The FTC wants to sue Google, and now it may have found the charges that stick | Hacker News Reader

The FTC wants to sue Google, and now it may have found the charges that stick

qz.com

14 pointsdonohoe27 comments

I'm not sure about the source, but this seems far more malicious on the part of the FTC than I'm comfortable with. Shouldn't they be impartially judging this sort of thing on a case-by-case basis? Instead they've decoded that Google, as an entity, is broadly criminal, and the crime itself is just their vehicle for delivering whatever punishment they deem appropriate.

Then, should Al Capone not have been indicted for income tax evasion? They really wanted him for peddling booze during the Prohibition.

The problem is that indicting an individual stops them, more or less. Whatever judgement they get regarding FRAND patents won't have anything to do with search. If all they had done was collect Capone's taxes without throwing him in prison, it would've been pretty useless.

I also have issues with things like tax evasion being used as a proxy to prosecute other crimes, but that's more of a romantic notion about how law should work. I realize it can't be that way.

Why the fuck is the FTC trying to troll Google? Because it prioritizes (and thinks better of) it's services than other sites? That's what ANY business is supposed to do!

They're trying to "troll" them for abusing their search monopoly to promote their services- but unfortunately they can't prove it at the moment.

They went after Microsoft for similar reasons- they were using their operating system (Windows) to push other products (like Internet Explorer), which limited competition and hurt consumers. Now Google is integrating Google Plus into their search, and ignoring sources like Facebook and Twitter for that same positioning. It's pretty clear cut to me why they're doing that.

The other issue here is that the author of this article is the one making this connection, and adding his own thoughts about it. No one from the FTC is saying they're trying this second path because the first one didn't work- in fact, if you follow the links from this linkbait blog post, you'll see that he's filling in a hell of a lot of blanks himself. The FTC is still pursuing the original issue, they're just also going after this second complaint at the request of Microsoft and Apple (amongst others), who think paying 4 billion dollars to add wifi to their phones is a bit ridiculous.

Google is not allowed to search tweets and Facebook posts. Twitter and Microsoft do not allow Google to do that and they both made an exclusive deal with Bing.

The isn't exactly true-

http://www.focusontheuser.org/

Well, it's exactly what Google says:

https://plus.google.com/116899029375914044550/posts/24uqWqvA...

There's a huge difference between "nofollow" and blacklisting a search engine- as the link I pointed out shows, google is still pulling in their information and displaying it in search results. They're just not giving it preferencial treatment like they are Google+.

Seriously, try the browser extension or tools setup on the link I sent- they use Google's own results, they're not just injecting things randomly.

The problem is when for majority of people Google = The Internet.

If you are not showing high in Google and you don't want to pay, you are fucked. You don't exist for the 85% of population.

Clearly, Google needs to be punished for such abuses of the power, power that is granted to them by consumers voluntarily choosing to use their free product.

Well if you show people Bing;s results in Google's search template, they will prefer it over Google's own results.

It's not like consumers make rational decisions. They are habituated to use Google.

PS: Searchers are not Google's consumers, they are their product. Advertisers are their consumers - they are the ones who pay them.

That doesn't sound quite accurate. I know Microsoft ran a study saying such but in the small sample size of friends on various social networks I saw test this Google won nearly every case, with a few ties (I don't think Bing won any of the posts I saw).

So, nice try Microsoft?

Not all "consumers" make rational decisions in all cases, but they do have the capability of doing so. Going by reason and reality (as opposed to whim or faith) is itself a choice.

Rankings are inherently mutually exclusive. Not everybody can be a winner.

Tell me how Bing is better at solving this problem.

It's almost certainly google's enemies having finally got through to the FTC. Google's made a lot of enemies, the telcos, microsoft, apple, big oil, big media. The population should wake up realize there's only a few good guys out there, google and maybe amazon, everyone else is evil and an effort needs to be made to stop the evil guys from destroying the good guys.

donohoe: You say that you are "Product Engineering Director for Quartz" and comment that you "do post stuff from qz.com on rare occasions cos I naturally come across it as part of my work".

10 of your last 13 posts, all within a month, are to your company. I think you need to change your about text and remove the words "rare occasions".

I get a lot of links to Quartz from another (financial) website I frequent.

I've never been able to get a page to load in Chrome, so I've never read a single article from the site.

Really - what version? Screenshot? (email in profile)

Yes! I do say that!

The three main sites I visit are NYTimes, Hacker News and Quartz.

This is a breakdown of my postings in the last 244 days.

  Quartz  - 16
  NYTimes - 20
  Misc    - 24

As I tried to say in terms of Quartz I have it open all the time at work. To me its stands to reason that if I'm seeing it all the time and I see something I like then I will post it more often.

It was the same at the NYTimes - however I haven't worked there in almost 2 years yet I still post significant amounts from them. Again, its about what I think people will like within the community that I've read.

I've been on HN for over 3 years and I'll bet the majority of my posts come from NYTimes where I worked for a large part of that time. Again - it was always open in my browser so hard not to be hyper-aware of what was being posted and catch interesting stuff.

I'm just doing my best to be as upfront as possible. Plenty of others don't necessarily do that:

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=nickbilton

Sometimes I post two links in a day, sometimes it will be one link in a week or two. Again, its as I see things I like and want to share.

Updated my profile to say: "I do post stuff from qz.com on occasions that I post cos I naturally come across it as part of my work" and linked to your Comment since it provides more detail.

Not sure this is the answer you wanted but I certainly hope that helps clarify things a bit.

Your numbers show that you are no longer posting rarely, and that you've changed your posting frequency during the last month. I've stopped following "The Atlantic" links because of their spam-like actions, described in http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2012/06/13/reddit-... . I believe the guidelines listed therein are reasonable. That you responded to my comment is actually a good thing. There was, e.g., a frequent poster to Outside Online pages who never responded to comments on their thread.

2.25% is slightly less that Samsung wants for it's FRAND patents and is a whole lot less than the 6% Apple wanted for it's patents.

Apple and MS seemed to want the mobile radio patent owners to give away their technologies for free but are unwilling to license their own patents on reasonable terms

What Apple patents has Apple promised to license to all comers under FRAND terms in exchange for getting those patents into required parts of international standards?

What Motorola's patent they promised to give for cheap? FRAND does not mean cheap. It never meant. Microsoft and Apple are trying to change the term now, because they want to tax Android products, and cheapening SEP is the easiest way to do that, because that would disarm all others OEMs, and they would be able to tax them with "utility" patents.

Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory - if everyone else is willing to pay 2.25% then that seems pretty fair...

Deleted comment

>"The truth is, Google is a big corporation run purely for profit"

As expected.

>"Google's dominant position helps only them and no one else."

Google helped me about 10 times already today. Their technology works.

>"In fact it harms the little players ( small e-commerce websites ) by taking the traffic away from them and selling it to the big brands"

As opposed to newspaper ads, or billboards, or TV commercials? The best accounts are the big businesses. That's the way advertising works, and Google is a an advertising company.

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