Google admits anti-competitive conduct involving Google Search in Australia
accc.gov.au
accc.gov.au
Like some European country(s) do with personal fines, afaik.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/06/finnish-busine...
https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/2...
If we want to stop bad behaviour, there can be NO PROFIT from illegal actions.
So if a company makes billions of dollars, through illegal actions, all of those billions of dollars need to be the fine, and the board and senior executives should also face personal fines, so they aren't also profiting.
Making the fine cover all revenue from the crime makes more sense. A bank robber doesn't get to claim that some of what they took should go to pay for their getaway car.
I had trainings upon trainings about this, particularly because in my line of work I deal with medical data, which is categorised as sensitive.
Not enough not, you still get almost all market participants trying to skirt the law instead of actually respecting it.
Google doesn't do stuff to be evil. It does so bc it makes economic sense on the margin. It doesn't like paying fines and arbitrary enforcement will just be used politically. You might like this case bc Google bad, but what if NBC gets fined an insane amount by current admin for their interview cropping, to discourage bad behavior, because you know, fairness.
IMO the fairway thing would be to remove as much discretion as possible so not to make things political by either side
The purpose of a fine is not supposed to be a fee for a crime but a penalty that has deterrent effects. A flat fine is not an equal deterrent for people of different financial means.
In Finland the system is called "day fine", meaning it should match approximately a day of labor/income. In some situations you can even go to sit in prison for time proportional to the day fines, although this is nowadays rare.
Otherwise it isn't a penalty and is just the price of being permitted to do a thing which might be out of reach for the poor. That's just fundamentally unfair to permit the rich to do things we consider immoral if they are just able to afford it.
Fairness in this case would mean giving equal fines for equal crimes.
But equality in which units? There's a case to be made that dollars are an implementation detail and that the political system cares about utility units.
If you want the fine to equally disadvantage all parties in utility units then the dollar values are going to be different. Because the idea is that each criminal should be equally unhappy with receiving the fine.
You can say it's the same percentage so it's the same punishment, but you can't pretend this isn't a recent change in jurisprudence.
If you jail different people, they lose out on different amounts of income. Is that unfair?
Now remove the physical jail component and keep the rest of the punishment. Is that unfair?
Similar, even fines proportional to income are still unfair because to determine how much a fine hurts you need to compare it to whats left of the income after basic needs have been paid for. For someone that has much more than they need, getting fined 50% of their income will suck but not immediately change their lifestyle while someone who is living paycheck to paycheck is going to be ruined by the same percentage fine.
There is another side that feels the penalty should "hurt" the same amount because that's fair. Two people that commit the same infraction feel the same amount of pain (theoretically), roughly corresponding to paying the same relative amount.
IMO this falls apart when you accept the almost tautological fact that these laws are enforced selectively, so "fairness" goes out the window almost immediately. Enforcement is used as political pressure and as punishment. Under that view, the second option above feels much worse than the first.
Proportional fees "hurt" everyone the same and give the government the discretion to "hurt" whomever they choose via malicious prosecution and selective enforcement. Flat-rate fees at minimal amounts save most people from this corruption. If the difference is between a flat rate penalty that hurts 5% of society if imposed, and a proportional penalty that hurts 100% of society if imposed, how is the first one not objectively better in the nearly certain scenario of a bad actor being in charge at some point in the future?
I think the reasoning as that when Google does it, it affects far more people than if (say) I sold a single phone with only my own apps pre-installed. Should I be fined $55 million?
10% hurts the same no matter your income.
Fines are about punishment and deterrence. You cant deter a millionaire with a 100$ fine like you can a pensioner on a fixed 1000$ income.
No, 10% of income doesn't hurt the same no matter your income. (Even if you ignore the relationship loose correlations between income and savings that can be used to cushion the effects of unexpected expenses, and assume neither party has any such resources.)
While fungibility pushes slows the decline compared to less-fungible goods, declining marginal utility applies to income, too, which means not only does a flat fine have less impact on the rich, so does a flat percentage.
(This gets even more true when you do consider savings, etc.)
Even better might be a percentage of disposable income but even that is not going to be enough and with more complexity in the rules comes more opportunity for creative accounting which again benefits those more well off.
Id rather have it scale badly than not at all though.
10% is more just. Than a flat fine.
But 10% hurts more when you are poor and have no savings and you need that money to pay rent. For small companies is the same. Bigger corporations have more resources available to minimize that 10% impact. Power does not scale linearly with money.
But to take a percentage is a much better way than a flat fine. Flat fines are totally ineffective when applied to big corporations.
The more your wealth (and note that income is a crude approximation here), the easier your ability to pay. Hopefully you agree that a $50 parking fine means virtually nothing to a billionaire; it may as well not exist. Whereas to someone living at the poverty line, it is incredibly significant.
If you feel it's fair to penalize everyone the same absolute amount of money, that means you believe that rich people have effectively earned themselves a right(!) to violate laws that poor people can't afford to.
Or, putting it more bluntly, it means you think rich people are superior to poor people.
Is that fair?
Just look at 2008. I'm convinced many things started to go downhill hard when the worst global financial meltdown since the 1930s went down with not one single person going to jail.
Who are you referring to?
> The less severe infringements could result in a fine of up to €10 million, or 2% of the firm’s worldwide annual revenue from the preceding financial year, whichever amount is higher.
> These types of infringements could result in a fine of up to €20 million, or 4% of the firm’s worldwide annual revenue from the preceding financial year, whichever amount is higher.
And then there's places like China, where the effective fines are "you either comply to the letter or you won't get to operate in this country".
It's have friends in the party or just roll over and do as we say. The "letter" does not matter. Remember the letter literally says there's freedom of speech there. And why did Google leave? Haha.
This works for Chinese businesses pretty well.
The problem for Western businesses is that "Creating domestic competition to any Western business with a comparative advantage which becomes too important to China" is always, on some level, a national priority.
My favorite Party explainer - https://chovanec.wordpress.com/2011/05/08/primer-on-chinas-l...
The incoherent views of the hn user: "We need to do something about the corporations" but also "China is evil for doing something about the corporations"
They can and will change it later.
[0] https://www.marketbeat.com/stocks/NASDAQ/AAPL/financials/
The 500 million one is also for anti-trust rather than GDPR, which is the one that includes % global revenue fines.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
Because the politicians and "regulators" rotate back into the private sector and earn generational wealth for playing ball.
So what happens is that they wind up going with non-massive fines to enforce compliance as a trade off (like you wouldn't deal out the death penalty for someone who was caught stealing).
And this has been known for 150+ years and it has been written about extensively, its just not considered acceptable/appropriate knowledge. Marxists study this.
Capitalism as we have it today is (roughly speaking) to laissez faire capitalism as modern China is to Maoism.
Marxism isn't as wildly flawed as some want it to be — but it is very, very out of date, a response to a world which we no longer live in.
Turned out there were a lot of ways to regulate capitalism besides all-in on Marxism.
The type of capitalism Marx described is alive and well.
It exists in the undeveloped parts of the world, and it is maintained through force by many capitalist blocks and their allies. People around the world are kept exploited because their economies eventually tie into ours, and their exploitation makes us "competitive". Just because its not you and your kids toiling all day doesn't mean there aren't any.
And it was like that here too, it was only undone through force by socialists, that's why you're allowed to work 8 hours a day only, we have a minimum wage, and children aren't working in factories.
This didn't happen by the graciousness of profiteers, it happened through the threat posed by the masses, people were killed on American streets for this. Don't ever forget that. That's how they rewrite history.
Don't think it can't arise again, it evidently is... slowly.
Obviously they did not get everything right (far from it), as their most fervent acolytes believed. But then again, in economics, who does?
Sort of? Marxism is like economic phlogeston. It’s experimentally predictive to many extents. But it gets some basics wrong and is superseded in its entirety by better models, particularly for information-age and increasingly-automated economies.
More murder and war has been perpetrated as part of anti-Marxism than any other cause in history.
- The Vietnam "War" (Genocide) - The Korean "War" (Genocide too) - The whole Afghanistan affair that still resonates on today - Balkanization (induced by NATO) - Indonesian govt killing 1.5 million in a single year (CIA) - US trained South American Death Squads - Invasion of Barbados by the US - the overthrow of Burkina Faso - the overthrow of Allende - the School of the Americas - Nazis killed more non-semitic East Europeans than jews in the name of anti-marxism
You could, in a very real sense, draw a line through the history of modern warfare and the history of anti-Marxism.
Only for Americans is it a myth because they are primed by their billionaire controlled media and educational system to avoid it.
All in all, its a theory of socio-economic development that implies the democratization of production. That's literally whats so bad about it.
Just look up all the ecological and environmental disasters in Eastern Europe and Russia, or the insane economic fuckups from the ‘great leap forward’ (or even going on right now!) in China for a breath of fresh air, amiright?
People be people. No system is going to magically solve these problems, but some (anything authoritarian, usually!) can certainly make them worse.
Most industries require regulations, to maintain competition, to avoid market manipulation, to maintain public health and safety, and to stop crime.
Some industries require government intervention or even participation, to ensure the existence of nationally critical infrastructure and to protect national resilience and safety.
"Pure" capitalism is just as much a nonsense as "pure" communism.
I'm a socialist because I know you can't stop it that way. It's simply impossible. They will corrupt/lobby/influence their way around it. They currently do.
What is your plan? To REALLY SUPER DUPER trust the next candidate you have zero control over?
"Democratic socialism" is not democratic or socialism. Socialism is actually democratic and prevents exploitation.
The only way to actually stop it is to not allow individuals to profit off of others. Individuals shall make their OWN assets through their own muscles. No ownership of property that allows you to reap what others sow. It's logically the only way to avoid power imbalances. And it's something that we all enforce and control through local councils.
Remember, democracy is not trust, its control.
Any group larger than a dozen is fundamentally going to have someone else controlling other peoples stuff - de facto or de jure. It’s how things scale.
"So long as the state exists there is no freedom. When there is freedom, there will be no state."
Lenin, The State and Revolution (1917)
So, the goal is that the people must become the state directly and dissolve the divide.
And so representative systems are necessary, as you say. And representative systems are not inherently bad.
What makes them bad is the other parts of society that allow a small group of people to take advantage of representative systems.
That small group is the capitalist class. Their control of production, and their profits give them a front row with the state.
Representation is all about context.
In order for the people (AKA literally everybody) to become the state we must undo that power imbalance and let people control production themselves.
How do you propose this would actually work?
What is interesting to note is that none of the other famines listed is attributed to ideological systems, just the last one even though monarchy ruled for the longest time. Also there has never been another famine in China since. But, anyways, I am not particularly fond of modern China and their affinities for capitalist production.
> How do you propose this would actually work?
The organization of the masses into our own political force. I dont mean middle class white people, I mean everybody. It literally requires the reorganization of our lives for the creation of mass democracy. It requires proactive participation of all of us that can. It requires physical tools as well as organizational tools. Democracy is something we do, not something that is done for us.
We would eliminate the regional bourgeois-state and replace it with the organized peoples representatives with essentially accounting roles FULLY accountable to regional and neighborhood councils. (blockchain could help manage funds) No more politicians with wealthy connections. No more policy groups deciding what goes on. It would be a council of representatives selected and organized by neighborhood councils whose collective aim would be the control of regional production. No more bourgeois-courts, it would be replaced by a peoples courts.
And you may say "That's what we have now", but it isn't. Your average citizen is so far removed from any democratic action and money has taken such a hold in politics that even voting is totally nullified in our system. That's why we call it bourgeois-democracy. Candidates are just celebrities/performers for their billionaire constituents and average people have ZERO control over candidates and their policies. Policy does not come from the people.
THERE IS NO DEMOCRACY WITHOUT MASS DEMOCRATIC ORGANIZATION.
And the reason that this cannot be taken advantage of within socialism is at the very core of socialism itself: and it is that through revolutionary education, people would learn to spot capitalists and eliminate them from social life. Like a person would stop a thief stealing in your own house. And we're talking about capitalists as a class, not necessarily individuals. No one will be allowed to own production for profits. No one will be allowed to employ other persons for a profit. People would enforce this with an iron fist in order to preserve their own working class power.
Just like if you see slavery you would stop it. Right? In the same way that slavery was extinguished and made unacceptable, so would capitalism. We would halt it as one would halt abuse on a street. If someone is using property to make profit from you they would be jailed as the only way to profit would be through wage theft, meaning paying employees less than what they worked for. Wage theft would be made a serious crime. Unlike today.
This is the "grandiose" check and balance of socialist representative democracy that through the democratization of production we dont allow individuals to leverage production. There shall be no profit-market from production.
We would then start reigning in that production and use production solely for the sake of satisfying needs, not generating private profits. Work would be a right, guaranteed. More workers is only better (except if you're producing for profits). Think about that, capitalism is the only economic system where more workers is worse because for-profit-production cant handle so many workers.
These are just thoughts I have from actually reading communist literature. At least read something. I've read about everything before making up my mind. Its called being intellectually honest.
Read about past revolutions from the perspective of people who were there, not the perspective of ideologues fear-mongering funded by millionaire think tanks. What is also very important to understand is that these 20th century revolutions were never "induced" by communists. They truly did arise from mass discontent, what the communists leaders did was guide the discontent into an organized form through teaching people who didn't even know how to read how to liberate themselves from for-profit-production.
Democracy is not something some dude on the internet writes into a chat box. We will decide on the best way to organize ourselves when the time comes, but private production ALWAYS leads to authoritarianism.
Shit like this actually happened and not even that long ago. It sounds like you've been Americanized in such a way as to see social change impossible.
You've got suburb mentality. The capitalists define your historical progression, even your conception of it.
Authoritarianism follows that mentality.
Like I said, a lot of this actually happened. Its word salad cause you're probably used to reading fiction.
Take the state and distribute its functions across organized neighborhood councils, treat capitalism like a crime, make production satisfy needs not generate profits.
There I condensed it for you.
Regulations enforced by courts are the only tool functioning societies are willing to use to limit corruption, including under communism. Some forms of communism are anarchic and just assume it will work without it, but then I can say this about anarch-capitalism too, and it's just as wrong there.
> The only way to actually stop it is to not allow individuals to profit off of others.
There are many kinds of profit besides the currencies broadly recognised today. Money itself is a fungible token of power, and the very same corruption works just as effectively when it's any other form of power. It's even possible just by barter, as demonstrated by that guy who swapped his way from a paperclip to a house: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_red_paperclip
To actually stop corruption would require an incorruptible omniscient surveillance system, and I know of nobody who wants one of those even in principle due to the downside of what "omniscient" means, and in practice it doesn't matter anyway due to the lack of incorruptible people to act in this role.
> And it's something that we all enforce and control through local councils.
Ah, the small-commune model of communism. For reasons too long to go into, this limits you to roughly the tech level of the Late Bronze Age collapse. Even then, this is only even stable until someone outside your council comes along with an army, and at best they insist you use modern tech you previously couldn't import because you abolished money, at worst you're working for a 1700 AD equivalent to the Spartans.
You are doing wishful thinking. The world is not ideas the world is real.
Regulations meets deregulation backed by billionaires. They can completely fund political candidates and judges. They can carry out conspiracies to avoid and circumvent regulations. In fact they do. The powerful already are the law, dont you see? They cant do everything they want, but they do almost all of it.
Do you think politics is as it seems? The very existence of the massive power imbalance requires you to think deeper about how politics works and not believe the illusion of modern democracies.
> There are many kinds of profit besides the currencies broadly recognised today.
Your mentioning of "many kinds of profits" is ignorant, we're talking about profits and capital, it doesnt matter what the currency is. The rule is still exactly the same:
The accumulation of profits from the work of others leads to power imbalances. The type of currency is irrelevant.
And the red paperclip thing was a stunt, it is not an inherent part of modern economies. Its not "real".
> To actually stop corruption would require an incorruptible omniscient surveillance system
Nah. Blockchain can be used for managing funds. In fact the function of the state should be reduced to accounting, which almost anyone could do.
> Ah, the small-commune model of communism.
Im not talking about that. Read Lenin, real democracy requires local councils. Small communes dont work.
Honestly, dude, I can tell you know nothing about communism, marxism or even power dynamics in politics. I'm not being rude. Read about it, because if not youre just hating because someone told you to.
Like I said before: Marxism is a framework that describes the progression of society through socioeconomic theories. It implies the democratization of production. Thats whats so bad about it, according to the rich and their state. Thats why they made you hate it without you even knowing what it is.
The issue is that the stated ‘progression of society through socioeconomic theories’ is all good sounding wishful thinking, which is only actually ‘doable’ through authoritarianism.
It’s why it’s such sweet bait for people to get sucked into, and why everyone who has tried it for any group larger than can fit into a single room turns into a authoritarian dictatorship - which then usually ends up just abusing the control for their own ends. Best case. Or turns into something even worse, like the Khmer Rouge.
Not that it’s the ONLY path to authoritarian dictatorship mind you. But it happens every time.
Marx's Capital is actually a very well written piece of research, fully cited with notes for each citation. The dude was a proffessor. Lenins books are research pieces, not vague posturing. They are cited and founded in real phenomenon. In fact Lenin was persecuted because of the things he researched. He has books studying the rise of banking in Russia and Europe and how corruption arised from the simple business practices of finance capital and how that turned into imperialism through profit seeking of raw materials in foreign lands.
You would know that if you actually engaged with it instead of forming your opinions from vague notions passed down to you or read on social media.
Their theories arent unfounded.
> only actually ‘doable’ through authoritarianism
Nah. The central point of Socialism/Communism is the DEMOCRATIZATION of production. Calling it authoritarianism is a lie by billionaires to keep people hating it.
See, If peoples courts decide that wallstreet hedge funds and the military industrial complex deserved life sentences in jail they call it authoritarianism.
But when bourgeois judges systematically put poor people in jail its "just the legal system" and "hey it aint perfect, but nothing is".
Your ideas on Marxism are very western. The Khmer Rouge was backed by the CIA and the brits. Pol Pot was the only Marxist who said hes never read Marx, imagine that. Its almost as if they werent Marxists. He also adored Hitler, which is antithetical to Marxism.
Remember and recognize that a peoples state will always be called authoritarian by the rich.
Marxism is about making the people their own state. Make society FOR itself by eliminating the capitalists who create the imbalance of power.
Marx's Capital is actually a very well written piece of bad research. He cherry-picked the data, ignoring evidence that was available to him that disagreed with the conclusions he was reaching. Let me say that again: There was evidence against his theories present in the data he was perusing.
> Nah. The central point of Socialism/Communism is the DEMOCRATIZATION of production.
How does that work out? You can call what happened "democratization", but it sure looks like central control to me - central control by an authoritarian. That's what has happened every time.
You know how they say "the purpose of a system is what it does"? Well, at least by that standard, no, the purpose of communism is not the democratization of production, because that's not what it does.
Also
I mean "what it looks like" to you is kind of irrelevant because we really do not live in a democracy but it probably looks like one to you.
Are you OK that your country aids in the literal enslavement and exploitation of people abroad for cheap goods?
Are you OK that capitalist countries perpetrate more war and caused more death than any other before it? You must be if you believe in democracy.
Wake up, there is no democracy.
ALL poverty is fabricated and sustained for profits.
So in the same sense: How does capitalism work? Is it democratic or is it a profit extraction system that knows no bounds?
I know communist states commited some mistakes in the 20th century, most are inflated for capitalist propaganda but there are legit ones.
But Im not here for apologia. I do what makes sense. And it makes sense to me that profit creates authoritarianism. And that to create true democracy we must democratize production. That shit makes more sense to me than "getting rich makes everyone better through competition".
Read communist literature and decide for yourself, be intellectually honest, and move on if its not right. I dont care. I dont want someone to rule over me. And I'll never EVER vote for someone who isnt enacting mass democracy. Which is why I havent voted. I'm a real person with real aspirations and I wont be taken advantage by the rich who provably run this shit.
There are many problems with the current system, but it’s hard to think of a better indictment of everything you’re saying than “Which is why I havent voted. I'm a real person with real aspirations and I wont be taken advantage by the rich who provably run this shit.”
Huh?
Corporations already fund some politicians and judges whole careers. Corporations fund the policy groups within popular political parties. They fund the policy groups/think tanks that influence popular political parties as well.
Did you think this was just the will of the people?
Ever heard of Citizens United? What is Lobbying?
Do you think these people are just gonna come out and say: "Hey, influencing politics is a whole industry worth billions."? and "We make sure your political options are aligned with our interests before they even reach your perception"?
None of them propose mass democracy because they know its not in their interest, but it is in ours.
Don't vote for images. Democracy is not trust, Democracy is control.
And you keep not answering the question while spewing a whole bunch of random other BS.
It reads like your only exposure to real life is Political Science 101.
And the stuff you’re complaining about isn’t even specific to capitalism! Do you think judges in other countries (especially communist and social countries!) are somehow totally independent? Do you think massive abuses of workers and the population didn’t (and don’t) happen in the USSR or under the CCP in its various iterations?
Even ‘return production to the people’ is ludicrous without even specifying how. Because
1) why should the current owners be okay with it, and what are you going to do to them if they aren’t. (Historically, this is often ‘murder them’)
2) how would ‘the people’ even operate it ‘individually’ without destroying it or having the same hierarchical (or worse) power structure (historically this is ‘don’t worry, our political appartchik/crony will run it’)
and 3) how do you stop abusive pieces of shit from abusing the structure? (Historically, this is murdering anyone who complains that we’re being abusive).
People like Stalin and Mao did untold damage under the banners of communism and socialism, because people kept just spouting the same bullshit you are and never asking these actual questions.
There are dozens and dozens of books outlining revolutionary experience of different peoples. I can't tell you all of it cause I haven't read every single one, and for the ones I have read this isn't the place to do so. Seek them out and read them, I can only give you a general overview.
> Do you think judges in other countries (especially communist and social countries!) are somehow totally independent?
No doubt corruption will literally ALWAYS be a problem. But capitalist property rights allows people to corrupt for a living.
Capitalist property relations means you control a vital part of a functioning society, its production, which allows you to profit from peoples labor and "invest" in politics to attain a better outcome. Workers can't do that, you and I cant do that.
Corruption under capitalism is intensified by the very nature of how capitalism works. In one phrase: Capitalism always leads to authoritarianism.
> 1) why should the current owners be okay with it, and what are you going to do to them if they aren’t. (Historically, this is often ‘murder them’)
They are not going to be okay with it. But you gotta get outta your head that capital is "mom and pop shop". Capital is finance, raw materials, and monopolies. Mom and pop shops are almost as equally squashed under the boot of monopolies as average workers .
That's also why monopolies and finance capital conflate themself with mom and pop shops, they want you to think they're "just like us". Half of us don't own our houses or cars, they own six of each.
The way this take over happened in the past is that workers would organize and after a long political struggle end up controlling production in their workplace.
The ownership of production would be made a crime enforced by the workers themselves. The incentive to uphold it is better share of the outcomes of good production.
> 2) how would ‘the people’ even operate it ‘individually’ without destroying it or having the same hierarchical (or worse) power structure (historically this is ‘don’t worry, our political appartchik/crony will run it’)
The workers already operate 98% of all production everywhere. They just dont do it according to their own collective interests. Right now workers operate production to squeeze pennies for the shareholders/owners. Think about what a manager does: put profits over quality.
What a socialist workplace would do is they would operate in a similar way by sustaining operations, organizing with other branches (top and bottom), coordinating with neighborhood/regional councils, increasing production to the highest degree, all in order to take production to the highest level and produce enough for all. No profit extraction to slow them down.
All workers would partake in the decision making towards sustainable production. They WANT to keep their jobs, so they have to operate well. Capitalists aren't ruling all of production and keeping it from falling apart, people aren't dumb.
> and 3) how do you stop abusive pieces of shit from abusing the structure? (Historically, this is murdering anyone who complains that we’re being abusive).
Ever heard the phrase "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun"? It's a poetic way of saying that the people must arm themselves and be their own police force if they are to preserve their own order. These neighborhood councils would (and did in the past) organize their own police forces made up of volunteer members.
Neighborhood representatives would be members of your neighborhood, if they were stepping out of line you could literally put them in jail yourselves. No big money to fund the police and defend them.
This requires deep political knowledge to recognize when a person is trying to take over property for their own gain. Total transparency of public income will be made a right, I'm sure everyone will agree.
> People like Stalin and Mao did untold damage under the banners of communism
You say that about Stalin and Mao, and sure they did commit mistakes, I am not here to defend them. But also think about what monarchies were doing and how they helped undo that. THE MAJORITY of people in Russia and China were indentured slaves, serfs. Many were prohibited from reading and kept in a state of constant toil and suffering for profits.
Many of those serfs rose up and killed their masters, its not right, of course, but what is? It happened get over it.
The communists didn't create the revolution, the revolution truly did happen organically and the communists were there to guide them into a state without capitalism.
Read a fucking book, there are dozens talking about just this.
and yet it always ends up the same, with one person in charge (chairman, commissar, supreme leader, etc.), and everyone at the point of a gun.
that you think because a bunch of academics wrote a bunch of words and that’s why it doesn’t happen doesn’t mean it doesn’t always happen. provably. in real life.
because of exactly the reasons I stated.
I’ve known many people who lived through the USSR, and a few that lived through Mao’s China. I’ve lived in Eastern Europe and seen the long term damage. This isn’t academics. This is what happens when people are given high minded academics and use it to justify atrocities - which are easy to do in this case. Almost custom made to do.
because you know, it’s ‘for the greater good’. And there is always someone else to blame. but it never actually works, so doubling down we go….
And re: Pol Pot. Just beyond words [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pol_Pot].
I'll tell you.
Pol Pot was never a communist. He was an anti-intellectual who himself said he had never read Marx and said he admired Hitler. Western Nations claim he was a Marxist in order to spook the average citizen. There are also serious allegations that the CIA and the MI6 were involved in trafficking weapons to them.
The Vietnamese were seen as a threat by the Cambodian capitalists and the Chinese didn't like the Vietnamese due to the sino-soviet split. The US, China, and the UK backed Pol Pot to get at Vietnam.
Pol Pot was a populist. Asian fascism was created to counter Marxism.
Read about the CIA backed killings in Indonesia. They aided in the killing of LITERALLY 125,000 people a month in order to squash communist sentiment in Asia.
> and yet it always ends up the same, with one person in charge (chairman, commissar, supreme leader, etc.), and everyone at the point of a gun.
Where did you read that?
Did you know that the Americans have placed more dictators in power than any other state in existence?
> I’ve known many people who lived through the USSR, and a few that lived through Mao’s China. I’ve lived in Eastern Europe and seen the long term damage. This isn’t academics. This is what happens when people are given high minded academics and use it to justify atrocities - which are easy to do in this case. Almost custom made to do.
Did you know that capitalism started world war 1 AND 2? What has caused more destruction in Eastern Europe than both world wars? Did you know that most of the destruction and social chaos in Africa was caused by capitalism? Did you know that capitalism has decimated South America? Why do you not say that the poorest countries on earth are all capitalists?
I'm not here to defend or espouse the doings of past states. I'm here because I want to put power in peoples hands. The billions of us, not just the middle class. I don't want anyone above me, like there is now. I want people to have democratic power in order to end this artificial poverty that generates power for the few. All poverty world wide is sustained for profits and that is evident.
It rarely spilled over directly until Cambodia kept crossing over into Vietnam and murdering people when they got overzealous with their own internal murdering. Eventually Vietnam got fed up and stomped on them.
The CIA hated both of them with a passion.
You have no idea what the hell you’re talking about.
China, the CIA, and MI6 backed them solely because they were against the NVA. They were tools. And they severely lacked an ideological backbone which is why shit go so bad in Cambodia. It was fascism.
Like I said before Wikipedia is average tier knowledge, but sometimes it compounds sources well, so follow the sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_United_States_s...
And it would be inline with what it has been proved the US did in that same time frame in Indonesia as well, and for very similar reasons too.
We got a little peek into this when the GDPR was rolled out and many small and medium companies simply blocked GDPR countries rather than risk the massive fines spelled out in the GDPR. This has lessened somewhat as it has become more clear that those massive fines aren’t being handed out and the language has been clarified, but I sat through multiple meetings where companies were debating if they should block GDPR countries until the dust settled even though they believed themselves to be compliant. They didn’t want to risk someone making a mistake somewhere and costing the company a percentage of global revenues.
Talking about massive fines that destroy big companies and crush their executives is really popular in internet comment sections but it would be extremely unpopular if people woke up one day and found Google was blocked in their country for fear of violating some law with extreme damages.
Where do I sign up to be too big to punish?
This may be true, but arresting drug dealers would also be unpopular with a lot of junkies. :-)
The problem is that these kinds of harmful practices (by companies) are like a slow frog-boil. The companies foreground the benefits and hide the costs until people are lulled into dependence and are unwilling to roll it back. But that doesn't mean we don't need to roll it back. It might hurt, but we still need to do it.
Unless junkies have started a new service to help me find the nearest hospital that I'm not familiar with. Otherwise, spontaneously blocking Google could cause material harm to people reliant upon it. You'd be surprised how many users are so net-ignorant that they wouldn't even know how to get to Bing if their default page stopped resolving.
Certainly I acknowledge that Google provides useful and maybe even essential services to people. But just because we want those services doesn't mean we necessarily need to allow Google to continue providing them. A parallel in the drug world might be shady pharmacists who get people hooked on painkillers. Yes, maybe it's good to have Vicodin, but that doesn't mean we need to let this particular person control it. Similarly it might be good to have maps, but that doesn't mean it's good to have some megacorp controlling them --- even less so if they try to use that as leverage to prevent regulation of other harmful aspects of their business.
Regarding loci of control: I've been using mapping tools built on OpenStreetMap as of late, and they're good, but they're no replacement for Google Maps. Things Google makes simple like "restaurants near me" are just fall-flat-on-your-face bad in most of the OSM clients I've seen. So I'm loathe to declare we need to kill the working thing when the alternative is worse. My preferred approach to ending a Google map monopoly would be to invest in making the alternatives better (particularly the open alternatives). Give people a better option, and we won't have to "kill" Google; the market will do it for us.
You have no idea just how much revenue Google et. al make from e.g. the EU. The shareholders would absolutely eat Google alive for just walking away from many billions of dollars rather than just complying. I've said this here before:
> A point we're still lightyears away from. The lengths they go to in order to operate in China are magnitudes greater than to operate in the EU, yet EU makes them $10+ billion more profit than China.
> What would actually happen is that the US would start seriously threatening (blackmailing) the EU to a degree where it's forced to relent long before Apple would pull out.
> Apple's estimated operating profit from the EU is around $40 billion dollars. If the US government wouldn't get involved, they could force Tim Apple himself to live on top of the Alps and he'd happily do it rather than lose that $40 billion, or shareholders would vote him out ASAP.
You can substitute Apple for Google or any SV big tech.
>We got a little peek into this when the GDPR was rolled out and many small and medium companies simply blocked GDPR countries rather than risk the massive fines spelled out in the GDPR.
So you do "% of global revenue", "gatekeeper/minimum size applicability" and so on. Absolutely trivial stuff, this has been figured out ages ago.
> You can substitute Apple for Google or any SV big tech
Except Google pretty much doesn't operate in China and shareholders seem fine with that.
Entirely different from their EU operations to just give one example.
EU social welfare programs are all in a precarious state and the EU is currently taking on massive debts to re-arm again. Their economy is also not growing and China is eating their lunch economically (autos, manufacturing, industry).
Public opinion has turned so dramatically against big tech that triggering $10B in fines is like taking candy from a baby. Expect this to 10X by the end of the decade.
The incentive structure is there and the EU has already realized they can raid US companies in the name of 'privacy' without much pushback (hilariously, they're also constantly trying to undermine encryption at the same time...so we know they don't actually care about "privacy," just easy money).
And the reality is that the US government would start blackmailing the EU long before that dramatic escalation is reached.
GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro and Claude 4 were released across the same time frame (staggered releases that affect users even within regions not withstanding) for EU and US customers.
ChatGPT Agents meanwhile had a three week delay, but that was not EU specific and affected other countries such as Switzerland as well. Previously, I have also seen the very much not EU UK included in such delayed releases.
Essentially, all recent LLM releases I am aware off either dropped simultaneously for EU and US customers or, if they were inaccessible within the EU early on, that generally included none-EU countries with different or no applicable regulation as well. Any example of differences in accessible features I know of hasn't been limited to EU member states.
Sora was the only outlier here, though as always, the restrictions did not encompass just the EU and were lifted shortly there after, just like with ChatGPT Agents:
> Right now, users can access Sora everywhere ChatGPT is available, with the exception of the United Kingdom, Switzerland and the European Economic Area. We are working to expand access further in the coming months.
Some things I'm curious about, and would be helpful context:
- Why did they stop in 2021, and is it normal for these things to take 4+ years to resolution?
- Does Google have similar deals in other countries, e.g. in the US does it have similar deals with T-Mobile, Verizon, AT&T? If yes are they are similarly anticompetitive, and if not why not?
- Similar question about the agreements Google has with Mozilla and Apple, to be the default search engine on their browsers.
- Roughly how much would this deal have been worth to Google? I imagine it's not very likely the providers would have chosen a different default search engine, though without this deal they'd likely have more options pre-configured so users would have had more choice (and this I imagine is the primary anti-competitiveness complaint in the first place).
Wikipedia has pages on antitrust cases against Google in the world [0] and specifically in U.S. [1,2] and in European Union [3].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Google#Antitrust
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitrust_cases_against_Google...
> Much of the trial centered on Google's deal with Apple to have Google search as the default option on the Safari web browser. Witnesses from Google, Verizon and Samsung testified about the impact of Google's annual payments of approximately $10 billion to maintain default status for Google search.
The deal is the Android MADA and you can find examples of it going back over a decade.
It isn't that long in terms of regulator response, believe it or not.
It came about out of an inquiry that released a report in 2021, that was further investigated and reported to government in 2022 and 2023.
Without knowing the inside story, this may have been gearing up to major litigation (the only way to fine someone in Australia), but settled at the last minute. Suing someone like Google comes with a lot of discovery time, particularly if they are trying to not be cooperative (and I have no idea if they were or not in this case).
That said, if you think this behaviour is bad, you should see what they pay Apple per year. Or even Mozilla.
and a lot of lobby money.
They have now set a "bar" for acceptable behaviour... the 55million is just a "you've been put on notice"
[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204425...
55m AUD -> 35.87 USD
(35.87/55)4.3 = 2.8
This isn’t naive behaviour, this sits neatly under the definition of anti-competitive behaviour and bears similarity Microsoft’s anti-competitive behaviour involving PC vendors.
> The three telcos can configure search services on a device-by-device basis, and in ways that may not align with the settings set by Google. They can also enter into pre-installation agreements with other search providers.
Before we go patting Australia on the back for helping consumers, all they are really doing for the end user is allowing another corporation to set your defaults.
The anticompetitive behavior they are admitting to isn't that they are taking away choice from the end user, it's that they have agreements in place to prevent telocos from forcing their own software on you or signing contracts with Google competitors to force their software on you.
Remember this when you're next phone comes with the non-removable Telstra browser.
I think most people's judgement about DDG is from a few uses and from some time ago. It's worth giving it a shot if you haven't in awhile. But give it a real shot, like use it for a few days to get over the "I hate it because it's different" game that our minds play.
And a major benefit now is you don't just get a fucking popup on your phone every time you're just trying to search something. Like seriously, wtf google. Needy much?
I'm no Microsoft fan, but man you're splitting hairs here. And most of the non-Google engines get a good portion of their index from Bing because it is available and saves everyone from getting scraped to death. Though I guess that's happening now anyways...
https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources
> it does get most of its index from Bing
But you (supposedly) get the added anonymity of that going through DDG's servers, and their promise not to do some of their own tracking to put the two together, and they combine Bing's results with their own crawled results.
Isn't that how it works?
In a thread about a monopoly abusing its power, the least you can do is to stop measuring success by how monopolistic a company is.
I meant in terms of Google's dominance in search. Currently, not even ChatGPT / LLM search are shrinking Google's dominance - Google keeps growing search traffic and revenue. It does seem though that the whole search market has grown with LLMs , people now query for stuff they've never queried before.
> In a thread about a monopoly abusing its power, the least you can do is to stop measuring success by how monopolistic a company is.
How do you measure success then? All companies want to dominate their industries why are we picking on Google? This is capitalism.
A healthy economy is the one where you have 50 smaller companies each with 2.5% market share, not one with over 80% and everyone else being called a failure like you just did. Hope that clears things up!
Making Google sell chrome, to me , wouldn't be different than making Nvidia sell a big part of their GPU know how or making Microsoft sell Windows or making Apple get rid of the App Store.
Content was so much better 15-20 years ago, when Google’s tooling was also better.
99% of content creators create content for a single reason: to monetize it. Usually through ads.
The end result is that most content, even if decent, is ruined by ads.
At this point, what percentage of searches are just end up with the user clicking on Amazon, Reddit, or Wikipedia? So much of the other content is low-effort slop, even before AI.
You.com used to have really good search, but it looks like they have veered off into the AI chat space instead.
searxng is a self hostable meta search engine that allows you to basically just use the best search engines and easily switch between them.
It's so laborious to sift through shitty Google search results when ChatGPT will uncover unknown unknowns.
I don't want OpenAI to become the new monopoly de jour, but I'm certainly happier as a user with their platform than I am with Google search.
Google stopped being a powerhouse tool when they dropped advanced search predicates a decade or more ago.
It cost money but that doesn't bother me too much, because it means they have a means of making money that isn't just selling my data. I also like that I get to rank the results instead of a program trying to predict what to rank at the whims of some kind of marketing.
The only other major market is weird tech nerds like us, but tbh, a lot of us would rather setup a peertube node then actually make any content for it.
I did used to have Rumble installed on my phone specifically for a single creator that was banned from YouTube, but this guy isn't racist, and isn't even conservative. The ads on the videos were something, lots of conspiracy baiting and "vaccine alternatives" and gold investing. I uninstalled it after a few months because it was using an obscene amount of data, even when I wasn't using the app. I don't know why and I couldn't be bothered to investigate.
I have a super fancy video camera that I bought specifically to make YouTube videos, and I had fun setting it up, but then I realized I don't have any ideas for videos to make.
I often see people complaining about this; but it's just not something I ever experience myself (provided I'm using my account, of course). While I do cultivate my YouTube recommendations using the "Do not recommend again" menu item, I think I've only needed to click that a few times a year - plus most of the videos I watch are from video producers I'm subscribed to (mostly retrotech, sci/tech/edu youtubers and archive film accounts; I do subscribe to a bunch of defence-economics and political youtubers but only because they don't engage in theatrics: it's all very bookish and academic, so that also helps keep the bad content away.
...so if you're seeing extremist and/or conspiratorial content, may I ask if you're clicking the "Do not recommend" menu option (not just the Dislike button) - and have you built a Subscriptions list of consistently non-extremist content? I imagine those are the 2 main things that informs YouTube's recommendation algo.
https://rumble.com/vt62y6-covid-19-a-second-opinion.html
I wish it were all "discredited". It isn't. It would arguably be wrong to censor things that were actually that
Or are they all similar to the rumble.com link below, standard 2020's coded propaganda and clickbait bullshit?
edit: Nevermind, looks like they ARE mostly conservative conspiracy crap. Carry on. :-(
...though the the problem with creating _good_ content on YouTube that still gets watched by millions over a decade after it was originally posted (looking at you, Jay Foreman) is your sponsored segments and this-month-only coupon codes will age poorly.
Part of the whole appeal of YouTube is user-generated content. It's fun to see stuff that people have made that wouldn't realistically make it onto TV.
Something like Bitchute or Rumble or Odyssey are more analogous to YouTube specifically because they're designed around user generated content. This is not a pedantic detail; the appeal of YouTube is the sort of "infiniteness" of it; there's millions upon millions of videos on the site and a lot of them are appealing to specific niches and subniches.
With curated content like Netflix or cable TV, you cannot have nearly the diversity of content.
I am saying that the “alternatives” to YouTube (e.g. Rumble, Bitchute) are overwhelmingly filled with conservative conspiracy crap; basically stuff that isn’t allowed on YouTube.
Similar as with Meta and their MITM approach when they bought Onavo to spy on users.
> In return, Telstra and Optus received a share of the revenue Google generated from ads displayed to consumers when they used Google Search on their Android phones.
So Telstra and Optus entered into this agreement and profited from it, too. Singling out Google is a strange choice given that all parties profited.
Kind of like how Microsoft was found[0] to do something similar with PC manufacturers?
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
Profiting isn't the misdeed, artificially suppressing competition is. Only Google experienced the benefit of suppressed competition, and that's why they were the ones paying the kickback, not receiving it.
Interestingly, all my discoverability came from Google. My app was on the first page of search results, which drove users directly to the App Store.
Then, Google decided to compete. Searching for "coin toss" started returning Google's own top-of-page inline coin-tossing app as the very first result. Users could now toss a coin without leaving search results. Unsurprisingly, my user acquisition tanked.
It was my first experience with this, and I remember thinking, "Is this fair? Why is Google competing with me?"
Google "Coin Toss" or "Toss a coin", before the search results you'll find a google-written in browser-app which allows you to toss a coin and get a result. Google literally entered the coin-tossing software solution market! Lol. But not lol.
Back then I was furious about it, and yet, did nothing. Forget legal action, I didn't even gripe about it online. This is the first time I've posted or told anyone about it outside of a few friends that didn't understand. I felt powerless to do anything about it.
Further - look at AI generated search results being introduced now... same pattern. Why click through when you're got what you need before search results...
(Personally, I resolve the paradox with "The goal is for neither Google nor app developers to 'win', the goal is to make it as easy to flip a coin as possible." Is my keyboard manufacturer competing with both if they put a button in the corner of the keyboard that either lights an LED or doesn't when pressed? Does the coin in my pocket compete with all three?)
For example, this law would have played out with Microsoft not being able to create Word (look at the history of what they did to the Windows version of WordPerfect). Amazon would not be able to introduce their own products and compete with their platform sellers. Apple wouldn't be able to take great independent app ideas and assimilate them into their OS. Google wouldn't be able to make a coin tossing app when its core business was successfully creating discovery for mine.
Perhaps a law like this would have prevented the formation of the mega-tech corporates that we see now? It's so easy to compete if you own the platform.
I think trying to carve up the world of possible creations into marketplaces like that is sacrificing progress on the altar of capitalism.
If Microsoft added a coin flip to the start menu, are they also competing with your app? If somebody makes a keyboard that has a button on it and when you push it It lights one of two LEDs, are they also competing and should the law stop them? Am I competing if I'm carrying a quarter in my pocket? At some point, there's no compelling societal interest to protect your app from more convenient solutions to the end user.
In general, protection against monopolies in the United States hinges on harm to the consumer. It's real hard to argue that things are worse for the consumer when Google makes the process of digitally flipping a coin easier than installing an app.
The real question is what happens when that logic is applied to everything. First, it's a coin toss. Then it's the weather. Then a calculator. Then flight prices. Then hotel bookings. Then product reviews.
Step by step, the platform that was built to be a portal to a rich and diverse ecosystem of creators becomes a wall that primarily shows you its own products. The "progress" you're describing is the progress of a single entity consuming the ecosystem that once fed it.
The ultimate harm to the consumer isn't a slightly less convenient coin toss; it's the eventual death of that vibrant, competitive ecosystem. My tiny app was simply the first course in the platform's long meal of consuming its own creators.
If Google started charging a quarter a coin-flip while leveraging its control over search to suppress the fact you'd made a coin-flip app that was free or flat-rate to purchase, there might be a case there under US law.
You were right that under the old interpretation, my app had no case. But that rabbit hole led me to the news that the interpretation itself has just been successfully challenged.
Judge Mehta found Google liable. The court has officially validated that the 'free vs. free' self-preferencing that killed my app is, in fact, illegal monopoly maintenance.
Fascinating to see a legal system's 'unhandled exception' get patched in real time.
p.s. Respect for your public comments here :-)
Google is a plague, and the sooner its gone the better.
EU: Already fined Google €8+ billion across multiple cases, including specifically for Android pre-installation requirements. Just issued new violations under the Digital Markets Act.
US: Federal judge ruled in Aug 2024 that Google illegally maintained search monopoly through exclusive default agreements including on mobile. DOJ seeking various remedies including divesting Chrome. This case is still in progress.
Google is one of the most anticompetitive companies to have ever existed. MaBell has nothing on the new AI overlords.
The browser / web / search / ads thing is insane, and the fact that they've made it so companies have to pay to protect their own brand is beyond fucked. It ought to be illegal.
And they own the largest media company in the world and have a commanding lead in AI and autonomous vehicles. They're bigger than most countries and are poised for world domination.
Break these MFs up already.
To think the government got mad at Microsoft for IE. Jeez. We used to have a spine when it comes to antitrust.
X does it too. Instagram does it too. TikTok does it too. YouTube does it too. Reddit does it too. LinkedIn does it too.
It's not insane, it's the standard way to monetize a platform. You have an app that takes you to a page to discover content. When discovering content ads are shown. When viewing the content ads are shown from the platform.
If I own a brand, I have to pay Google ads to rank for my own brand. Google doesn't like the concept of a "URL bar". It's a search bar. My closet competitors can pay for placement against my trademarked name and there's not a damned thing I can do to stop it.
One company should not own all of that surface area. That's practically the whole internet outside of social networks and buying off Amazon.
Google just sits there taxing the whole internet. (And half of mobile...)
Fixes? Here are a few:
1. Take Chrome away. That's the lynchpin of this racket.
2. Make Google (and Apple) support non-scare wall app installs from the web as a default. No hidden settings menus. (The EU would be great and enforcing this.) Don't let them own login or payments either.
3. Best yet: break the company into pieces. If it was good enough for MaBell, it'll be good enough for Google. It'll be worth more as parts anyway - so much of that value is locked away trying to be the sum of parts. YouTube alone is bigger than Disney and Netflix.
>If I own a brand, I have to pay Google ads to rank for my own brand
Google will still rank your page even without ads. Normal search results are shown after ads. Other platforms as I mentioned before have search ads. This is not a unique thing.
>Google just sits there taxing the whole internet. (And half of mobile...)
Investing billions of dollars into platforms for other people to build upon for free is not "just sitting there." Unlike other apps like TikTok where the company has to spend resources developing mobile apps, websites can utilize the browser Google is writing.
>Take Chrome away.
If you remove a platform a similar one will take its place.
Chrome isn't the only browser that exists, no, but it damn well isn't for the lack of trying. They've been trying to smother every alternative and now that they've largely succeeded, they're trying to push hostile changes like Web Environment Integrity and Manifest V3 that take even more power away from their users.
Other companies have search, other companies have ads, other companies have apps, other companies host video, one other company has a mobile platform and a browser, but they don't have all of those combined, and the one company that has most of those (Apple) is just as anti-competitive and just as problematic as Google. What makes them anti-competitive is how they leverage their dominance in ALL of those areas to smother any fair alternative in their crib.
Because if I don't do it, who will?
>that monopolies are good as long as their stranglehold produces some positive side effects
Chrome is not a monopoly as it compete against the apps I previously provided.
>they're trying to push hostile changes like Web Environment Integrity and Manifest V3 that take even more power away from their users.
The changes are not hostile. Their goal is to improve the web.
>and the one company that has most of those (Apple)
Apple has all of them.
Hopefully nobody? Defending anti-competitive practices of corporations is generally a really odd thing to do.
> Chrome is not a monopoly as it compete against the apps I previously provided.
Google the company, not Chrome.
> The changes are not hostile. Their goal is to improve the web.
Please don't insult me with corporate PR. Their goal is to take control away from their users in order to empower their customers - advertisers.
To deny that is plainly dishonest, they've been engaging in the same practices on every property they own - Android as the most direct comparison.
Did you read the proposals to understand the actual goals of them? Taking away control from users or empowering advertisers was never a goal. The goal of the attestation API was for improving the security of the web platform. This is important to do in order to keep the web platform relevant compared to competing app platforms. MV3 was an update to extentions that improved performance, security, and privacy of web extentions. Ad blocking is still possible with MV3, so if their goal was too kill it they did a terrible job. Also if their goal was to kill ad blockers, why did the chromium team work with adblocking extentions to iterate and improve the API to better suit their needs? If they didn't like ad blockers they wouldn't be working with them.
Yes, and better yet, I understood their technical implications.
> Taking away control from users or empowering advertisers was never a goal.
It was never a stated goal, but it becomes self-evident if you actually understand their technical details. Both of those effectively install locks on our digital doors and while they're unlocked for now, they can and will be locked at the first opportunity as the protests die down.
MV3 didn't block ad blockers for now, but it added technical limitations to the number of dynamic filters that ad blockers can use - a simple switch that Google can flip and hobble their functionality with some bullshit "safety and security" excuse at the first opportune moment.
The best part is, they might not even have to do that because if I worked for an ad network right now, I'd be knees deep developing a new system that simply overwhelms the technical limitations imposed on MV3 ad blockers, specifically the 30,000 rules limit.
We heard the same sleazy explanations when SafetyNet was being rolled out on Android, it's all for our safety and security, and now those mechanisms are being used to lock us out of our own devices. Not as a matter of official Google policy of course, it just so happens as a side effect of their benevolent goals.
Here's a simple canary, if these mechanisms were actually provided for our own safety and security then Google wouldn't use attestation APIs to block usage of Google Pay on GrapheneOS which has been battle tested to be significantly more secure than stock Android.
I'm glad the normies will read your post and find other routes of ingress.
Defaults and distribution matter. Google has your parents and grandparents on lock.
> Investing billions of dollars into platforms for other people to build upon for free is not "just sitting there."
They've spent more in stock buybacks. No better way of saying they don't know how to spend the money.
It doesn't matter how much the trillion dollar company spent. They're an ecological menace. We need a forest fire to clear away the underbrush and ossification, to create new opportunities for startups and innovation capital. Google is like an invasive species. Like lionfish. They're ruining tech for everyone else, taking far too much meat off the bone across every channel.
> Unlike other apps like TikTok where the company has to spend resources developing mobile apps, websites can utilize the browser Google is writing.
I wouldn't know because I use Firefox, but on the subject of apps - these are taxed by Google too.
> If you remove a platform a similar one will take its place.
That's literally the point. Something with less surface area moves in and competes.
Companies should face evolutionary pressure constantly. Business should be brutal and painful and hard. Google is so big they'll never feel any pain. That's been bad for the web, for competition, for diverse innovation. Everything just accrues to Google.
Not to mention these tech conglomerate oligopolies get to put an upper bounds cap on startups and the IPO market. They get to dump on new companies and buy them on the cheap when they give up. It's easy to threaten to subsidize competition for any new company when you're making hundreds of billions a quarter.
Some of the apps I listed have billions of users. The normies know about them.
>They've spent more in stock buybacks
This is moving the goal posts. They still have done a tremendous amount of work creating and maintaining platforms that millions of people are building upon. Companies can always do more, but you can't say that they are doing nothing at all.
>these are taxed by Google too.
Ad revenue, which makes up the bulk of revenue, is not taxed.
Also the post you linked to targeted users of adblockers and affected Chrome users using adblockers.
So we now have META, MSFT, GOOG, AAPL all with major government actions against them.
Maybe its just not possible to get that big without doing something anti competitive?