The Founding Fathers could not have predicted this.
Google's "We're a private company" get-out-jail-free card cannot continue to apply.
Google controls 91.89% of the search market [1]
G controls 68% of the browser market [2]
G's android is on 84% of phones operating systems [3]
G has 73% of the search advertising market [4]
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/544400/market-share-of-i... [3] https://beta.trimread.com/articles/16433 [4] https://www.geekwire.com/2019/amazon-gaining-google-search-a...
Browsers would be a different issue. In that case, there are network effects like about what standards are supported and how, which make it difficult to launch a competing browser, even with technological superiority, and in that case, it would be reasonable to worry about too much market share.
They dominate the software ecosystem. Although it's not difficult to load 3rd party applications, it's certainly not common. Their removal of the Podcast Addicts app is a great example. Also you cannot interface with things like Android Auto without getting Google's golden approval (so no Android Auto for F-Drop apps)
I did a full post on all the gripes I had with Android a few years back, and I think they all still apply: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/android-fragmentation/
If some less popular app is banned they have little recourse except hope for their story to go viral.
On this topic. WSJ states DoJ is readying antitrust vs google ij near future. May turn out to be quite an accomplishment if done
It the same monopoly that a town center has in term of political activities. Anyone could easily choose to switch to hold demonstrations somewhere else, but the result of holding it where only 8% of people will see it will make that less of a choice for the ones organizing the event.
As a society where I live we recognize the benefit of political diversity, and we acknowledge that the disruption that such political activity bring is usually minor. As long it does not cause prolong and significant disruption to everything else then the benefit of giving everyone equal right to demonstrate in the town square is a benefit.
I do agree however that Browsers are more similar to regular monopolies worries. One company in control of the market will increase prices, decrease innovation and create perverse market incentives.
While people can be physically only in one location, they do get their information from a variety of source online. Comparing Google to a town square is dumb, when you account that Facebook has much more engaged users than YouTube.
At the time of writing I'm reading stuff on Facebook, Reuters, Yahoo Finance, Twitter, Reddit and watching YouTube videos in between.(HN as well) I'm present on all of those "squares" at the same time.
I would like to be wrong on this and that google do not have this kind of power.
They did. Maybe not in public, but it has been communicated clearly to the employees:
https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/09/12/leaked-video-googl...
I'm not saying this is okay--it probably could've been conducted in a more (politically) inclusive manner. But my argument is that this doesn't apply to the GP.
Edit. Also of course the main post about comment censoring is troubling.
For this analogy to be correct, there can be no equally populous squares. But there are equally populous squares.
So, no. One square dominates viewership (ie the town square <-> Google). You can switch to another square (ddg) if you want, but you don't get the viewership that you'd want to get the reach that you need.
If Google were to block search results to DuckDuckGo for example, that would be monopolistic and warrant antitrust action. As it is now, Google isn't blocking competition, consumers are choosing to use Google despite the privacy-oriented preferences here on HN.
Can you share some of these occasions?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_vs._Google
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2013/01/googl...
And some upcoming regulatory attention:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/15/technology/google-antitru...
I specifically didn't bring up the Shopping case because EU anti-trust law is very different, and the case doesn't qualify as anti-trust in the U.S.
> Google required direct partners to exclusively use Google's AdSense and could not engage with Google's competitors
> Google required that partners take a minimum number of Google ads and predominately place them above any other advertising, nor could place ads from other services above or alongside Google's ads;
> preventing manufacturers from selling smart mobile devices running on competing operating systems
> Google entered into anticompetitive exclusive agreements for the distribution of Google Search on both desktop and in the mobile arena
> The Commission’s complaint alleges that Google reneged on its FRAND commitments and pursued – or threatened to pursue – injunctions against companies that need to use MMI’s standard-essential patents in their devices and were willing to license them on FRAND terms.
Again, the EU anti-trust law is different from the U.S. I already mentioned the Android Play services case already.
For me, this is blatant anti-competitive practice and should be punished.
All just speculation, but I haven't noticed the same issue.
It's since been fixed.
Is that consistent with the "it is because FF doesn't support new thing yet" explanation?
It is not the case.
But who would have the legitimate right to stop it? Do we want government dictating product features?
I'm not sure I'd agree with the word "despite". I still think the majority of the non-tech world is still oblivious to the privacy implications of G,FB,etc. Sure, I'm sure there's a percentage of people that have made the decision they don't care and are fine with it, but there are definitely don't know/understand.
In many 3rd world countries, smartphones were the "couple months salary" iPhone or an Android that's literally a tenth the cost.
To most of these people, Google has been an unalloyed good. Google is probably one of the most resilient brands worldwide. Even in America it's well trusted. For good reason.
Two types of trust though. Trust in the products which they've earned in spades, and trust to moderate political speech which they have not.
This story is suggesting that they are willing to enforce standards set by the Chinese propaganda departments - which is to be expected, really, given their interest in regaining a presence in China. They aren't trustworthy in the political sense.
You're just raging that other people have a different opinion about their online activity.
Now imagine you quantify the cost of having Google Search. If you search for florist - Google could charge you $10 for the results(florist CPC is very high) and up to $30 per search for a hotel in NYC.
So dramatic. It's an amazing product that billions of people depend on that you don't have to use if you don't want to. Pretend it doesn't exist if it makes you feel better. Try Bing and Proton mail on an iPhone and never look back.
>If these products were just the products they appear on the surface
They're not a charity. If you're not paying for it upfront, you're paying for it with your eyeballs. Don't like it? Take your eyeballs elsewhere.
Monopoly power is different from abuse of monopoly power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly#Establishing_dominanc...
I was capable of doing this before and regularly did. But, from what i've been able to tell, my web searches must all go through google now, either through the built in search feature or the browser.
[0]: https://ddg.gg/html
[1]: https://ddg.gg/lite
Conversely, a monopsony is the lack of other options for buyers. Words matter.
Google censors information relating to that 10% for everyone else. They don't care enough to switch.
Centralization is an issue _a priori_. It's giving power to a single entity that we have no reason to trust will act in everyone's best interests.
Google Search is a consumer focused product, if they don't serve up the stuff that the users want - they loose viewers. No viewers - no revenue. Their bottom line depends on giving each person the best search results possible.
Pretending that they'll just decide to cut off even 1% of users is insane.
If they can make 2% more by selling out half their users and giving them inferior results to serve the interests of somebody or something willing to pay Google money to screw over the users, they will do that without an instant of hesitation, in the absence of oversight. They are in an absence of oversight.
You are wildly in error to believe that people magically can tell they're not being harmed. People absolutely have no idea whether they are being 'given the best' anything possible, much less something like search results (or information in general).
It is highly profitable to screw over mass audiences for one's own benefit and there's largely no mechanism to prevent this… again, in the absence of oversight.
The most annoying bit is that it's never the majority. It's at best plurality that "gets" to decide.
No, "controls" means decides the rules and what is happening on that part of the market. Any number that is not 100% automatically implies it's not a perfect monopoly and it's possible to switch, but once you are within the area controlled by Google, it's Google's rules. Including removal any content Google doesn't like for any reason, blocking any action Google doesn't like for any reason, etc. So for 91% of the searches, Google decides what you can and can't see.
Google hasn't leveraged their ownership of the browser to enact censorship (frequently on behalf of most vile dictatorships) yet as far as I know (surveillance is another mater) but it certainly did and is using its control over search, advertising, video hosting, etc. markets to do that.
All available search engines run on ads and offer roughly the same service. There is no competition in the market from the perspective of the consumer. How is this healthy?
Because people are conditioned by defaults. Google knows this, and so does every other business. Google had a good product, but Google also bought market share by bundling their products with random software (like adobes flash player, which later they unsurprisingly tried to kill), making a deal with Dell to bundle their software/toolbar, etc. Yes anyone in theory can switch, but its not really how people think. People are not as informed as we think they are, or aware of the pros and cons of various competing services and products. That includes most people, even people on this site, so its really not an elitist thing.
Just because a company is providing value that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be regulated. Just because you can technically leave a service doesn't necessarily mean that you aren't realistically locked into it and that that service isn't going to exploit that fact.
Usually I consider terms like “control” to be hotheaded but if you substitute “is in control of Which results are returned” you can see the consequence could be nefarious. This understanding informed antitrust theory up to the 1980s.
I don’t use Google for anything myself except for communicating with my gf’s kids’ scout troop. That doesn’t mean I think they have a bunch of evil geniuses cackling and rubbing their hands in building 42. The rehetoric makes me think some people do think this.
They're abusing the hell out of their status. AMP, removal of adblock capability, driving web standards to potentially be more opaque, walled gardens, automated removal and takedown, etc.
It doesn't even include Baidu, which dominates China and has something like >12% of the world's market share for search engines, so how can Google have 91%?
Who believes this crap? You might as well have linked to a Facebook comment.
It works if you have a specific URL to click on for a video, but if I just want to "find" a video, that will be relatively difficult.
Can you provide evidence of this? Not that I don't believe you (nor do I have any financial interest in Apple), but I'm not a fan of seeing baseless accusations on HN.
duck.com for more examples...
I don’t trust any big company and assume they’re all lying, but I trust random online assertions without evidence even less.
Not just someone offering an opposing opinion.
At that time Google’s motto was still “Do no evil”...
still 2 years after Steve Jobs died which I think had a better moral compass
DuckDuckGo - search
Brave - browser
Android - you've got me there; but I might switch to Apple next year.
Gmail - ditto, but I'm hoping to switch to proton or similar
Youtube - alternatives like Bitchute exist for banned videos
Fortunately, although the GOOG does have a lot of best-in-class products out there, competition is rising. Consumers benefit from lots of choices.
For example Android is ~52% of the US market.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held...
(quote from there):
> Google is getting WH [White House] and State Dept support and air cover. In reality they are doing things the CIA cannot do . . . [Cohen] is going to get himself kidnapped or killed. Might be the best thing to happen to expose Google’s covert role in foaming up-risings, to be blunt. The US Gov’t can then disavow knowledge and Google is left holding the shit-bag.14
Over 75,000 people are happily working for G with many more eager to join
There's a deep rabbit-hole of hyper-nationalism right next to the deep rabbit-hole of hyper-corporatism. Does a YouTube beholden to the US government get banned from being used in China at all? And if it does, what happens when China creates a competing product that is more successful than YouTube, and YouTube gets displaced globally by a product that is beholden to China's censorship policies in general, not just in isolated cases?
The intentions were good: Reduce the risk of global nuclear war. The globalism outcome is good for trade and relations with nations that have transparent governments, bad with the opaque.
In any case, I opened by admitting my perception of the United States is as a more transparent actor than China. Still doesn't make a dichotomy.
Yes, it's bad because "naval strategy is build strategy", and all of that industrial activity and technical know-how exported to China has facilitated the buildup of a massive, modern, increasingly-blue-water Navy and supporting Air Force that is postured specifically to challenge the US. The US Navy's global presence and open sealane patrolling is key to enforcement of the Petrodollar system, and therefore one of the lynchpins of American economic hegemony. Eventually China will challenge the US, and the US will either back down or lose. Either way, expect the global order to change, the Petrodollar to go away, and the US economy to collapse....and we'll have basically spent 30+ years making down-payments on our own destruction.
At least that's the theory.
Obama and Romney both ran with the policy of designating China a currency manipulator in 2008: https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/03/currency-manip...
When the TPP fell through, China moved in with it's own version lock down the region called RCEP.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_United_States_campaign_fi...
The US has always had undertones of economic nationalism, particularly around jobs getting outsourced to China. It just took a while for the pot to boil over.
It still is.
Why have the hypercorporatists and hypernationalists not replaced it???
Because fuckers in both those camps think it has to make money as a condition to exist. It's their weakness. Requires imagination to exploit.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia.
You may be thinking of the various wiki brands run by the Wikimedia Foundation, which doesn't aspire to be any of these things, either, but at least entertains the aspiration of being a better Google News with WikiNews. (But do not confuse WikiNews with WikiTribune, the latter of which is a non-WMF project of Jimmy Wales, originally aspiring to be news, now aspiring to be a social network).
I'd imagine the amount of blatant organized 'revisioning' by nation states, NGOs, for-profit corporations, and politically biased individuals is now dwarfing the objective individual contributors who once were the majority of Wikipedia's editors.
It’s not profitable.
Nowhere near as many people would donate money/time/edits/content to Wikipedia if it wasn’t a registered non-profit - nor would they receive donated/subsidised hosting services from their providers - and if it’s for-profit they would need to run ads - and there’s no money in generic ads so they have to be either content-based ads (which immediately creates a perverse incentive for articles to be edited or biased in favour of the advertiser, which devalues the content of the encyclopaedia - or behavioural/tracking ads, which won’t be here for long due to expected incoming changes in browser handling of cookies and cross-site content) - which leaves behind only paywalling the encyclopaedia - and we saw how well that worked-out for Britannica, Collier’s, and Encarta.
Wikipedia has a high-value because it’s a non-profit - as contradictory as that sounds.
No question. It's the primary reason its community stuck with it across the many years it took to build it up, whereas the editor communities abandon for-profit content farms like Quora or Answers.com.
> and there’s no money in generic ads
Wikipedia could operate the encyclopedia side of itself with generic advertising. There is a lot of money in generic ads, relatively speaking, when you're dishing out static text content and some images at a billion page views per day (especially when the bulk of your platform's expansion is over, so your situation re expenses is increasingly stable).
Could you run the encyclopedia thin for ~$20 million per year? Based on their budget history, you absolutely could. So could you bring in at least $20m in revenue via generic advertising, against several hundred million page views that you're able to show ads on (a bit larger than the English edition's daily page views; ie I'm heavily discounting monetizable traffic down from their global figures to tilt this even more conservatively)?
You need a CPM of around a range of $0.10 to $0.15 to at least have a shot at making it work. It's a very low number for a super premium property that sits at the top of nearly every Google search result.
You could make ten phone calls and trivially fill $20m in generic advertising every year. Pick up the phone and call: Google, Amazon, Walmart, Microsoft, Coca Cola, Procter & Gamble, Comcast, Unilever, Samsung, AT&T. At $2m each, you'd have to fight them off with a stick at those CPM rates for that reach. Procter & Gamble spends $10 billion globally on advertising, they wouldn't take $2m to slap their brands on Wikipedia? They'd probably take that every month if they could.
Would any and all manner of advertising turn off visitors and editors? Probably. That's the far bigger problem than whether Wikipedia could bring in $20m per year in advertising on their massive traffic base. Not to mention that Google might (would) start viewing them as a competitor and might (would) downgrade their content placement to neuter that risk.
(In the countries where it's strict. Which could be the EU, US, Kanada, Japan and more. Through it would be more tricky for smaller China dependent countries or autocratic powers. But the other countries could push that through in the way they currently push through commercial interest like copy right).
Think about it, if a Chinese social media site could outcompete YouTube, they would just do it already anyway. If they can’t, they have to either block YouTube and have a Chinese clone propped up by an effectively protectionist policy or else try and get YouTube to cooperate with them.
You know YouTube is already banned in China, right?
Whatever they decide, they owe you no explanation or recourse. After all, these people are 'accountable' to wall street. To them 2008 and Boeing 737 were an unforceable turn of fortune, and they should bear no harm from it.
If 1.5B Chinese people totally democratically voted to ban particular words from usage worldwide, and were very serious at enforcing their decision, would you conform?
I'd very much appreciate if no society ever chooses things for me, as long as the choice is not of a conflicted shared resource that needs to be handled uniformly to even work (like property laws or traffic rules).
I appreciate that corporate platforms are different than public spaces when it comes to free speech, but we've got a long way to go before US society broadly tolerates censorship by foreign entities (at least, I hope).
I'm as pro-democracy as they come, but the belief that the government is somehow (and always) more accountable than companies strains credulity. Companies are accountable to Wall Street, which implies they're accountable to their consumers too. Shake Shack did not have to return the funds they received recently, but they did, because of media attention.
All your examples are from defence. I've been watching people challenge in court every kind of decision, from roadbuilding to Brexit.
But tech companies circumvent laws, uber is not a taxy company, people driving them are not employees, Youtube is not a media company, etc. Every time this happens, voting becomes more and more meaningless.
Half of those examples have nothing to do with the DOD. One of them (Ahmad Arbury) has nothing to do with the federal government at all. Where did you get this idea from?
Why do you think Zoom hired security professionals and bought Keybase? Why do you think Facebook reacted after the Cambridge Analytica scandal? Why do you think TikTok separated itself from ByteDance in China?
Even with the most federal oversight, US banks and financial firms tanked the economy and then got paid for it. And it's not a left-right thing; it's a them-us thing. And if you don't believe that, you only need to take a look at the Panama Papers scandal.
Boeing was not punished severely enough, because of two things - American nationalism would prevent it from drowning(helloo rescue package ;) ) and belief that they could fix it fast enough. But as a person holding Airbus stock for a long time, I disagree that Boeing wan't punished at all. Boeing's price dropped by 75%, while Airbus lost only 50%
Almost anything is better at safeguarding freedom than allowing people to vote on what counts as freedom.
But in terms of network effect... YouTube has two billion users.
> The idea that some governing body can better choose my communication platform for my personal needs than I can for myself doesn't seem logical from my point of view.
It's an elected body that is chosen by the people in a fair and free democratic process. Why would they be incapable of serving their electorate?
I'm not claiming they are incapable, but with a constantly re-elected congress that's on an upward trend and just now hitting 30% approval rating it seems they don't serve their constituents effectively.
What I have seen is suggesting breaking up giants like Google and Facebook to allow them to compete more with each other rather than allowing the two fold in any possible alternatives as soon as they become popular.
If all the policies and processes around censorship were laid out in the open for that to be considered when weighing up the options, people would be able to make more informed choices.
I’d recommend just breaking Google’s monopoly; which is an idea that has more benefits and less downside risk.
Would an independent YouTube be less susceptible to these requests?
Or imagine YouTube were to split into two; YouTube the distribution platform and YouTube the recommendation engine. Imagine Youtube the platform had to license content publicly. Now it is much more likely to have competition emerging and end users benefiting from it.
Before, industry players, YouTubers, and users largely didn't mind. Now, there is a systemic chilling effect in the form of demonetization, algorithm shenanigans, and banning.
To recover revenue under this new paradigm, YouTube is catering to "brand-safe" corporate media productions and surfacing their videos much more highly than those of independent creators. There's likely media money involved as well, much like how Yelp and food delivery apps rank restaurants.
We don't know if it has ever been profitable at all.
You probably can't know. The ground truth would be if YouTube were spun out and had to rent its infrastructure from Google directly via Google Cloud. But GCloud doesn't actually sell the infrastructure they use, as far as I know - for instance the search engine, the ads engine, the anti-abuse engines, Borg, the edge networks. AFAIK most of the stuff that YouTube relies so heavily on isn't actually available to buy at any price.
Pricing is hard work, too. What price should Google charge to license out their search engine tech for competing video sites? There's no existing market for that kind of tech that could provide an obvious price point.
For an integrated operation like Google/YouTube you can't ever truly say if it's profitable or not. The division of costs and benefits will always be rather arbitrary.
I disagree both on knowability and what needs to be known. The point of the exercise is not having a calculation down to the cent. We don’t even know if the order of magnitute of the revenue and the cost is the same. By its nature I would expect youtube to be very IO and compute heavy, which would dominate the cost function, to the point of rendering rest of your list into bells and whistles.
> Pricing is hard work, too. What price should Google charge to license out their search engine tech for competing video sites? There's no existing market
That is precisely the function of making a market, supply and demand meet and iterate over the price. Right now there is no price because there is no market.
>>What's the ROI?
>Idk should be good though.
>>Here's three million just in case.
A conversation that no one has ever had.
...but ideally, we would have multiple YouTube competitors, that would allow content creators vote with their choice to use Google.
One of them is even a heavyweight - Facebook. Did you not realise that Facebook hosted videos? Maybe you're unaware that Instagram has Instagram TV section...
You would almost certainly need something like the Paramount Consent Decrees to structure the marketplace correctly and to foster the kind of competition that would prevent a single player from being in such a vulnerable position.
Sure they could. They had the East India Tea Company.
I'm not a legal expert but it seems like the fundamentals are pretty simple and timeless. If they have a monopoly, then their private get-out-jail-free card no longer applies.
The British (or Dutch) India Companies had a stranglehold over shipping -- and thus over communication -- to colonial holdings for much of their existence.
I recommend the biography of Benjamin Franklin by Walter Isaacson
but fairly certain that a monopoly on permissible communication/speech was and is still held (in title at least) by the Crown
this is pretty much precisely what the 1nd amendment is about and why it was so radical at the time.
That said, I see this sort of thing a bit differently.
If Google is all powerful and a monopoly and never in danger of being killed, why comply with an authoritarian foreign nation to remove comments that are amplifying an anti-government sentiment? Why should Google care if the government of China is feeling a bit insecure about their own population's loyalty?
I worked at Google during "China Debacle #1", where Google went to China as an uncensored search engine, left in the middle of China Debacle #2, when China infiltrated Google's infrastructure to use it to track dissidents, and watched from the outside (as many here did) for China Debacle #3, when Google tried to create a censored search engine for China.
Why does Google need China so badly, that they are willing to compromise their values (debacle #3 and this comment censoring behavior)?
I don't think you need the antitrust legislation. I think Google is slowly dying and as they die their ideals wash away. Clean user experience, gone, Useful free services with return only positive feelings for the brand, gone. Employee perks, fading away. Lofty slogans of not being evil, gone.
This compliance, sometimes forced by edict in the EU's antitrust case, sometimes forced by coercion, tells me that Google isn't powerful, it is weak. It has lost its way and may not survive if it is unable to find its way back to something good.
Even if Google dies, its replacement will still be equally tempted to censor dissenting voices, in order to please the people in charge.
I have come to define the magnitude of need to represent how far out of your internal value system and the law are you willing to ago to satisfy a "need." I'm not sure what the units are, desperation perhaps.
For example, I "need" to eat to live but at the present time my need is modest because I have enough money to buy food to eat. At my current level I wouldn't steal food (go outside the law), or misrepresent my state of poverty to a food bank (go outside my internal values) in order to acquire food. So the magnitude of that need is "small."
However, if I was unemployed, out of savings, and behind on my bills, the calculus changes. I really need to eat, and in that situation might do things I would not normally do (like rummage around in trash cans for discarded food).
It is clear to me that Google, like every company, needs revenue in order to survive. The stronger the need for that revenue, the more willing they become to compromise the user experience, the law, and/or their internal values.
To me, their actions of the last few years appear to directly contradict what at one time were core internal values. Whether its the level of monetization of their own properties, or their willingness to cooperate with an authoritarian state to keep information away from their population. I see their taking of these steps as an outcome of their great need for revenue.
China is the second largest economy on the planet, and Google does not appear to be willing to hold true to their values and forego the revenue that economy could potentially produce for them. That is the reasoning by which I come to the conclusion that Google needs China.
Does Google rise to this level? Facebook, Twitter, cable TV and every newspaper and blog would seem to present a decent front of competition.
Now we have just a few mass media content producers and a few mass social media outlets. The situation is beginning to resemble that which existed for decades, from the 20s to the 80s, in broadcast media.
Why would we expect to be able to force Google to host speech they disagree with?
Regardless, I think the main point from the proceedings is: it was only found constitutional because of limited airwaves available (i.e. physical constraint of the medium, or exclusive government licensing). The same rule would not be constitutional if it applied broadly to "the press."[0]
In that sense, my point remains: there's nothing intrinsically exclusive about the medium of Google's websites that would prevent another from competing for the same "airwaves" (other than their perceived popularity), so a requirement that Google shares its "airtime" with others would not be supported by the precedent.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine#Decision...
I'll classify Fox News with other media, like Vox and Slate and Buzzfeed. (for the articles and shows at least, not necessarily the paid advertisements)
I'll classify Google and Facebook with other communication platforms, like T-Mobile and FedEx. Paid advertisements probably go in this category too, even if appearing within the other category.
Individuals who decide to run news segment on Fox News get denied, just the same as they would if they decide to run an article in Slate or Salon or The Atlantic. To communicate on a platform in that category, one must get hired or convince an employee that an interview (which would be tightly controlled) is beneficial to the employee.
So from that perspective, why should Google be treated differently from Fox News simply because Fox News has a higher standard for publication than Google?
We don't let the phone company disconnect phone calls in which people complain about the phone company, or about China, or about the governor. We don't let FedEx decide that you can't ship an unauthorized biography of the FedEx CEO.
Common carrier status has never applied to news media. The closest we ever had was the fairness doctrine, which is gone and wasn't the same thing anyway. Fox News is clearly news media. Most of what we call "Google" is clearly not news media.
It never applied to websites either, so why do you want it to apply to websites but not "news media"?
Do you believe that Fox News should be allowed to delete comments from foxnews.com?
I don't think so. It's the same old stuff, merely with a technology upgrade. Be thankful, so the first amendment doesn't only protect quill pens and lead movable type.
The comments on foxnews.com are at the borderline, so it wouldn't be bad to flip a coin. A reasonable approach would be that deletion is restricted to crude insults and off-topic rants. It doesn't really matter though, because the foxnews.com comments sit on the border between being a publication and being a generic public communications medium. There is no point splitting hairs.
Verizon's phone network is a platform that is privately owned and financed by the owner.
I think you're failing a litmus test here, unless you really believe that Verizon should have the right to drop phone calls that are politically offensive to Verizon executives.
The same goes for FedEx's logistics/transportation network. It too is privately owned and financed by the owner. Imagine that it were run by an executive who decided that the terms of service would include disposal of democrat campaign materials. Send a box of Biden yard signs, and they go into a dumpster. The tracking number just disappears from the system.
It's probably hard to see that Google is very much like Verizon when you happen to like Google's bias.
So what Google is doing with this particular epithet is fine is what you're saying? Sure hope there's no other cause that you champion that Google decides they disagree with someday.
It never really did, and this would only be more apparent if we tried to re-institute such a doctrine today.
We aren't talking about economic monopoly exploitation - we're talking about monopoly control over domestic communications.
Maybe they're not just stupid, but have a different way of thinking. Bottom-up versus top-down.
Financial, political, religious entities controlling newspapers and book publishers is a problem known (and well documented) across thousands of years.
Same for near-monopolies of means of transportation, materials, water, and other.
If founding fathers had netflix this wouldn’t even make to a black mirror episode of their time.
It can, should, must and most importantly, will.
What's really not acceptable is their monopoloy position on information, not that they, as a private company, have a right to decide what to publish.
The Founding Fathers used this to their advantage.
They colluded with the handful of major publishers of the time to orchestrate a rolling, synchronized release of the Federalist Papers, saturating the already-monopolized (due to the massive expense of presses and paper) media market with their ideas.
The authors of the Anti-Federalist Papers had no such deal. They had to print out their responses on their own and distribute them by hand.
The country probably would not have even gotten to the point of needing a debate about a constitution, one-sided as it was, if it hadn't been for publishers telling non-conforming opinions to fuck off.
And please, nobody chime in with "publisher v. platform": it is irrelevant, you're wrong.
HA! The founding fathers were all lawyers and newspaper owners. They were very aware that private interests, through control of available media, could exert influence all manner of public debates.
There was an article about RSS on HN recently — in the end, people voted with their feet away from a decentralised web to the YouTubes and Twitters and Facebooks of today.
Maybe we need more actions like these to remind ourselves of the perils of lease-holding.
Google also doesn't have anywhere near a monopoly position in consumer markets. YouTube isn't an absolute majority of online video and strong alternatives are right in front of you - Twitter and Facebook offer free video hosting. You could even build a private one, or rent space from Vimeo or Dailymotion.
The Founding Fathers can go &&*k themselves. Invoking their name is literally appeal to authority.
Similarly, the Fairness Doctrine was overruled because requiring companies to air opinions they disagreed with was found to infringe free speech.
I see no way this could go wrong.
That's why envelopes were sealed.
The question was historically then how do teenagers (or the developing world for that matter) pay for electronic services and cue Facebook and Google.
My point is just if you pay for something, you are less likely to be gamed for advertising cash.
For search you should be paying for the indexes in some way, or for the algorithms in your company.
I am just presenting this as a philosophy. Not trying to solve the world's problems on a forum.
Since when did Google became the defacto public communication channel?
[0] https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.htm...
The only way to fix that is a nearly-uncensored#, non-profit& communications and streaming platform that is globally-distributed and doesn't have a SPoF. Trying to get a content creators' union is all-well-and-good, but it doesn't solve the fundamental problem of reliance on corporate greed that will never assure access to speech.
# There are only a few topics that shouldn't be enabled like child porn and actually planning mass murder.
& Nonprofit itself while it supports monetization for creators with only minimal fees to cover costs.
> Google's "We're a private company" get-out-jail-free card cannot continue to apply
You're upset that they have a monopoly on their own website/business? What the hell are you even talking about?
Do you even remember the internet before Google? I do. You know how I found new websites? By typing random domain names into the URL bar and trying different combinations of TLDs.
Then I used Yahoo. Excite. AltaVista. Lycos. Ask Jeeves. Dmoz. Alltheweb. They all kinda sucked in their own unique ways. And then Google came around, and I could actually find what the hell I was looking for in one go.
Your outrage is pure entitlement. You don't like the way the world works, so you think you deserve to change everything to function exactly the way you want. As if that's in any way rational, fair, or ethical. Presumably you think of yourself as a good person. How is it good to demand unreasonable things from people who do not owe you anything? Do you really think this is the best way to effect societal change?
In such a environment, a premise for life is a permanent monitoring on all levels of performance, to have the option to bring on steering and governance, if a discrepancy in goal-reaching or goal-setting occurs.
no, that was'nt english enough, let me try better:
"'Sharks' are speaking of 'satisfied' when a half of the profits result by dividends and from Performance."
Exploiting the central-bank-agitation
so big on a global scale, more in detailed,... now you...
Do you want to continue to support art, like 'google will eat itself'? (-;