Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google | Hacker News Reader

Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google

wsj.com

870 pointsDespegar414 comments

The career officials at the FTC recommended antitrust action against Google back in 2012, but the political appointees shut them down.

>When the Federal Trade Commission neared a momentous decision on whether to charge Google with violating antitrust laws in January 2013, the White House was watching closely.

New emails uncovered by the Campaign for Accountability, a public interest watchdog organization, show that a White House advisor met with top Google lobbyist Johanna Shelton and top Google antitrust counsel Matthew Bye twice in the weeks before the FTC announcement.

And minutes prior to the final decision – in which FTC commissioners took the unusual step of overriding their staff’s recommendation to sue, and voted to settle the case instead – the White House official even sought Google’s talking points in the matter.

https://theintercept.com/2016/08/18/white-house-official-coz...

FWIW: It sounds nefarious, but the DOJ/FTC/etc quite often meet with all parties prior to taking antitrust action.

That's because (at least in the number of times i've been invited to meetings with these sorts of regulators) the relevant folks are not idiots, and in fact are trying to understand all sides of the issue before deciding what they should do.

This is actually what you want them to do, as there are rarely, if ever, truly disinterested parties in these sorts of things.

As an aside, i'm pretty sure Matthew was not the top antitrust counsel at Google at the time. I believe it was Nikhil Shanbhag. Job titles on linkedin seem to confirm my recollection.

The fact is that the revolving door between Google and our government was spinning pretty quickly during that period.

>The Campaign for Accountability (CFA) this week launched the first two of its Google Transparency Projects. One of the projects – a visualisation of the revolving door between Google, the White House and US government agencies – is so dense, the website suggests viewing it on a desktop display.

As well as Googlers leaving the ad giant to join the administration, there’s also a heavy traffic in the other direction, with federal employees leaving to join Google. The project documents 61 staff taking key public positions after leaving Google, or firms working closely with Google, and 171 leaving public office to join [Google].

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/29/google_transparency...

Notice that no Googlers have a good response to this or the Eric Schmidt / Hillary Clinton connection. Google’s ties to the Obama administration were deep.

Which raises deep suspicions about the political motivations of this "investigation".

Anti-trust is about companies using their market power to exclude rivals, raise prices, and hurt consumers. It's not about consumers overwhelmingly choosing a product because they like it more.

Can anyone really say that Google's practices are more anti-competitive than, say, the dominant players in broadband or health insurance or wireless telecom or household appliances?

It really shouldn't matter what a public officials prior employment, often domain expertise is often a good or necessary thing. But it unfortunately seems to be a recurring problem worth investigating. There should be some conflict of interest rules around anything related to your former employers. Only if they were previously high up at the company, of course.

The DoJ and other state legal offices have rules about excusing prosecutors from cases but this one seems to not be seen as an issue at these regulatory and broader judicial agencies.

This should matter considering the US is disparaging China for having private companies backed by the powerful government bodies, operating under a different set of rules than everyone else.

You never asked for one?

Here's one:

This dataset includes people like my intern, who left to go join USDS after his internship was up, etc

So there is some amount of flat out silliness here.

It also covers 14 years (2002->2016), and has a fairly small number of people for that number of years.

A significant number are DC people, and, surprisingly, if you want to stay in DC, you are going to work at the government most likely.

During the earlier parts of this timeframe, there was no one other than Google who was local (google opened the office in 2006). During the middle part, 2006-2013, other tech companies were just staffing up policy orgs. Over the entire time period, the government is by far the biggest employer in the region. There were not a lot of even tech companies (let alone local policy orgs for tech companies) in most of that time period, the biggest other one would have been weird things like "livingsocial".

Having been recruiting in DC during the 2006-2012 timeframe , out of the 1000+ resumes i'd reviewed, i'd say 80+% were working at the government.

Like, why is this a conspiracy instead of normal attrition? In particular: where was it you expected them to go that was more acceptable? I think you are seriously overestimating the amount of non-governmental jobs they would have been able go to if they wanted to stay local.

It's a little more true now, but even then you'd just see them bounce between tech company policy departments.

Over the same time period, i'm 100% sure as many policy/legal/etc people in MTV/etc went to go work at Facebook, startups, etc (IE whatever the local industry was).

I'm also sure you'd find the same relative number of facebookers/etc in DC (which again, was very small during that time period) left for the administration, etc.

I wish it was common knowledge that large and influential companies and the government have VERY strong ties. It’s how the entire upper echelon of the world works, for better or for worse.

As were the Obama administration’s early ties to many technology companies. Obama explicitly attempted to bring on “technocrats” into his cabinet as a way to try to modernism the effectiveness of government and leverage the internet. In contrast to many other administrations who lag behind technology, at least Obama was attempting to keep pace with it. I don’t view this as a bad thing.

Googles entire restructuring into Alphabet was a response to this imo. They knew this could happen and have already organized the business into discrete operating and reporting lines. The battle will be over how much they fracture the big 4 Google services themselves (Maps, Search, Email and YouTube).

Is that wrong? Maybe we should do something about Fox and Breitbart's link to the current administration then.

This. Obama administration had a lot more googlers than Trump administration has Fox news icons. I still don't why exactly they have ties so deep specifically with Google.

I’ll note for the audience that such meetings are common for many types of prosecutions, even for relatively low level criminal ones. If you’ve every watched a TV show about a murder investigation, you know the police will talk to you and get your statement before they arrest you. The SEC will also send a “we’re thinking of suing you” letter (Wells notice), where you can respond with a PowerPoint presentation of “why you shouldn’t sue me.” When you’ve got complex antitrust and securities issues, that up-front discussion becomes even more important.

TV shows are notoriously bad sources of information about the real world. In the real world if the police has anything solid which they believe points at you as the perp, they will arrest you first (possibly after watching you for a while). Extracting information from you is so much easier when you are intimidated and fearful - as anyone would be after marinating for a few days in a cell.

Talking to the police before you get arrested is just plain stupid. Let the lawyer do the talking. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRNc3Qic-Ks

rayiner is a notoriously good source of information.

He is also a laywer, see his profile: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=rayiner

Yeah, this is basically how regulation works. You give whoever a chance to do something reasonable before you bring the hammer down. Threat of regulation is a key part of the process.

Ajit Pai just did this move with robocalls and SHAKEN/STIR:

> Ajit Pai orders phone companies to adopt new anti-robocall tech in 2019 Pai threatens "regulatory" action if carriers don't use Caller ID authentication. (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/02/ajit-pai-orders-...)

FWIW: Before the preceding comment apologizes and distracts from the real issue, the WH involving itself in the issue is very different from the prosecutor meetings described by the previous comment.

Given that this amazingly nameless "white house advisor"and title is clear spin for their narrative in the same way the "top competition counsel" thing is (and proven wrong by totally trivial fact checking), do you have evidence or anything to back up that this was not a standard meeting?

I have no opinion on the nature of the meeting but the White House Advisor is named directly in the article and they include screen shots of the emails.

This is the advisor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._David_Edelman

It's not like he was Secretary of State but he also wasn't just an intern.

Do you think you might have a conflict of interest here?

The mental gymnastics below in the thread where people try to explain why not investigating Google in 2012 was OK and investigating it now is not OK are quite amazing.

Though to be fair, in 2012 Google exerted its monopolistic power far less than it does now.

For the life of me I can't understand why it's good that less than a dozen unelected and non-removable people in this country (Schmidt/Page, Zuck, and the owners of 99% of "independent" media) have the power to decide who wins elections, and what people think about issues.

Here's the staffer report from that event: http://graphics.wsj.com/google-ftc-report

That's one interpretation by interested parties another would be that enforcement lawyers are always aggressive and those who make the decision in the end would have to weigh the odds of winning in court and unanimously they decides not.

Regardless, the FTC would have had a much better chance than the DOJ as they have specific broad powers more suitable to this case.

Google was also very positively connected to the Obama administration. It was some googlers that stepped in and turned around healthcare.gov for instance. I've heard a lot of rumors that they gave a lot of data access to the campaigns too.

Not only is the amount of revolving door between Google and the Obama administration well documented, but Eric Schmidt was literally part of Hillary's campaign staff and personally funded a company to provide her campaign's development and infrastructure.

Suffice to say, they have a lot less allies in DC this year, and even Democrats are starting to look negatively on them now.

Although this is a minor digression, I always felt that it was very interesting to contrast the overwhelming amount of airtime on the legacy media devoted to throwing fuel on the fire of "Russian interference in the 2016 election" with the scant concern for Alphabet's working relationship with the Clinton Campaign. I know I'm not the only person concerned with the disproportionate influence that companies like Google, Twitter, etc have on modern political discourse. Isn't it frightening that the assistance of such companies can be bought with the promise of regulatory lenience? Even if someone didn't agree with the previous statement, isn't it still of significant concern that the companies controlling the flow of information are participants in partisan politics?

I don't know about data accesse rumors but the fact that a bunch of Googlers did government work during the Obama years is well documented, that said the FTC is an independent agency with commissioners from both parties and they unanimously voted against going to court.

Google engineers also built Obama's campaign software. The relationship was far tighter than most people realize.

They built his campaign software while working for Google? Are you sure about that?

It's not so much an interpretation of what happened as it is a leak of what happened.

>The Federal Trade Commission on Thursday faced renewed questions about its handling of its antitrust investigation into Google, after documents revealed that an internal report had recommended stronger action.

The 2012 report, from the agency’s bureau of competition, said that the agency should sue the Internet search company for anticompetitive practices, according to several people who saw the report but would speak about it only under the condition of anonymity. At least one other staff report, they said, recommended not to pursue a lawsuit. In early 2013, the agency unanimously voted not to bring charges after an investigation.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/20/technology/take-google-to...

Google has already lost several antitrust actions in the EU. It's not difficult to imagine that the investigation by FTC career officials found sufficient evidence of wrongdoing to recommend taking action.

The EU has different rules (and extra motivation to go after US companies) they also don't need to win in court, their enforcement action in unilateral.

In the last ~year Google has admitted to accidentally-but-knowingly stealing $75 million from Adwords customers, and settled a case they had fought four years for $11 million to avoid revealing what happens to a banned Adsense account's unpaid revenue. There is likely several hundred million dollars of fraud just in these two 'edge cases' they ignored handling for decades, so it's definitely time for someone to dig deep into this company.

https://www.businessinsider.com/google-emails-adtrader-lawsu...

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/adsense-lawsuit/248135/

I saw a similar complaint video[1] from ZoggfromBetelgeuse but didn't know the problem was pervasive. It is a shame this killed one of the best channels on YT.

[1] https://youtu.be/SADDJY7e7cM

lets not forget their latest and greatest of releasing chrome for free until it saturated the market and became a monopoly then maliciously making changes to reduce the effectiveness of adblockers like ublock origin

And they did all they could to kill Windows Phone (a viable alternative ecosystem at that time) by blocking access to Youtube[1] and providing sub-par experience for their other services.

Now I fear Firefox has a similar sisyphean task at hand, trying to keep their browser usable on google services. And for many of the users, that is same as usability of the browser as a whole.

[1]https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/microsoft_on_the_issues/...

Microsoft managed to kill Windows Phone by itself and take Nokia, and a more mature more viable smartphone OS, down with it. Windows phone was a "viable alternative" by the end, but in the beginning it was uncompetitive without any hindrances.

Also recall that mobile carriers and OEMs were opposed to Android because it would further degrade their ability to create walled gardens. The carriers lost control of apps, not for lack of trying. Imagine what a world that would be.

The FANG succeed largely instead of a carrier-controlled mobile ecosystem.

You may think that replaces one kind of oppression with another, but if you weaken the internet platforms, you strengthen the carriers who are now off the net neutrality leash, and who see 5G as an opportunity to gain control of a lot of what we now enjoy as an open internet.

Also recall that mobile carriers and OEMs were opposed to Android

I agree with the other claims (about Microsoft killing Windows Phone through their own actions and choices), however this one is a bit weird. Apple gave essentially no ground to carriers, which was a huge change. Which is why carriers all embraced Android, at a time when it was horribly uncompetitive, because it returned control to them, letting them preload any nonsense they wanted, making it undeletable, etc.

Apple updates come through Apple alone. If you have a Samsung phone on a carrier, they still matriculate through your carrier.

Add that of the 30% cut that the Play Store takes for apps and games, historically one half of that went to the carriers (it was always very nebulous, but again was one of the reasons carriers pushed Android when it was not good).

Apple and other hardware will not agree. But peope buy devices bacause of the apps. The reason symbian, meego, blackberry, windows et all died was because some of the popular apps where only available on Android and iPhone. Microsoft of course knew this but failed because they where unfriendly to developers. And are now desperately trying to bye goodwill in order to keep Windows on PC relevant.

I've only met happy Windows Phone users

It's going to be interesting if we have to lie about user agents. If you lie about the UA and it works then something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

[citation needed]

Really? I mean, pick one of a hundred. They are deprecating APIs that would block the interception and are ignoring community pushback.

But since you asked...

https://bgr.com/2019/05/31/google-chrome-update-ad-blockers-...

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/evy53j/google-struggles-t...

https://9to5google.com/2019/05/29/chrome-ad-blocking-enterpr...

But I mean, that was a 2 second search. Citations are indeed hard to come by...

Good reason for about 5-10% of the internet users with adblockers to switch to Firefox. Which kind of hurts the monopoly argument. Not that I support google being more and more monopolistic these days.

I still don’t think the browser market is a good example right now.

There’s far better examples than this.

Prediction: In a year, adblocking extensions on Chrome will still block the same percentage of ads from Google's networks as they do on Firefox. Care to make a bet?

Err, is there another reason for chrome to exist? Google is no philanthropist.

To compete with Microsoft, who used to try to leverage their power in similar ways.

Yes, because before Chrome existed most people used IE which is very slow to create or adopt new web standards and is full of bugs. That makes developing complex websites really difficult.

What company do we know that makes some the most complex web sites out there and would really benefit if the web had... I dunno WebGL so they could make a smooth mapping site, maybe with a 3D mode. Or a new version of HTTP so their sites load faster. Or a new version of TCP that works better on mobile. Or native web components that makes their web framework faster. Or HTML video so their video streaming site is more reliable.

I'll give you a hint - it starts with "Googl".

They created Chrome because IE was holding them back. Not to kill as blockers (did IE ever even support as blockers). Some people here don't use their brains...

Look, I get it — the issues with Google, Facebook, Amazon. But I can’t help but think about how AT&T and other ISPs banded together to claim they shouldn’t be regulated because they are Internet companies just like FANG during the Net Neutrality discussions. When I see just how bad ISPs are acting, in lack of competition, price gouging, content ownership, data monitoring, it really seems they were successful in shifting the focus to FANG and convincing everyone to forget about Net Neutrality.

This is not meant to whataboutism, but the truth is the public/news cycles can only handle so many “tech” related items at one time. People are not “locked in” to any of the FANG companies nearly as much as they are their physical ISPs where they really do not have an option.

You're right, ISP monopolies are a bigger antitrust issue. People are overwhelmingly pro net-neutrality

They will take this action against Google, and meanwhile, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts will continue to take in an average of $100 per customer per month.

This is, quite nakedly, Comcast influencing action against Google for trying to compete in broadband.

It is convenient that Comcast owns NBC while lobbying government for legislation it wants to see.

https://www.cnbc.com/video/2018/10/25/watch-cnbcs-full-inter...

IDK. Maybe this is not totally relevant, and maybe it's not a valid counterpoint, but I find it interesting that the market capitalizations of AT&T, Comcast and Charter Communications combined are roughly $200 billion less than Alphabet alone.

You make a good point. Antitrust actions should be a function of both behavior and size. IMO, actions of ISPs have been more nefarious than FANG,

https://www.freepress.net/our-response/expert-analysis/expla...

https://potsandpansbyccg.com/2019/02/13/isps-are-violating-t...

Why not both? (Apart from politics, obvs.)

As an occasional content creator it's impossible not to be aware that the ISPs can limit access to the bandwidth I need, while any of the platforms I might use - PayPal, Ebay, Google/YouTube, Amazon, Apple, even Etsy - can kill an income stream at any time and keep all my earnings just because they want to, with no convincing good-faith resolution procedures and no (affordable) recourse.

I think more importantly, ISPs made a (in my opinion, bullshit) free market argument that resonated with conservatives. At the same time, FANG made themselves an enemy of conservatives. Conservatives are now in power.

You could make the free market argument here too, but it won't appeal to them. Conservatives have a sort of pact with business interests that are otherwise neutral on social issues. They can look after each other because neither care much about the other's priorities. FANG are not reliably neutral in that same way, they are more like Hollywood in terms of "values". Of course their money is just as good as anyone else's and conservatives will take a lot of it where there is a tactical advantage but there can't be a long-term alliance.

What would be different today had NN passed?

The news can only focus on one major company at a time, but the courts can go after all of them.

There can be very real bandwidth limitations at the government regulatory agencies, however.

A neutral net is pretty meaningless if it’s just a handful of walled gardens you can access

You still have a choice about what sites you visit. Maybe FANG just provide a great value for people so they choose them more often. Most people don’t have a choice in what ISP they can use.

It shouldn't be a whataboutism, it's true. They gave too much of a pass to ISPs and that needs to stop. But it doesn't stop by relaxing on tech companies like Google, that would only further normalize it.

Not only the US is affected by Google's actions and ISPs are not evil everywhere. This is why Google is the more important issue from the perspective of the rest of the world. This is a transnational issue.

Just in case one of the downvoters stumbles upon this again, I'd appreciate your reasoning. What part of what I said is untrue (assuming this is the reason you downvoted)?

I was the biggest Google fan ever. I recommended all their products to everyone I know.

Gone are those days. I now trust Microsoft (heh! M!cr0$0ft, anyone?) more than Google which is strange given I grew up rebelling against MS’s technical desktop hegemony.

I wonder when Google decided “doing evil” was okay. I wonder how the SWE’s and other senior people in this thread feel about working for a company that many now consider scum. All their excuses and retorts can honestly take a hike: It is my honest opinion that if you still work for Google you’re selling us all out.

After years of serving malware through ads and doing nothing to stop it, they’re now trying to stop us blocking ads?! That’s just the last of many strikes that set me down this road.

I wonder how the SWE’s and other senior people in this thread feel about working for a company that many now consider scum. All their excuses and retorts can honestly take a hike: It is my honest opinion that if you still work for Google you’re selling us all out.

Googler here, I understand why you may think Google is evil now and I'm not going to say they are a perfect company. But I think you should consider that it is a large company working on many different products. Not everyone is working on Ads or various "evil" things. Many of us work on things that people like and improve our lives.

If parts of the company is doing bad things, it doesn't make all of us sell outs in my opinion. Just like how every American that pays taxes isn't a sell out for all the bad things the US might do.

As far as I understand, the penalty for not paying taxes is incarceration or heavy fines.

The penalty for not working for Google is effectively having to find work somewhere else. Not exactly oranges to oranges.

I appreciate that you may be working on things that improve people’s lives. How is that work funded? What would happen to those projects when they are deemed not profitable enough or endanger the evil stuff?

I didn’t write that post lightly, but with a heavy heart and a bitter taste in my mouth from a former #1 fan.

I agree its not a perfect analogy but you could argue that you can go live somewhere else too.

And yes, a lot of the work is funded by the "evil stuff" but Google is trying to expand their enterprise offerings and their hardware business is growing as well. I expect those to be profitable one day if not already.

Moving countries is extremely difficult and sometimes impossible. The US is one of the easiest countries to immigrate to and we only have 14.4% of our population having changes countries (coming in at least) [0]. This LinkedIn article citing BLS stats says the average person will have 12-15 jobs in their lifetime [1].

So I don’t think it’s very comparable to say “you can just change countries.” The vast majority of people are stuck with their country, and the vast majority of people change jobs.

It must feel bad to work at Google. Making odd comparisons might be a symptom of explaining how positive things that are cool are still funded by ads that are at least annoying, but seem to be turning out to be anticompetitive and fraudulent even.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_Stat... [1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-many-jobs-average-person-...

>Many of us work on things that people like and improve our lives.

Why is it that the things that Google creates that might actually "improve our lives" only last long enough to get people hooked into the G before said product is end of lifed?

I do not use a broad brush and paint 100% of Google employees as doing evil. However, I always think of the Grisham novel The Firm when thinking about Google. They lure very young, bright, talented employees in with the lure of very large pay checks. By the time said employees become aware of what the company actually represents, they are too entrenched into the lifestyles to "which they have become accustomed". At the same time, the users are lured in with free apps/tools/services that seem quite useful. Whether these apps/tools/services remain long term or not is a crap shoot, but G has you now

I feel quite a bit of the same as nsomaru; I've gone from being a naive Google fan to cautiously optimistic about Microsoft.

Unlike a bunch of others I never think I despised the majority of people working at neither Microsoft or Google.

But for the Chrome team; aren't they now actively undermining and weakening a major part of the Internet infrastructure by nerfing one of the most used clients to make sure it stops acting on behalf of its users?

If it wasn't for ad revenue, do you think you would be able to work on these things that people like and are supposed improvements to people's lives? That there would be funding for such work?

Your position is arguably worse than selling out: Others do the dirty work – 'Ads or various "evil" things' – so you can do the nice stuff and claim a clean conscience.

It's a valid point, but to be completely honest, the same point applies to all the rich countries. The only reason we can have the life style we have, i.e. drive a car that costs only 20k, wear clothes that cost 20 usd, have a smartphone for 150 usd and oay for gas only 3 usd us because if slave labor in third world countries and the American military forces make sure to preserve this state of things. Otherwise we'd pay 40 usd for gas, 200k for Mazda 3, 5000 usd for a smartphone and 50 usd for a coffee.

But all salaries at google come basically from its ad business that does have some taint.

You can't take a cut of that and clean your slate because you work on defensible projects.

Just take the hit: say you do value Google's work conditions in spite of the questionable things they do. It's honest and acceptable: there are no clean hands in this world.

Honest question: do you want to see Google broken up or heavily regulated? If I were lucky enough to work at Google, I think I'd be cheering for regulation so I could enjoy all the sweet comp and meaningful work without feeling conflicted about the truly dark parts of the company. Isn't that Google a much better Google to work for?

> If parts of the company is doing bad things, it doesn't make all of us sell outs in my opinion.

You’re either lying to yourself or you’re naive. Either way it’s not an excuse to dismiss agency.

>If parts of the company is doing bad things, it doesn't make all of us sell outs in my opinion.

That's textbook selling out. As is using compartmentalization as rationalization.

> Many of us work on things that people like and improve our lives.

Like what? Services that support the ads monetization, lock in users and strengthen control over the ecosystem?

Your work is funded by ads. Ads are effectively making life worse.

> I now trust Microsoft more than Google

What's so good about Microsoft? They filled their OS with spyware and adware and they seem to be incompetent as a tech company - remember their recent Windows update that deleted user data even though early testers have reported the issue.

Lesser of two evils? That's how I interpreted the comment you replied to, anyway.

Microsoft != Windows. Windows isn't its own division anymore. There is a lot more to MS than Windows. Do we judge other companies as a whole based on one product or service they offer rather than looking at the whole?

The "spyware and adware" is added by those who sell the computers (i.e. the hardware manufacturers) rather than by Microsoft. It's been a way for them to make money with the slimming of the profit margins from the hardware. This isn't on Microsoft.

I find MS to be more trustworthy because of their income models. They are far less reliant on surveillance. Their market share isn't as dominant. And, they aim to be a platform rather than an aggregator (see the Bill Gates line).

> The "spyware and adware" is added by those who sell the computers (i.e. the hardware manufacturers) rather than by Microsoft.

Hmm? What about the surveillance tech that was added in Windows 8 through a Windows Update that sends pretty much all your activity to Microsoft? Am I missing something about this?

> They filled their OS with spyware and adware

But only after Google, et. al. proved how willing we all are to trade our data for free stuff. This is just the new reality of SaaS, at least as targeted to the general public who now expect free updates for life, isn't it?

Sure if you wanna accept it as a foregone conclusion then that will certainly become the new reality. I paid for windows, including those updates, by the way. I dont need to be mined and packaged for all my information’s worth on top of that without any sufficient choice in the matter.

IMO Facebook is the real modern evil. Google is exhibiting the woes of a company that's become too big for its own good; it controls too much. However it continues to provide very high value services, especially to businesses. Facebook on the other hand is converging toward pure evil. The little value it was providing to the world has turned fully negative, a succubus in everyone's life.

Facebook has the messenger app, that is pretty useful. Otherwise I don't use facebook much.

> After years of serving malware through ads and doing nothing to stop it,

I occasionally see articles to that effect. But I have never been effected by such malware. And that includes 20+ years on the web, including the seedier corners, and without ever taking special measures like anti-virus.

As far as I can tell, this 'ad-distributed malware' are a few cases far between, completely blown out of proportions to justify peoples' use of ad blockers.

Agreed... Google has lost its mind. The removal of ad-block was the final straw for me. There's no rational explanation why that would be needed.

Removal of ad-block is just talk, not actually implemented and live yet, correct?

That’s what was said when this plan first started last year. However, it’s been consistently progressing over the months. When it’s progressing, it’s no longer just talk. They’re clearly adamant about making this a reality.

Who stands to gain when Google is weakened? Conspiracy time. Maybe there was a concerted efforts by media conglomerates and other tech firms (Oracle, Microsoft, Amazon, Tencent, etc.) to bombard Google with bad PR for the last 5 years.

Oracle is fighting to stay relevant. Tencent/Baidu will dominate AI if Google gets nerfed. Microsoft and Amazon will take over all of western tech once Google/FB is out of the way.

/tinfoil

I hope you’re only marginally more trusting of Microsoft. Open sourcing stuff and embracing linux has given them a lot of tech brownie points (effectively, good PR) but just like with what google was vs what it has become, it’s important to be cautious in taking this all at face value when it’s unclear what their endgame is, besides trying to exploit its position as the dominant OS to catch up to google on data mining and selling their customers. They could very well do the same with .NET (Core), and I fully expect that to be true in some fashion. We’ve already seen signs of it with default “telemetry” in the .net core sdk.

> I wonder when Google decided “doing evil” was okay

The moment they incorporated, at the latest. Really. When people go to such lengths to tell you "we're not evil, honest!" -- you should know where it's going.

Would it make you feel better if I told you Google pays really well and offers nice perks for SWEs? It’s worth it to a lot of people to have a path to early retirement, even if it means the destruction of the open internet.

I think you're being downvoted because your post is too nuanced.

I think it’s probably because perks offered to google employees are meaningless to 99% of people. The damage and potential damage google is doing to the public is far worse than the fat salaries they pay their employees. If Google and Facebook paid the same wages as any other other tech company, people wouldn’t be as eager to join them and throw their ethics out the window.

> If Google and Facebook paid the same wages as any other other tech company, people wouldn’t be as eager to join them and throw their ethics out the window.

On that note, if unethical business practices weren't so profitable, Google and Facebook wouldn't be able to offer higher wages than other tech companies.

Dear Justice Department: Take a look at google AMP and how they use it to strong-arm publishers by linking it to search placement. You'll find some stuff.

People don't seem to understand how this stuff works in the US, Google has full editorial control over their search results protected by the first amendment and that right was affirmed in court time and time again:

https://searchengineland.com/another-court-affirms-googles-f...

If you don't like their free no lock in service go elsewhere, and that's why there is no sherman act case here, which is why if the DOJ actually does anything here it would be a waste of time and resources.

I'm not a lawyer but the first amendment argument is a separate concern than antitrust violations. You can exercise your first amendment rights while still breaching antitrust law.

Depends on what's being investigated here, if the government would actually want to compel Google to alter their search results then it's a first amendment case.

> Take a look at google AMP

The argument here is its unfair to bias ranking towards a preferred format. In this case, something about excluding competitors, except AMP is completely open-source[1] so...?

The counterargument is yes you can, because it's your pamphlet/newspaper/website and you're the editor, not the government.

[1] https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml

> You can exercise your first amendment rights while still breaching antitrust law.

Go on... example?

Here is the first example I came across:

https://www.rbr.com/six-broadcast-tv-groups-settle-doj-antit...

No one is saying these broadcast groups don't have 1st amendment rights, just that they were going about it in an anti-competitive way.

Yes, the first amendment here does not seem to apply, except if the poster above, has something else in mind? That DOJ even considers going to court, hints that they have a strong case -- given how conservative the DOJ is to betting on a court case and not settling.

No one is reporting that the DOJ is considering going to court nor that they have any "case" let alone a "strong" one if the WSJ reports are to be believed it's very preliminary stuff.

This is not a first amendment issue, this is leveraging a monopolistic market share to force technologies like amp on customers.

I’m fairly sure strong arming your clients does fall under anti trust, regardless of how hostile google is to its ad targets.

Playing hardball is itself not an antitrust violation. Doing it to maintain monopoly power is. (Under section 2 of the Sherman Act.)

Google is not a monopoly in terms of consumer choice (we can choose any one of mostly identical search engines), but it is in terms of market share ala internet explorer. It is in a perfect situation to leverage this to force arbitrary policies that mostly benefit it, like amp.

> strong arming your clients

You're describing any business, that's how business works.

? I though a business arrangement was meant to be optional and mutually beneficial.

Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Warren (not exactly a conservative Trump supporter) seems to think that antitrust regulators do indeed have a legitimate role to play:

Warren would appoint regulators who would reverse some of the biggest tech mergers that have taken place in recent years. That would mean the reversal of Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods and Zappos, Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp and Instagram, and Google’s acquisition of Waze, Nest, and DoubleClick.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/3/8/18256192/el...

Downvotes be damned, but I honestly can’t tell if this is satire.

lol. well, truthfully, i was trying to make a serious statement.

i figured mentioning a proponent of big tech breakup with valid legal credentials and a different political axe to grind might be useful evidence in deciding whether the antitrust case had any merit.

(i believe the Vox article is trying to be serious as well.)

I think this is a really simplistic view of how the first amendment applies to businesses. I think the key here is the definition of a 'public space' as what freedoms a business has changes when they provide a public space. It's a bit unclear what defines a public space in the digital world, I'd argue that physical presence isn't a requirement and the key aspects are accessibility and communication. i.e. If anyone can go there, and anyone can communicate there, it's a public space. _If_ this is true, then many sites are public spaces, certainly social media. Search is a bit more unclear since the communication aspect is questionable.

Indeed. Many people fail to grasp that in the grand scheme of things, this is unlikely to change anything. Google has always been at the center of the tech industry. Some of its services are not only important to the public and vital for the U.S. economy, but also very critical to national security as well. Rest assured that efforts will be spent to ensure Google will continue to remain at this position in the foreseeable future. Actions like these are more likely to serve as a way to calm down the public aka damage control.

>Google has always been at the center of the tech industry.

Are you showing your age?

Yeah, this is simply capitalism.

Remove the cause and not the symptoms!

AMP is just the start. I won't be surprised if we find out Google is promoting websites for using Google Analytics.

No, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLmO1GE4GvI

> search quality in general does not use Google Analytics in ranking

> it won't affect your ranking

Do you actually believe them? I don't.

I agree with lohszvu and given this was made nearly a decade ago, I'm pretty sure their tactics have changed (I don't even think AMP was made in 2010).

If Google we’re truly committed to building a search engine that is useful they would give the user control of ranking. I hope one day we see a search engine not driven by ad incentives....

They don't even have to be that "extreme" about it. Simple tools that would still allow them to "sell" ads but give the user more control.

E.g. Being able to "blacklist" certain domains from results.

Same thing applies to youtube. You can not permanently block/remove/disable channels from being present in the content results/feed.

I think that deep-down Google high-ups "know" that giving some of these "basic" usability features would essentially disable their control of the content that they push to you. E.g. imagine publicly-shared black-lists of bad domains and bad channels that one could subscribe to. Similar to the ad blockings lists that have generated a bit of a thriving ecosystem. I.e. smart people would eventually use this basic "building block" to build content-control that would be more decentralized/democratic and really personal.

There's already some questionable aspects, like the way that Google search query strings are only available if you sign up for Google Analytics. And I would be very interested to hear what Google does with the other data they collect with Analytics...

It would be interesting to start an Hacker News but for 'anti-trust' suggestions.

Basically you have a company and then people like us can upvote areas we think companies are breaking the law.

If true, this will be a landmark case and should scare FB and Amazon as well. Personally, I think this is a good thing and it's past time for the government to at least set some boundaries, but there's no telling how it will play out with the current administration and amount of lobbying dollars flying around.

Why would this have any relevance to FB and Amazon? I realize a lot of people on HN don't like what these companies are doing with their data, but this lawsuit is not about privacy at all so I don't see how it relates to those 2 companies.

Amazon is not a "trust" in the strictest historical definition, but it's a amoral and terrifying company with incredible reach that frequently can and does snuff any chance any competitor has of using anything else.

If Google is bad for using AMP to try and drive publishers to AMP hosting, then how is Amazon not even worse for ramming crazy terms down publisher's throats while buying or undercutting every other shipping and shopping system in the country? Amazon's pretty much dismantled and eaten the entire American book industry, it's in mid gulp of the American consumer shipping industry, it's already business critical via AWS for a majority of American businesses, and now it's turning to selling "AI" products to government and law enforcement.

As for Facebook, I think maybe Facebook isn't a monopoly. But they shouldn't be allowed to buy Youtube or Twitter.

> Amazon is not a "trust" in the strictest historical definition

Yup. Amazon can legitimately respond to trust and monopoly allegations with "Walmart, Azure, GCP, and Netflix."

Why would Google sell Youtube to Facebook?

I don't think either sale is possible, I'm merely using it as an example of what wouldn't be permissible.

What if Alphabet is forced to spin off YouTube in to a seperate entity?

Amazon is using it's profits from AWS to 'dump' on other, low margin businesses.

The most recent FT Alphachat podcast with an official from the Fed talks about Uber this way: Uber (and Lyft) are taking money from somewhere and undercutting the classical taxi business. This is a problem for competition. They could feasibly try to run losses until 'regular cabs are pushed out' (or largely) and then lock up the business.

Amazon can do this with any number of products, they can do it to shipping companies, to grocers.

More abstractly, Google does it with mobile OS, possibly browsers etc..

In our new world of globalization, it's a serious problem.

All this money from Saudi Arabia, under the control of Softbank is coming back and just throwing markets upside down in what is arguably tantamount to 'dumping' which is a bad business practice generally.

Even we work is like this - it's losing tons of money, ultimately selling stuff below market value.

In some cases it's much more clear than others, but it's going to pose a problem.

This issue very well highlights the problematic idea that business is about 'better products and service' or even 'free markets' due to the fact that so much cash provides leverage that distorts markets quite heavily.

Alphachat with Robert Kapla @ FT:

https://ftalphaville.ft.com/series/Alphachat

Ant-competitive practices? Facebook buying up any and all rivals like WhatsApp and Instagram? They are a juggernaut and shouldn’t be able to own all social media.

At the time of buying, people were mocking FB for being delusional left and right.

After FB manages these acquisitions well, we are now like "FB is evil and anti-competitive".

Are humans inconsistent?

Are different vocal minorities loudest at different times?

I’m not convinced people is a coherent group.

Does the fact that some people were mocking X at some point in the past negate the validity of antitrust cases against X for ever?

Facebook doesn’t own all social media though.

YouTube, Pinterest, Snapchat, Linkedin, Reddit, Twitch are all major social networks and there are scores of smaller ones. In search it is basically just Google and Bing.

They also tried to buy Snapchat but their bid was rejected.

What’s wrong with buying competitions?

There are market concentration regulations. The SEC typically applies a formula to determine if an acquisition results in a single entity owning too much of the market, in which case it would not be approved.

I don't know if this has been considered for these companies, but I suspect it may have been bypassed. At the very least, that's what an investigation would determine.

Well, in a word, it’s anticompetitive

All you need to do is look at their respective stock price histories to see how they are related.

Both of these companies are very good at extinguishing competition.

Considering how the current administration has - or at least feels it has - been treated by social media companies, I’d give good odds that the administration is the impetus behind the investigation.

While I think an antitrust suit against Google would be a waste of time, they really need to stop recommending Chrome every time you do a Google search with a different browser. Just stop, that will not play well to a jury.

Your reply almost immediately says you think a jury could be swayed by argument, sentiment or both. Does that not mean an antitrust suit may actually be reasonable, judged by a potently prosecutor?

I think you meant "I don't want them found guilty" which is a different thing. If you really think there is no case to answer I don't think you understand what an antitrust case is about. It's about market dominance and anti competitive behaviour. Something alphabet has already demonstrated they are capable of doing, as in when google, Facebook and apple agreed not to poach Staff and altered the pay rates accordingly, something of which they have already been found guilty.

Any antitrust theory against Google would be pretty abstract given that they don’t charge for either search or Chrome. But the pop up trying to get you to switch to Chrome when you go to Google search is pretty much what you’d put in a textbook to illustrate leveraging a monopoly in one sector to gain market share in another. It’s extremely concrete and intuitive. That doesn’t mean it makes the case, of course. But it’s a great starting point for building the overall case.

On that note, even Internet Explorer (IE) was bundled freely, Microsoft never charged a dime for it. Why was anti-trust pursued against Microsoft then?

Honestly, I see no difference between that scenario and this. If anything, Google has been a lot more guilty than for just monopolizing on a browser here.

> Why was anti-trust pursued against Microsoft then?

One example among the many things the court found they did was to tell OEMs that they wouldn't license Windows to them if they _also_ included Netscape preinstalled in their computers.

The stated purpose, from internal emails, was to prevent Java from becoming the de-facto API for writing applications, which at the time was win32. This was a gigantic barrier of entry that protected Windows' monopoly and they did all those shady things to keep it raised.

Competitors did. Netscape charges for Communicator Suite for example. There was a monetization model that involves eventually charging for the product once they had a monopoly in browsers. That’s easier to explain than how browsers are monetized today.

Microsoft specifically targeted Netscape, and there was documentation that that was the goal in the form of emails and the like.

Chrome wasn't seemingly to target anyone. Google generally makes more money if people use the internet more, so spending to make browsers better has some obvious benefits.

The initial release of IE was sold as a separate product in retail stores. Microsoft only added it to Windows later. If IE had been just another Windows feature from the start then it would have been more difficult to make an antitrust case against them.

You don’t have to charge for your service to be within the scope of the Sherman Act.

> The Sherman Act broadly prohibits (1) anticompetitive agreements and (2) unilateral conduct that monopolizes or attempts to monopolize the relevant market.

You don’t have to get very abstract at all to see how Google may violating it. Microsoft lost their antitrust case in regards to how they distributed Internet Explorer, another free product.

Can you post a screenshot of this popup? Never seen it in years of Firefox use and lots of Google searching. Maybe one of my plugins blocks it.

Here's a screenshot from Edge.

https://i.imgur.com/iwymopx.png

Sometimes it's in a new top bar on the page but cannot remember if that's only on Gmail.

It was an annoying popup for years. I don't see it now when I search, but I've seen it recently.

It looks like they also make other browsers pay for ads while they post their own ads for "Google's Official Browser" at no cost:

https://imgur.com/a/exzor1l

But doesn’t using the profits from one part of the business to subsidize giving away a product in a tangential business amount to dumping?

What is your operant model of monopoly and antitrust?

>Your reply almost immediately says you think a jury could be swayed by argument, sentiment or both...

If this goes to a jury, Google will definitely get off. I seriously hope that doesn't happen.

How can you be so sure about the outcome of a jury trial when the investigation hasn't even reached the point of a specific allegation, let alone one that Google wants to defend at trial?

I wouldn't be so sure. Juries can be convinced of anything if you look at past judgements against Monsanto.

I'm not saying that I think Google is innocent but often the evidence is very difficult for the lay person to interpret (especially when it is absent).

>Juries can be convinced of anything...

Which is exactly why they'd get off.

Similar thing drives me nuts in GMail for iPad. Every time I open a link, it asks me to download chrome. I say no thanks, and uncheck the default “remind me later” option, yet few weeks later it happens again.

Been going on for a year now.

This is infuriating, and was one thing that motivated me to quit Gmail. I'm much happier now – traditional mail clients like iOS's Mail app work much better with a mail host that implements IMAP properly.

YouTube for iOS does something similar when clicking a hyperlink; it'll give you a popup for what browser, Safari or Chrome, even if Chrome isn't installed.

Shrug. Windows 10 keeps nudging me to use Edge.

Ha! Nudging is an understatement.

* If you type Chrome into Bing you'll get a full page ad urging you not to switch.

* If you try to switch to use Chrome as your default browser it will ask you if you're really sure and you have to click the tiny text to actually switch.

* Edge and Windows 10 will send you notifications about Edge being the recommended browser and it's speed/security/whatever.

* If you install Adobe Reader and check "set as my default PDF reader" Windows 10 will send you a notification saying that "there's something wrong with your default reader app" and set it back to Edge.

* In the start menu Edge gets special treatment by having flavor text that says it's the Microsoft recommended browser.

* You have to use 3rd pary hacks to get the start menu search to use anything other than Edge & Bing.

* Microsoft teated a feature on insider builds which intercepted the installers for Chrome and Firefox and displayed a pop-up asking them to use Edge instead.

* Before they got backlash for it, once you switched your default browser to something not Edge Windows would open up your new browser to an ad for Edge.

You'd think they spend more time actually making Edge not shit..

When will Apple stop sending me desktop notifications about switching to Safari?

I use Macs and iProducts all the time, and I've never seen one of these. What do they look like? What do they say?

https://twitter.com/pfooti/status/527301101523963904?s=19

From 2014 though.

I believe you should update your OS, this was removed 2 versions ago.

However, if you like to disable the notifications: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/153379/how-do-you-...

You can stick this line in your .bash_profile, etc to get those notifications to stop popping up:

defaults write com.apple.coreservices.uiagent CSUIRecommendSafariNextNotificationDate -date 2050-01-01T00:00:00Z

I dont even get those and I use Firefox on all my Macs.

Apple doesn’t have 90% market share in anything.

Except profit. Seriously, they earn 87% of the total profit of the entire smartphone market.

I will go ahead and bring up a related issue. Most people seem to not see it as being related but in my mind it is very closely related. So maybe consider not burying my comment completely.

Part of the reason we have these technology monopolies is that they provide ubiquitous platforms and that is very powerful for consumers and businesses (as long as your goals don't conflict with their goals).

The issue is that these platforms are being provided by private interests, but have so much scope that they act like public platforms.

My suggestion is to try to create public platforms that business or consumers could tap into/build off of. This would allow for us to audit the mechanisms and also provide a base layer that competition could be built on.

In my mind the obvious technical direction is decentralization technologies. That's the only way such public networks could be feasible.

I actually see this as covering technology in an extremely broad sense. It applies to everything from Google search and ads, to Amazon and online retail, to Uber and taxi apps, maybe even the US dollar and currency, or perhaps even government itself.

I think the slowly most businesses would realize if you are a big company, it makes much more sense to capture exclusively the high end market (iPhone) and try to stay as much away as possible from the low end market. This gives you a lion's share of the profits, while making sure you don't get labelled a monopoly (and people asking you to make your platform open). This is the exact model of Apple. iPhones dominate the high end market, and the high price ensures both a.) high capture of the profit. b.) less market share due to simply being out of reach for a lot of people.

Once you are in the above position, you can do anything on your platform, and since you aren't a monopoly, you have much more leeway than your competitors. Your competitor might be forced to unbundle and compromise the uniformity of their platform, while you can simply choose to not even allow alternative browsers, because you know, you aren't a monopoly. Getting the low end market share might be come to seen as more of a headache than required.

Its an interesting take on things. Other view is that Apple is an abusive monopoly any is getting away with it for the same reasons Google is. America is permitting Monolpolies at the moment because it is scared of China.

Presumably the US has doubts that capitalism is best and is betting on state supported Monoplies. ;)

i don’t understand how Apple is an “abusive monopoly” when their iphone market share is 15.8%, while samsung is at 17.3%.

was your characterisation related to their app store by any chance?

Distressingly absent from this list is the company that cheerfully collects and sells even more data that Google about the average American's life and collects MUCH more of their money: Amazon.

What they do with Amazon basics is ripe for antitrust. Using purchase data to find profitable products, and making a basic version of it which they then rank at the top.

Is Amazon Basics any different than any other store brand? It's not like national retailers before amazon were just throwing darts at a printout of their catalog.

That isn't a meaningful question for anti-trust cases. The rules are simply different for big companies.

I don't understand how Amazon is even in the anti-trust docket. They own like one tiny ass grocery chain, and an online market dwarfed by large retailers. Sure, they have a near monopoly on eBooks, but I don't see how you make the case they used that to break into the discount microfiber towels market.

Amazon does not collect more data than Google does, even by your own definition. In fact, Google uses Amazon to collect even more information than they do innately by mining Gmail for purchase receipts.

Amazon purchases your credit card purchase history from major CC providers, likely as part of reciprocity agreement. They know more about you thank you think.

Source: I was retargeted on Amazon for an impulse buy of an obscure item from Macy's. My CC was the only way to join my data.

Google does that too. I don't think there's any company dealing with ads which doesn't do that kind of an agreement.

To be fair, Amazon probably does "sell even more data than Google about the average American's life" given that Google doesn't sell data.

Collects money, yes. But collects more data? I'm dubious.

Maybe not more data, but perhaps more important data?

"Things you've bought before or looked into buying before" seems like much more useful data to sell ads than "non-shopping things you've searched for." It's definitely a higher signal to noise ratio.

If your Amazon receipts go to Gmail, Google collects not just all of that data, but from every other site you've bought stuff from: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/17/google-gmail-tracks-purchase...

Google stopped mining Gmail two years ago:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/technology/gmail-ads.html

Any aggregation or segmentation of emails by ML/AI algorithms, as your article talks about, is analogous to having smarter filters in your inbox. It's tech illiteracy to confuse these perception NNs with data mining for business purposes.

This is true for gmail users, which is about half of the email market in the US. Amazon by dollars has over half the ecommerce market, but by any intelligence we have on sales sales they're much closer to 80%.

Even if Google can get some of that data, its still Amazon's data, Google just happens to get some of it.

I meant "more types of data" and I'm still willing to stand by that. Maybe not more bytes per person per hour.

Everyone who uses AWS essentially gives data signals to Amazon. As they're by far the biggest cloud provider, that's a lot of data. Add that to their physical goods store, their shipping, their payments, their music store, their player apps, their subscription data, their identity and payment data. Amazon's looking at getting into the consumer communications business too.

If I were a bad person asking, "Who's more valuable to Hack for consumer data" I don't know how I could conclude it's anything but Amazon. Google might have your credit card and purchasing patterns, Amazon will. Google might know about your phone, Amazon will.

The idea that data stored on AWS is equal to data collected by Amazon is ludicrous. There are contracts and laws to govern such relationships. Hundreds of people inside Amazon would know about it, and any one of them could expose them to existentially threatening lawsuits whenever they are even slightly upset with their employer.

That's not what I said though. I said as the biggest CSP they have signals no one else has access to. I didn't say they were reading your RDS boxes.

I may be mistaken but every major cloud provider, from AWS to Azure to Google, has dictated in their SLA that they don't mine your data (as a cloud customer).

Perhaps you forgot about AWS? More than 70% of the world's internet data goes through just one of their data centers: https://www.nextgov.com/analytics-data/2016/01/70-percent-gl...

Unless subpoenaed, I doubt they do much more than collect access logs, and even then, I doubt they use those logs for anything outside AWS operations. If they were caught doing this, it would massively erode trust with AWS customers.

Relevant tweet from a Yelp SVP, who propagated many allegations of anticompetitive behavior in Google Search:

> :)

https://twitter.com/lutherlowe/status/1134621790720995328

Happy emoji faces coming from a company whose business model is basically extortion. Nice.

Maybe someone will investigate their mafia-like treatment of small businesses as well.

Two wrongs.. whataboutism.. etc.

Maybe yelp had to resort to these monetizing tactics because their results were buried by google promoting their own business-ratings copy-cat service?

Can someone knowledgeable in this area lay out some of the potential anti-trust points that could be shown by the probe?

This WSJ story has details about the FTC recommendation to sue Google (overruled by the commissioners at the time). They accidentally sent the WSJ every other page in a botched FOIA request.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-the-u-s-antitrust-probe-...

How do I read it? Do I have to subscribe?

Archive.is / archive.fo generally works.

http://archive.is/TsG4K

Starting with the recent EU decisions is probably a good bet. There are three fines the EU imposed: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_vs._Google#EU...

Just one point, but I know that we submitted a complaint to the DOJ about Google’s sudden maps and street view API pricing changes. Their “free until there’s no competition, then we take all of your money” business model fits in the antitrust regulations. We’re hoping they include that.

This is just speculation, but I read somewhere recently that alleged that Youtube wasn't the gift to the world it appears to be. While I love Youtube for the most part (Free, High Quality), it is strange that we haven't seen much competition. Maybe it's a loss leader for Google and nobody else can afford the expense, or maybe they're doing something shady to make sure nobody else can afford to compete.

Can you please find this source? It seems to me like there’s quite a story here if your idea is even remotely true.

I love YT for the instructional videos (how to repair this or that). I would miss that.

I think YT just in the last couple of years went into the black. That’s a lot of bandwidth and they don’t have as many paying subscribers as NFx.

With Eric Schmidt leaving, the hanging sword has finally came down. He knew how to play lobbyist network in DC even with unfavorable administration if you had almost unlimited money supply. Breitbart publishing recent video leaks on Google execs in tears on election results meant this was inevitable.

Google has LOT to lose from this. They had previously made absurd the argument that they are not monopoly and Amazon is their biggest competition. Somehow lobby money made this argument magically acceptable and everybody moved on. Now they would have charges from Yelp, funding services like gmail using search business to bankrupt other players, making arbitrary decisions for advertisers, youtube piracy, website takedowns and de-rankings, Chrome defaults, AMP...

However, I wonder what could be the end game here for the government? Google is still very monolithic as far as revenues are concerned, so how do you even break it up in any viable way? My guess is that they would probably impose some fine and settlement agreement.

1. I fully agree with an investigation into Google.

2. Why hasn't any federal agency looked into Apple's behavior, where they sell hardware (and here bestow it's ownership to the consumer), but continue to play middleman in what apps the user is allowed to run. It's contrary to the fundamental concept of ownership, and worse, to the tenets of decades of general purpose computing

And before regurgitations of "it's unit sales aren't a majority" gets thrown at me as a justification for monopolistic behavior, please note the truth [1] that iOS install base/usage in the US is almost 10% more than Android, AND iDevices constitute a majority.

[1]: http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/united-stat...

Yep. Been coming. Platforms are super interesting with laws/regulations. Going to be interesting to watch what is decided.

The 2012 leaked memo from the last time they tried this: http://graphics.wsj.com/google-ftc-report/

>closely examine Google’s business practices related to its search and other businesses

Not a lot of detail.

As an ex-Googler: good. Google has done a lot of good in the past, and that continues today, but it's pretty clear nobody should have as much control over "making information universally accessible and useful" as Google does. Especially after they give up any pretense of "don't be evil".

I also very much hope FB is next.

Google isn’t a monopoly and using a competing search engine is quite easy.

Pretty sad that providing an excellent service that customers love is seen as a bad thing, especially on HN. Sad bitter people celebrating the thought of Google being punished for being at the top of their game... get a life.

Questions from someone who doesn't know a lot about antitrust law, in case someone knowledgeable cares to chime in:

To what extent does antitrust law require specific intentional or knowing conduct? Is there some "knew or should have known" standard that would require Google to explain why they didn't anticipate or investigate some suspiciously favorable placement of Google products/services/affiliates? Or can Google basically shrug and say "algorithm" a lot and the Justice Department would have an uphill battle to prove intent?

It requires no intent, and iirc the argument of Standard Oil before their censure was precisely that they didn't mean to stifle trade, they were just better than everyone else at it. The Supreme Court said they didn't really care why or how, they cared that it was a monopoly in fact.

But historically anti-trust suits have usually been about what happens when negative sentiment towards American mega-corporations grows too high. Essentially the rules are different for big companies. In reality, most of the things companies need to do to avoid anti-trust cases are performative. Even more ironically, the super rich at the tops of corporate pyramids often end up profiting from these sorts of actions. All an anti-trust suit can do is mandate companies fracture into multiple legal entities. Usually the same owners retain their ownership, only now over dozens or more of companies which each individually pay upwards.

What's even more distressing about these laws is that they're quite unusable against entities that are at least as frightening, like Amazon (and historically Walmart). Amazon is the omni-company, and now they're gonna get into consumer telecom too. And because they're lateral as opposed to vertical and they choked out the competition during a recession, they don't even have to pretend the're offering a square deal to their resellers.

Amazon could very well be the next target. Their practice of driving out smaller resellers in a category and then jacking up prices could be looked at as an antitrust issue.

Monopolization requires anticompetitive conduct. To prove this, intent evidence is often helpful. For example, in the recent Qualcomm case the judge cited evidence that Qualcomm executives knew their business model created antitrust risk.

But intent evidence is not required. A corporation doesn't have a state of mind. Also, wanting to beat your competitors is fine (and good). So it's tricky to distinguish bad intent from good intent.

This is civil law. It's not about any sort of moral failings, and therefore intent is rather unimportant.

http://archive.is/PHSfY

Imagine what competition in the search space would do for adword prices. I have no idea how one would go about breaking up google search, and the infrastructure/IP behind it. Or changing consumer habits, but there would be a lot of beneifts to everyone.

Adwords prices are based off the bids submitted - whether this is done through one centralized exchange or many competing ones makes little difference. Each search-based digital advertiser will end up charging the maximum it can while avoiding "vacancies".

How would it benefit everyone? Who exactly and in what way?

This should be part of some philosophy course: how can one become evil, even when starting with good intentions.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18647750

Stop the bubbling

Stop the personalization engines

I am quite creeped out by Google following me about and requesting that I rate random shops

I don't see how after the FTC came up empty the DOJ would fare any better as arguable the sherman act is a much tougher route, and the competition landscape has changed to google's detriment (amazon ads, facebook, etc).

Anyway the article is quite scarce and the source is the WSJ so they might be trying to amplify some stuff or even advocate for it.

The FTC backed off because the administration at the time (2012-2013) were friendly with Google.

Source is probably controversial, but I'm interested in refutations: https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/

Don't forget that social media, FB & GOOG helped elect the administration at the time.

The DOJ has significantly more resources and investigative power.

The FTC act has broader powers in these cases as they can consider effect on competitors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Trade_Commission_Act_o...

The DOJ enforces the sherman act, which is useless here (no consumer harm).

I'd be more interested in Google/Amazon/FB paying taxes than in anti-trust actions.

Facebook's corporate income tax rate in 2018 was 12.8% ($3.2b) and for 2017 it was 22.6%. About 2/3 of their income taxes are paid domestically. Historically Facebook has paid high income tax rates. In 2014 and 2015 it was near 40%, in 2016 it fell to 19%.

Google's corporate income tax rate in 2018 was 11.9% (2017 had an abnormally high domestic tax payment due to repatriation accounting; 2016 had a 19% rate). About 1/2 of their income taxes are paid domestically.

Europe's average corporate income tax rate in 2018 was 18%, the EU was 21%, the world was 23%. There are eight European nations with corporate income tax rates equal to or lower than what Google and Facebook are paying.

Their rates are low, no doubt about it. They're neither zero (paying no taxes), nor shockingly low given the very low tax rate jurisdictions available to them (eg in Europe).

Amazon is however avoiding taxes successfully. They've managed to temporarily delay the tax hit on their new profit machine. That won't last much longer.

They pay a ton of taxes :), payroll, property, etc.

Corporate taxes they pay on profits if you invest a ton you can deduct it from profits. Nothing nefarious going on here.

> Corporate taxes they pay on profits if you invest a ton you can deduct it from profits. Nothing nefarious going on here.

One's definition of "deductions" and "profits" can, of course, depend on how much one spends on tax lawyers, one's appetite for testing the untested boundaries of the relevant tax laws, and one's willingness to do fun and interesting things with structuring international subsidiaries.

The ultimate result may or may not correlate with what the average citizen would accept as legitimate. Whether you think this is okay is a matter of opinion.

We need to care about governance beforehand.

Tax laws are what you're looking to change.

For everyone here squealing with glee: This will be just another Tuesday for the legal team at Big G ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You can't seriously believe this. The US bringing a case a vastly more a BFD than Europe's prodding at companies for cash.

See USA's FTC etc - we take our fair share of drive by fines, and change nothing afterwards.

Doubt it'll happen in this case...people want blood from Google or FB, and they're going to get it.

Other commenters had it right, though - ISPs, and lobbyists should be hanging next to them.

Thank God! It's time to control this unethical and ruthless internet-suppressing evil corporation. Google took over the internet and it thinks it is theirs. Google took over the search. Google took over advertising, a real currency of the internet. And they believe that this currency belongs to them. Google hampers creation and creators on the internet. Google is a world wide surveillance machine. Google controls too much. It's time to break this evil behemoth.

And now let's listen to the Google fans and apologists about how everything is just one click away...

We've already asked you several times not to post like this. It breaks the site guidelines. We're here for curiosity, not flamey rants.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I have news for you, most corporations are unethical because they are not people they do not care for ethics they are literally money making machines and Google is great at making money.

I'm not a Google fan and welcome this investigation but you need perspective.

and third world countries are corrupt? They are just open about it and give everyone a chance to bid. Imagine the hundreds of billions this decision was worth to Google. Total cost to Google? Probably tens of millions, and a lot of lobbying work was overlapping.

Good. To quote an old friend who worked for Google:

"I'm worried that if the rest of America knew what we were actually doing here they would literally come here and kill us..."

As a Googler, that's a sentiment I have never heard expressed, nor have I felt anything even remotely like it myself. My guess would be that most people would feel a lot better about the company if they could see how the sausage gets made. At least, judging by the reactions of my family members when they ask me concerned questions and I explain how things work, that's what would happen.

That being said, it will be interesting to see what comes out of this investigation. I'm curious to know what practices they are going to zero in on. No company should be immune to the law.

As a Googler, that's a sentiment I have never heard expressed

I've seen a lot of Googlers coming here lately, professing to be Googlers and stating "this hasn't been my experience".

Asked genuinely: as someone inside the company-with much better access to sentiment, opinion and company culture than I could ever hope to have, is Google truly that open and transparent to employees that you actually had an expectation to see this sentiment "expressed" elsewhere?

(I would pose a similar to question to other FAANG employees who do the "as an employee of faang[]:")

Yes. At least in my part of the company, people are very open about the things that make them unhappy or that they think are stupid. Probably the most-hated thing is how certain migrations are handled. There has also been dissent about certain anticipated large acquisitions, the most egregious of which fortunately did not go through. I have heard statements like, "I don't know why we/they are doing this" many times. I have also heard from current and former Googlers who think very negative things about leadership's approach to product development.

I've heard all this and more. But one opinion I have never heard is that increased visibility into our operations would make people trust us less or dislike us more. I cannot see how anyone could believe that who is familiar with both the internal workings of the company and the external views of it.

Many many googlers constantly advocate their resentment to the company. The company gives more avenues for this than any other company in the world.

That's fantastic-that employees feel they can express resentment without reprisal, however I'm left feeling that my question wasn't really answered-regarding the sentiment quoted and the context being discussed via the article linked.

"I'm worried that if the rest of America knew what we were actually doing here they would literally come here and kill us..."

This is a VERY specific and very interesting response to the goings on of your employer. My company frequently has feedback surveys prompted by HR for employee satisfaction, I still hear through back-channel mediums a lot of gripes and kvetches that were uttered over libations with the understanding that the discussion doesn't leave the bar.

I'm inquiring how insulated individuals at Google are from even that level of 'resentment' born dialogue between colleagues and coworkers.

No, it isn't. Think of G as an oil company that owns and operates a pipe from the oil source (user data) to countries that need gas and other oil products (companies that pay for targeted ads). G employees have access to a lot of knowledge about how this pipe works, but make no mistake: any attempt to look into the pipe will be retaliated viciously. Employees are strictly not allowed to look at personal user data, even though they can do so by writing a simple SQL query. I really doubt that G sells raw user data. Not because it's kind or nice, but because an oil company makes more profit margin by selling oil products, rather than crude oil.

Interesting. I work for Google as well and I have a somehow opposite opinion here. Working here means you gotta fight through extremely complicated, thorough (and sometime bureaucratic) privacy, security and legal reviews by daily basis. Those teams have a real power to block any launches they don't like; Google give them the power not because of good-will but it's more about decreasing a risk of significant revenue impacting consequences. You got a fancy design which may give you a big revenue boost at the cost of compromising user privacy or legal risks? Good luck with upcoming privacy and/or legal review sessions; they don't care about your product since they have no motivation to do that.

I'm not trying to convince you and HN users to trust Google (which seems to be impossible anyway), but at least for more than 5 years there has been a strong incentive structure for not doing something that might make "the rest of America would literally come to Google and kill them". I think this investigation would enhance this structure even further, which might be a good thing since there's still room to improve especially for keeping high level executives in check.

"You got a fancy design which may give you a big revenue boost at the cost of compromising user privacy or legal risks? Good luck with upcoming privacy and/or legal review sessions; they don't care about your product since they have no motivation to do that."

From the outside, it's doubtful that this team exists at all. Or if they do, they must watch YouTube all day instead of doing their jobs, because Google is getting better and better at compromising privacy, thanks to fancy designs/dark patterns: https://www.forbrukerradet.no/undersokelse/2018/every-step-y...

It looks to me like you have no clue what your own company's doing but hurry nevertheless to defend them.

> because Google is getting better and better at compromising privacy, thanks to fancy designs/dark patterns

You're suggesting that the situation is getting worse, which I don't really see much clues from the linked report, though I don't want to spend my weekend on scrutinizing 44 pages report. I don't work for Maps, but AFAIK it used to track you silently and didn't give you control on user history. But now at least it tries to get a consent (even though it's admittedly just a nominal action) and give you some amount of control on your data, which is better than typical web practice on average. Can you explain why this should be considered as going toward "dark patterns"? All those works were strongly pushed by Privacy team. I don't expect you to praise their works, but you still don't have to use that level of derogatory words as well.

I don't necessarily deny that Google's previous (and probably current) business practice has been done in a quite privacy-invasive way. That needs to be corrected. But there's much more things to be considered as well, which slows down the pace for a good reason. So the best thing Google can do is improving the situation carefully rather than breaking everything by changing the fundamental at once.

Let me give you a super simplified example of ads; which privacy invasive practice has gone too far. But it's also true that this has powered the web ecosystem for a decade. Any kind of significant updates would lead to direct revenue impacts on not only Google but publishers and advertisers. This is real existential threats to them; surprisingly many publishers and creators solely depends on ads revenue. There are also indirect impacts on users via garbage ads and more pay-walled contents. Of course, I know what would typical HN user's answer be; "I would rather choose garbage ads than tracking and I will pay money!" But the history shows that most of attempts to prove this kind of people are significant has miserably failed (except very few examples, such as NYT) including Google's own.

BTW, one irrelevant stuff; is there anyone who have a concrete, feasible business proposal to materialize this no-ads-willing-to-pay demands into the reality? Then try a business and be the next Google/Facebook/Amazon. I'm serious. I always have been thinking about a way to do this so the web can run without ads, but because of Dunning-Kruger effect, I'm getting less and less confident about this idea :)

You seem to know even less about maps than the bunch of HN users complaining about the tricks and dark patterns Google was using to convince people to share location data.

Just do a search for "dark pattern" + Google on HN.

Your business model is at odds with privacy, you have that much figured out. But for unknown reasons you seem to think that Google can win against market forces and implement privacy-maintaining SW solutions.

That is disproven by Google's entire history. It's gotten particularly clear lately with AMP & Chrome.

One more thing: the world doesn't owe Google a business model. The world can survive just fine without internet ads, Google, Facebook and Amazon.

I'm glad we both agree. There is a lot of work that needs to be done. The web ran just fine before the surveillance economy took it over. This needs to change-pronto

Where were those teams when whatever the predecessor to G+ was called was launched and started sharing with your abusive ex's, people you had orders of protection taken etc. etc.?

I am sure they do review things quite carefully to avoid something too obviously illegal. But anything more than that? Color me skeptical.

Is this sort of compliance testing needed in countries with authoritarian leaders?

It's mostly about western world regulations, especially those from EU.

While I'm all for increased scrutiny of tech companies that have such a large presence in the public sphere, the current administration has been off-and-on pretty hostile towards Google for reasons rather unrelated to antitrust. Given the DoJ's actions in the AT&T/Time Warner merger, it wouldn't be a stretch to suspect a politically motivated ploy here.

Do the ends justify the means? Maybe. Is this causing an unfortunate precedent to be set? Maybe, too.

I have never heard anyone working at Google say that. I'm not sure what your old friend was up to though.

There are many many people who do good work at Google. Quote a random to suit your pitch forks. No name, no context , no source.

Sounds too self-obsessed, and that claim suits any big corporation without context.

If he or she worked for Google why did they not bother exposing them when he got out. They could do it anonymously through a media outlet in the UK like the Guardian.

I mean I would guess it's pretty much yeah we have everything you have ever typed into Android, almost every site you have visited, a detailed dossier of your porn habits, all your Google Home conversations... All your e-mails. List of your friends. Your driving habits. And we've been pretty much trying to kill all our competition pretending like there are bugs in our software when often it's been intentional... oh and we've been sharing everything with the government so it's been looking the other way.

That is not a likely scenario. There are so many ways through which purposeful anti-competitive behavior masked as accident would get exposed for what it is that it wouldn't work in practice (just look at how many internal posts got leaked around Demore).

That happened.

I wonder how severe the backlash is going to be, not just for Google but all the tech giants. Our anti-trust laws were mostly written around monopolies abusing pricing power to rip off consumers, but with the intersection of data and hosting and analytics and everything else the potential to abuse people is far greater than just raising prices. And they have expanded their ability to profile and experiment on individuals worldwide, regardless of whether you create a Google account.

It's just getting scary at this point.

Can you elaborate? I left Google years ago but it wasn't that bad.

This could actually turn out to be terrible for we the consumers. It's unlikely that Google would be found to be a monopoly. So we can forget about that. But the anti-competitive nature of their business practices could be targeted successfully I think. (Keep in mind, "I think" means jack in court. The government could very well be laughed out of court. But I think Google does still have some questionable practices.) Google made some superficial changes around 2013-14 time frame, but I don't know if that would be enough for them to get out of hot water.

But the thing we should be concerned with is how the government goes about solving this anti-competitive issue. A breakup is not in the cards since Google is not a monopoly. So the fact that the justice dept has jurisdiction here does not bode well for us. It likely means any remedies will be within the parameters of the current regulatory regime. But what we as consumers really need is a new regulatory regime. What do I mean by that? Well, like the Microsoft case, they may "solve" this whole issue of anti-competitive practices by simply obliging google to allow everyone access to their 'OS', so to speak.

But in this case the 'OS' would effectively be their data.

Which is our data.

Which would be very bad news for us.

All of a sudden, hundreds of companies, all with guaranteed access to our data. Basically, imagine the privacy equivalent of a 9mm round being turned into a shotgun blast for everyone not fortunate enough to be born an EU citizen. (GDPR)

What we really need is a GDPR, not really sanctions against Google. But DOJ can only give us sanctions. I'm starting to believe that somewhere deep in the bowels of the government, there is an extreme aversion to any potential action that might lead to making commerce based privacy infractions illegal.

Suddenly, any regret from not pursuing a Google interview is gone...

Will you consider interviewing should the case ultimately turn out in Google's favor?

At least in my opinion, no. Many reasons but the underlying ones that make me not want to interview with or work for, Google are the same as for Microsoft. I can't trust them. I can already hear the argument, 'who can you trust'. That's subjective depending on your criteria. For me, I won't work for a company I do not trust to keep their promises, be it to the community or its employees.

If, and it is an impossible if, the big nine or ten AI companies (mostly in USA and China) could be split into smaller companies like Judge Green did to AT&T so many years ago, then, I think that would overall be a good thing.

However, it is not right for the large companies in just one country to be split up.

Piketty in Capital in the 21st Century makes good points on how mass amounts of capital earn more money than mass amounts of labor. It is the same winner take all situation in high tech.

It is easy conceptually: governments just need to apply the law fairly. But in my country (USA) corporate interests have almost totally co-opted both main political parties and control most of the regulatory institutions.

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