigation shut down, but also by the Trump administration wanting to hurt SV and Google in particular for being too friendly with Democrats, and to put those social media companies (Youtube, Facebook, Twitter) on notice not to "prosecute" and ban conservatives on their platforms (at leas that's what Trump and a lot of "conservatives" say is happening).
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/06/obamas-...
It was the political appointees (from both parties) who shut their recommendation that the FTC begin an antitrust action down.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2013/01/googl...
So what was this "settlement"? Google promised to be nicer and said mea culpa a bunch of times. They did not pay a fine, did not agree to any hard regulations that would carry a penalty if violated, they did not pay any compensation to the entities they kinda admitted they wronged.
With Microsoft there were clear injured parties: Netscape, Samba, WordPerfect, and those results created a chilling effect around Windows.
From a health-of-the-system perspective it really should be intolerable that a few large closed-garden platforms control the flow of information. Information monocultures are a threat to everyone, even if one partisan group feels more threatened than the other at any one time.
I happily take the market-efficiency position on most debates, but the risk of Google being anything but neutral is worrying. They appear to have a political bias in their employee base and are under pressure to make judgements about fact v. fiction (might even be an inherent requirement of choosing a sort order for search results) - that is a position somewhat similar to a conventional media organisation.
I support the concept of media being a special case where the risk of an information monoculture outweighs the damage of being inefficient. Laws that basically make it impossible for one media source to control a market are fine. I'd like to see internet search designated as a market where there legally can't be one dominant player, and details get sorted out as best can be done.
Maybe that is already how the market is, I don't know. There are many alternatives not controlled by Google. But something even stronger than antitrust seems appropriate as a matter of law, even if we don't apply it today. I can't see how a platform like Google can be neutral given the ongoing partisan extremes that have developed in American politics and Google's connections to the Democrats.
Apps and games are media. In 2019, that's a glaring truth which is obvious to many in the industry. It's just that society and the culture haven't caught up with technological reality yet.
And that's not what the charges are about either. You're making it way too simplistic. Google has been involved in actual anti-competitive actions, for which they've already been found guilty in Europe that had nothing to do with "users liking their service more" - Google actually downranked competition in the search engine, and other stuff like that.
There even was a story a while ago on HN about ProtonMail being essentially shadowbanned from Google search for the term "encrypted email" for a year before they made a big scandal about it and Google "admitted its error" (the same bullshit excuse Facebook uses every time it's caught tracking users in a new and more nefarious way).
Also, I can't be bothered to look for a link now, but there is a good story out there about how Google killed a map competitor in the US around that time, too (Skyhook was it?). Once again - nothing to do with "users liking Google's maps more" -- Google took real action to prevent a competitor from existing in the market place.
It's also a super-duper coincidence that Eric Schmidt started working for the Pentagon, while also remaining on Google's board and some kind of technical executive, too, not long before Google started working with the Pentagon on Project Maven.
Either people don't want to admit what's happening or they are being way too naive when they see all of this and think it's "nothing but a coincidence". It was well known that Schmidt was one of Obama's besties at the time. And Google is ranking very high in its lobbying efforts, too.
I may not like it, but it's not an anti-trust concern.
> Google started working with the Pentagon on Project Maven
Google shut this down under pressure from employees. Also, not an anti-trust concern.
> Schmidt was one of Obama's besties
Executives at right-wing media are besties with the current president, but that shouldn't result in a future administration launching anti-trust actions against their firms.
> encrypted mail, Skyhook, etc.
Sounds pretty tenuous, but if there's something here roughly equivalent severity to other anti-trust issues then sure, investigate that.
But it looks to me like a piddling pretext to punish perceived political differences in media and infotech.
By "product", I take it you mean their advertising services? Most of the other products are not paid for. In fact, critics are often fond of pointing out that the consumer is the product in this case.
Whether this action is right or not, parallels can be drawn with the Microsoft investigation: Microsoft allegedly used its position within the desktop to "push" their browser; Google is allegedly using its position within search to "push" their browser.
On a personal note, I'm not convinced that this is grounds enough for antitrust action. There could be a personal data related angle to this, but then again that would not come under antitrust.
Windows didn't get to 90% market share because consumers chose it. Windows achieved overwhelming dominance because Microsoft punished computer manufacturers if they sold any competing operating system.
That's anti-competitive, and Google isn't doing anything like that.
Then Microsoft used their illegally-obtained dominant position in operating systems to bundle their shitty browser, essentially forcing every consumer to install it instead of any competitor. And you couldn't uninstall it if you wanted to.
Again, that's not at all similar to Google and Chrome. Windows, Mac, and iOS don't have Chrome pre-installed. Android manufacturers are free to pre-install Firefox or Opera or anything else they want.
Just this week it was announced that Google will disable important features required to implement ad blockers. Google absolutely abuses their monopolies (browser, search, streaming video, possibly maps) at least as aggressively as MS ever did.
Have you ever tried to watch YouTube on Firefox? That’s a deliberately hobbled experience if I’ve ever seen one.
Completely off topic at this point but I’m curious what video card you have and if you’re on X or Wayland.
My Linux box at work is an HP laptop from several years ago with a pretty basic business class AMD graphics card in it, I did have to install AMD’s binary drivers on this machine.
And, using Slackware, it’s X. Not sure if Wayland is easily installable or not on Slack but it’s certainly not part of the base install or supported by Patrick.
Firefox is the only piece of my install that isn’t part of official Slackware-CURRENT.
Other than running it in Windows all of my other computers that use Firefox are running stock, no fancy desktop versions of Slack or OpenBSD. I use calm window manager on both. (Sorry, this contradicts an earlier statement, I also had to compile and install Calm on Slackware from source, everything else is just part of the supported packages for CURRENT)
Maybe my low resource OS’s help?
Whether it’s the government’s role to break that up is a political question, but Google is most definitely a classic monopoly and the internet is worse off for it.
Google was doing exactly this until it was forced to into a consent decree with the EU. Manufacturers couldn’t sell Google licensed Android phones and sell non Google Android variants.
Selective enforcement is arbitrary, politically motivated enforcement.
Antitrust doesn’t care about how you got market dominance. It cares about what you do with it. To use the browser example I used elsewhere: maybe Google’s dominance in search is because it’s indisputably the best. But that doesn’t mean Google can use its dominance over search to get you to use Chrome.
To address your other examples, say health insurance or cellular, that market dominance is absent. Google has 89% of search market share. Verizon has 35% of cellular. Likewise, no health insurance company has more than 15% market share. That’s a completely different market. And I can’t get a discount on cellular because I’m a FiOS customer, nor can I buy car insurance from my health insurance company.
As I said elsewhere, I don’t think an antitrust case against a Google would succeed at this point in time. But lots of things that are common in the web tech space (cross selling products, giving away products for free, etc.), become potential antitrust concerns when you’ve got 90% market share in an industry. For example, giving away Android for free to push Symbian and company out of the market and cement Google search dominance in mobile. You wouldn’t be crazy to try to make a case out of that.
https://www.verizonwireless.com/promos/verizon-fios-installa...
> nor can I buy car insurance from my health insurance company.
https://www.statefarm.com/insurance/health/individual-medica...
and bundling deals: https://www.statefarm.com/insurance/multiline
Google search prefers sites that are fast. Amp makes sites fast.
Non-Amp sites that are equally fast and relevant get equal search ranking.
Is there any evidence whatsoever that Google ranks Amp sites higher because of Amp, instead of speed and relevance?
Nope. Amp ranks above everything else in a page-topping spinner.
No, but I'd love to see antitrust litigation against those monopolies/oligopolies too.
I guess, "not exactly exonerating, but not exactly damning" is à la mode in 2019.
>Which raises deep suspicions about the political motivations of this "investigation".
So, if a company was in bed with politician X, and get investigated under a future (opposition) politician Y, it's the ...political motivations of the investigation that you're concerned about?
That sounds totally backwards...
>Anti-trust is about companies using their market power to exclude rivals, raise prices, and hurt consumers. It's not about consumers overwhelmingly choosing a product because they like it more.
Well, Google uses its power over search results to do all of the above.
The DoJ and other state legal offices have rules about excusing prosecutors from cases but this one seems to not be seen as an issue at these regulatory and broader judicial agencies.
This should matter considering the US is disparaging China for having private companies backed by the powerful government bodies, operating under a different set of rules than everyone else.
Here's one:
This dataset includes people like my intern, who left to go join USDS after his internship was up, etc
So there is some amount of flat out silliness here.
It also covers 14 years (2002->2016), and has a fairly small number of people for that number of years.
A significant number are DC people, and, surprisingly, if you want to stay in DC, you are going to work at the government most likely.
During the earlier parts of this timeframe, there was no one other than Google who was local (google opened the office in 2006). During the middle part, 2006-2013, other tech companies were just staffing up policy orgs. Over the entire time period, the government is by far the biggest employer in the region. There were not a lot of even tech companies (let alone local policy orgs for tech companies) in most of that time period, the biggest other one would have been weird things like "livingsocial".
Having been recruiting in DC during the 2006-2012 timeframe , out of the 1000+ resumes i'd reviewed, i'd say 80+% were working at the government.
Like, why is this a conspiracy instead of normal attrition? In particular: where was it you expected them to go that was more acceptable? I think you are seriously overestimating the amount of non-governmental jobs they would have been able go to if they wanted to stay local.
It's a little more true now, but even then you'd just see them bounce between tech company policy departments.
Over the same time period, i'm 100% sure as many policy/legal/etc people in MTV/etc went to go work at Facebook, startups, etc (IE whatever the local industry was).
I'm also sure you'd find the same relative number of facebookers/etc in DC (which again, was very small during that time period) left for the administration, etc.