50 U.S. states and territories announce broad antitrust investigation of Google | Hacker News Reader

50 U.S. states and territories announce broad antitrust investigation of Google

washingtonpost.com

492 pointsihuman322 comments

While this is a far shorter list than Luther's 95 theses, I will post this here while I run to get popcorn to see just how Google gets out of this.

Sample arguably anti-competitive actions Google has taken:

1. Turning off XMPP federation in Google Talk, moving from an open standard to an archipelago of walled gardens (Hangouts, Allo, GChat, Hangouts again, Messages/RCS that the carriers are gonna give up to Google to host(!?))

2. Killing Windows Phone by not allowing any Google-based apps on the platform (https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/14/15970082/google-killed-wi...)

3. Posting map/weather/review content straight to SERPs starving MapQuest/WU/Yelp et al from getting clicks

4. Anyone not browsing on Chrome gets an upsell to install Chrome (MS got roasted for this with Windows Media & best used on IE)

5. Degrading services on competing browsers/platforms via things like U2F in Firefox, slow/wontfix polyfills (https://www.computerworld.com/article/3389882/former-mozilla...)

There are probably more entries to list, and these are complex issues being reduced to a sentence or two, but I've tried to not post things that are not immediately anti-competitive even if I don't like 'em (Google+ forced integration which resulted in me still not commenting on YouTube all these years later, RIP Google Reader)

There are probably more entries to list, and these are complex issues being reduced to a sentence or two

A recurring pattern with Google and YouTube: Someone achieves virality through controversy. They are promptly de-monetized, deleted, or frozen with no reason given. When the period of viral opportunity has passed, typically in about a day or two, the account/monetization is reinstated with no reason given.

This pattern is so insidiously subtle, so frequent, and so potentially powerful in manipulating the media of 2019, it probably deserves its own Wiki and its own investigation.

Those who can control virality can modulate most of the loudest voices on the Internet. That's basically the power to relegate the ideas you don't like to relative near silence. (Also, those who can control virality can pick the winners among startup companies.)

(EDIT: Basically, these sorts of shenanigans are like Michael Swaine's story from decades back about deleting his own parking tickets in South Carolina. He was supposed to have parking so he could work on the city's mainframe, but the bureaucracy dropped the ball. Way back then, this sort of thing amounts to a funny anecdote. In the world of 2019, it would be a firing offense and possibly get someone prosecuted for fraud. There are analogous things from the world of aviation, and stories of the wild west. With great power comes great responsibility. Make no mistake, as a technologist, you wield power.)

The dual pattern is a variant on what used to be called a "Joe Job"[0]: Falsely directing the platform's harsh automated bots against your competitor or enemy. This has become quite prevalent on Amazon [1] and I've seen several indirect instances of it on HN recently, where an Android developer tries to defend against shadowy competitors stealing their app by putting resources in nonstandard places, which then results in Google banning the original developer rather than the true guilty party. If Google (or Amazon or anybody else) is going to use zero-tolerance bots to police itself, they need to be designed such that people can't turn them into weapons. Designing such bots is not at all easy and it requires a very high level of skill.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_job [1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/19/18140799/amazon-marketpl...

Automated bureaucracy without a means for recourse is nightmare fuel.

You should read Philip K Dick.

Interesting, seems like a worthwhile read in this context. Any particular suggestions?

Also Kafka.

I knew I was forgetting a big one but couldn't bring it to mind. I agree with you wholeheartedly.

It is rather chilling to see that even though the world-wide web started open, so much centralization can have quite the chilling effect on competition.

What can we do about it? If I were king of the world, it would be P2P decentralized content provided over mesh-network-powered-by-cognitive-frequency-hopping-radio but since I'm not, what are solutions prospective officials could leverage?

Split Alphabet from YouTube, then split YouTube in half between user-posted content and business-posted content?

The only way forward is p2p.

Inet in current form is too susceptible to governments and bad actors like Google who only work for their shareholders.

Has google released anything worthwhile the last several years?

What has happened to the culture of innovation at Google? We still know them for gmail, maps, and search but what have they done lately? They seem bland by comparison to the Google of the late 90s and 2000s.

Why has Google become the new Microsoft?

> Why has Google become the new Microsoft?

Google hasn't changed, their actions have acquired increased consequences and attention. You'd have to go back to their early days to find a truly different Google, nearly two decades into the past.

Gates for example was always ruthless in business, even in the early days, it's just that few people cared about Microsoft's behavior until they became powerful. The same is true of Google and most any corporation. Google is behaving pretty much as you would expect a company in their position to, it's entirely predictable.

Amusing Gary Reback quote (he was notorious in those days for opposing Microsoft in Silicon Valley) from the 1990s Microsoft era:

"The only thing J. D. Rockefeller did that Bill Gates hasn't done," Reback would wail, "is use dynamite against his competitors!"

Wired, Nov 1, 2000

The Truth, The Whole Truth, and Nothing But The Truth

https://outline.com/2DKmtw

Here's a pretty long article detailing some of Google's recent history and culture clashes:

https://www.wired.com/story/inside-google-three-years-misery...

Google the company shifted towards being purely profit oriented long ago, but google the employees didn't see it that way, and resisted quite a lot, until recently.

A centralized system may be susceptible to large bad actors such as Google but a p2p decentralized system is susceptible to large numbers of small bad actors. We simply haven't cracked the hard problem of trust and so we're stuck delegating to large authorities.

In some ways this is reminiscent of the history of civilization, where people band together for protection against marauders. In exchange for protection, we become vulnerable to tyranny.

> We simply haven't cracked the hard problem of trust and so we're stuck delegating to large authorities.

Just to clarify- what sort of trust are you referring to in the context of a service like YouTube?

> The only way forward is p2p.

Then we as the tech community need to figure out tooling so that grandma and grandpa can use p2p / mesh networks. We have several challenges in that way that I'd like to see solved, but don't know how to make that happen.

2 immediate challenges is that If you can't get today's iweather over ipfs or bittorrent (with a better UI clearly, not everything has to be file transfer), p2p can't fully replace HTTP. Email is arguably pretty federated if not quite p2p, but the spam problem is real.

The below example is an account of my grandma's attempt to get p2p chat going. Grandma doesn't even know what a p2p / mesh network is, but we will assume she read about it in the paper from the HK protests and being the enterprising unafraid-to-try-new-tech-things user most users aren't, she tries it out.

She is in a large concrete gym, no cell service unless she stepped out of the building for a moment. Remembering the paper article, she decided to try the Bridgefy app so she can text with someone else. How do you spell Bridgefy? Oh right, I have the paper here, let me painstakingly hunt and peck to find the name of the app in the Play Store, ah there it is. She stepped out of the gym, got signal, installed the app on both devices, then stepped back in and opened the app.

Her friend gave her her own phone so she could install both at once so they can be apart, yet chat.

Being forewarned by her techie grandson, she managed a feat denied to nearly all the cell-phone using public and skip the dark patterns of denying Bridgefy contacts, reluctantly giving it location access 'for Bluetooth', and attempting to stop it reading her phone number. Already, 95% of users would be long stopped by now. But she persisted.

The app would not move forward, giving error toast messages of error 7::0 cannot do that. She had to step back outside where she had signal for it to work for an unknown reason.

She got back in the gym, was not able to get either phone to talk to each other, either in 'public broadcast mode' or by trying to add a contact straight from the app. She uninstalled both copies and moved on without having p2p messaging, not because our devices' bluetooth radios couldn't handle ad hoc communication, but because the client doesn't exist that doesn't want to surveil or otherwise profile you.

PS -> that user was not an enterprising Grandma, but myself. If someone knows how to get Bridgefy / a p2p mesh chat app going without selling the privacy farm, I'd love to hear it.

Was astonished by your grandma's technical proficiency until the end

> Then we as the tech community need to figure out tooling so that grandma and grandpa can use p2p / mesh networks.

It seems that the grandma/grandpa use case always comes up in technical discussions. I've never really seen the need to cater to those who aren't willing to learn how to use the tools they have.

Could a person born after 2000 figure out how to use a VCR? Set the timer so that it records the correct program? What about a rotary dial phone? Do they know how to make a collect call? What about directory assistance? Could they figure out how to use an 8 track player?

They probably wouldn't, but the motivated ones would avail themselves of the resources at hand and figure it out.

The same thing applies to current technology.

Google started down the evil path when they had their IPO. Before that their incentives were aligned with those of every citizen of the net. After that they were only incentivized to make money and grow, by whatever means necessary.

It may be possible for them to change, but I doubt they'll do it on their own. The real driver that changes a company's culture is competition. And that's why I applaud this antitrust investigation.

Rather, they are becoming the old Microsoft. Are you sure they aren't becoming the new Yahoo? Also, what new thing is the new Microsoft?

Nadella's Microsoft is the new Microsoft. Before Nadella, Microsoft looked doomed to a slow demise behind the increasing irrelevance of Windows, with revenue from (local-only) Microsoft Office as the only future source of income.

Nadella has changed the course of that staid ship by changing the underlying culture, no small feat! Some specific actions: Microsoft Office on iPad and Android, going all in on cloud (Azure has 22% of the market, ahead of GCP's 7%, at the start of 2019), being friendly with Linux (Windows Subsystem for Linux - WSL, exFAT specs were released a few days ago), given up Windows Mobile (he “did not get why the world needed the third ecosystem in phones”).

https://www.inc.com/scott-mautz/microsoft-ceo-satya-nadella-...

https://qz.com/work/1539071/how-microsoft-ceo-satya-nadella-...

>The only way forward is p2p.

This is the tech utopia's cop-out. What does p2p even mean? How is the current internet as it is not p2p? p2p doesn't solve discovery.

Because of the people that they hire and the culture they promote.

The rise of the vendor contractor...

This is what happens when you develop an entire industry to avoid claiming the true number of employees your company has.

In the process you stifle creativity and innovation.

But hey, if your big enough you can just buy potential disrupters.

Likely focusing on government contracts/DARPA programs... :/

I don't see how breaking up Google is going to help us decentralize the internet though. But I don't like how they selective demonetize certain groups of people and mess with small businesses with zero transparency.

Regarding the pattern you described:

> On July 27, Tulsi Now Inc. filed a lawsuit against Google, alleging that the internet technology company suspended the campaign's Google Ads account without reason and that the company had treated the campaign's mail differently than it treated other campaigns' mail. The lawsuit seeks "an injunction against Google from further meddling in the election and damages of at least $50 million."[50]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsi_Gabbard_2020_presidentia...

Interview about it, from yesterday:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gy797D3cAY

Won't be in the 3rd debate, so that it's for her:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Democratic_Party_presiden...

She can still qualify the fourth debate - the thresholds remain the same. Tom Steyer just qualified for it despite not qualifying for the third one.

An anti-war candidate like Tulsi will never be allowed to be the final presidential candidate by the DNC. Google and the party work in lock step to make her go away. And they will. You'll get a candidate like Biden or the other awful woman who will do what they're told.

> Those who can control virality can modulate most of the loudest voices on the Internet. That's basically the power to relegate the ideas you don't like to relative near silence.

If you wonder why HN exists, this is it.

If HN went down tomorrow, I could hop to slashdot to find the old-timers, lobste.rs for the hip, reddit.com/r/sysadmin | r/selfhosted | many, many more tech subreddits, and more tech watering holes.

If Google went down tomorrow, we have what, Bing? Yahoo, DDG, and others are all powered by Bing. Otherwise we are trapped with the likes of Yandex/Baidu.

> If Google went down tomorrow, we have what, Bing?

If it's down for a day, Bing is fine. If it's down forever, we have access to $100 billion per year in venture capital to chase one of the greatest economic opportunities in world history. It'd be an extraordinary gold rush that would draw in dozens of start-ups.

Europe would also produce several dozen new search start-ups attempting to take a piece of Google's former market position. It'd be a fun time with a lot of experimentation. Would we end up doing New Search mostly the same way we do Google Search today, just with more competition (or only until there's another winner takes all)?

I was focused on a short term argument, but I get and agree with your point regarding long term opportunity.

I've been using Bing primarily and it seems fine. It's stronger in a few areas like image search, customization, and weather. Translation is roughly equal. For code and paper search it's somewhat worse than google but not WAY worse. I'd highly recommend making it your default search engine if only to help create a more multipolar internet power system.

The point isn't about whether HN goes down. It's about the community you can shape and cultivate.

> Someone achieves virality through controversy. They are promptly de-monetized, deleted, or frozen with no reason given.

In my mind the simplest explanation is not something nefarious by Google, but simply that advertisers don't want to be associated with controversial videos.

simply that advertisers don't want to be associated with controversial videos.

Then why would the re-monetization and restorations happen? It makes more sense that the timing of denial is the key thing. Also, it's an article of faith for implementers of large systems, that if something can be exploited, it will be exploited. This applies as much to attention and political power as it does to monetary gain. In the case of the 1st two, the exploitation is probably done by low level employees for outside interests.

If that was the case Google AD hell would simply realocate the space for the next high bidder of that space.

This is millions of “spaces” we’re talking about. Advertisers can’t vet that many videos, and neither can Google. So they demonetize.

>A recurring pattern with Google and YouTube: Someone achieves virality through controversy. They are promptly de-monetized, deleted, or frozen with no reason given. When the period of viral opportunity has passed, typically in about a day or two, the account/monetization is reinstated with no reason given.

Tulsi Gabbard is suing Google for exactly this:

https://www.staradvertiser.com/2019/07/25/hawaii-news/hawaii...

Exhibit A should be Eric Schmidt's book 'The New Digital Age' in which he explains his view that because Google is rich, they should therefore take the reigns of global culture and decide the moral and social norms of society. He is not terribly secretive about the fact that he believes he is inherently Better than the masses and should be a large player in herding the public 'for their own protection.' Of course that just so happens to amount to ossifying global culture in the exact state it was in when Google rose to prominence in the early 2000s but I'm sure that's a total coincidence.

Can you give some citation on Michael Swaine's story. Not challenging you, I'm just interested about it. I couldn't find anything when I searched 'Michael Swaine parking tickets'

> * A recurring pattern with Google and YouTube: Someone achieves virality through controversy. They are promptly de-monetized, deleted, or frozen with no reason given. When the period of viral opportunity has passed, typically in about a day or two, the account/monetization is reinstated with no reason given.*

Do we have a partial list of videos that followed this specific pattern? I'm curious what the agenda(s) might be.

This happens a lot in political commentary videos. Almost none of them receive ads anymore.

Also because a lot of marketers were royally taken to task for letting their ads appear on political videos. Part of it might also not be that Google demonetised them directly, but allowed us the tools to opt out of having our ads shown on those types of videos altogether.

We now have a load of hoops to jump through to justify spend on YouTube advertising - and political videos are a strict no-go area.

Hm. Is that to suppress a particular set of ideas, do you think, or just cynically pandering to controversy-phobic advertisers? Not that either one is good, but that latter at least seems even-handed, I guess.

> Basically, these sorts of shenanigans are like Michael Swaine's story from decades back about deleting his own parking tickets in South Carolina. He was supposed to have parking so he could work on the city's mainframe, but the bureaucracy dropped the ball.

Do you have a link with more details? A quick Google didn't seem to turn up anything.

>Basically, these sorts of shenanigans are like Michael Swaine's story from decades back about deleting his own parking tickets in South Carolina

I can't find anything on this. Do you have a reference? Sounds interesting.

6. Pretty much everything about AMP: forcing sites to conform to a standard they created in order to show up in search, a standard that doesn't let sites control their UX or interactivity (then, just showing Google hosted caches by default instead of being a search engine.)

7. Overzealous GMail spam filters making it hard for anyone new to run email services

8. Google Groups: buying the biggest Usenet archive, breaking features, and embrace-extend-extinguishing it with groups that are on the same interface but don't syndicate to Usenet

9. Buying Meebo to shut it down, buying Softcard to shut it down.

10. Breaking reCAPTCHA for Firefox users, then maybe fixing it a year or two later after causing untold numbers of people to switch to Chrome (possible duplicate of degrading services)

11. Running YouTube at a massive loss for a decade to prevent anyone else from competing in online video

12. Not letting YouTube be run on Amazon devices

13. Bundling / requiring / defaulting Google services on Android phones, the world's dominant phone platform

14. Slowly allowing more ads in search (which has 90+% market share) and reducing their visibility so that people have to pay to have their own website show up when they are searched for

All this being said, my gut is that something with their opaque ad markets is what's really going to stand out in the investigation.

The one that will actually get them in trouble is running ads on top of navigational queries to a trademarked brand.

Here is Jason Fried of Basecamp openly accusing Google of a shakedown racket: https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016

Of the 100,000 or so people that actually give $2,700 to political candidates, I'd think this is their biggest gripe with Google, and likely the issue that is going to cause Google the most problems.

The more interesting thing to me is how quickly goodwill just expires. Google search is among mankind's greatest achievements in the past century, along with the free gifts of quality email, youtube, android, etc. It is an interesting thought experiment of how to keep a brand burnished in the eyes of the public given goodwill decays so rapidly.

Google Search has gotten worse in the past few years in my opinion. It seems biased towards newly published content and content from the top 100 sites or so. Before it felt like you were grepping the internet, but now it feels like you're at an airport newsstand. It will frequently re-write your queries for you if you are searching for uncommon things, and putting it in quotes doesn't always fix it.

Have you seen Google Image search recently? They have updated it such that when you click on an image to select/expand in view, the selection is now presented in the top right hand side of the page. But the selection is not floating with your scrolling - so selecting anything below the fold means you end up scrolling back and forth between the top of the page and your previous position. Honestly not sure why they changed it. Terrible.

Using image search on mobile is a truly a painful experience

I've stopped using Google for searching for various generic terms and instead search nearly everything as site:reddit.com 2019 "search term".

Sometimes I get mildly useful information that stands out from the page after page of pagerank gamed garbage.

Now, searching reddit.com for solutions has other issues (notably using Reddit on iOS via Safari, is, as of 9/2019, almost entirely impossible), but that's where I'm at currently.

There are many searches that have so much SEO optimized crap content in the results that it is impossible to find any actually useful content.

Yes, they changed how search works - try using "google verbatim" for the old behavior.

The worst is the blog spam that reaches the top of Google's search results.

I don't think it's a coincidence that those poor quality results are given precedence when they also happen to be littered with, and optimized for, Adsense ads.

Amusingly, at least for me, a search for [basecamp] now gives me no ads.

> ... the issue that is going to cause Google the most problems

I am certainly biased because I seem to see more negative HN Google comments than positive ones. But, I'm starting to wonder if taking money from Google will cause politicians problems in 2020. Will we see candidates bashing each other for being too cozy with Google? Could taking Google money even become a third rail?

And Cal AG Xavier Becerra is a test case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20944284

Would be more effective if he titled it "Dont click this ad | Click the first organic result below"

As a web user, I have to say, I hate AMP. I always click through it. Especially on reddit.

The double-whammy of AMP meets reddit nagging requests to launch the app really grinds my gears

A combination of noscript and only using old.reddit.com prevents this kind of bullshit for me.

come to europe for extra cookie and gdpr requests

Re: #7, I run my own mail server and haven't had issues sending to Gmail addresses (at least that I know of). Having DKIM and SPF working helps Google figure out that yes, my emails are legit. So does running a secure-by-default mail server (OpenSMTPd) and - relatedly - checking spam blacklists / running open relay tests every once in awhile to make sure I haven't been flagged for some reason.

AT&T, on the other hand, is the one that's quite overzealous.

Running YouTube at a massive loss for a decade to prevent anyone else from competing in online video

How is that different from what every VC does?

It can also be illegal when VCs do it: "Pricing below your own costs is...a violation of the law [if] it is part of a strategy to eliminate competitors, and when that strategy has a dangerous probability of creating a monopoly for the discounting firm so that it can raise prices far into the future and recoup its losses." [1]

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...

So does that include Uber and Lyft?

i cant see why not. and Wework

I am not sure your list demonstrates anti-competitve behaviour:

1. Did Apple ever offer a XMPP federated iMessage? Facebook offered XMPP messenger? Shall Google bear the eternal burden of keeping their products constant, and not make changes they think are better(even if they are worse overall).

2. When did we have iTunes on windows Phone either? Even Office came for Android and iOS only when the fate of Windows phone was sealed. Lots of developers didn't develop for Windows phone. Shall those be investigated too? (Yes yes, MSFT did make a youtube app, but google has full liberty to decide which platforms they want to make apps for).

4. Now MSFT even specifically tells you that Edge is a better browser in Windows during all sorts of things(while changing default browser, I think while downloading other browsers too). Also iOS will always remind you Safari is there, as it is the default browser and that can't be changed.

It has not been my experience that Apple services are dominant outside of the Apple ecosystem inhabitants. Google, on the other hand, is everywhere.

As a former Windows Phone user, there were apps that talked to Google Accounts (mail, calendar, contacts) as well as an app written to work with YouTube. I don't remember any others right now. But Google actively blocked those apps while refusing to release their own interface to their services. That made it more painful than it needed to be to continue using Windows Phone. The fact that they were able to say "too bad, we will not work with you, the users will suffer" is exemplary of their dominant position.

Maybe there are iTunes users out there that wanted to access their iTunes accounts on Windows phone, but could not?

If you see the original iPhone introduction by Steve Jobs, being able to play iTunes songs was a huge deal. No other phone could do it. (Well apple did try with Motorola for some phone to play iTunes, but those were heavily restricted). iTunes was the dominant music store. Did they ever offer a version for either Symbian, Blackberry, android, Windows Phone? No.

Windows phone had no Instagram too, and even that made it painful to use. If the platform doesn't have enough users, developers aren't obliged to develop for it.

You could always use a web browser for all of Google's services. They never blocked HTML5 apps.

Windows Phone came out a year after iTunes dropped the use of DRM, so any native Windows Phone music app would work.

This was not true of YouTube, where Google actively blocked Microsoft from building a native client.

I'm not really following what you're saying. I believe you're making my point - if you are in Apple's ecosystem, you're in. And it is popular. But Google provides search and email and maps and contacts for "everyone." That's why when they actively blocked Windows Phone from their services, it was anti-competitive.

Other entities like Instagram were under no obligation to build for Windows Phone, but 6tag was built and served the purpose. I don't believe Instagram blocked 6tag from working. If they did, it might not be anti-competitive, but just anti-consumer.

Beyond this, Google's behavior had ripple effects. Developers could tell that Google was putting up roadblocks to make Windows Phone an undesirable platform, and that discourages contributions.

If iTunes only exists on iPhones, but not Android, then it doesn't matter if it also doesn't exist on Windows Phone. Apple, the iPhone and iTunes are not monopolies. They are a walled garden, though. That's just a separate issue.

> iTunes was the dominant music store. Did they ever offer a version for either Symbian, Blackberry, android, Windows Phone? No.

Is it me or does that just sound like whataboutism? So people complain about Google intentionally screwing over a competitor but what about Apple? Apple is very much "we play on our own court".

I think what we're seeing on this forum at times is more emotion than rationality.

Regarding the original list, it's likely only 2 and 5 would pass muster as being issues that antitrust laws would actually be able to deal with effectively. Number 3? Might be an issue if you can frame the argument in a manner more consistent with antitrust concerns. 1 and 4 are probably just emotional frustration leading the poster to say, "These must be illegal because I don't like them."

We need to focus on real issues if we want to be taken seriously. Right now privacy and security activists just sound shrill and unconvincing. Part of that lack of credibility is the tendency to focus on things that are not true issues from a legal perspective as opposed to the slam dunk type issues that stare us in the face.

This is why these issues are so hard to build a consensus around in the larger population, because lawyers hear the complaints of some activists, and they just laugh. Then those lawyers go off and work on things that actually have a chance in Hell of working. So I applaud the move to have an antitrust investigation, but we shouldn't be under the impression that every little thing some guy doesn't like is part of it. There are very specific families of issues that are reviewed for propriety, and if action needs to be taken, it is.

Doesn't mean we should waste the time of these states looking into why some guy's youtube account was cancelled. That, and other ridiculously trivial issues like it, are not what this is about. So we shouldn't even set up those expectations. Particularly not in lieu of getting the word out to the larger society about real antitrust issues. (Of which Google and FB are the main offenders.)

> We need to focus on real issues if we want to be taken seriously. Right now privacy and security activists just sound shrill and unconvincing.

No offense, but honestly just look around. Those activists are killing it nationally in the PR game and have been consistently for the past year.

Part of the purpose of activism is to exploit current laws for immediate change, but the other part is to create support for changing the laws to provide better protections.

The idea that you could disappear completely from anyone using modern technology (which is what getting accounts banned from communication services will amount to) with no legal recourse or transparency is horrifying, even if it's technically legal, because the laws were written at a time when the tools of communication were widely distributed and could only be feasibly disrupted by governments.

In the short term, the lawyers matter. In the long term, we need to create laws and conventions which ensure that the lawyers of the future are focusing on the right issues.

The Apple ecosystem is huge though. You can't claim Google is dominant "outside the Apple ecosystem". That's the same as saying Google has a monopoly if you ignore its competitors.

I used to work at Google. Apps written by hobbyists were only exceptionally rarely blocked deliberately. But those apps often [ab]use internal APIs and protocols of the services, so they'd break during updates (which were frequent). Sometimes they have to be blocked due to external contracts (e.g. Maps). Sometimes they tripped anti-botting/anti-spam detection and got users blocked that way.

In the end there's no law, agreement or even convention that all services exposed over the internet must allow reimplementations of third party client software. Moxie Marlinspike has written about the difficulties introduced by formally supporting this:

https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/

> In the end there's no law, agreement or even convention that all services exposed over the internet must allow reimplementations of third party client software

Yes there are. They are called anti trust laws, and anti competition laws. These laws apply to companies that have significant market power, regardless if they are on the internet or not.

If a company has significant market power, then it is illegal for them to engage in anti competitive practices.

In Google's industries, such as search, it can be described as being close to a monopoly, which is enough for anti trust laws to kick in.

Yes, if you have significant market power, then you are required by law to not engage in anti competitive practices.

> Did Apple ever offer a XMPP federated iMessage?

EDIT -> They did NOT, see below comment by nvrspyx.

Apparently they did, and removed it around Mojave-era or so...? I'm not familiar with Apple products, this statement is based on https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/9l5xu7/mojave_now_th...

> Also iOS will always remind you Safari is there, as it is the default browser and that can't be changed.

> When did we have iTunes on windows Phone either?

I agree that incompatibility in general is not on its face evidence of anti-competitive behavior.

> Facebook offered XMPP messenger?

They did, then once they imported users to their platform, turned that feature off. That might have precipitated Google to turn off XMPP federation on GTalk to stop the bleeding.

> Shall Google ... not make changes they think are better(even if they are worse overall)?

Nobody said that Google cannot make any changes to their products. Moving from a standard 'everyone' can use to a closed-off system could be argued as anti-competitive, hence its inclusion on the list.

> Lots of developers didn't develop for Windows phone. Shall those be investigated too?

Those developers could refrain from developing themselves, but they were not in a position to stop competitors from developing their own apps. Google is in a different position.

> Yes yes, MSFT did make a youtube app, but google has full liberty to decide which platforms they want to make apps for

Google said not to develop the app that way, but this way. MS complied. Google still refused to allow the app for no explained/good/political/anti-competitive? reasons. Google was focused on killing Windows Phone, not the iPhone, even as far back as 2006. Eric S in the Verge article in my above comment "... at the time we were very concerned that Microsoft's mobile strategy would be successful."

Jabber was an option in macOS's messages app, which allowed you to connect to Facebook for example. It was an app to consolidate multiple messaging protocols. iChat (replaced with Messages) was sort of like Pidgin, Empathy, or Adium. However, iMessage, Apple's own chat protocol, never used XMPP. It has always been proprietary. Messages replaced iChat, which only uses iMessage. However, iChat used to technically still be hidden underneath Messages, but was really a separate app. That reddit post is when they removed iChat completely.

Thanks for correcting me on that. I learned something today!

Messages used to support Jabber and custom IMService plugins. Both of those were removed and Messages now only does iMessage and SMS.

> Nobody said that Google cannot make any changes to their products. Moving from a standard 'everyone' can use to a closed-off system could be argued as anti-competitive, hence its inclusion on the list.

So you're saying that Google (or any other company for that matter) is better off NEVER EVER releasing services that use potentially open protocols because later on if they would ever consider changing those to a closed protocol it can be seen as anti-competitive. Better to just always use closed protocols.

"Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" is a pretty clearly anti-competitive strategy.

The best way to counteract that strategy is a more complicated topic.

You are correct that creating bad rules around the removal of open protocols could end up dis-incentivizing usage of open protocols, but that doesn't mean there aren't some good rules that won't (I don't claim to know what they would be).

I think it makes sense that we create anti-trust or consumer protection laws that cover the circumstances under which services with high market-shares can remove support for open protocols.

I even see a potential argument to require services with sufficiently high market-share to implement open protocols.

Google just happens to be the biggest among them, so it's understandable they come first, but this is going to happen for every entity that grows to a certain point because it's how our system works: small players crying mommy about big corporations killing competition until they grow to a point they can kill competition themselves, which they will happily do, becoming themselves the bad guys. Then some external entity comes and restores some balance by splitting them etc. Rinse, repeat.

Maximizing profits, which is the goal that moves every company everywhere, from small shops to multinational corporations, leads ultimately to this if no, sloppy, or deliberately inefficient control is performed.

Biggest among what companies. Both market cap and net income of google are less than both MSFT and AAPL.

MSFT has had a phenomenal year. Amazing that big bad monopoly MSFT, survived an attempt to break it up, and then collapsed to irrelevancy, attacking Google with AstroTurf political advertising campaigns, yet is now higher market cap then AAPL, GOOG, AMZN, currently the only one worth (barely) over $1T.

All of these companies are guilty of anti-competitive behaviour, actually. This isn't proof that Google isn't guilty.

If some behaviour is too common across all companies, Governments need to focus on laws to address the underlying problems across the industry, not to cherry pick a company and make example of.

I mean, that's why the government isn't just one institution. You have Congress/Senate and the state-level governments to pass laws, and the FTC and the DoJ (and state-level equivalents) to enforce them. You can do both. Except the behaviour of Google et al. has largely gone ignored since their rise for whatever reason. I don't even remember the last time we saw a proper anti-trust case in the US, much less one that went anywhere. Was it Microsoft? Who knows. And there are plenty of financial interests to ensure that anti-trust isn't enforced and isn't adapted to the modern state of markets. There are a lot of things that need to be addressed, but that doesn't make suing Google for their abhorrent behaviour any less valid.

It seems to me like a decent first step.

The irony is that anticompetive behavior usually means competitive behavior but being the one that wins, as OP's examples show. OP even went wonder as blaming Google for Talk, which is mostly famous for being the last major service to disable XMPP after losing marketshare to competitors who already did or never supported it. Before Google, Apple and MS went head to head with the same anti/competitive techniques as each other but since MA one Apple got to play the victim.

In 1903 I haven't gotten the Edge prompts when changing.

Whoa - you might be right. I got a laptop and it was on 1809. Got the prompt. But then updated to 1903... fiddled with some stuff. Reinstalled Windows (but it stays on 1903) and I changed the browser to Firefox, and I don't recall that prompt this time around. (Where it asked you to confirm and you have to carefully read the buttons and then click "Switch anyway.")

Those sound anti-competitive as well

> Facebook offered XMPP messenger?

They did actually. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9266769 The actual link itself is now gone, so there are comments. I remember using it with Thunderbird at the time.

I would imagine it's pretty self-evident that other companies' examples of anti-competitive behavior don't absolve Google of their own wrongdoings.

Are you claiming that google has never engaged in anti-competitive behavior? If not, I would be interested to see your list.

No, I am claiming the above examples are not evidence of anti competitive behaviour.

There is a big difference between removing support for something you once supported versus never supporting it at all. If Google never supported XMPP, we wouldn't be having this conversation. But removing XMPP support in favor of closed protocols raises eyebrows. It makes people wonder if the change was for the better, or just as a way to close out competitors. Similar to Google Reader. If they never had the product, no one would be complaining. But they did offer the product, it was so much better than the competition that it put the competition out of business, and then Google shut it down. That raises eyebrows. That makes people wonder if there's something malicious behind it.

That's not to say they can never change their product lineup or discontinue products. But if they do, they have to answer questions like this. If there was no malicious intent behind removing XMPP support from their chat product, then everything is fine and the questions stop. We don't know, which is why regulators are investigating.

On the Windows Phone part, you are blatantly misrepresenting what happened. It's not that Google refused to develop apps for Windows Phone, it's that they refused to develop apps for Windows Phone, then blocked Microsoft from developing their own apps for Google products, then blocked Windows Phones from accessing Google products through a web browser that was more than capable of displaying Google web apps. You could not access Google web apps on Windows Phones in any way, a limitation that was not applied to any other phone maker or any other phone.

There is absolutely no defending that situation, Google played Microsoft hard and they played them dirty. Yes, Microsoft has done the exact same thing in the past and yes they deserved it, but remember: Microsoft was punished as an abusive monopolist.

XMPP is a bad example. Google Talk (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Talk) supported XMPP from 2005-2014, but by the time they dropped federation, it had already massively declined. You can argue over the reasons for that, I personally blame a combination of smartphones (iphone launch in 2007), which drove phone number based messaging apps/iMessage/WhatsApp/etc and the rise of path-dependent social networks like Facebook (FB messenger)

However, even if you look at the pre-2007 pre-FB era, instant messaging was dominated by Yahoo Messenger, AOL Messenger, MSN Messenger, etc. None of them supported federation, there were several attempts at interop, but none of them wanted it. Moreover, IIRC, Google's stated reason in 2014 for dropping federation was a non-reciprocal leaching that some of these platforms were using to exploit XMPP federation to ingest users into their walled gardens.

In messaging, every single product Google has offered has failed to gain market, and it's really Facebook and Apple which collectively have a oligarchal stranglehold on the market (or WeChat in China)

Google's latest attempt is a restoration of federation on mobile through RCS, but what's the likelihood that the dominance of iMessage and FB Messenger/WhatsApp are going to be weakened by this?

People hate Google for "Don't Be Evil" because it was the "chosen one", while giving a pass to their unabashedly evil competitors.

Google wasn't _chosen_, they said that they would be better and then promptly gave up as soon as they had gained a bunch of good will and it wasn't convenient for them anymore.

And I still fail to understand how Google surveilling and exfiltrating is somehow better than anyone else doing it.

> 3. Posting map/weather/review content straight to SERPs starving MapQuest/WU/Yelp et al from getting clicks

I get why this is included in Anti Trust but I love this feature. Recently read a report that now <50% results lead to click which means it is loved by lot of users too.

Recently read a report that now <50% results lead to click which means it is loved by lot of users too.

You're misinterpreting that report. All it tells us is that Google returns results the user doesn't want to click on more than half the time. We can't determine whether that's for positive reasons (eg info in the results page) or negative reasons (eg the results were garbage) based on the fact there wasn't a click.

Agreed -- my favorite example of this is lyrics. Most lyrics sites are horrible, ad-filled messes, and I for one can't wait for Google to finally eliminate them from existence.

Genius.com is such a good lyrics site (good... not great) and it kills me when I search for lyrics and it's not on the first page of results. I don't know why, but I always have to add +genius to my searches to get it to show up over all the trash sites.

I second that. So good and clean that I've atually contributed myself.

I personally hate Google including say Wikipedia snippets. Quite often I want to read more of the article, and the link is small and at the bottom of the box, often requiring you to click and arrow to reveal the full box.

If they value Wikipedia and Genius/MusicMatch so much, they should make it much clearer where they got their content from.

from a few years ago: https://techcrunch.com/2013/12/25/google-rap-genius/

Lyrics websites are just spam at this point.

Whenever you search for song names they take the first two pages and interesting stuff such as news and interviews are scattered around the rest of the results.

Solution: allow these companies to bid for the spot. Like they're doing in the EU for the choice of default search engine in Chrome.

Allow power users to pick a default, so we don't have to suffer through terrible third party content and ads.

Disabling this functionality will be a net negative for the end user.

I agree that's a useful feature, but that seems orthogonal as to whether or not it is anticompetitive.

i would also love to scrape google s search queries and results pages and make a website showing them. i m sure my users would love it.

Sorry but some one else already did that before you (http://startpage.com).

> Startpage exclusively uses results from Google, which the company pays Google for

or they cant find the link to click. seriously, they are tiny and greyed out and the SERP content fills the view already

Honestly, so many of Google's arguments sound exactly like Microsoft's arguments from the late 90s when they were adamant that the browser was an integral part of the OS and not a separate application. They were essentially saying that "the OS is everything", and so they could roll all sorts of functionality into the OS, leveraging their OS monopoly to get advantages in other areas (i.e. apps). It was always my understanding that it was that leveraging of their monopoly into other areas that was the illegal part.

Google is now basically saying "everything is search", i.e. rolling pretty much everything into SERP pages so you never need to click off Google.

Microsoft's biggest legally official sin was killing the paid browser market. Reflect on that with the benefit of hindsight and the larger modern VC backed freemium economy.

The other evil stuff they did, like blackmailing PC makers to ban competing OSes, didn't even get them in much trouble.

There's a bit of a difference between controlling the OS, which was (largely still is) almost impossible for the average user to safely change even if they wanted to, and controlling a web page that anyone who can type 20 characters can switch away from.

At this point, the "anyone can switch away to another search engine" argument is getting pretty stale, preciously because Google owns all the major assets that would make writing a truly competing service viable:

1. They own Android, so as the default search engine on the majority of the world's phones they are privy to insane amounts of data. They also know tons of other things that only being in control of the largest OS provides, like location history and app history.

2. Similarly, with their purchase of DoubleClick 15ish years ago they own the largest ad network.

3. With Gmail they probably know as much about social connections as Facebook.

4. They de facto control AMP, and can thus dictate site implementation to millions of publishers.

All of this info is used by Google to constantly improve their search engine, and it has all the hallmarks of using information from disparate areas (mainly of businesses they acquired, mind you) to build a deeper moat.

I think #1 is its primary job, search: They rip off everyone's and their mother's content yet don't allow scraping google result pages.

and their moneymaker, ads: preventing advertisers from reaching any kind of adult content publishers by imposing arbitrary filters for what is "acceptable", and using advertising revenue as a weapon to deplatform opinions they dont like

Their acquisition of AI competitors is a huge one imho. They are the only companies which seriously threaten their search engine. In another time, the UK would have blocked the purchase of Deepmind for national security reasons alone.

> 4. Anyone not browsing on Chrome gets an upsell to install Chrome (MS got roasted for this with Windows Media & best used on IE)

Every time you install a new copy of Windows and switch the browser to Firefox/Chrome/whatever, you get prompted "are you sure you really want to switch from Edge? It's amazing!!!1!" Then there's the fact occasionally it will still open things up in Edge -- search for 'Amazon' in Windows Start (is that what we're calling it still?) and do "Search the web" or "Web results" and it will open Edge (in Bing). Apparently my default apps are Mail for Email, Maps for Maps, Groove Music for Music Player, nothing for Photo viewer, nothing for Video player, and Google Chrome for Web browser. I've never opened Mail, Maps or Groove Music, I've never had a problem with photos and videos opening in my preferred viewers, and Windows doesn't seem to entirely respect the Web browser setting anyway...

Antitrust against Google? Sure, but MS is still doing it's antitrust thing 20 or so years on; I'm not aware of Apple being significantly different either. Outside of the OS vendors, all of the tech companies are trying to "maximize profits" by spying on users, forcing lock-in, degrading others' services, whatever.

Point being? I don't know -- "Big Tech" sucks and there's either no taste or no competence in government for shutting down these little tricks and loopholes. Something needs to change, but I don't know how or what. Join EFF, donate money? Maybe...

You forgot AMP and AMP for Gmail

Indeed, I did. Glad you remembered it for me, that is a big one and another example of embrace, extend, extinguish leveraging the power of Google Search.

I suppose that's me in the super-privacy-nerd bubble. Having moved to Fastmail for email and using Firefox for Mobile + Startpage search, I almost never encounter Amp in my own SERPs (not that there's much AMP content out there for Clonk Endeavor ;P).

I don't think it qualifies since anyone can go and implement AMP. If AMP extensions are being made which aren't documented and they are implemented only by closed source code in Google clients and servers then you can argue that they are leveraging their power to keep competition out. Otherwise the competition can simply implement AMP.

Or let's look at it differently, if you are Google and find that a new, HTTP-incompatible protocol would make things better for a significant number of clients, how would you develop and push for that new standard in a way that people won't complain about anti-competitive behavior like you are complaining above? And are you sure that following those steps won't result in other people on HN complaining that it's anti-competitive?

> how would you develop and push for that new standard in a way that people won't complain about anti-competitive behavior like you are complaining above?

IMHO, google would have been fine if they had done everything the same but instead of basing mobile search results on AMP usage, they had based it on page load time metrics.

EDIT: The issue with AMP is less that Google created a new standard and more the way that Google has tried to utilize its other properties to force adoption of that standard in ways that seem more focused on benefiting Google than the internet as a whole.

This 2012 FTC report has some ideas: http://graphics.wsj.com/google-ftc-report/

US antitrust law requires demonstrating harm to consumers not competitors. All of your examples are about harm to competitors.

Harming a competitor harms the consumer because competitors create the products that offer the consumer choice.

My favorite, though it's closer to racketeering, is that they run ads for for branded keywords and charge the same brands for placement. Basically, Google is telling companies "you wouldn't want someone to get you competitor listed in the top position when they search for you, would you?"

As a user:

1. xmpp sucks for battery life. extensions to improve it exist but are optional. xmpp-free hangout was free to improve battery use

2. if i made money selling ads and someone used my content for free & ripped out the ads, i would deny them access too. If they had 0.01% of marketshare, i also would not prioritize making a custom app just for them either

3. GOOD! i do not want to make extra clicks when i do not need to.

4. ok, this is a dick move, i admit

5. having worked at google and seen how things work in there, i am 100% sure this is not a top-down "break firefox whenever possible" directive but just normal shortage of engineering effort and too many things prioritized higher than "make shit work in firefox"

I find the antitrust angle weak, but XMPP federation doesn't require the client itself to use XMPP, only the servers among themselves.

>> 2. Killing Windows Phone by not allowing any Google-based apps on the platform (https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/14/15970082/google-killed-wi...)

I honestly had no idea about this one. The Windows phone and Microsoft clearly had other issues with their mobile platform, but this clearly did not help. Most people I know said they wouldn't switch because most of the Android apps weren't available on the Windows app store.

Another anti-trust violation that was part of Microsoft’s suit was for product tying. Basically, it’s legal to obtain a monopoly in one product via competitive means, but it’s illegal for the company to then obtain monopolies with other products by tying them to the legal monopoly.

Microsoft was guilty of this vis-a-vis Windows, Office, and Internet Explorer (and maybe some server side stuff). Google may be guilty of it as well with Google Search, Chrome, YouTube, Gmail.

There are several more instances of Google promoting their own services above the SERP (and competitors).

1. Shopping. Google got in big trouble with the EU about this recently.

2. Job listings. Google launched a jobs product and promoted it above the SERP, damaging Glassdoor / Indeed etc.

Providing the largest source of traffic (via google search) and competing in industries that depend on that traffic is an inherent conflict of interest.

In my very humble opinion, services that are offered for free should also be investigated for anti-trust practices. Google comes up with Gmail - phenomenally better than other services of its time - kills all viable competition and the let it languish or even degrades the experience. No one can compete with free. Result is that email as a platform is slowly languishing with no real improvements.

If you kill off free and ad supported services[0], you take away the ability of a large fraction of the world's population to use the internet. People using 3-4 USD/month prepaid internet packs to communicate using Facebook and Whatsapp, and these days, even finding jobs (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20556346)

HN's default position of "burn the ads with fire", therefore, has always struck me as a very privileged position that fails to take into account users from all around the world. And guess what? If the kind of people who usually post here succeed in forcing through that opinion, that is what most of the world will have to deal with too, since Silicon Valley drives so much of tech.

[0] Although, it is unlikely that advertisers are really targeting the kind of users I'm talking about, so in effect these users are being subsidized by others.

WhatsApp’s original model was $1 a year. That would have been a reasonable fee even for most developing countries. Job posting sites make money from the poster and don’t have to be ad supported.

What would a $1 a year model do in terms of opening the market up to competition? That seems like the worst of both worlds, no additional competition, and we make these difficult for those without much money.

Were they profitable with that model?

So as a company better to just not provide a great free service or a service that is largely better than the competition because if it's too successful then you get blamed for not keeping it updated.

Yahoo and Hotmail were the market leaders offering free email at the time. They set the price to $0 first.

So I guess we should ban HN....

Personally, the one service I really liked that Google killed off for good was Deja News. Ever since they bought it, they brought more and more user hostile patterns until they turned it into Google Groups where you can't search old stuff anymore at all.

This is a good list, although in economic damage terms it's really just the start. Our efforts on this are just becoming public now, but there's a lot more that will come out -- especially in ads, ad serving, and content.

Just about all google sites use user-agent detection which can sometimes mean different quality. I know because I have had to analyze lots if sites with linux vs windows user-agent to see if they behave differently.

This investigation is only about their ad network

Just to pile on, how about taking features out of Android open source project and putting them into Google Play services?

Running YouTube at a loss of hundreds of millions a year for over a decade on a billion-dollar+ infrastructure purely and solely to guarantee that no competition could ever rise against it would, I think, be an easy sell as anti-competitive.

I personally would also like to see Google be the first of many "sellers" of digital goods prosecuted for fraud and false advertising for constantly advertising that they are "selling" you digital content when they are, in fact, only giving you a license which itself amounts to a contract lacking consideration - placing no obligation upon the licensor and extending no legally enforceable benefit to the licensee.

As fun as this is, why not investigate companies that actually display anticompetitive behavior? Luxottica? Comcast? AT&T? I feel like this simply won't benefit consumers as much as the attorneys general believe it will.

Luxottica can be fought with ZenniOptical and friends. Besides my very first pair of glasses, I've never in my optical-aid-lifetime given money to Luxottica for glasses/frames/contacts. That is not to toot my own horn, but demonstrate that an informed consumer can sidestep their monopoly without adverse impacts.

Comcast & AT&T are terrible actors, and they need more regulation, not less, to counter their natural monopoly + rent-seeking behaviors, but there is at least some regulation going on that could be iterated on. Google is, relatively speaking, running amok through the streets.

It had never occurred to me to try to avoid Luxottica, because until about three years ago I had never even heard of them. Yet I seem to have avoided them by accident.

My current frames are Zyloware frames from Walmart.

Before that, my frames were made by Safilo. I had those for something like a decade.

The frames before that say "Frame Japan". I can't find anything useful about "Frame Japan" on Google, so don't know if those are made by Luxottica or not.

They also own all of the equipment everyone else uses to make your glasses.

Own? Or produce? You're not saying lens grinding equipment is always leased from some Luxottica subsidiary, are you?

One possible reason is that the telco giants are indestructible. Are you going to poke one of the largest media conglomerates in the world? Seems like you may face some rapid backlash there. Telco voices sure do carry.

I don't understand this sentiment. Antitrust laws are specifically designed to deal with "indestructible" companies.

And yet they have historically not been used in such a way. The railroads that were targeted during the height of US antitrust legislation were some of the smaller groups.

They were used to literally break up a telco, Bell, in the 80s, so it’s not like it’s impossible or unheard of

Yes, that is true. But now the telcos have adapted into an oligopoly. Additionally, that action was initiated by the Feds, not state AGs as in this context.

I would maintain the position that prosecutors often look for attainable (low risk) fruit. It certainly depends on the prosecutor, but the federal level has been quite reluctant in the past (e.g. how did at&t become so large?...).

Grandstanding before the 2020 election. Google's big, successful, and there have been enough tech scandals in the past few years that it's an easy target.

1- Do you believe that Google isn't engaged in anti-competitive behavior? 2- Investigations have to start somewhere. Sure, those would also be some great people to go after, and everyone is going to have all kinds of expectations of "what's important" but that's entirely subjective.

Basically, I don't see progress, even if it's maybe not the most important thing, as ever being a bad thing.

> 1- Do you believe that Google isn't engaged in anti-competitive behavior?

People seem to be broadly confusing competitive practices with anti-competitive practices. There's nothing anti-competitive about outperforming your competition. No amount of outperforming your competition can make a company anti-competitive. The premise is ridiculous. As long as Bing exists, Google search obviously isn't a monopoly. GSuite is obviously not a monopoly, Microsoft sells essentially the same product. GCP is obviously not a monopoly, it's piddling compared to AWS, and smaller than Azure too. The only Google product I can think of that a reasonable person might find concerning from a monopolistic perspective is Youtube, since afaik it has no comparable competition these days. But even still, having no competition doesn't make your behavior anti-competitive unless you arranged to have no competition through some mechanism other than offering a superior product. Youtube appears to have beaten out the other products in its niche based on merit. why is it Google's problem if no other company was up to the challenge of profiting in that niche?

Very true. I guess it is nice to know there are things done against SOME monopoly/anticompetitive organizations, but still I wish it would go further. After reading your comment I do agree with you though!

Biggest fish in the pond is google. With at&t and comcast you typically have one other competitor within a 25% margin of 50% market share that offers similar services.

It benefits consumers immensly since with good alternatives users can for example use more privacy conscious apps or apps with different approaches of solving their problem than what google thinks is best.

Would I be a bad person for saying I'm sad about this because I want to work at Google and I don't like seeing their future threatened?

I also don't get the anti-Google movement, there are far worse things like our broken healthcare and criminal justice system. This seems like one of those "screw the coastal elites" type of thing. Unless someone can give a reasonable explanation of why Google specifically should be targeted instead of other companies that are more conservatively aligned.

> Would I be a bad person for saying I'm sad about this because I want to work at Google and I don't like seeing their future threatened?

That doesn't make you a bad person, but it IS a bad reason.

That reason is no worse than the inverse reasoning: gleefully supporting the investigation because it threatens Google's future.

Also, I think the reasoning is independent of the specific situation. Working at $PLACE could benefit the poster. So the poster wants to see $PLACE continue to have a bright future. Seems like a standard argument for capitalism and the free-flow of human capital to better jobs.

I understand there are externalities that affect this specific situation, hence the investigation, but since it's not clear there's antitrust behavior, it seems premature to classify the reasoning as bad.

> gleefully supporting the investigation because it threatens Google's future.

what about gleefully supporting the investigation because it will create opportunities for competition, create room for other small companies to have at least a fighting chance at success?

> Unless someone can give a reasonable explanation of why Google specifically should be targeted instead of other companies that are more conservatively aligned.

This is really curious. Do you think anticompetitive investigations and lawsuits should depend on the political orientation of companies?

Your sentiment is understandable, and I still use Google every day because it's still the best in its niches. But here are a few things to keep in mind:

* Advertising revenue is practically nonexistent today compared to its heyday in the late 90s. This is because a few key players like Google have created a monopoly/oligopoly where they are so large, with so much more personal information on everybody, that they keep much of the profit for themselves and squeeze out any competition.

* The internet still provides lucrative careers for many, but this is in spite of (not due to) monopolistic players like Google. In other words, we'd all profit more, and have more room to innovate, if the big players like Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, etc didn't control nearly every aspect of the internet.

* Google is several orders of magnitude bigger than anyone's conception of how big it is. Short of a national monopoly breakup campaign, this will have little to no effect on their profitability or hiring.

My personal feeling is that income inequality largely stems from the US no longer enforcing antitrust laws, consumer protection laws, or finance laws like the Glass–Steagall Act. It effects liberals and conservatives alike and leads to global threats like nationalism (a leading contender for World War III) when the vast majority of the population spends so much time working to make rent that it's effectively disenfranchised, no longer has upward mobility/retirement, and doesn't have the means to raise a family.

If there was a monopoly on advertising, wouldn’t we expect advertising revenue to grow, rather than shrink?

I think he means that outside of Google, advertising revenue has shrunk for the publishers and others in the space, and that Google has consumed and controls the lion's share of the advertising revenue.

If you don't want to feel sad, maybe you shouldn't get emotionally invested in a company with a near trillion dollar market cap that exists solely to sell targeted ads.

>should be targeted instead of other companies that are more conservatively aligned.

They shouldn't be targeted to the exclusion of others based on political alignment, but neither should the not-googles be targeted to the exclusion of google based on google's politics.

> Would I be a bad person for saying I'm sad about this because I want to work at Google and I don't like seeing their future threatened?

You're not a bad person for rooting for a company or wanting to work there. I'd just say you're incredibly naive for having a such an attachment to brand. And you're setting yourself to have some of your most productive years chewed up by a company (not even necessarily google) that can take advantage of your dedication with no additional compensation beyond trowing some creature comforts at you.

I used to think like that as well, but then I realized that most of the lawsuits against Google was fair. And the thing is that the anti competitive practices done by the sleazy people over at the business department are bad and leads to lots of lawsuits, but they are also profitable and hurts competition so it is unclear if Google is really losing out on this.

Disclaimer: I work at Google but I haven't seen any internal communication related to anti competitive behavior, I just know what I read in the news.

They are not being "targeted". If you'd read the article, they're being investigated for using anti-competitive tactics from a position as a monopoly - but you think they should be given a pass because outwardly they project a liberal image?

Never ceases to amaze me how you "liberal" americans can support a megacorp in this manner while simultaneously thinking of yourselves as being on the left...

Most of the liberals I know are deeply concerned about google and the other FAANG companies and the abuses they are getting away with. And you're right behind the curtain none of these companies are liberal. There is a word I use, but if you use it on HN you get threatened.

> There is a word I use, but if you use it on HN you get threatened.

The term I know for this type of attitude is "champagne socialist".

Preaching liberal values with a silver spoon firmly wedged in their gob, only caring for those values superficially or only when it applies to others.

don't you think you're succumbing to marketing a bit?

> I also don't get the anti-Google movement

It's virtually all political propaganda from hostile nations. Europeans understand that they desperately need to develop a tech sector to compete with China and the US while their population is aging, brains are draining, and productivity is slumping. But since they've killed off their own tech companies seemingly the only option now is to try and ban FAANG - protectionism through propaganda, arbitrary fines, targeted taxes, etc. Then you see some troll or a useful idiot from US post a nonsensical argument like "I BUILT MY PERSONAL BROWSER AND GOGOLE DIDN'T ALLOCATE 100 ENGINEERS TO MAKE THEIR APPS WORK ON IT", and upvote bots from China / Iran / Russia pick up and amplify the post to the top. This is modern warfare and it's effective. Ask a senior engineer at Reddit or any other communication platform and they'll confirm it (in private).

If you get a chance you should definitely work at Google out of Mountain View office because you'll gain unparalleled technical knowledge and build an amazing network that can match Stanford or Harvard as far as your future goes.

Europeans are humans, and humans have rights, and the EU will enforce those rights.

The title is slightly confusing. According to AP,[0] current participants are 48 States, Washington DC, and Puerto Rico. California and Alabama are not involved.

[0] https://www.apnews.com/042b0989b2404c34a57e8ff9c8bbd0db

I can't say California surprises me, but I wonder what the deal with Alabama is.

Are we so far gone that we can't even expect the largest state by population and GDP to help police it's own mega corps to the benefit of the rest of the country? No doubt Google represents a massive chunk of Democrat donations... it's rather alarming that California is just sitting this out.

This is why http://www.madeinalabama.com/2018/04/google-kicks-off-constr...

Google has datacenters in other states, too.

>100 jobs

Yeah but it'll also provide some good money to businesses during construction too.

California, leading by example again. /s

50 = 48 states, 1 district and 1 territory

oh but title said territories plural, red alert

There's probably a rule of grammar that in such a phrase the noun must agree with the quantifier, even when the noun is part of an aggregate. "50 states and territory" doesn't sound right at all. "48 states and 1 territory" sounds stilted. Better to say "48 states and the District of Columbia", but once you include Puerto Rico it gets too wordy.

The original title seems like the best option. Also, D.C. is a territory in a loose sense (part of the U.S. but not a state), just not the same formal category of territory as Puerto Rico. It's an immaterial distinction in a headline such as this.

The stories that make me cringe are when some loyal user's account is frozen and there's no recourse to learn why it happened. Can't reach a person to ask why, email queries go unanswered. It happens every day. Or, say, gmail addresses get taken away, and it causes suffering. Sometimes Amazon closes accounts and effectively seizes assets, because the account held funds. Someone else here mentioned youtube's intermittent demonitization of videos when they go viral. These are issues a government could actually be effective at solving, giving consumers guaranteed review, with burden of proof on the corporation, not the consumer. Add fines and penalties to make it meaningful. Make them remember that the customer is important and shouldn't need a lawyer to get an overlord's attention.

In the past, the tech companies could count on the Republican impulse to protect Big Business to shield them from a lot of these type of investigations (for example, see how the Microsoft Antitrust DOJ investigations got a lot easier for Microsoft after George W. Bush became President).

Now, large numbers of Republicans view Big Tech as the enemy, and combined with Democrats historic suspicion of Big Business, this has resulted in a very volatile time with respect to government regulation and investigation.

Were Obama and Clinton not friendly enough to big business for you? Obama bailed out the big banks without any real punishment and had Henry Paulson (ex CEO of Goldman Sachs) as Treasury secretary.

You also might want to look up the Sherman (R) antitrust act

From https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nicolenguyen/google-ant... (which I can actually read):

> "Amazon Marketplace and Basics, and Google’s ad exchange and businesses on the exchange would be split apart. Google Search would have to be spun off as well," according to the [Warren] plan.

I'm all for busting up monopolists, but what would fund Google search? I mean, that's what arguably drove Google to build its ad business, in the first place. But if it could work somehow, maybe we'd get a return to more useful search results.

Edit: OK, I get it, ads.

Hmm. I'm a big fan of breaking up Amazon, but that's not the line I'd draw and I'm curious why Basics should be removed from Amazon. Most large retail outlets have the "store brand" for value shoppers. Walmart, Target, Meijer, Home Depot, Staples, etc, they all have the store brand. I'd certainly split Amazon Marketplace and AWS apart from the rest of Amazon, but I'm curious why Amazon shouldn't have their own store brand?

When you own the platform then you have complete access to data like user behavior and sales. With that (unfair) advantage you can more efficiently sell your own alternatives. This happens on every platform (app store, web search, social media, etc.) but it's problematic on Amazon because it can stifle small businesses on and off their platform.

Amazon is utilizing its knowledge of its powerful marketplace machine — from optimizing word-search algorithms to analyzing competitors’ sales data to using its customer-review networks — to steer shoppers toward its in-house brands and away from its competitors, say analysts.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/23/business/amazon-the-brand...

This data is much more powerful than large retail outlets have with their store brands: “I can’t just walk into a store and say, ‘Excuse me, did you look at this brand of cereal this morning and decide not to buy it?’ Amazon has that data. They know you looked at a brand and didn’t buy it and they’re not going to share that data with any other brands.”

> This data is much more powerful than large retail outlets have with their store brands: “I can’t just walk into a store and say, ‘Excuse me, did you look at this brand of cereal this morning and decide not to buy it?’

They definitively can, and are. Granted, it's a fairly new development.

Are there options that don't involve advertising?

Is there any way that we as a society could try to move towards an online economy that isn't built upon hijacking attention?

And making that universally available (geographically, economically and for all ages) as "free with ads" is and making it as anonymous as that (because while people complain a lot about Google's privacy invasion, last time I checked they don't require login to do a search, you can use private browsers, tor, etc but good luck making a universal payment system not traceable, don't think governments would ever allow it).

From a brief survey of the cities I've been to around the world, I'm gonna have to say "not yet".

And even in a post-scarcity post-money society the one thing which remains valuable is attention.

I hate seeing ads, and I hate being tracked. So I'd much rather have fairly priced and privacy-preserving micropayment services.

However, I also get that many people couldn't afford even micropayment prices that are comparable to current ad income. So they'd need some accommodation. Having a "pay or see ads" choice might work. Except that there are adblockers.

I hate the idea of paying for the luxury of having your own thoughts not be intruded upon.

I'm usually as hardcore as the next person, but isn't a bit much to get huffy about someone trying to fund their site using ads? As I see it, they have the right to use ads. And I have the right to block ads. So we just fight it out.

Ads would fund Google search and Google search could still sell ads on the exchange.

This is at least how I took it to mean.

What about all the underlying infrastructure (hardware, software, services, libraries, etc) that both use? Google has a famously single large repository for almost all their products (except Android, Chrome and a few other things): https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-stor...

Good luck changing billions of lines of code so you can create a clean separation that can work together between different companies.

It's really no different from a fork. Keep copies of the repository at both companies. Then let things run its course (engineers deleting unused code etc).

The entire Unix operating system was developed at Bell Labs which was then broken up by the US government along with the rest of AT&T. This led it to being commercialised and distributed. Who knows what would come out of Google if everything they did wasn't locked in a monorepo inside a single organisation.

I feel like this argument applied to Bell and it still worked.

"Too big to refactor" is a pretty silly argument against anti trust action

Also that's just not how "single large repositories" even work

Google Search would earn money just as any other site using Google Ads does.

Why Google and not Apple? Apple is worth more, and is extremely anticompetitive. You have to buy and sell apps in their app store. Apple charges a base 30%. All apps must be approved by Apple. And Apple has a history of removing apps from their app store only to release their own clone of the same app!

Because most people don't have an iPhone? Only 40% of smartphone users use iOS. Its fine to be anti-competitive, you just can't do so if you hold monopoly powers. MS only got in trouble when they leveraged their monopoly (OS) in one area to gain marketshare in another (browser).

Google has a effective monopoly on search traffic, (find me a Bing exclusive SEO firm), if they leverage that to gain Android marketshare or others, they could run into issues.

You must mean 40% in the United States, right?

Yes, which is the relevant number for this post where the topic of discussion is US anti-trust law.

> Why Google and not Apple?

It took the various levels of government about 15 years to catch on that all was not well with Google.

Apple will not skate by forever, but at the moment there are more egregious fish to fry.

The simple answer is all the things you list are things you are allowed to do when you don’t have a monopoly, and while Google has a monopoly on Search, Apple does not have a monopoly on Smartphone.

How does Google have a monopoly on search? Does Bing or DuckDuckGo not exist? Or the dozens of other sizable search engines? Monopoly does not mean majority shareholder.

I vaguely remember a strachery article on Google's strategy of saying that they weren't a search company so they could claim that they weren't a monopoly because, hey look we aren't winning at self driving cars and reader and google plus etc.

> Why Google and not Apple? Because Apple controls just their ecosystem (iOS, macos, etc.), and Google controls the web and Android. It is just like Microsoft, but much bigger and more dangerous.

Google gets more press for things like the Damore memo, political advocacy/bias, and walk-outs. They lost a lot of good will with typical defenders of laissez faire business practices.

Laissez faire for me but not for thee, apparently.

or maybe both?

Banning and demonetizing users is not an antitrust issue. Poor customer service is not an antitrust issue. Nothing related to politics or censorship is an antitrust issue.

Where I think google could be in trouble.

- Using google.com to push chrome installations when non-chrome browsers are detected.

- Forcing google services on android users

- Giving preferential search rankings to google services over competing services

- Ad network exclusivity contracts.

how is demonetization not an antitrust issue? They control the ad market, why should they also decide whether their advertisers can reach certain publishers? Shouldn't they be a neutral ad exchange platform, given that they have absolute control in the ad markets? What's the justification behind demonetization other than starving websites to death?

Demonetization is in service of advertiser prerogatives. YouTube would monetize every video if they could because it would make them a lot of money, they don't do so because advertisers do not want to advertise on controversial videos. YouTube loses a ton of money when they have to stream HD video to millions of viewers for free. Additionally, advertisers are not prohibited from working directly with publishers and this is actually pretty common.

> because advertisers do not want to advertise on controversial videos

all of them? proof?

> Poor customer service is not an antitrust issue

When you control both ends of the market (advertisers and consumers) it becomes antitrust because of the consumer harm.

Antitrust hit Microsoft's corporate culture to the core. It had a dramatic effect on the company and it's leadership.

I wonder whether a serious and prolonged litigation will affect Google as deeply a well.

Possibly. I started writing this comment and then ran out of insights to make, but the rough draft is posted below since I already typed it out and it's not utter drivel, if not that deep.

Speaking as a layman, the MS corporate culture, at least viewed through the lens of PR releases, system documentation, and MS press tech books through the years somewhat fuzzily expresses the corporate culture.

The first books I became aware of were from the 9x era when an ascendant Microsoft was eating Be/Amiga/Apple/Sun and everyone else's breakfast lunch and dinner in the desktop space. Things either worked Microsoft's way, or not at all.

Post anti-trust, MS suddenly was markedly open to doing things with inter-operability (which ~= backwards-compatibility) in mind, as long as you used primarly Microsoft's product offerings and kept the unwashed masses of Linux away in a closet somewhere.

These days, the culture seems to be a similar idea, but the product offering has moved up the stack from OS, RDBMS, or AD forest to CI/CD pipeline, compute cloud platform, and Office suite. We love Linux and open source, by the way have you tried our new Azure cloud?

Interesting, do you have some links exploring this topic further?

This is a too-brief but interesting oral history: https://www.theringer.com/tech/2018/5/18/17362452/microsoft-...

Gates was a business shark before the trial. Absolutely ruthless.

It’s hard to say how much of the changes are due to the court case, vs a changing technical landscape, vs the company growing to an enormous size, vs Gates simply getting older, but certainly after there were far fewer stories about his passion for crushing any company that might compete with him.

And promising to support Office on the Mac after Jobs returned to Apple definitely smells of a response to anti-trust concerns, and it was critical at that point in time to Apple.

Probably what Google does every time they get some negative attention: Circle the wagons.

It's also the worst thing that they can do, in this case.

What is the suspected antitrust violation?

> Their concerns ran from the way Google processes and ranks search results to the extent to which it protects users’ personal information.

Ranking search results isn't anti-competitive and protecting user information isn't relevant to antitrust. Ranking search results is the service a search engine provides. Google doesn't stop other search engines from competing in the search space.

It would be quite amusing to see engineers trying to explain search algorithms to politicians and lawyers, I admit.

Not as amusing as the questions they might ask or the solutions they might suggest, though.

Google search also has a hidden cost and lock in. It’s likely that most products you find through Google and which you also see ads for are forced to pay Google 20-40% of the retail price in ads (passed onto the consumer) due to a lack of competition in search. And this number is not going down over time and Google has no incentive to make it go down (such as by innovating in ways people discover what they need so that it becomes cheaper).

Not only that but the consumer doesn’t directly pay this Google tax, and thus does not attribute this cost to Google.

50 of [US States & Territories]

48 states are included, all except for California and Alabama.

What is expected outcome of this? Can Google be expected to be broken up like Bell Corp?

A breakup is highly unlikely IMO. Not only has the U.S. govt not been keen to break up monopolies in the last ~30 years, but it actually let AT&T reconstitute itself by re-acquiring most (all?) of the former baby Bells ~20 years after breaking them up.

In addition, the current administration has taken an absolutely anti-regulation approach if you get/stay in their good graces. I suspect that something closer to a toothless consent decree with certain <cough> accommodations to the administration would make this all go away. Not saying it's right, just that it seems the most likely.

These are states bringing g this issue. So it isn’t up to this particular administration in this case or even the DOJ.

Just because the States are kicking this off / working together doesn't mean that they will ultimately have jurisdiction over (most of) the charges they may want to pursue. Interstate commerce is an enumerated power in the Constitution so it may not be their call to make.

None of the tech companies are in the US administration's good graces right now if Trump is to be believed:

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/11634787705877217...

Similar comments about most of the tech industry can also be found on his Twitter.

Right, my point exactly. Now given what we've already seen from this administration, imagine Alphabet/Google took the path of least resistance and gave the administration what they want. What is the likely outcome of the antitrust situation then?

I think this would be good for everyone. But Bell corp was broken up not only for the monopoly but also because the government essentially created and subsequently funded the monopoly. At the time it was needed (arguably so) to create a reliable nationwide communication network, Im not sure how much the government had a hand in Google.

I had to replace the "50" in the title with "All" since HN doesn't allow titles that begin with a number. Hopefully this doesn't count as editorializing the title, and is allowed.

Edit: put "50" back in the title. In this case, the number isn't there to make a clickbait title.

You can edit the number back in afterwards (and that's the official solution), but this rewriting by the HN software is still obnoxious.

Thanks, I didn't know that.

It's not actually 50 states though...

TFA says it's 50, you have a source to counter?

It says "50 US States and Territories." The most natural parsing is that 50 entities are investigating, and some of those entities are states and some are territories. It's possible to parse it as saying all 50 states as well as (some) territories, although this phrasing would be awkward. If the former parsing is correct, then the number of states is less than 50, with the remainder being territories.

For the life of me, I cannot find anything in the article which lets me figure out who is actually investigating.

The confusion is that there are 50 states, and generally Americans do not know how many US territories there are. So "50 states" is understood as "all states," even though it could be 35 states and 15 territories for all we know.

The 50 states part carries so much weight that one's mind may interpret it as "50 US States and X territories" with an implied X.

> The most natural parsing is that 50 entities are investigating

That's now how I parsed it at all.

> For the life of me, I cannot find anything in the article which lets me figure out who is actually investigating.

Perhaps we should find another source to corroborate instead of wildly speculating.

>A bipartisan coalition of 48 states along with Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia said Monday it is investigating whether Google’s search and advertising business is engaged in monopolistic behavior.

>California and Alabama are the two states that haven’t joined an investigation into Google’s market dominance.

https://www.apnews.com/042b0989b2404c34a57e8ff9c8bbd0db

Technically says 50 States and Territories, but I can’t read past that because of the paywall so there’s maybe up to 5 territories which are also investigating and maybe up to 5 US States which are not investigating at all.

Or alternatively, all US States really are investigating and it was purely an editorial decision to say “50 States and territories”. I’m open to that possibility because I’m cynical about this particular source’s writing and editorial style and wouldn’t put it past them even when they have the facts of the matter largely correct. But, paywall.

Right now, the article doesn't specify which states and/or territories they are. It says it, "is a developing story and will be updated," so the page may list them in the future.

Next time I'd recommend use of the word "Fifty" in this case. Which doesn't work if the number your article starts with is 53,295, but works great for a short number like 50. It maintains the accuracy, as someone pointed out "all" may not be true here.

Let's see if Eric Schmidt stands by his "if you haven't done anything wrong, you shouldn't have anything to hide" viewpoint in the coming months. Should be fun.

This seems to be dodging the broader point that Google is simply too big and can exert too much power over which companies live and die by virtue of their massively diversified influence. I see this investigation ending with fines, which won't solve the root problem.

"I want the best advice, from the best doctors — not the doctor, not the clinic who can spend the most on advertising" says the politician, with no sense of irony.

I hate this ongoing PR attack on Google now being joined by politically ambitious state AG's. Google has done more positive things than any other company over the last twenty years. Instead of targeting bad companies that destroy people's lives (think gambling or alcohol or junk food), they are trying to destroy the company that gave us free search, maps, and email.

Let them probe, why all kind of IM services refuse to interoperate, while e-mail does it just fine.

Minimum bid on AdWords/Google Ads is a clear sign of monopolistic practices. Even if there are no competitors for the phrase or if it's very niche, you will have to pay the minimum Google tells you, in order to even appear in SERP.

A big part of the reason we have these technopolies is that people want/need the large networks/platforms they provide. To get that without monopoly companies we will need to turn to open decentralization technologies.

This is great. Break Google up intro search, corporate services (G Suite, GCP), YouTube, Android and a few others. Then, split Facebook into Instagram and FB. Amazon into retail (split further by category?) and AWS.

This will trigger a new wave of innovation. As smaller businesses, more innovations will be big enough to move the needle and will therefore be worth pursuing. Competitors will emerge - the giants are strangling their innovative competition in the crib right now, and we are all missing out as a result.

Breaking up standard oil and ma bell had very positive results. Glad to see some movement on breaking up anti competitive monopolies again.

> Break Google up intro search, corporate services (G Suite, GCP), YouTube, Android and a few others.

Supposing that hypothetically any of these products have a monopoly in their market, how does splitting them up into separate companies by market help in any way? Splitting Facebook into FB and Instagram at least makes sense, since the resulting two companies would both be social media companies and could be expected to compete with each other. Will Google search compete with GCP, or G Suite with Android? How does this make any sense from an anti-trust perspective?

What is sad is that these investigations are coming always way too late (after the damage is done) and probably won't be resolved until another couple of years.

Or resolved at all.

On more selfish note... I'm hoping to apply and work at Google. How much can this affect me? What could be the possible timeframe when penalties would go in effect?

The antitrust thing had been going on for a decade and Google had managed to vanquish the efforts, thanks to friendly government. Now the Breitbart videos of founders with teary eyes on Trump election victory has shook the conservatives to the core. Trump's bulldog, aka DOJ, is in full revenge mode and they would opt for maximum damage. Google's bad luck is that alt-left also want them to be broken up! It appears that there is nowhere to run for them. My expectation is that Trump would retain presidency due to weak Democratic field and antitrust would go through. This can really tear apart the stock if split is done intentionally to handicap them of capital. As employee who gets vast majority of comp as stock, this could be disaster in high CoL place like CA.

Ironically... reported by a source that bans us Europeans because they can't stop breaking GDPR. -_-

Any other source for this news?

Tell your MEP to stop passing dumb laws, but here's an archive link: http://archive.is/25rzP

MEPs don't create laws in the EU, it's the Commission that controls that. MEPs may only rubber stamp or delay them somewhat. They aren't politicians in any normal sense.

Perhaps the EU should be reformed to allow more direct representation in lawmaking, otherwise it risks future exits.

That's a bit too simplistic view.

It is true that MEPs lack the right of initiative, as in, they can't introduce laws, only the commission can. I do see this as a major democratic deficiency of the EU system. But there are some valid reasons why this is the case, which is way too off topic to go in to here.

The GDPR is widely-considered to be the state of the art privacy law, and other countries (including states in the US) are drawing inspiration from it.

I have no budget to be able to comply with GDPR, my web apps are barely break-even as it is. I don't even cater to EU citizens, and even though I don't do anything shady with personal information, I'm still at risk of running afoul of some regulator in some far off country. So my choice is to keep running this risk or just block all European IP addresses.

IMO that's not really "state of the art," and the more countries / provinces / municipalities that pass their own convoluted regulations the more risk it puts me under as a small business owner.

The net result is only huge companies have any hope of being able to afford the compliance costs with all of this bullshit.

Eh... if you don't do business in Europe and don't target EU citizens, you don't need to worry about GDPR. It only applies if you sell to EU citizens or ship products to Europe or in some way advertise that your company does business in Europe. [1]

The regulation is definitely state-of-the-art in terms of end user privacy, even if some companies don't have a state-of-the-art response to the challenges it poses.

[1] https://gdpr.eu/companies-outside-of-europe/

You're operating under the incorrect assumption that the EU owes some individuals or companies in some far of country an existence, even at the cost of the privacy of EU citizens.

It doesn't.

Obey the law or stop serving the European market, it's that simple.

As an european, I don't see it as breaking GDPR but as respecting it actually.

Making free content accessible on the condition of having one's privacy violated most definitely doesn't respect the intent of the law. A site that would respect the GDPR would either offer a no-tracking page like NPR, allow access only to paying users, or forbid access period.

So is seems they are taking the third option and forbidding access to GPDR countries?

Who's they? WaPo, which I was referring to does not.

I just checked and they even differentiate between paying less with some tracking and paying more for no tracking.

> offer a no-tracking page like NPR

Merely doing this is not sufficient for GDPR compliance. The site also needs to be able to verify that they are not collecting and storing personal data beyond what is necessary to operate the site, and have the mechanisms in place to respond as such to regulators when they inquire. That's not free (in time or money), and some organizations have decided it isn't worth their while.

> allow access only to paying users

Free vs. paid is completely irrelevant to the GDPR.

> forbid access period

As someone else noted, that's what they are doing.

If the NPR is not doing tracking, it's dead easy to respond to anyone's inquiries.

Free vs paid is relevant if it's free with tracking vs paid. It's basically trying to manipulate the user into being tracked by making not beibg tracked cost money.

WaPo is not forbidding access. If they had no access & paid, it would be fine. But they have free with tracking, cheap with tracking and a bit more expensive for no tracking.

It's pretty much what Google does isn't it? There's the irony :)

Google's mostly ignoring or working around the law. They already got fined.

But I was referring to WaPo, not Google.

GDPR is hard and I don't blame a business from simply refusing to comply and narrowing their audience.

never too late but late for a lot of companies ruined by Google.

Cash cow identified.

5 years too late

So, is this all 50 States, plus assorted territories, or a total of 50 States and territories? If the latter, who isn't taking part?

The article links to a piece from a week ago saying that half the US State's AGs were taking part in the investigation. Looking forward to hearing more about how broad this is.

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