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Comment by comboy | Hacker News Reader

I have no idea if The Daily Mail claims have any merit, but you do not want to live in a country where thief cannot report burglary.

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This is exactly the completely deregulated free-market economy that op-eds in the daily mail have been asking for for decades.

They don't like it when it comes back to bite them.

s/burglary/theft then

"No capitalist ever saw a market and wished it free."

Of course people don’t want to compete. Too bad.

Capitalism is about increasing efficiency / resources through brutal competition.

Just don’t let them make laws giving one group special treatment. Like banning the competition.

Who don't want to compete with who? This is between a news publisher and a search engine; they're not exactly in the same business.

Sure they are: they both make money from selling ads don’t they?

If they're equals does it make sense to ask when's the last time the DM sent traffic to Google?

Google news

The article says the DM is accusing Google of burying the DM's results in favor of other news outlets'. The dispute is not about Google favoring its own news, as if there were such a thing, over the DM's.

A completely deregulated free-market economy would have no recourse to the courts. Such does not exist. I have no idea regarding the merits of the case but so far we don't know who's to get bitten.

Courts are integral to a free market. Without them all sorts of markets evaporate completely.

More generally, having a market does not mean having a government that supplies no public goods -- that is, having a government, since supplying public goods is all a government does.

The confusion may be a linguistic one -- conflation of the terms "competitive" and "unregulated", and of "a" market with "the" market.

The existence of some free markets does not imply that every market is free. Excepting failed states, nowhere is every market free -- the markets for grenades, ivory, medical licenses, political appointments, assassinations, etc. are all things most of us want either tightly controlled or entirely suppressed.

And even in an extremely competitive market, like the ones for lettuce or generic drugs, there are still important roles for government to play. Of course regulation can be and often is grossly wasteful, even corrupt. But it's also critical to our safety.

This is a level of gotcha akin to "NYTimes shows ads, so they have no authority to criticize Google" that we see on HN.

No, it’s not. Participating in capitalism is not equivalent to advocating for it.

Being pro-free-market is against the interests of incumbents, and if in fact an incumbent was pro-free-market regardless then that is laudable. Incumbents are protected by regulations.

There is a lot to dislike about the Daily Mail I'm sure (I don't read it). But you aren't catching them in a moment of hypocrisy here. Everyone hates losing, doesn't mean they are wrong about what the rules of the game should be.

> where thief cannot report burglary

Written from the perspective that the most straightforward explanation is true:

Bad analogy. Nobody entered anyone else's business.

The defendant prefers that its users get good quality information, and the plaintiff's reputation for low quality information runs afoul of that practice.

Also, why would a thief report his own crime?

I don't think it's meant as an analogy, it's an idiom.

> Also, why would a thief report his own crime?

The thief isn't reporting their own crime, they are reporting that they have been robbed by someone else.

It's an idiom. It basically means that someone who committed a lesser, but similar crime wouldn't be able to report a crime themselves.

> The defendant prefers that its users get information that a) maximises the defendant's ad revenue and b) advances the defendant's preferred narratives.

FTFY

I agree with what your saying, but have no sympathy for the rag that is the Daily Mail

I used to be very much of the same opinion. But increasingly I find the Daily Mail to be the only place to turn for a sensible reaction to woke hysteria – like the supposed "rape culture" in schools, and the recent walkouts over the flying of the Union Jack at the Pimlico Academy.

Wait.. what? You find the DM a home for "sensible reaction" to cultural issues? That's horrifying.

I would have been amazed even 5 years ago too. For example, I listened to Harry and Meaghan's cringeworthy new podcast on Spotify. Afterwards I clicked around the web, trying to find some commentary that would truly sum up my feelings.

Eventually I landed on the Daily Mail's site and what do I see? A headline: "Woke Word-Salad". At that point I had to concede: okay, maybe this is where I belong.

Why not? The poor thief is just trying to support his 20 orphan kids. People should feel honored when they are robbed and left for dead.

> you do not want to live in a country where thief cannot report burglary

There was a Daily Mail article about a thief who was unable to report a burglary? Or what exactly did you mean by that?

It appears to be an idiom for a party in the wrong (Daily Mail for clickbait article) from being allowed to report that they were wronged (manipulated search results by Google) since the parent poster seemed to suggest that Daily Mail somehow deserved that treatment and two wrongs make a right.

That's a weird idiom, then, considering that Daily Mail is in the UK and Google is in the US. And considering that Daily Mail is not a search engine, so they're not comparable entities to begin with. And that I'm not even sure that Google was in the wrong here in the first place. So I was confused on multiple levels, apparently.

Per Wikipedia, 70% of the Daily Mail's web traffic is from outside the UK, mostly from the US.

Not quite sure what this has to do with the idiom's inapplicability, unless "country" in it meant "world". But clearly the reason for what you point out is that the English-speaking world is way larger than the UK.

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