Does anyone else find it suspicious that a government run by the party that is suppose to be hands off and “pro business” is going after a company run by “left coast liberal elites”?
If this is a politically motivated attack on the left, why have so many jurisdictions that are controlled by the left leaning party joining in the investigation?
Google is in the unfortunate position that Republicans don’t like them because they are bunch of “hippy liberals” and Democrats are well Democrats.
That said, in theory at least, the US Justice Department is supposed to be unbiased and not directed by the whims of the parties.
The Justice Department has never been unbiased. I don’t recall any scandals where the justice department were obviously been manipulated by a Democratic President (I’m not putting it past them), but there have been many reports about Bush II and Trump.
But even if it is not stated, the Justice departments more or less goes after cases along party lines.
Why should Republicans care about startups run by tech bro’s being squashed by big companies? It’s not like they will be able to donate large sums to PACs and they are probably hippy liberals too.
Not Google, but part of the overall strategy:
"“We can’t remove all of it because it will disproportionately affect conservatives,” said Kaplan, a former George W. Bush White House official and now the head of Facebook’s Washington office, according to people familiar with the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect professional relationships."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/20/faceboo...
Google has destroyed free market in programmatic ads.
Arguably a giant no-holds-barred antitrust litigation every 15 years (Republican way) is better than onerous legislation that always ends up entrenching the incumbents (Democratic way).
For the record, I was just as opposed to government intervention when it came to MS. History shows that the market took care of that. The government had nothing to do with the rise of Amazon, Facebook, Google and the resurgence of Apple to take away MS’s influence on tech.
You might argue that it probably wouldn't be a huge loss but that would be your perspective there.
Nevermind the fact that the ad serving market, once you remove FB/Google/AMZN, is actually quite broad and diverse, especially in the display/programmatic world.
This being said, Chrome recent announcement wrt privacy & 3rd party cookies might be the final blow for a lot of indies. Not that I disagree with you and I believe a culling and a new approach is required, one that purposely avoid the SV giants and centralisation of data.
Besides if your income is dependent on third party ads, what happens as more people start using ad blockers? A content blocking framework has been built into iOS for 5 years. I haven’t seen a Google ad in half a decade.
I also don’t have a problem with first party ads controlled by the site or podcast ads.
That being said, I put my money where my mouth is. I pay for ad free streaming services and will buy an in app purchase in apps to avoid ads.
Now that Ben Thompson (Stratechery) is offering a podcast version of his Daily Update, I’m thinking about buying a subscription to his newsletter.
There were massive campaigns against it plus antitrust rulings in the EU.
To this day there is people out there suffering the consequences of MS' policies.
Same for Intel and others.