Comment by dalbasal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dalbasal | Hacker News Reader

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IDK if it's "past a point," but in some cases maybe.

I'm torn on that though. EG, what would it actually mean if FB or twitter became "regulated like utilities?" Interoperability? Portability? IMO, these are pretty finicky problems for a regulator. I think it would likely look like the mandated personal data dumps we have today. Some clunky feature that few use, and don't change the structure of the market. Useful transparency, but not really game changing.

Regulated equal access? Court-like proceeding to confirm bans? I'm not feeling it. I suspect it will entrench monopolies further.

A Telecom or EnergyCo is fundamentally different from a FB or Google. Regulators needed to make sure everyone had access, because it's always more profitable to just exclude certain people/areas. Prices are an issue because infrastructure monopoly. Also because government/regulators typically fund a lot of the capex.

There is almost no cost, marginal or fixed, associated with instant messages, shares, likes, links, etc. If Facebook and Twitter folded tomorrow, we would still have plenty of all of these because they are not scarce. Maybe there's a case for cloud computing as a utility, but even here I'm hesitant.

Enough with analogies to 19th century monopolies. Platform monopolies should be regulated as platform monopolies, not utilities. New thinking.

In any case, google is the perfect target for actual trustbusting. Separate search from adwords and android. Ban default buying. Ban mergers.

The old challenge was (eg) trust busting steel without harming the actual production of steel. Today's problem has little to do with production. It does have a lot to do with share prices. Is there really an appetite for turning Alphabet from a $1.5trn company into a $150bn company?

> Court-like proceedings to confirm bans

The EU's initial proposed version of the "Digital Services Act", requires that when a service takes down information that they think is "illegal" or incompatible with the terms of service, They are required to provide the "facts and circumstances" used to arrive at that decision, as well as reference to the specific term of service they think is violated, and why they feel the information violates that.

Furthermore, they must provide an appeals mechanism for both information takedowns and any account suspensions/bans associated with them (and besides things like non-payment, I'd bet the majority of account suspensions/bans on online services are due to some posted content the company finds objectionable).

Lastly, if the internal appeals process fails to satisfy the user, the user initiate a what is basically an electronic binding arbitration process with a certified " out-of-court dispute settlement body" of the user's choosing, with this body having the power to overturn the companies decision.

That last part sound an awful lot like "Court-like proceedings to confirm bans".

I suspect the final law may not be as pro-consumer in these areas as the initial draft is (many big companies will not be happy about this part of the law and will try to kill it off).

If it does survive it would be much better then all too common: "We are banning you because we think you broke an unspecified part of the terms of service. We won't be more specific because we don't have to be, and are scared that people trying to break the rules could learn how they got caught. We won't even tell you that this was a fully automated process with no humans involved, that gets things wrong x% of the time. There is no appeal, unless you can get Twitter or the news media sufficiently riled up against us."

Hmm. I didn't know that.

I suppose we'll see how it works out, assuming it does become law. There is devil in the generalities here, but plenty of devil in the detail too.

Detail-wise.... Compliance, currently, is the art of ticking boxes while not changing anything fundamental. Too often, politicians and advocates have their eyes on the spirit of (proposed) laws while corporations and their advocates put their eye on how "compliance" will actually work procedurally. The latter approach is more effective.

That doesn't mean no goals are ever achieved, but it does dampen a lot. EU transparency laws, right to be forgotten and such are good examples. They might establish moral rights, but they don't affect really achieve big practical goals.

Generality-wise... I think the problem for (eg) free expression is the platform oligopoly itself, not their corporate policies. That's not my main concern here though. My main concern is: These laws are only necessary because monopoly. The danger is that the laws entrench monopoly, by applying them unnecessarily to smaller platforms.

That said, we'll see when/if it happens. Thanks for the info.

Generally good comment, but if search is separated from ads, how does it make money? I'm totally on board with splitting up Google, but losing Google search (or search becoming notably worse) would not be worth it for me. The competition is just so bad, and always has been.

Part of why searching is as painful as it is is because it has been deemed acceptable to pollute the search space. SEO should be neither encouraged or allowed. It is nothing less than adversarial corruption of a shared index.

Boolean searching works. Go back to a library catalog sometime and be amazed at how quickly you can get relevant results when every Tom, Dick, and Methuseleh aren't shoveling extra irrelevant feces into the index.

Says someone who never used Altavista…

There is no practical way to disallow SEO. Search results have to be ranked somehow in order to be usable for most people. And site owners will always figure out tricks to game the ranking algorithms.

It's not SEO that's the problem. SEO is a symptom of the perverse incentives.

So Google has created incentives (via ad embedding in user-sites) for entities to generate content and compete with each-other for who can show the most ads. This in turn "pollutes the index" as the other poster phrased it, which makes it more and more difficult to find actual real (unique?) content, which then Google turns around and supposedly "helps" us with.

Let's be honest. Despite it's surface-level gigantic scale, the internet is actually very tiny when it comes to real genuine content. My wild estimate is that 99% of it is spam. Even in the case of user-generated content, for every genuine blog where someone shares their thoughts and unique insights or content, there are a thousand blogs which are just there to get ad-views by generating any content that might get someone to look there. I can't even find the former type of blog/site anymore. The only place I still encounter those on occasion is when it's linked to from HN. And the ones I do encounter that way, I find that even when I try to, I can't find it via any sort of generic search (i.e. not cheating by using the site name / author / unique phrases).

Splitting Google up won't fix this.

How is searching painful? It's gotten better with almost every year.

I only see this sentiment here on HN, along with many other shitty takes about how pure the internet used to be. Are you talking about that era when opening the wrong search result would bombard your screen with millions of popups and install 20 toolbars on your machine?

Please tell me when this magical time of no spam in search results existed? 1995?

You do a search, it says millions of results, the first pages all have results without the quoted terms in the page at all. They don't show "we don't have any good results" if they can display a bunch of ads on a bunch of pages with useless results.

It wasn't a case of no spam; but rather predictable spam.

After a while you'd start to recognize the Web rings. The "just link" pages became extremely obvious after a while, and you could generally reliably get the same results regardless of where you searched from or what you were doing when the time came to search. You had far fewer syndication mills, and you could even find resources reliably.

The net was a reasonably navigable thing even to children doing school research. Nowadays, I have to explain to kids all the myriad pitfalls that exist nowadays, when they look up something, ho back a bit later, and can't find their resource anymore.

And that's just the bloody legit stuff. When you talk malware, we're in a completely different world nowadays.

It isn't deemed acceptable, encouraged or allowed. It occurs, like spam.

Google Search could still show ads.

They would just be Google ads customers, like any other website, and they would get paid for displaying ads.

Google will continue to make money as it does now, through adwords as a "search partner." This is also how other SEs make money. The biggest antitrust case Google has lost so far has related directly to this.

Would they make less money? Yes, probably. It's hard to say how much, but it would still likely be enough to run Google.

I think it's easier to understand the paradigm with Twitter or FB, since they're simpler. Facebook currently makes about $100bn pa from ads. Circa 2015, they were operating profitably on about $10bn ad revenue. Twitter has had a similar (more modest) trajectory. They spend a lot of money running FB & Twitter, because they can, but there's no reason to think FB or Google Search on far less revenue than they bring in currently.

There are versions of what I'm suggesting that likely affect revenue moderately, and versions that could hit harder. IMO, in either case, I don't believe there is any meaningful consumer harm or ill effects outside of FB's shareholders or perhaps employees.

This isn't true of all monopolies/sectors. It's true of FB, Google, maybe twitter.

> it would still likely be enough to run Google. [emphasis mine]

Is this arbitrary guess really worth risking the whole farm?

The farm is at risk at all time.

That said, I think the risks are way smaller than previous era's trustbusting. I like FB as an example, as I said. I'm pretty confident that FB would be pretty much the same on far less revenue because they were pretty much the same on less revenue in recent years.

Comparable social media services run of far less revenue (scaled whichever way you like). You can also look at their accounts, which reveal a lot. The simplest clue is profit margins.

If we're wrong... one social media service declines and another takes its place. Personally, I see very little risk. The actual risk, IMO, is not really about keeping these services viable. There no "shit! I broke auto-manufacturing and now we don't have cars" risk.

It's about share price. Smallish declines in revenue can mean big declines in profit. Any decline in revenue can lead to a collapse of share prices, regardless of profit. The big techs are a big part of the S&P, and high profile. Quite a lot of the S&P's value relates directly to monopoly, so antitrust (IMO) directly conflicts with equity values... and things could get "macroeconomic" from there.

All that said, I'm not advocating anything intentionally destructive. Google is, I suspect, expecting to be broken up eventually. I think that was part of the Alphabet restructuring logic.

The primary objection that comes to my mind, in the vein of your comment,is a hayek-esque information argument. A Hayekian logic though, is totally incompatible with paragraph 5 above though, and I'm quite confident about that... so I don't know where it fits in.

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