Justice Department meeting state AG offices Tuesday to discuss Google: sources

The only way we move forward is if a) open standards have a business advantage or b) all players are forced through regulation to use open standards.

(My initial thought was "more ads?")

The only way I could see the US being able to regulate non-US competitors who grow too large is to fine them, such as what the EU does. Although that may not be enough to stop them from acquiring market dominance and may cause retaliation (such as the current trade war).

To be clear, I'm not a shill for these big tech companies. I don't currently work in any of them nor have stock in any. I'm concerned about their dominance, stifling of competition and their use of market position to render consumers powerless just as much as you may be.

Pai worked at Verizon for two years between 2001 and 2003. He was appointed as FCC member in 2012. How much loyalty do you have to a job you held for two years, nine years ago?

It isn't. But that's not an argument for nationalizing AT&T; it's an argument for privatizing the others. In fact, two out of three of them already have private competitors in the US; the only one that doesn't is Amtrak.

It'd be like if Microsoft rigged Windows to run .NET applications twice as fast as anything else, and made it very difficult to open any other type of application... where second-class applications are unavailable from being found in desktop search, can't have custom icons or be in Program Files.

But also make Google Search an open auction system (like it sort of is on Display) where other players can integrate with and Google (search) takes a fixed % for each click. Pipe dream I suppose but best way to avoid Google from being able to be truly dominant.

It seems that pretty much all of the FAANG corps would require serious invesigation into their walled garden and anti-competitive practices to allow for smaller players to again enter the market and compete. Having a single search provider is extremely dangerous. As dangerous as having an OS where no 3rd party browsers can exist and no software without Tim's approval can run.

Edit: downvoters, mind explaining the reasoning?

[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamjeakle/2019/11/25/how-ap...

It's certainly not a forgone conclusion that investigations led by "friendlier" administrations are necessarily fairer. I doubt there's any way to have a purely unbiased investigation into an entity as prominent and influential as Google.

It's an Obama-era policy that has been shown to have wide, bi-partisan support across the country. Bringing it up here is a means to say "Look, Obama also did bad stuff. You can't call Trump out on his bad stuff" which is an asinine way to frame anything.

It reminds me of an old conservative response to progressive/leftist ideas about American foreign policy.

Leftist: "... and that's why the current administration should be considered as war criminals" Conservative: "By that logic every administration since World War 2 were war criminals" Leftist: "Yes"

Whether or not the argument posed by the above comment is even valid is, for the purposes of this comment, irrelevant. What is more interesting is knowing why the supposed crimes/overreach of the Obama administration excuses the overreaches of the Trump administration.

Edit: Also, poor form or not, I see the same patterns here as I do on threads about china and the people that took over bitcoin - votes up in increments, then all comments are downvoted multiple times in batches. That and lots of whataboutism.

While you may believe he is taking on the FISA court, and there are abuses there to fix, by Barr's own admission he doesn't seem to think there are any restraints on an Executive's power in the realms of national security or foreign policy. It seems to me the motivation around FISA is strongly motivated not by sincere belief in the limitations of executive authority, but because of a sense that they (read: the President) were wronged.

When Attorney General William Barr spoke to the Federalist Society in a memorial lecture just a few months ago[1] he lamented the transparency Congress has forced upon the Executive, "There is no FOIA for Congress or the Courts. Yet Congress has happily created a regime that allows the public to seek whatever documents it wants from the Executive Branch at the same time that individual congressional committees spend their days trying to publicize the Executive’s internal decisional process. That process cannot function properly if it is public, nor is it productive to have our government devoting enormous resources to squabbling about what becomes public and when, rather than doing the work of the people."

Barr then attacked the judicial branch directly, claiming they are "encroaching on Executive responsibilities in a way that has substantially undercut the functioning of the Presidency" and in particular, those darned judges keep finding that they can review the acts of the Executive! Isn't that frustrating?

He writes in such an example: "Courts are now willing, under the banner of judicial review, to substitute their judgment for the President’s on matters that only a few decades ago would have been unimaginable – such as matters involving national security or foreign affairs.

"The Travel Ban case is a good example. There the President made a decision under an explicit legislative grant of authority, as well has his Constitutional national security role, to temporarily suspend entry to aliens coming from a half dozen countries pending adoption of more effective vetting processes."

Do you think that a surveillance state reformed by Barr would really rein in the courts, or simply remove them from the picture?

[1] - https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/attorney-general-william-...

Yet. If I start feeling like Google operates as a compromise with the Trump administration, it super freaks me out. Kind of like what happened with Facebook?

In theory, breaking up monopolies increases competition which allows better companies/products to spring up that would otherwise be crushed by anti competitive practices. If you agree with that theory, then the act of breaking up monopolies actually makes the US more competitive.