Hacker News Reader

Comment by Aunche | Hacker News Reader

While Google is functionally a public utility, it's not something that I want to be regulated like a public utility. If the government can't be trusted to law lines on a map that aren't blatantly rigged to favor their own political party, I can't trust that they won't tamper with search results the same way.

View on HN

So trusting a private company that doesn't answer to the public at all is better than trusting elected officials that favor the incumbents?

Unfortunately that skepticism is warranted today. American politics were always somewhat broken in the past, but the blatant partisanship today makes any kind of progress almost impossible.

At least with government we have the powers of oversight and political organizing. It seems like a better bet then a corporation who's accountable to a bottom line, or owners.

I trust "political organizing" (codeword for astroturfing and cathedral control) less than I trust Google's profit interests.

I guess you are ready for dictatorship then?

Could you explain this take further? I’m tempted to write this off entirely, but I’m curious if you actually have some reason to associate corporatism with monarchy.

Corporatism in practice is an oligarchy. The people at the top decide the fate of everyone lower than them. In some companies it is effectively a monarchy, as a sole person is driving the decisions.

I would rather be governed by a public actor with constraints than the arbitrary interference of a private actor.

This is the core republican (as in the political philosophy: Discourses on Livy, Philip Pettit, etc.) insight. If you want a stable society, you cannot leave space for arbitrary private individuals to become domineering forces on the rest of society. It's literally textbook how civilizations will fall, yet as a species we seem incapable of avoiding our own mistakes.

Google is more effectively constrained than, say, the US federal government.

Google is effectively unconstrained, so hard to see how that could possibly be the case.

Sure, the government has more power, but it is also more constrained. There is no public control of Google, it is not a publicly sanctioned power.

> Google is effectively unconstrained

Google is many orders of magnitude less likely to kill someone (legally or extralegally) or seize their assets than US government.

I'm confused, do you not believe there is "political organizing" outside of the guise of astroturfing? And even when political organizing is just astroturfing, isn't the motivator just the same as Google's profit interest?

Whether you believe it or not, you have a lot more power to influence government (locally at least) than you do to affect what Google does. That was my only point.

The cost-per-search is negligible even if every user had to pay. Instead of running the search the government could implement policies that make search advertising illegal and thus forcing another business model.

Pay-per-search would be cheap enough for municipalities to negotiate subscriptions for their entire broadband network as a part of broadband service.

> Pay-per-search

Yeah, the last thing I would want my search history to be tied to is my payment information.

What an awful idea. A municipality would probably only have one search engine, search engines would serve municipalities which could pressure them to suppress stories, there'd probably be one search engine targeting republican municipalities and one targeting democrat ones, there'd be pressure groups trying to get municipalities to use another search engine that doesn't show results they don't like and it would be incredibly hard to start a new search engine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com