Google et al are no saints. However, I can’t help but feel like all this misdirection and grandstanding is the establishment’s territorial reaction against the rise of another powerful opponent.
Whoever wins we lose.
Whoever wins we lose.
Most small business would benefit from more competition for ad-placement and consumer eye-balls. Their savings would be passed on in the form of lower prices or greater investment in new products. Hard to see that as a loss for anyone.
If I were a European, I would benefit a lot more from a flourishing ecosystem of "also-rans" (yuck, so harsh) building their own local workforces and communities.
As an American, I miss the days when it was considered acceptable to run a business that makes yourself and your local area rich, instead of the only "cool" thing being an extractive VC-launched all-or-nothing gluttonous monopoly (joining in the harsh adjectives I guess). We would have many more opportunities for all levels with thousands of $50mil companies instead of a handful of $500bil companies.
It's also not obvious to me that in the realm of indexing and searching the web it would be better to have numerous worse choices instead of one big one. Say what you want anecdotally about Google search quality, but it is better than anything else on the market in objective terms. What will the searching public lose if you impair Google's ability to pay for search quality?
That's my main beef with the European line of thinking on antitrust, that it considers for some reason the well-being of certain failing companies and doesn't really seem to take into account what the public harms and benefits might be. Whereas in the American approach of the last 40 years, regulators need to show that customers are being harmed, without much regard for competitors.
When I read what seem to me to be rational and legitimate criticism of Google, it tends to come from a disinterested source like a law school or philosophers of ethics, or economists. But these also tend to be even-handed, recognizing that it might be globally optimal to have a single search provider, while criticizing Google for things where it is vulnerable to criticism, such as the fact that it both operates the major ads marketplace and owns the largest participant in that market.
Great point.
To me, it seems like those $500bil companies have perfected the art of wrangling those people who could be building the $50 million companies. I mean, why risk failure when, did someone say free lunch?
Bigger companies get more press as they employ more people and (more significantly) more people tend to be their customers. Wal Mart is in the press more than Lockheed because Lockheed has few customers. But the Mittlestand (as the Germans call it) is a big part of the US economy.
Isn't Google and their army of lawyers/board members/consultants/lobbyists/etc already the establishment?
There are a few types of ultrarich:
1) People whose power is in institutions. For example, wealthy European land-owning families, Saudi princes, etc. These vary in liquid wealth, but can swing trillions of dollars in power.
2) People who made money long enough for money to be liquid. Bill Gates is in the class. They have money, and can use all of it. Gates has a lot less power than people in the above class.
3) People whose money is all in one place. Jeff Bezos is like this. If he tried to sell all his Amazon stock at once, Amazon would tank. His paper worth is in the same ballpark as Gates, but he has a lot less power.
4) People whose money is locked down. E.g. pre-IPO founder of a unicorn. They can have astronomical paper net worth, but little real power in comparison to Bezos.
The United States is an upstart compared to European nations which existed for millennia. Google is still fundamentally young even though they have grown older.
Pedantically I would use "the" for the current eldest establishment with any power and "an" for any that are newer and even eclipsing.
Trump would not have won without social media, for example. The republican party didn't even ratify any policy at their convention, just sweating allegiance to the man - that is the position they base their actions from.
This isn't an establishment thing as much as an explicitly partisan play by part of the establishment.
And the sad thing is, it isn't right, it shouldn't work. It shouldn't be convincing. It shouldn't be reasonable. They should have to fight to articulate, react to, uphold, and reify the values of the public at large. They should have to claw and change, evolve, and do something. In this year though, it's laughable. I can't take any political party in the United States seriously given the repeated failures at generating reasonable candidates.
The fact we have the fundamental dysfunctional logic that we have to put up with the big two National conventions candidates because the anything else is a wash just demonstrates how broken the system has become, and why the Founders were wary of the social construct and institution in the first place!
The fires are occurring in largely Republican areas of the west, on federal land mismanaged by a republican administration. And cancel culture is worse on the right side of the aisle than it is on the left, see e.g., what has happened to every former Trump ally.
That's the most hilarious thing about this whole thing. They talk as if there is someone out to get them in Facebook, even though it seems they were most helped by it.
For example, if someone makes you king, you kill that person as soon as it's official. They have the ability to confer legitimacy, and that's too dangerous if your opponents would be able to use it.
The things you want when you have power aren't always the same things as when you're trying to gain power.
The willfull ignorance is akin to saying that it is impossible to distribute music more efficiently than audio CDs and despite ripping being trivial direct music downloads are somehow an unacceptable risk. We saw this with Tower Records and other dead middlemen killed by the now commodity 99 cent song default download.
You could see this in EU as well with publishers being frothing mad at Amazon undermining their price cartels. I am personally of the point of view that this sort of disruption is a good thing as out of vogue as it may grow.
In this case their norms of the old world they are fine with some author publishing a "special interest" book stating say the War on Drugs is racist it is just publishers putting outragous stuff to print for money as normal but when it shows up in the W section of encyclopedia listing racism as an influence on the War on Drugs they are outraged at the publisher acting "pushing against" them. Except Google isn't doing anything active against them let alone actual remotely an issue.
If anything has been far too lenient with their manual turn offs of trending to avoid awkward viral suggestions but that is my opinion and my biases are anti-norm by default.