It wouldn't surprise me if this claim is true: here's to the discovery process to figure it out.
Unless there's something new on this case that I haven't seen?
The case was rejected on procedural grounds for lack of standing - a decision that has been hotly debated by many legal experts.
Did you ever actually read the filing? [1] I recommend it, very approachable.
If nothing else, the math and statistics cited should be of interest.
[1] https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/ima...
I do remember it using that "1 in quadrillion" statistic that appeared pretty questionable even on the surface.
This is true, but only because it is such an amazing example of bad statistics. It asserts that there is a “less than one in a quadrillion statistical improbability of Mr. Biden winning the popular vote in the four Defendant States”. It bases this on two things.
First is that Trump had an early lead, so it is statistically impossible for Biden to have ended up winning. Obviously, it fails to account for the fact that votes are not randomly distributed and mail in votes heavily favored Biden.
Second, that Biden performed better when compared to Clinton in 2016. Obviously, it fails to account for the fact that people vote differently at different times and for different people. The same differences would be seen comparing Kerry/Obama or Dole/Bush.
This is pretty easy to debunk.
https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/politics/el...
Do you think they would spend it if they were on the right side of the law ?
This is an interesting example of a prisoners dilemma. If N companies are competing without lobbying, their lobbying costs are zero.
But if one company 'defects' and start lobbying to tilt the regulatory landscape, then every other company must also start lobbying to prevent it.
The end result is that every company lobbies against each other for no net benefit[1], despite large amounts of money spent on lobbying. Good for lobbyists, bad for the companies.
So a company spending money on lobbying doesn't really tell us anything. They may be a bad actor, a good actor, or anything in between. There are valid reason for every position in the spectrum to spent money on lobbying.
[1]. Obv the real world is far more complex than this. The lobbying may provide industry wide benefits, or may prevent the entry of new competitors, or there may be semi-random fluctuations in the regularly landscape, etc, etc, etc.
Lobbying can be a lot of things, but one of the most common is basically marketing & PR for lawmakers. If you're going to be in the news, you pay some clever marketers to make hyper-focused versions of what happened for every single individual law maker. The company wants their view to be easily understood by the 535 voting humans who are seated in congress right now. It's the second oldest trick in the book (after bribery which also ofc happens to a degree).
Lobbying can also include skullduggery and dirty tricks and also other mundane things, but it is not (and never will be) a clear sign that a company is doing something wrong.
A quick search came up empty. Could you share a source?
A quick search I imagined doing (I even imagined that I used a VPN) turned up 10,000,000 results, 49 of which were news articles from the last 15 years detailing what, but not how, Google Search search results were censored. When I imagined clicking "Next" to see the rest of these results, I imagined that I was presented with a No CAPTCHA, asking me to identify which colored block of visual noise most closely resembled hell itself.
Edit: Oh, and then I did the search for real, and got 4.95m results of similar composition.
Anyways, searching "artificial 2 second wait to non-AMP ads" is inconclusive. However, if you quote "non-AMP", you get the expected results. Google seems to have a peculiar way of handling dashes and the "non" in "non-AMP" seems to get lost.
You might call that "sentiment analysis". Google has published papers on it. They've refined it so much that they even turned it into a well-documented feature of their Natural Language API [0].
> Google could probably pull it off but for what? Google hate drives views, and ironically, these are commonly monetized by Google itself.
If you could assign a monetary value to showing someone an advertisement (or several), would you? Google has.
If you could assign a monetary value to someone's knowledge about government/justice actions against yourself, would you?
If you could categorize sentiment into something that can generate revenue... or perhaps something that could hurt revenue... would you?
There's money in censorship.
> Anyways, searching "artificial 2 second wait to non-AMP ads" is inconclusive
Let me make it much less inconclusive . The two searches [1] [2] both reveal the lawsuit by the Texas AG which has explicit allegations [3].
[0]: https://cloud.google.com/natural-language/docs/sentiment-tut...
[1]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Google+AMP+second+delay+lawsuit
[2]: https://www.google.com/search?q=Google+AMP+second+delay+laws...
[3]: https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/ima...
I've always assumed this was the case, but has this been proven?
https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/8/22319136/whatsapp-cloud-ba...
> It alleges Google "punishes" publishers in its rankings if they don't sell enough advertising space in its marketplace.
Whether that's true or not is another thing...guess we'll have to wait and see.