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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

It's sort of amazing how people are boosting this lawsuit up to the front page of HN dozens of times over three days, without really seeming to grasp that it is one side of a civil law suit, and that anyone would be a fool to take a filing like this at face value. It's a little thin on evidence, don't you think?

Normally when the attorneys general of Kentucky and South Dakota put their heads together about something, the rest of us point and laugh. But when they put together a document that looks like the top 1000 most-unhinged HN comments from users like `ocdtrekkie`, critical thinking gets thrown under a bus and it's 100% pure credulity.

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Newcorp and the other media's anti google campaign has worked flawlessly. Even techies boarded the train and now think Google is worse than Microsoft or Apple. At worst Google is as bad as Microsoft or Apple if all the things the articles accuse them of is true.

I don't work for Google nor own Google stocks, but among the things I am afraid of Google using its position to capture a bit too much of the ad-market is among the least of those, and that is ultimately what all these accusations boils down to. User data is for ads, these anti-competitive practices are for ads etc. If ads is the peak of their evil then I'd say they aren't terribly evil.

Google's biggest sin was to sit in the way of news media profits, that caused a barrage of articles written by news media companies targeted at them. I'd say that is evidence of news media being evil, not Google being evil.

Secretly colluding in backroom deals to intentionally hamstring privacy protections seems pretty unambiguously... bad? Can you explain how anything Microsoft or Apple has done has worse implications for society?

Both Microsoft and Apple happily collaborates with CCP, that is a big one that Google still doesn't do. Then both Microsoft and Apple often performs huge patent litigations for nonsense patents they spam, Google doesn't. Both Apple and Microsoft uses their industry dominance to push their own products and push others products out of the market, Google does that as well but before it seemed they didn't do it at the same rates, but this lawsuit would put Google at roughly the same level of Microsoft and Apple.

> Both Microsoft and Apple happily collaborates with CCP, that is a big one that Google still doesn't do.

Google has offices in China.

But its services aren't available in China. Both Apple and Microsoft runs services like search or appstore in China. You can't access Google search or Google appstore in China since Google refuses to hand over the related user data to CCP, both Microsoft and Apple hands over that data to CCP and works to help CCP censor its critics.

I agree that the "don't be evil" part of Google has mostly run out, but some of the effects are still there or Google would already be operating in China just like Apple or Microsoft. So until they do operate services in China I'll say that they aren't more evil than Microsoft or Apple who do operate services in China.

My point is that if they're allowed to operate in China, then they have to bend to the will of, and collaborate with, the CCP if they want to remain there.

But the argument is evilness. That is a problem, but I don't see how that makes Google more evil than Apple or Microsoft that has already bent to the will of CCP with seemingly no complaints.

My argument is basically: Over the past 10 years Google has made great strides towards becoming as evil as a typical big corporation. They are about there today, not sure if they are there or just soon to be, but they are certainly not significantly more evil than the other big corporations.

> Apple or Microsoft that has already bent to the will of CCP with seemingly no complaints.

Apple certainly gets complaints for their cooperation with the CCP and for their CCP-sponsored censorship in China, HK, and abroad. You can search my HN comments on Algolia and see that I've complained about it plenty of times before.

Sour meta comments are boring, especially when they rope in unrelated personal beefs you have with individual users like ocdtrekkie. That was a little much.

Consider posting something like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28977462, which inspired a lot of sub comments and a good on topic discussion, vs yours, which produced “haha Kentucky and South Dakota”, “Microsoft/Apple bad”, “gigantic evil news cabal”, and “HN is dumb”.

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