Google: The harmful consequences of Congress’s anti-tech bills | Hacker News Reader

Google: The harmful consequences of Congress’s anti-tech bills

blog.google

67 pointsKoftaBob94 comments

I started reading that and... it really doesn't say anything. Even after introducing "Some specifics:" it's just generic FUD hemming and hawing. Basically it says Google doesn't like some legislation (without getting into any details about why) and I guess we should be concerned because Google says they will have to take their balls home.

The big problem here is Google has a long history of handing out balls to the public and taking them away whenever Google got tired of those balls. So what if Google gets rid of Gmail or Maps or Search or whatever. Shouldn't everyone expect Google to get rid of any of their free services at any time anyway?

I'm really very curious what exactly this legislation is proposing that makes Google so hysterical? Maybe that they must provide support and appeals processes when their machines grind up users?

> I guess we should be concerned because Google says they will have to take their balls home

As they haven't do that in the EU and Australia, everyone knows they're bluffing.

For 'hurt small businesses', two links deep is this article[0], and the only accusations it actually makes are:

> Like the House’s bill, the Senate’s bill would force companies like Amazon to separate their marketplace from their own retail offerings. This sounds “good” in theory, but the end of hybrid services would inevitably mean the decline of the SMBs who use and succeed on these platforms.

and

> The Senate’s legislation would also make it impossible for Amazon to offer its Prime free shipping service on millions of products, many of which are from small and medium-sized businesses. Consumers will likely turn to big retailers, none of whom are targeted by the bill and most do not provide the same seamless and robust access to massive consumer markets or promote small businesses nearly as well.

Despite these, I can't find the bill text in these articles.

(also, I hope the marketplace breakup would also affect walmart.com - they made a 3p seller marketplace that has caused confusion in customers who now think Walmart is selling GPUs at scalper prices[1] when they're actually just taking a % of those scalpers' revenue)

0: https://www.ocregister.com/2021/10/26/small-businesses-would...

1: https://www.walmart.com/ip/MSI-NVIDIA-GeForce-RTX-3080-Ti-Gr...

Yeah, so many stores have added the third party marketplace functionality and it's always sketchy. Like when you end up having to work with some random business that exists out of someones house to fix an issue with computers you bought on Newegg. It's usually at best a single line noting that you're buying from someone other than the site you're on.

It seems pretty specific to me. If Congress writes a law that says Google can't integrate hours of operation into Google Maps, they have to defer to Yelp, that harms consumers and only helps Yelp. Viewed through that lens, you can and should think of these bills as Yelp welfare.

If you are a big fan of Yelp I guess that's OK for you, but most of us can see that it's a scam.

But it isn't true, I can see an equally likely scenario where Google has to offer its POI maps data to other search engines, making the overall search experience better, to stay competitive.

That doesn’t make any sense. What precedent is there for this sort of action? Do we really want the government to be micro managing the features of online services?

Precedent? What about Microsoft being forced not to cripple browsers other than IE in windows? That's the most prominent recent example.

Just because it doesn't make sense to you doesn't mean it makes no sense at all.

That's not the same as what the parent said at all. When has the government ever forced one company to offer data to another one?

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 did just that, forcing data interoperability between the carriers.

Thus, another key provision of the 1996 Act sets obligations for incumbent carriers and new entrants to interconnect their networks with one another, imposing additional requirements on the incumbents because they might desire to restrict competitive entry by denying such interconnection or by setting terms, conditions, and rates that could undermine the ability of the new entrants to compete.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996

There's certainly no consensus that what it did was good, and interconnection isn't the same as forcing one provider to literally give data to another.

> There's certainly no consensus that what it did was good, and interconnection isn't the same as forcing one provider to literally give data to another.

How about number portability?

What about just forcing them to open the API to search competitors?

Really, government loosening control of web browsers in windows is an indirect way of forcing MS to give data to other companies. With hindsight MS could have made all the same arguments we hear today about protecting users from invasive privacy violations involved in web browsers.

If I recall, the government required AOL Instant Messenger to operate as an interoperable system, which is why for a while, other messengers could talk back and forth with AIM.

Imagine if the same quality government regulation required the same of Facebook Messenger or Twitter or Google Hangouts.

Only if they don’t innovate.

They could create a search marketplace for providing high quality hours of operation services, and let multiple providers compete for it.

Ok. So in your new framework, who would be choosing which provider is used, how are the prices set, and who would be compensating the provider? No end user will agree to pay for this data. But you can't have the payer be different from the decision maker.

By "they" I meant Google - instead of embedding just their own services in the SERP.

I guess it could be a marketplace made by the industry as a whole or regulated by government.

But yes, you’re right this needs thought.

Developing good regulations is a skill. It happens all over the world in all industries - we need to encourage it to be done well and to iterate and copy practices that work well.

> If Congress writes a law that says Google can't integrate hours of operation into Google Maps

I don't get where Google is even getting that scenario from. Where in the antitrust laws does it specify rules that would result in that?

And what happens when Google becomes the operating system for the world and you have to do everything through Google?

Competition is incredibly important.

Imagine if Microsoft hadn't been anti-trusted and didn't have to unbundle the web, pay Apple for their malfeasance, etc. We wouldn't have iPhone / Android.

You think the reason for Android and iPhone is Microsoft anti trust? Why? The final settlement didn't amount to much

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_C....

If anything it proves that we didn't need anti trust action, the market took care of itself. Microsoft stagnated, Steve Jobs returned to Apple and innovated, Google had a great search algorithm and piggy backed their infrastructure on free software (Linux) and then ripped off apples design for phone software.

But yelp is not the only company that can compile hours of operation. However, if Google is able to integrate all that into the same product, there will be no yelp or yelp competitor to talk about.

But as a consumer it's very nice to have hours of operation, directions, phone numbers, and reviews all in one place that's linked to my search engine.

I can see how, if Google's top priority is turning a profit, Google having a product so data-rich and unified that it leaves no room for competitors is bad for consumers in the long term. On the other hand, the most desirable option would be a reliably "benevolent" mega-corp that could be trusted to prioritize the user experience while also horizontally integrating across product segments to create a unified service.

>the most desirable option would be a reliably "benevolent" mega-corp that could be trusted to prioritize the user experience while also horizontally integrating across product segments to create a unified service.

Why is that desirable? Its not to me. The most desirable outcome is open data exchange standards that allow data exchange so that ANYONE can build such a service.

Google locks-up publicly available data and they subsidize/price dump to offer services at no-cost so other players die out leaving them to manipulate the market as they see fit. Its the worst possible outcome for everyone involved.

From a consumer perspective the death of Yelp is something to be greatly desired. That's the anti-trust perspective of the USA over the last 40 years.

Speaking of "free" google services - I found it interesting that the free covid home testing kits signup links by the USPS have google advertising links.

    https://special.usps.com/testkits

Where do you see Google advertising links? The only Google service I see is Tag Manager, which is used for measuring website analytics.

Even if Google is being genuine with this article, it's still a bad look. They've expended their social capital, they could speak pure truth and nobody would believe them. And not for no reason. People have good reasons to distrust them.

But having read the article, it references "these bills" without a single sentence from any of them. I'm supposed to take your word for it that all of "these bills" would harm me? There are absolutely no anti trust approaches that wouldn't be harmful to me?

Sounds like a load of scaremongering, a little "hurt national competitiveness and security" language as a thinly veiled message to legislators, and grasping at public perception to protect their asses.

If you want to convince anyone, quote the lines in the bills and lay out how they would affect the public. People see through your bullshit and nobody is buying it.

Trust and ethics aside, maybe they should worry less about controlling everything, and more about the actual quality of their products... Currently there's literally no good search engines... I've tried em all, and google's results are just like slightly better but hardly enough to notice, and the only reason I use it is because it sometimes guesses what I want from the omnibar better... if I'm revisiting doc sites, etc...

> These bills may compel us to share the sensitive data you store with us with unknown companies in ways that could compromise your privacy.

Is that really any worse than sharing the sensitive data we store with them with known companies in ways that definitely compromise our privacy though?

Google sells advertising. They don't sell your private data to 3rd parties. Same with Facebook. It's not in the interests of these companies to sell their proprietary user targeting data to other companies. They need to keep it closely guarded if they want to retain any edge in the marketplace.

Two very different things, but they've been (intentionally) conflated in a lot of the public debates to make it sound more evil.

And, why does Google and Facebook not sell data? It’s not out some altruistic concern. They want to play kingmaker. Tomorrow, if there’s an option to sell data versus stay in business let’s see what they’d do.

We're not saying they wouldn't sell data if it meant 10x revenue, but it'd have to be 10x revenue sustained for eternity.

As of now, all of that data staying safe in their solos means

(A) they don't lose customers who are fine with advertising but not that data going to some DB that anyone could then inspect (since you know some company would buy it then charge others $x thousands of dollars to dig into users' lives), and

(B) they're the only ones with that data, and thus their advertising business can use it to possibly show more relevant ads. If the competing ad company can just buy Google's user data, they could sell just as well-targeted ads as Google but undercut them by x% margin, thus always winning the ad space on a website.

> The idea that Google or Facebook "sell your data" is a myth.

Do you have hard evidence for this claim?

It doesn't even make logical sense. Why would the company give up their edge in the market?

Where does one go to buy this Facebook or Google data? Who's buying it? Surely these things would have come up in all of the Congressional hearings, right?

Data flows from and in and out of data warehouses is very commonly known now [1]. It would be very surprising to me that FB, Google and Amazon aren't participating in that marketplace.

[0] https://themarkup.org/privacy/2021/12/06/the-popular-family-..., https://themarkup.org/privacy/2021/09/30/theres-a-multibilli..., https://themarkup.org/privacy/2021/03/25/i-tried-to-use-the-... (more investigations have been done by WIRED as well).

Cambridge Analytica harvested Facebook user data with help from Facebook... You go straight to Facebook or Google and become a "partner".

This was a long time ago CA did this with the personality quiz apps (2013 IIRC). It's incredibly onerous and in some cases impossible to get this data legally from Facebook anymore.

Facebook was fined in 2019 by the FTC for 5 billion dollars due to privacy violations. Despite the fact that data was trading hands up until 2016, I don't think it was that long ago...

Exactly, it was a scandal because data left Facebook's silos because in normal operations it does not.

Yeah and then they gave access to chat data for companies like Spotify https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/dec/19/facebook-...

Do you have any evidence that they're selling PII?

If I don't want to share my data with Company X, and Google doesn't want to share my data with Company X, why should Google be compelled to share my data with Company X?

So you mean Google won't use cookies to track the things I browse then use retargeting which is basically selling my data/habits (by proxy) to the advertiser? I totally thought they did this...

“The government’s attempts to rein in our harmful monopoly will cause a slight dip in our absurd profits and potentially protect citizens and users from some, but certainly not all, of our abuses”

Just because the bill is bad for Google doesn't mean users will be protected. I, for one, remain confident in the government's ability to come up with solutions that will leave everybody equally miserable.

I dont agree with Google or Apple. But I also dont think regulation or Anti-Tech bill is the answer.

But both Google and Apple seems to be blindsided as why the world have turned against them. Not surprised given how they think of themselves as so righteous. Which is also why this piece doesn't actually address any of the underlying issue, and instead writing what is like propaganda.

May be Self-reflection really is a rare thing.

Here's food for thought: most of the "regulations" in the tech industry have started well past the point of when apple & google, facebook have established themselves as the big monopolistic players. So while Google complains now about regulation, and i'm in the same boat generally speaking: less regulation is net positive in the vast majority of cases, it's kind of hypocritical from them to say it:these corporations have enjoyed 10-15 years or even more of non-regulations towards them.And, without sourcing the following statement because i don't have the information at hand, in most cases Google,Apple & Co. themselves have >lobbied< for legislation, regulations, which raise the bar of entry in the market.Again, no sources to hold my statement, but i would be surprised if anyone is able to dig anything up considering the amount of collusion that kept happening for the last 20 years when talking about billions->now trillion dollar industry.

Sorry, which anti-tech bills are they referring to?

Afaik the Antitrust law, from the third paragraph. Not American, but why is it suddenly being talked about? Is it being discussed for change right now?

https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/18/22889903/democrats-target...

Bill was just announced today.

Interesting.

I've railed in the past about how much I hate advertising in any form, and the Snowden leaks made me hate the targeted ads even more. I'm somewhat of the opinion of "no one is immune to propaganda", at least not entirely. Ads serve effectively as propaganda for corporations, and sometimes literal propaganda towards politics.

If Google cannot make a profit without creating a massive surveillance state, then I don't think they should be in business.

> If Google cannot make a profit without creating a massive surveillance state, then I don't think they should be in business.

And yet many people don't want to pay for YT Premium. YouTube wouldn't exist if targeted ads didn't exist, and I imagine such a predicament isn't what most people envision. (and, if Google can't convert all viewers to paying customers, I don't see why another subscription-only social video platform would work either).

Why nowadays people associated ads with targeted ads? Google can still show ads, just not surveillance-based info ads.

I'm fine with them showing ads or even contextual (based on youtube content, blog content, etc) ads or targeted geography (based on ip address, which is already public) ads which don't need surveillance at all.

Early on Google adverts were entirely targeted on search terms and made tons of money.

It’s a myth that targeting users is needed - it makes more profit, and creates a moat for the ad market, but that’s all.

DuckDuckGo shows this is the case.

Google search ads are still entirely contextual - but YouTube likely doesn't have the same volume of advertisers to match how much niche content is out there.

> And yet many people don't want to pay for YT Premium. YouTube wouldn't exist if targeted ads didn't exist.

Is that actually true? Did pre-google YouTube have the level of targeted ads that we have right now? I would be incredibly surprised if the level of surveillance at that time was anywhere near what we have now. Granted, Youtube would almost certainly not be as profitable as it is right now, but I do think it would be possible.

That said, I don't think you're wrong; things would be pretty different, but I also think this might lead to more competition in the video sharing space. As it stands right now, no one can compete with the market dominance of YouTube, particularly because of their insanely good recommendation system.

Pre Google YouTube was not a sustainable service nor was it nearly as big as it currently is.

There isn't really any way to have a video streaming service that mainstream without ads.

I thought YouTube had ads before Google that just weren't hyper-targeted. Could be wrong on that.

Even if I don't like them, I can live with contextual ads (e.g. I'm watching a video about video games and I see an ad for a Switch).

Google bought it in October 2006 [0] after it had ad concepts in August 2006 [1].

0: https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna15196982

1: https://sites.google.com/a/pressatgoogle.com/youtube5year/ho...

YouTube wholly can exist without targeted ads.

The internet and ads have existed long before YouTube, and all three can exist without tracking your life.

The bill as I understand it from reading an article or two still allows targeting based on content. So if you’re watching videos about car maintenance, they can put up ads for Pep Boys. They’re not banned from advertising totally.

What they can’t do is put up ads for vacuum cleaners because you were searching for them on another site or emailed somebody about them.

probably https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29987342

Wow, is this a bad post. Hand-wavey discussion of "these bills" without even the name of them (let alone a thomas.loc.gov link)... Isn't Google an internet company? What's the call-to-action for the reader... Dial in to their Congressperson and complain about "these bills?"

It’s more or less undeniable that if you cracked down on Google, their end users would be negatively affected, yes.

The question is whether or not better companies would be born and ultimately provide even greater services to the same set of customers.

That - is what is obviously harder to prove.

Personally I think the answer is to simply say that after a certain reach per industry a company must provide “access” to platforms or pay a percentage of revenue to nurture the smallest competitors.

—-

As an aside, I believe the bill in question (https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23177323/B...) is dumb.

Basically it bans ads as a model for monetization. Terrible idea imho.

Not at all - the improved competition would help existing users by encouraging innovation and improving search quality.

For example - by offering a way for any provider to embed info boxes and search UIs, all competing with each other.

Or by reducing adverts to increase better quality organic results (Google can have much less cash and still run fine).

Or by solving all the basic search relevancy flaws discussed on Hacker News in recent weeks.

The things you’re stating are hardly obvious. In fact everything you’re saying is already true - providers can already compete with Google on search.

It’s true that Google can run in less money, but the argument can’t simply be that. Otherwise you’re effectively saying companies cannot make as much money as possible in general, no?

Yes, harmful behaviours by companies have to be regulated.

We don’t let chemical waste get poured into rivers.

Likewise, we shouldn’t allow harmful behaviour online. We have to as a society agree what that means, which is what is now finally happening.

Ultimately the businesses will still be viable, just different. Most likely more innovative and making better products in more competitive environments.

What behaviors are happening that are akin to chemical waste?

I'm sure I agree with most of this post, but it would really help if they gave an overview of the laws being proposed or at least a link to the drafts

Google is also the company that had a motto of "Don't be evil".

> However, legislation being debated in the House and Senate could break these and other popular online services, making them less helpful and less secure, and damaging American competitiveness. We’re deeply concerned about these unintended consequences.

The point of breaking up these services is so people can actually compete with them?

> Antitrust law is about ensuring that companies are competing hard to build their best products for consumers. But the vague and sweeping provisions of these bills would break popular products that help consumers and small businesses, only to benefit a handful of companies who brought their pleas to Washington.

Yeah, the benefit would be for the other S&P 500+ companies to even stand a chance. Google holds top market cap for the #5 & #6 spots today. More breaking up tech = more competition in smaller niches to make products that are absolutely amazing and affordable. Not increasing subscription plans when you have a monopoly on the market.

The fun is over. Stop trying to play God Google.

The ad-supported part of the economy has become far too big. It used to be just a few ad agencies on Madison Avenue in New York and TV stations that were purely ad-supported. Now it's a sizable fraction of the economy. Maybe it's time to stop allowing advertising as a tax-deductible business expense. Encourage companies to focus on doing the thing, instead of hyping the thing.

At least show us the bill before starting the PR machine.

Well I was on the fence but Google has sold me. I'd love to not be forced into their entire ecosystem just by using one of their products. Choices? That would excellent.

>Americans might get worse, less relevant, and less helpful versions of products like Google Search and Maps

Yea don't do it Google Search is already bad enough.

This is a mix of surprisingly good arguments and absolute howlers.

In my experience, the only way Google search results could be less relevant is if they disregarded the query altogether and invariably dispensed a liquid almost, but not entirely, unlike tea.

More outrageously, wet streets apparently cause rain: "sectors where prices have actually been rising and contributing to inflation". You heard it here first folks, from the self-proclaimed most reliable source of information in the universe.

So true. This line was great, “And when you use Google Search or Google Play, we might have to give equal prominence to a raft of spammy and low-quality services.” I’ve had to help family members put locks on their credit report because of top-ranked, fake websites that offer global entry, DMV license and registration renewals, etc. Digging deeper, you can find troves of consumer complaints about these websites being scammy. If they can’t even prevent spam websites for critical government services from being recommended, I’m not sure how much worse it could get before people start dropping them faster than Ask Jeeves.

Well, the actual sentiment here at HN about Google is -

"HN: The harmful consequences of Google's anti-user approach"

Who's the intended audience for this? Does blog.google actually have any kind of a measurable reach?

Ummm... This is Google propaganda, nothing more. There's no actual content that substantiates their claim that Congress will hurt people, or to substantiate their bullshit "anti-tech" title.

We should be focused on anti-censorship laws.

After their anti-union campaign, is there much remaining reputation behind their voice?

This is one of those "torn between 2 evils" situations...

Google == Evil

Government == Evil

there needs to be a 3rd option

Create an eco-village (buy land and everyone puts their own tiny houses on it), go mostly off-grid, use alternative search engines, create mutual aid w/ others to provide healthcare costs for the least of the members, and create some recurring streams of income -- glamping maybe? or real estate rent outside the intentional community...expand this to a worker co-op or just something where you have a lot of people who can synergistically combine forces and create mutual aid networks, alternative to current companies that are themselves worker owned and part of the syndicate...etc...

So step 1 would be start a co-op or co-living space. Step 2 - join w/ other co-ops/co-living spaces to create a wider network. Step 3 - create powerful income producing shared resources among the groups. Step 4 - ignore the govt cause they now provide less and less benefit and thus have less control on your life.

Step 5 - the co-op members dont always agree. Create a government council and police to settle disputes.

> there needs to be a 3rd option

Public "cancel" movements == Evil

Lol what is it about? So vague.

When the legal guy tries to make the case -- it may be the right thing from Companies perspective but to me this a tad bit above PR with linguistic gymnastics of Legal.

Not buying it, not going to waste my life reading these vacuous hocus pocus arguments.

edit: I want the tech guy or the founder make the case, with basic blocking and tackling tactics and strategy bits.

edit2: I read about half the shiz.. it was unbearably vague BS I gave up. Google apologists downvoting can go read that garbage.

> Every day, millions of Americans use online services like Google Search, Maps and Gmail to find new information and get things done.

Can we talk about this instead? Whats up with not finding the things i search for. Either the internet has stopped having the useful info i was seeking or google couldn't find it. It would not be a great annoyance if it was easy to switch to bing. Google holds all the entry points to the internet for themselves

Switching to Bing is a matter of going to bing.com or changing the default search engine in your browser, literally the easiest thing imaginable.

> literally the easiest thing imaginable.

Oh, I can imagine something even easier: getting annoyed at someone using "literally" that way. In fact it's so easy, it happens even if I don't want it to.

Self-hosted text-based pages with no SEO make up a significantly smaller percentage of the web than they used to.

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