The case for why Google should be regulated as a public utility | Hacker News Reader

The case for why Google should be regulated as a public utility

rankscience.com

284 pointsabhivyas5386 comments

One Google quirk I've been thinking about lately is the times when you search for something and the thing you want is the top advertised and organic result. Seems like a waste of money.

An example, if you search for "heroku" then you get an ad for heroku, which, yeah, is what I was searching for, but heroku is also the top result and obviously what I was looking for. Heroku is paying Google to provide Google with the search result that Google should've (and does) already identified as the right result.

I assume the reason these ads exist is because if they didn't competitors would take them, but still, it feels like an odd arrangement very much to Google's benefit where companies pay Google up prevent competitors from taking their traffic.

Those ads have very good click and conversion metrics, if you're not sophisticated it looks like a good idea to cannibalize your organic traffic that way.

The problem is that your competitors can use your name as keyword, and become the top result for your company name ...

Only if people actually click on competitor ads. I imagine it's pretty rare anyone searches for ebay and clicks on amazon ads instead. So you're uniquely situated to outbid the competition with absurdly low CPC because click through rate is dramatically higher.

And sure, it's not fun handing over money to defend your brand. I could see an argument be made that you want the competitors to outbid you because the costs are so high for them.

I get 30% discounts on delivered pizza by googling the name of the competing brand in my area. It's an extremely effective strategy, at least in my case.

Weird; I just tried googling pizza hut and got zero ads, let alone 30 percent discount coupons.

It's also the best way to get accurate data on how many searches for "heroku" there are. Without an ad running, you only get estimates.

This is quite an interesting idea. Hm.

That's an interesting idea. I just looked up "heroku" on Google's keyword planner and the max cost per click is 3.00. Is it really worth three dollars a click to know the ratio of people who click heroku over people who search it?

Seems like a crazy loss of money to me.

Maybe Heroku gets a deal by virtue of being Heroku?

Afaik, on Google ads, cost per click scales inversely with page quality. So clicks on the heroku ad searching for heroku generally find what they are seeking and therefore don't cost very much. If Google thinks you are advertising people toward trash, they charge a lot more.

It's a digital protection racket.

Is this any different from putting up a billboard next to a restaurant for a competing restaurant?

It is, because it is not always perceived as an Ad. Looks like a duck, talks like a duck, and Google has it #1, so it must be my duck.

So in principle, you're right, but in my opinion, it's a lot more powerful than a billboard (clear ad) next to a real storefront.

That's the cost of directing customers to your website even if they misspell your brand name or don't remember if you're a .com or .net or many other things. After all, if they knew to go to topicseed.com, why didn't they type that URL in and go directly there? I certainly don't search for Hacker News or Apple.com or Twitter on Google each time I go there, do you?

Most people going to a specific store do Not know its address. You just know where to find it. You trust that the storefront you're roughly familiar with belongs to the actual shop you're wanting to get into.

You are right but in practice it's just not the same as street stores and restaurants.

It's more like asking for directions to a restaurant and getting directions to a different restaurant.

It's really not. You're asking for a seafood restaurant and are given directions to various seafood restaurants. You are not shown directions to one (a link) and when you show up there, it's another (link was fake).

To follow the GP's point ITO this being a protection racket: You "pay to be at the top" of that list of seafood restaurants. Let's not pretend like google aims to find you the "best" answer to your search question.

No contest, just don't see how this is unique to Google. When you go to a store and you look at an aisle at eye level, do you see the objectively best products or the ones that paid the most to be there? Before you get to that aisle, do you see the best product on the endcap? Do you grab that item regardless or only if it's what you're looking for anyway?

It's okay to have a problem with advertising -- I think it's pretty healthy to do so -- but this is a societal problem and not one with any single player.

I disagree. We're not talking about an instance where you search for "search engine" and the first result is Google. We're talking about searching for "Bing" and the first result is Google.

And that's the crux of our disagreement. I don't think you have any right to be the first result for any query. If you want Bing when you search for "bing" then go directly to bing.com. You are using a third party's service so you accept the terms of use (and therefore monetization).

If I search "apple", should I get apple.com, a Wikipedia article on apples, or recipes using apples on allrecipe.com, or something else? You see how that doesn't work? What about "caviar"? At what point is Google obligated to show you Caviar the delivery service as the first result? I say never.

Note here that I'm talking about first being first whether it's an ad or organic result.

>And that's the crux of our disagreement. I don't think you have any right to be the first result for any query. If you want Bing when you search for "bing" then go directly to bing.com. You are using a third party's service so you accept the terms of use (and therefore monetization).

What if I didn't want to go directly to bing.com, but just wanted to know more about Bing? Maybe I want to see some reviews and determine if it's appropriate for my use-case. But then there's a big ad as the first search result for "bing" that says, "Looking for Bing? They suck! Use Google instead!"

>If I search "apple", should I get apple.com, a Wikipedia article on apples, or recipes using apples on allrecipe.com, or something else? You see how that doesn't work? What about "caviar"? At what point is Google obligated to show you Caviar the delivery service as the first result? I say never.

I definitely see your point here, and I do agree - in circumstances like that. However, I've only been talking about the ads that are above the first result, not organic results. No, there's no special reason that apple.com should or shouldn't be the first organic result for "apple", but as I hope I showed above, there are reasons that the first result, which is always an ad, shouldn't be microsoft.com, or samsung.com, or alibaba.com/knockoff_iphone. It forces companies to choose between buying the ad space themselves or allowing a competitor to advertise directly to their potential customers. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's a digital protection racket, but I do think it can be used maliciously.

It's definitely a questionable business model, whose obvious problems are underscored by the fact the Google doesn't allow you to do it with some some entities. In other scenarios, it's a borderline protection racket.

For example, you can't use ads to squat on search terms for government agencies. I haven't tested it extensively, but I'm pretty sure even searches for things that are outsourced to third parties still land on the .gov page. Search for "<state> state park reservations" and you'll usually see only organic results, with the .gov as the top result. The actual provider (Reserve America in many states) is below the .gov in most cases. Sometimes (most notably california), the provider is the top organic result.

In most verticals, you'd see a wall of bullshit ads for affiliates to the reservation provider.

I was told that these ads are very cheap, because Google scores the relevance very high.

You give them a choice between divesting all their various businesses, or the FCC dictates how the business is run. The latter will be boring stuff like % of search results that are ads, etc., rules for auditing algorithms, etc.

I don’t recall which, but I searched for a brand name recently and their web site was number five or six. Pinterest was higher, which drives me nuts.

Pinterest might be bidding very high for that phrase, or maybe other consumers prefer Pinterest to the manufacturer's site.

eBay used to pay Google $20 million/year for ads with the "eBay" keyword. When they stopped, they noticed no impact on sales:

https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-h...

On-brand keywords are defensive plays, and should not be paid for unless others are targeting them as well.

It's possible that the competition stopped advertising against ebay searches as online shoppers migrated to Amazon.

You're right. when i searched "digitalocean pricing" today the top results were ads saying "linode is better", "free $100 vps coupon", etc.

It seems borderline fraudulent that Google is doing this to companies that clearly should be the first result on the page.

Try it in a private/incognito window and see if you get the same results. When I did that it was all about digitalocean. I'm guessing they used your "anonymous" profile to figure out which ads were best for you.

I think having competing ads make sense because it shows consumers alternatives which is competition. Google does add a relevance factor to the cost which means Heroku would have to pay a lot less for the spot than its competitors.

its kind of a form of ransom. now they can seek rent from roku to pay for their own word to stay on top or else their competitors will do so

I love how few actual proposal there are out there as to what the government should actually do. That is - not just "regulate" or "break them up". I'm talking specifics.

Once you start making concrete proposals it becomes increasingly obvious just how hard it is to come up with something that won't make everything worse.

1. There needs to be guidelines for what Google can and can't do with search.

Ex: Only 25% of the screen real estate can go to Google-owned ad products for allowing it to continue as a monopoly.

2. YouTube should possibly be broken out as a separate company and it shouldn't get favorable placement and treatment in search results

3. Businesses need to have more control over how their businesses appear when users search for them directly

> 1. There needs to be guidelines for what Google can and can't do with search.

Again that's vague. And once there are such guidelines who enforces them? Will it be law applicable to all companies? Will there be a special govt office enforcing this? What kind of punishments? Fines?

> 2. YouTube should possibly be broken out as a separate company and it shouldn't get favorable placement and treatment in search results

Who and how will determine if treatment is favorable? Auditing code and internal comms for signs for favoritism? Otherwise if you can go only by appearances then how do you keep this system fair to the companies subject to this scrutiny?

> 3. Businesses need to have more control over how their businesses appear when users search for them directly

Again how do you codify this into law?

Don't you think you're putting an unreasonably high burden on people? I can argue that I think the lawmakers representing me and other citizens need to figure out the details without myself having figured out the details. I can point out a problem and ask someone to fix the problem without know what the specifics of the solution look like. I know healthcare is absurdly complicated but I still think single-payer is the right idea and I want my law makers to do something about that - and if there's problems, it's on them to try to communicate that with me or to work around it. Same principle here. "Regulate Google as public utility" is actually fairly specific since we've got lots of public utilities already that we can model this off of.

I haven't searched exhaustively, but nonetheless you'd think there would be more specific proposals being talked about given how hot this topic is.

There is very little precedent to regulating tech companies on such a granular level. The closest thing I can think of is various EU regulations that usually amount to shaking down US giants for money once in a while. It's hard to compare this to regulating something like electricity or water delivery which is much more stable technologically. Google has changed tremendously over the years and still is innovating rapidly.

And as to healthcare, well, I do think people should actually go through the same thought exercise. Tons of totally broken overregulated healthcare systems out there. "Lawmakers" usually effectively ends up being a combination of lobbyists, politicians and public pressure.

So, to be clear, are you saying that someone should make such a proposal or are you saying that advocating for this change requires there to be a proposal? Because I'd be in favor of the former but I think the latter disrupts conversation and is unreasonable. The way you wrote your post sounded strongly like "I have a knock-down argument against any advocates until they have legislation written up." Which would be an unreasonably high bar.

Well, I'm merely saying that a lack of proposals indicates a lack of workable solutions.

By proposal I don't mean an actual bill ready to be passed, just a high level overview that does talk about the implementation. Obviously doesn't need to be a sound legal document.

I think it's perfectly fine and important for people to speak out against perceived injustices committed by tech companies. But yes I do also think that calling for "regulation" while being very vague is also a bad idea.

We've seen this play out with GDPR. Tons of people were (and are) calling for more stringent data privacy regulations. So EU came up with this monstrosity nobody fully understands in its consequences (because you can't). Enforcement is totally random. Some websites ended up just banning EU users. Many now come with very annoying cookie popups. Those that try to "comply" can never be sure they fully do. Very few people are happy or have benefited from this thing in any way.

I think this is exactly what you get when you want something done but don't know what.

The most common proposals I've seen are to break Google into multiple companies, particularly with search being separate. This seems adequately specific. (Though obviously different from the public-utility plan in this article.) Is that not specific enough for you? This seems vastly simpler than GPDR in scope and with much more relevant precedent to draw from.

Well a breakup is definitely easier to define. But you should specify along which lines. YouTube is the obvious one. Maybe a bunch of other acquisitions that aren't too techy can be rolled back.

What about other products? Gmail? Maps? Android/App Store? Chrome? Google News? Shopping? Translate? Docs? Should these be separate companies?

Only once you define that can the plan be criticized.

This is so much easier to do as one only needs to list up to 20 names (and perhaps some minor obligations), yet we're still not seeing too many people spell this out. I think for exactly the same reason - it becomes obvious how unpractical it is.

This is an example of why I think you are placing the burden of detail too high. The discussion was about the case for why something needed to be done, not specifically what. Yet a lack-of-sufficiently-detailed-solution let's you shut it down. Even in the case of a fairly clear proposal, it's not detailed enough. Search is Google's biggest monopoly and a proposal to separate that out would be obvious. Is Shopping really relevant? To the lawyers figuring out the details it is, but not for this discussion.

Anybody can list a bunch of names to be broken up in a few minutes. I gave you plenty of examples to work with. Nothing to do with lawyers.

Google search is approx. 60% of Google's revenue according to the latest 10-K. And may be an even bigger portion of the net income. If you keep that intact you won't kill Google's golden goose nor will you solve many unfairness issues as relating to search.

AdSense et al. is 13%. YouTube is 10%. These 3 are most of revenue-generating Google.

It is important what happens to their many other products. Most of which are not bringing in big money (in an obvious way) but are widely used.

Does everything not-search become one company consisting of Google leftovers? (this may be what you're proposing, but it's not clear)

The goal of any such action is to benefit the consumer in some way. When you actually do start defining how things would be broken up it becomes more obvious how consumers could suffer. And it becomes more obvious how you're not de-monopolizing anything.

> The discussion was about the case for why something needed to be done, not specifically what. Yet a lack-of-sufficiently-detailed-solution let's you shut it down

This may be what the original linked article talks about. I started this thread talking about how instead and it never discussed the why. It's merely a thought exercise aimed at illuminating what I consider a lack of workable solutions. Not telling anybody they cannot be interested in yet-undefined solutions.

> Don't you think you're putting an unreasonably high burden on people?

In a world where the question of "Should we attempt to do a thing?" depends in part on whether or not there's a way to do it that brings more help than harm, I think it might be worth considering that these could be seen as reasonable questions.

Given that regulated utilities have occasionally produced massive messes like California's ongoing issues with PG&E and wildfires, do you think it's worth being cautious and considering possible consequences?

Where I live, the largest public utility is being sanctioned for criminal manslaughter and burning down large portions of the state.

So I think the specifics are rather important.

You've misread me if you thought I said specifics aren't important. Rather, that it's possible to advocate for "someone needs to figure out the specifics" without yourself knowing the specifics.

This is not materially different from "someone should do something!"

It's the something that makes all the difference.

With that 25% of the screen real estate regulation now Google has an incentive to break its search results down on multiple pages.

Search results would be available for navigation in a card UI (one screen per result) where 25% of the screens real estate being devoted to Google on a products would get them a lot more impressions.

Does YouTube get favorable placement in search? I see video results from other sites like Vimeo. I just did a search for a recent sporting event and 6/12 video results were YT. The only "problem" is that YT has such a large share of the online video market.

wrt #3, no, I don't want businesses to control the information I get when I search for them, because I want neutral and true-ish information, not ad copy.

Or all the impacts down the line. If they decided to basically seize Google, they would be telling investors that long term investment doesn’t work as the government will come along and ruin it.

Watch as companies like Google rapidly stop any innovation spending and become high dividend stocks built only to pump out cash.

Hasn't this already happened with Bell and Bell Labs? Why didn't the breakup of Bell stop Google from investing in innovation?

Bell was a real monopoly - as in, it was literally illegal to start a competing phone company. This is much different from "monopoly" with quotes, as in "gee whiz they seem so big and popular it must be a monopoly".

I don't see the relevance here. Google knows that both sense of "monopoly" can and have been regulated by the government since Standard Oil was broken up. Hence the threat of regulation did not stop Google from investing in innovation.

Does the comparison to Standard Oil stand scrutiny? The case against Standard Oil wasn't merely that they were popular. After all, kerosene is an undifferentiated commodity where consumers have no preference other than price. The case against Standard Oil was that they held such a breadth of natural resources (which are exclusive; no two parties can pump oil the same barrel of crude oil), and capital-intensive assets such as pipelines and railroads where Standard Oil was bribing the operators to get them to charge higher rates to their competitors.

So what's the comparable unfair practice? You believe Google is paying Level3 under the table to make sure all its competitors pay more for network transit?

The comparison holds up if the claim, as stickfigure made, was that the relevant factor is whether or not there is a legally-enforced monopoly. US vs Microsoft shows that the factors you cite aren't necessary either.

Microsoft closely parallels Standard Oil in this regard. Microsoft was forcing Dell to charge a higher price for competing operating systems (in effect, Microsoft got paid $100 every time Dell shipped a computer with OS/2 or whatever). I can easily see how the first party forcing the second party to charge a higher rate to the third party is abusive.

I think we need a new "antitrust" law that says companies can grow too big and influential. That's one of the big downfalls of capitalism, without restraints it can easily allow corporations and people to accumulate and hoard too much wealth and influence at which point it becomes a hindrance to society as a whole rather than a positive

Maybe because of Microsoft being able to make all its problems go away after they started actively participating in DC. Google hopes to do the same.

Bell broke up in 1982. The current startup wave that began in the 90s has not seen an antitrust case of that magnitude, even Microsoft's.

The breakup of the AT&T / Bell System was in 1982. Let's look at what happened to the seven companies it was broken up into. Pacific Telesis was acquired by AT&T in 1997. Ameritech was acquired by AT&T in 1999. Southwestern Bell Corporation was acquired by AT&T in 2005. BellSouth was acquired by AT&T in 2006. The other 3 are now either part of Verizon or CenturyLink.

The breakup of Bell sent a message, but so did the reconsolidation of Bell.

> If they decided to basically seize Google, they would be telling investors that long term investment doesn’t work

That's a confused deduction. "long term investment is a bad bet" (or whatever you were trying to say by "doesn't work") is not a sensible deduction. Long term investment has already worked and continues to work across the world.

The takeaway would be assess a risk factor to the US companies under discussion of regulation, at worst.

The government doesn't need to seize google. They can vertically deintegrate it. Google the index could sell its services to google the search engine the same way bing the index sells itself to duckduckgo the search engine.

Or the same way that standard oil's railroads were forced to provide the same prices to everybody.

Then, google the index could be forced to not provide preferential pricing to google the search engine. This would not stop innovation it would enable innovation as google the search engine wouldn't have an unfair advantage through vertical integration. A cottage industry of search engines that piggyback off the google index could sprout up.

The problem is that unlike oil or phone lines, it's not physical infrastructure, so the government could order all they want and Google can respond by rm -rf / on all their servers and walking away and founding "google2" tomorrow that happens to do all the things Google did and another 20+ year cycle starts again

The proposal of what to do is for the Justice Department to sue them for antitrust violations and for the courts to break up the divisions of the company that engage in unlawful anticompetitive behavior.

Not only is it plausible we saw it done with Microsoft, and the result was an explosion of entrepreneurship and innovation in the relevant markets, which were software and internet services.

No, Microsoft was never broken up. That was the initial judgment. The case ended in a settlement [0] which didn't require all that much from Microsoft. The obligations have now long expired.

[0] https://www.justice.gov/atr/case-document/file/503541/downlo...

That’s correct, they settled before any divestiture was forced on them, and I assume Google might too.

But the threat stopped them from dominating the browser market and enabled the first dot-com explosion.

We would be way better off today if there was a powerful countervailing force to all this FAANG consolidation. The current environment is deeply harmful to innovation.

> But the threat stopped them from dominating the browser market and enabled the first dot-com explosion.

The first dot-com explosion was well under way at that point. Microsoft's domination of the desktop didn't stop any e-commerce companies.

The inquiry was opened in the early 90's and Microsoft's first consent decree to stop them from tying was in 1994. They later argued that IE shouldn't count and continued to bundle Explorer with Windows, and the US DOJ plus twenty states sued over it in 1998.

So, no. The threats of antitrust enforcement against MS were a key part of the timeline for the first dot-com explosion, as they made MS curtail their behavior and provided startups with a little breathing room to exist without being instantly crushed by Bill Gates.

I'm old, I was starting my career and working in and around tech startups at the time, it was a big part of the discussion then. It's hard to overstate how dominant and scary MS was at the time, they didn't have any real rivals.

Microsoft didn't compete in e-commerce. They competed on desktop operating systems.

Name an e-commerce company Microsoft tried to compete with.

Expedia started as a Microsoft division before it was spun off into its own company.

The settlement did no such thing. The fact that not only Google spammed chrome ads on the most popular web page but they also bundled Chrome with third party installers led to the rise of Chrome.

Chrome was launched in 2008. The key events in the Microsoft antitrust case happened between 1992 and 2002.

And look at IEs market share until 2008....

https://www.jitbit.com/news/3304-browser-market-shares-1993-...

I mean, I get what you're saying, but I don't think it's that controversial to point out that facing serious consequences from the US DOJ put a serious check on the actions of Microsoft and held them back from employing their embrace, extend, extinguish model on the web.

How so? Out of three of the areas where they were investigated - there is only one where they are not still dominant. They lost browser market share because Google was the most popular web destination.

MS lost the mobile market - but outside of Apple, “winning the mobile market” was a Pyrrhic victory for Google [1]. Apple won by selling hardware not by licensing.

But they are the second largest cloud provider and are making far more than Google is making on mobile. Microsoft also don’t have to pay the competition a reported $8 billion a year because their competitor has the most valuable customers.

They also successfully pushed their way into the console market. MS is still the 3rd most valuable company in the US. Down from #1 in 2002.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/21/10810834/android-generate...

lol what? Microsoft did not get broken up. Attributing the dot com boom to the antitrust suit is a very creative interpretation of a spurious correlation.

Theres also very little discussion about what the fundamental principles are behind what, when, how much, and why government should regulate beyond "it's good for society" or, worse "it's good for the economy". There's a lot of really bad things you can do under the color of that reasoning and it would be nice to have a series of easy-to-understand concrete litmus tests, or at the very least an enumerated list.

Imagine if the internet was started by one corporation.

Instead, the internet is an open source set of protocols.

The answer lies in converting companies which abuse becoming the standard due to network effect, to an open source set of protocols.

Maybe give them a period of 10-20 years to profit. Then they have to expose a public set of standards and protocols which can be used by everyone else.

For instance microsoft windows after 15 years, would be forced to release a freeware version of code, which contained all functionality they had at that time.

Other companies and users could build on this code and thus microsoft are no longer the standard. Just a version of it.

Nice idea but not sure about the example.

> and thus microsoft are no longer the standard

15 years ago was 2005. Imagine MS would open source Windows XP SP2.

I don't think anyone would build an OS better than modern Win10 from that code. 15 years is a long time: that WinXP was primarily 32-bit (64 bit build technically existed, but no one used that), it wouldn't support modern hardware, and won't run modern software either. I see why some people would like to have that code (education, research, maybe some embedded applications or servers), but I'm pretty sure Microsoft would remain the standard.

To stop being standard, in addition to that law MS need to screw up Windows in a huge way. I wouldn't expect that to happen ever, they're large company managed by reasonable people.

> Imagine MS would open source Windows XP SP2. [...] I don't think anyone would build an OS better than modern Win10 from that code.

Uh, yes they would? It's literally trivial - you just hit compile. As you note, a 64-bit build did exist, so it's not even limited to now-obsolete hardware, although unless you want to call some of the things at [0] automatically better than XP just because they run on amd64, even that wouldn't disqualify it from being better than windows 10.

0: https://wiki.osdev.org/Projects

> it's not even limited to now-obsolete hardware

That's not correct, it is limited. The primary reason being GPU drivers, Vista switched to hardware compositor, as a side effect they reworked kernel API of GPU drivers. I don't think Intel, NVidia or AMD ship drivers for WinXP x64, or Server 2003, for their current generations of products. To lesser extent, same applies to the rest of the hardware: I don't expect it's easy to boot XP from NVME SSD, or support modern flavours of wireless like 802.11n or BT4.

Software is even more diverse, vast majority of modern apps won't run on XP64. For the software that I currently work on, the largest missing pieces are Direct3D 11, Direct2D, DirectWrite, Media Foundation, and .NET framework. These components are huge, Microsoft spent many millions to make them.

Windows is not just code, it's an ecosystem.

Isn't there a fallback driver that almost all graphics cards support?

It seems like if anyone wrote a single implementation of that it would work.

Depends on your definition of “work”.

The driver is called “basic display adapter” or something like that. Modern Windows is barely usable without 3D GPU acceleration. Too many pixels to render and doing that on CPU is too slow, especially so on laptops. Vast majority of modern software, web browsers included, normally use a 3D GPU to render. And since Vista, windows desktop compositor, dwm.exe, uses a 3D GPU to compose windows into desktop.

Old Win32 apps working on XP will be OK, though. WinXP shell didn’t require nor use a 3D GPU, and very few apps of the era were using GPUs. Unless you have too many pixels in the display, or the app in question renders 3D graphics of any sort, the performance probably gonna be adequate.

> Modern Windows is barely usable without 3D GPU acceleration.

That is a specific example (admittedly only one) of why Windows XP is better than Windows 10, so I'm not sure why you're citing that as if it supports your point.

> admittedly only one

Other hardware requirements are much lower too, XP will work on Pentium 233 MMX with 64MB RAM, Win10 requires at least 1GHz CPU and 1GB RAM. Some old software, and many old device drivers, won’t run on Win10 even if the OS is 32-bit.

> why Windows XP is better than Windows 10

The hardware evolves just as fast as the software. If you run XP on modern PC with a 4k display, I don’t think it will do great even if you’ll manage to install a 3D GPU driver (you probably need some GeForce 900-series GPU to try that, or maybe virtualized VMware GPU will do). If you run Win10 in 800x600 resolution, will probably work OK even with that basic unaccelerated driver, will render on CPU.

Here's one idea: Make the index open and public, set up a public body to update it, and allow anyone to build a frontend. Access can be charged per query. Other companies/entities/governments will be allowed to mirror the index for essentially the price of data transfer.

This is just something I thought up right now, and sure, there might be problems with the approach. But to pretend like there is absolutely nothing that can be done betrays a willful lack of imagination.

The way that people underestimate the scale and complexity of Google's indexing always makes me chuckle. I'm especially fond of the idea that other parties will just wantonly copy it, like for research purposes or something.

Also I'm sorry to inform you that the way the index shards are produced, arranged in memory/on disk, and the manner in which they are queried and ranked are inextricably linked. You can't make a search-neutral index format that can be queried economically.

> The way that people underestimate the scale and complexity of Google's indexing always makes me chuckle.

The same approach that works for Google can also work for a public body supported by public funds. It can also use much of the same systems and maybe even personnel that Google currently employs for this purpose. I'm essentially asking for the search division of Google to be appropriated by the government.

> Also I'm sorry to inform you that the way the index shards are produced, arranged in memory/on disk, and the manner in which they are queried and ranked are inextricably linked. You can't make a search-neutral index format that can be queried economically.

I'm not asking for a search neutral index - public Google just needs to be (largely) open, transparent and accountable about its ranking algorithm. That's why the stipulation that other entities be allowed to mirror the index - they can optimize the index for their own purposes and rankings on their own hardware.

> I'm especially fond of the idea that other parties will just wantonly copy it, like for research purposes or something.

Not for research purposes - other entities will be free to copy it for purposes like sovereignty (governments), less/more censorship or to build their own systems on top of it for profit, or any other purpose.

There are currently zero governments and only about 4 commercial entities possessing a datacenter large enough to do the job.

Doesn't the NSA have a bunch of massive datacenters?

Regardless of that, the datacenter can be appropriated by the government too.

No, the NSA has one facility that would be a small/medium datacenter in the big league, but only if you assume that the NSA is as efficient as Google, which is a bit of a stretch.

NSA Utah: 65 MW Google Pryor, Oklahoma: 340 MW

Presumably that Google data center does a lot of compute intensive, non search related stuff - like GCP for one.

Another thing that people persistently misunderstand is the scale relationship between GCP and the rest of Google.

Even if all you say is true and it is truly impossible for the government to replicate any of what Google does, the point is moot. If the government is going to appropriate Google's index, might as well appropriate the datacenters too. Really, whats Google going to do with them once search is gone? According to you, it is the only thing they have have running there.

Might as well appropriate the engineers, too, and chain them to their desks and force them to keep everything working.

Truly an absurd comment. The US government is the largest employer in the country, with something in the order of 10 million employees. Are they all slaves chained to their desks?

It also does a lot of storage intensive, non search related stuff, like Google Cloud Storage.

Every Google data center does...everything.

Megawatts are indicative of compute load, not storage load. I can definitely believe that Google is doing more compute than NSA, but that sounds more like a difference of need, not of ability.

What do you think the query pipeline looks like?

I can assure you that it's not mapping each query down to a single-sector disk read off an inverted index.

I think the query pipeline for NSA (relative to the scales of Google's query pipeline) looks like absense-of-query-pipeline. Hence NSA using less compute and thus (the reasoning goes) less power consumption.

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

> designed to store data estimated to be on the order of exabytes or larger

While google says:

> The Google Search index contains hundreds of billions of webpages and is well over 100,000,000 gigabytes in size

https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/crawling-indexi...

Seems like the government already has the expertise and equipment required to handle data at Google scale :)

Having disk space is only a small part of being able to make use of something like a search index. Arguably the least difficult part.

One of your suggestions was

> That's why the stipulation that other entities be allowed to mirror the index - they can optimize the index for their own purposes and rankings on their own hardware.

And the point is that there's nobody who can do this outside of Google, Microsoft (who also does), Facebook, and Amazon.

Not to mention the problems of actually getting the data. You're at the scale of data where trucks of disks are faster data transfer than cables unless you have direct fiber backbone connections.

99% agreement, except for the amerocentric viewpoint. I think it is likely that Baidu has the scale.

I knew I was missing someone. Yes, Baidu (who also already runs a large search index) could probably do the same thing.

A giant building full of hard drives is NOT a Google datacenter.

You're just comparing two storage numbers without taking anything else that running Google at a global scale requires.

The NSA also monitors most of the worlds communications in near real time. A building full of hard drives is also completely useless without some sort of reasonably decent search and indexing capability, so I'm pretty sure the NSA built something for the task.

Any tech corps shouldn't be owned by US Gov. Please.

Are you arguing that it's somehow impossible or technically unreasonable for a startup search engine to piggyback off google's search index in a similar way to how duckduckgo piggybacks off bing's search index?

And that the very idea that this could be made possible through law makes you chuckle?

Bing doesn't make its search index public. It has a query api, where you can provide a search query and get Bing's results on a per-query basis.

The closest comparison to what this person wants is Common Crawl, which is minuscule compared to the big players, and is a 100TB gzipped download that gets updated monthly.

Bing provides API access to its search index. IIRC the type of queries you can do are a bit more sophisticated than just "what's available via the Bing search engine" (e.g. select a market).

That's not index access. You are getting ranked results. Index access would give you the posting list for the term "moose", or the intersection of the posting lists of "moose" and "caribou", or whatever.

You can't make a neutral service that returns ranked results, because that's contradictory.

I can't answer for OP but I can say it makes me chuckle too.

If the solution was purely to force Google to sell access to their index then yes it seems possible on the surface.

But as mentioned index and ranking are inextricably tied together.

Even if they weren't, no other organization is going to be able to produce search results comparable to Google using their index. You're underestimating what goes on under the hood.

So then the answer (often in these conversations) becomes to open up the ranking algos too.

The problems with that are numerous so I'll just point out some of the bigger ones:

- Arms race: Search is a constant arms race between providers and 3rd parties trying to game the system. The minute you make the algos public, gamers win the race. Search result quality returns to the way it was in the 90's and stays that way until someone else comes up with proprietary algos that work (but is that even legal at this point in our thought experiment?)

- Motivation: If search is open and you therefore can't directly profit from your efforts to improve it (because you automatically give away anything you create to competitors) where is your motivation to keep innovating?

- It's harder than you think: Truly, there's so much more going on in modern search indexing and ranking than you likely realize. The chances that some new organization (especially a gov organization) given access to Google's black box as it exists right now would be able to maintain search result quality for any significant length of time is essentially zero.

But let's imagine that it's as easy as many people think... Wouldn't the solution then be to build a public alternative rather than effectively killing what we have now?

>But as mentioned index and ranking are inextricably tied together.

I'm pretty sure they're quite extricably tied together. I'm almost certain google's engine weights the different ranking variables (e.g. page speed) differently depending upon context. Why not expose those variables to other search engines? Well, it would kill google's search engine dominance - if you're concerned with that...

Unbundling isn't technically infeasible and it would create more competition. This would help with the arms race alluded to. What if another search engine used google's index to build a more spam free index? not good for google but great for Joe public.

>Motivation: If search is open and you therefore can't directly profit from your efforts to improve it (because you automatically give away anything you create to competitors) where is your motivation to keep innovating?

Nothing saying that they can't make money from the users of their index just as Bing makes money from DDG. However, is there any reason their search engine shouldn't compete with other similar offerings? Maybe somebody out there does it better.

Well, other than "we've got an unfair advantage and wed like to keep it please"

>It's harder than you think

Actually it's probably a LOT easier. This idea is a direct attack on google's power and the easiest response they can make is "too difficult. not possible". Not "this would fuck us in the bottom line". Simply "we can't do it, who are YOU to tell us it's possible? "

fwiw if you look through history similar reactions were made to attempts to regulate pretty much all utilities. Then it happened. This kind of response is kind of an expected part of the process. Most recently it happened in the UK when utilities and banks were told to open up API access to their data. Same claim you made.

Part two is when they tell you "it's not fair!". It's coming.

Bing's index and algos are not available to DDG, there's no comparison there. DDG uses Bing's results, they can't see how they're produced. Incidentally, Google offers a similar API.

> Actually it's probably a LOT easier

Can you support that claim?

Just the scale alone is mind boggling when it comes to search.

Then throw in natural language processing, contextual signals, hubs and authorities, content categorization (which grows ever closer to looking like actual understanding), machine learning, a host of other basic and ever evolving quality signals that exist both in and inter-dependently of one another, the more complex signals that arise from the above and on and on.

Search is hard. Even the most casual of Googling (or maybe Binging would be apt in this case) will provide you with endless info about how hard it is.

"Search is hard" deliberately misses the point. This isn't about whether search is hard it's about whether decoupling search engine from search index is hard - whether the APIs used by one could be used by others.

This trick you're echoing is, incidentally, used every single time a government comes looking at unbundling opporunities. I remember distinctly how Microsoft claimed it was "too hard" to decouple office from windows. The banks in the UK made the same claim. They were all equally ridiculous and all equally self serving. There is a lot of precedent here.

Google will pretend that it is "impossibly hard" to expose their internal APIs as well, just as every other company did. It would be surprising if they didn't.

Search is hard, yes. A lot harder than exposing APIs, isn't it?

Governments can do that right now too. EU is trying to do that right now with Qwant.com where European Investment Bank invested €25 million.

So, I'm curious will you start using Qwant.com from now on?

https://www.qwant.com/

How are my personal decisions relevant? I'm calling for a government appropriation of the search division of Google.

If you say you want it government run after stealing it (lets not mince words here) and aren't using a government run one right now kind of undermines the sincerity of your arguments.

> aren't using a government run one right now kind of undermines the sincerity of your arguments.

First I never said I'm not. Either way it is pretty irrelevant to the discussion.

If, in fact, I am not using a government run one right now, maybe it is precisely because the government hasn't yet stolen Google's? If the government already had something as good as Google, clearly there would be no point in them stealing Google's, would there?

Google could be broken up pretty easily into 3 or 4 units. Facebook, I don't know how you break it up except instagram/facebook would be pretty clean but insta is a fairly small business compared to the big ol' facebook machine. Apple could be busted up fairly easily phone/computer/accessories companies. I'm not sure how you would break up Amazon. Maybe Amazon sells only and then 3rd party sales could be busted out on its own but I think it would die pretty quickly without easy access to the shipping and logistics part of Amazon.

Google is a private corporation that runs various free services, i.e. you are the product.

You agreed to their terms and services.

If you don't like that, you can use a competitor. As long as there's an open internet infrastructure, there's no anti-competitive behavior. Everyone can be a google competitor of one of its services. Case in point, DuckDuckGo etc.

If you want to regulate something, start with the ISPs and restore net neutrality.

"If you don't like that, you can use a competitor." This ignores the tremendos cost to creating a search engine - DDG is the only one that has been able to even make a dent in Google's monopoly.

DDG, Yahoo, Bing, are all valid alternatives. Why does Google get screwed after the enormous investment they made (with time and money) to index pages on the internet?

> Why does Google get screwed after the enormous investment they made (with time and money) to index pages on the internet?

If that was _all_ they did for the past 20 years to get to where they are today, there wouldn't be any problem. The issue is when you leverage this market gain to punish competitors and expand into spaces at below cost (read: negative profits) to wipe out competitors and gain footholds. See examples regarding: Maps (Mapquest), reviews / answer boxes (Yelp), among others.

As a parallel example: Amazon reinvested profits to near 0 margins in their core business for years so that they could legally gain market share without resorting to anticompetitive behavior.* That's why you don't see similar breakup dialog against Amazon: they don't use this market dominance as leverage to own other markets in the same way Google has done. (Now, if they had done this for, say, boosting market share for AWS, then it _would_ be problematic.)

[*] There have been some examples pointed out regarding using third-party seller data in nefarious ways, but as of current evidence and testimony those examples have been so limited that the impact to market share are virtually nil to marginal at best.

It's not regulations we need, it is better education. Especially skeptical thinking.

No one would expect Google to not suppress search results that harms its business. It is called capitalism.

And internet citizens should know that and actively make use of competing offers.

It's like going to a Honda car dealer and expecting to get offered the best deal on a Toyota.

>It's not regulations we need, it is better education. Especially skeptical thinking.

As someone who is pretty much exclusively against regulation - I agree with you. However regulation to ensure competitive markets is totally appropriate for government responsibility.

>No one would expect Google to not suppress search results that harms its business. It is called capitalism.

This is fine if Google were some upstart or new entry to the market. Example: Bing has done this for years with promoting its own products / services like Office 365 in search results. The issue comes when you own a _massive_ share of the market, then in the eyes of the law it becomes anticompetitive.

> It's like going to a Honda car dealer and expecting to get offered the best deal on a Toyota.

Not quite an apt comparison, as the car market is very competitive, and Honda / Toyota only have ~7-10% market share within the US, respectively. So in your example, YES it would be dumb to assume that. However if Honda had 95% market share and therefore could undercut any price Toyota offered by taking negative profits in the short-term, then it would absolutely be problematic.

If one views Google's market as information-organization, then Google has never left its market niche.

Amazon absolutely uses its "flywheels" to dominate other markets. UPS and FedEx are presently facing a competitor with a trillion-dollar market cap, several cash-machine businesses, a decade-scale investing strategy, and a "your margin is my opportunity" focus. Through tenacity and bankroll, Amazon can enter and compete in new markets in ways few existing market participants can oppose.

Indeed, I suspect that Amazon has begun to corner the market on long-term investors, too. Why risk investing in a smaller company that intends to duplicate Amazon's strategy when one could, instead, invest in the original zero-margin-so-we-can-take-over-the-world behemoth with a track-record of success?

Google Maps beat Mapquest because it was so much better.

You could say Apple engages in a similar anti-competitive tactic by preloading all iPhones with Apple Maps. Yet, Google Maps is still used far more by iOS users than Apple Maps even though they have to manually download it. Why? Because it is a much better product.

I'm not saying the big tech companies don't use their position in the market to promote their products, they obviously do, but whether or not this constitutes as anti-competitive behavior, I don't think it does.

Now if Apple or Google were to prevent users from installing Google Maps, or crippling it for the sole purpose of degrading its user experience, then that would be anti-competitive behavior in my eyes. Sure, there have been disputes between Apple and app makers, but when you dig into the details of these stories, it isn't as cut and dry as some lead you to believe.

I think using Mapquest and Yelp as examples harms your argument.

Mapquest and google maps are fundamentally different products. Google maps is a geo database that happens to also give good driving directions. Mapquest just gave people directions. A better example would be google's Waze acquisition, but even that one is not very comparable.

Yelp is basically a protection racket whose sole purpose is to squeeze money from small single location restaurants. They actively harm their customers by promoting reviews based on whether or not you pay them. They are a modern day BBB

It's called capitalism.

It would be a monopoly if there's no way for a competitor to enter the market. But you are the market. It is your decision to go try a different search engine.

Following your argument, google would have never made it against AltaVista, Lycos...

Bingo. Every device that I can think of allows you to choose a default search engine. It would be very easy for me to use something other than Google; they have no anticompetitive hold on how I explore the Internet and discover new services.

This article is written by someone who would personally profit from Google’s regulation. It’s an ad for his company disguised as virtue signaling.

> Every device that I can think of allows you to choose a default search engine.

Users, overwhelming, do not change defaults. Period. Unless there is a step where they are shown a range of options and select one, this is not an active choice for them.

Citizens (at least in the US), overwhelmingly, don't vote. But that doesn't mean this isn't a democracy.

The second half of that sentence is doing a lot of heavy lifting to get your point across.

Which is why Google paid the Mozilla Foundation a shitload of money to be the default search engine when Firefox was still running around 25% market share.

So we need the government to come in because people don’t know what’s best for them?

Alternatively, the government can be useful to ensure people know what options are available to them.

I would argue that for example Googles push for AMP is anti competitive behavour.

Nobody is charging you by the word. Go ahead and make your argument.

> As long as there's an open internet infrastructure, there's no anti-competitive behavior.

While I _really_ want to agree with you here, in all due respect this is a naive view on antitrust theory.

Elasticity of demand - the ease at which you as a consumer can switch to competitive offerings if price were to suddenly skyrocket - is only one factor of the calculus regarding whether or not Google is anti-competitive.

You also need to look at the elasticity of supply: in this example, is it easy to enter the search market? You can learn to make a SERP or an algorithm for indexing / ranking results in an algorithms 101 class...but let's not pretend there's not a SIGNIFICANT investment needed in indexing BILLIONS of pages of documents just to be a viable competitor. This is not free by any means, and requires $millions (dozens? hundreds?) of upfront capital just to maybe get a few % points market share.

In historical experience, part of the disconnect with the latter piece when discussing this with other tech people is that the easy answer is "oh you can compete with Google: you just need a better algorithm." Of which I'm not sure I can fully agree / disagree - but I _would_ press on the fact that the machine learning scale required would still be a significant upfront investment that makes market entry have steep odds.

>You also need to look at the elasticity of supply: in this example, is it easy to enter the search market? You can learn to make a SERP or an algorithm for indexing / ranking results in an algorithms 101 class...but let's not pretend there's not a SIGNIFICANT investment needed in indexing BILLIONS of pages of documents just to be a viable competitor. This is not free by any means, and requires $millions (dozens? hundreds?) of upfront capital just to maybe get a few % points market share.

This is not as convincing for your argument as you may think. All it sounds like is "you took a big risk, you succeeded, and now that we see it's a pretty neat thing, we're going to take it away from you, thanks, please take more risks and make more cool things so we can take them from you".

The fact that this doesn't happen often is why we can have nice things. As soon as you start seizing things that become successful, the nice things stop.

Yeah, but following your argument, no one can ever build a better car...

I agree that the US should regulate its ISPs and restore net neutrality, and that that's a more pressing issue than google.

However, Google has had a number of practices in the past that were anti-competitive. So much so that the EU fined them 1.5 Billion last year[0]. Anti-trust law is not so simple as "Is there any competition?".

In my personal opinion, Google has ongoing anti-competitive practices, but IANAL and I am far from an expert.

[0] https://twitter.com/EU_Commission/status/1108324107446300672...

> You agreed to their terms and services.

Search engine web interface doesn't require users to accept anything. Search crawler indexes the web without any contractual relations with web site owners.

> you can use a competitor

As a search engine user, I can and I do.

However, the party most affected by the monopoly is web site owners. They can't do that.

> start with the ISPs and restore net neutrality

Where I live, I have a choice of 2 wired broadband ISPs, 3 wireless with comparable speeds (30-40 mbit/sec in practice). To my knowledge, none of them filters or prioritizes traffic. I generally support net neutrality but I'm not affected my the lack of these laws. This is unlike search engine monopoly: despite I don't personally use google search, most other people do.

> Search engine web interface doesn't require users to accept anything. Search crawler indexes the web without any contractual relations with web site owners.

robots.txt is obeyed by (ethical) search crawlers, including the ones from big search companies. If you don't want to be indexed, you have many tools to block things or to be served only by specific search engines.

> If you don't want to be indexed

If I had a web site that actually makes money as opposed to only consuming money for domain and hosting, I would want it to be indexed, and I would want search results from that index to be fair.

By “fair” I mean I want it to only depend on the content of the site. I’m OK for search results to depend on the content of other pages on the internets which might link to it, helps to rank pages making search results more relevant. I don’t want search results to depend on my choice of web technologies (see AMP), or commercial relations between search engine and third parties.

I don’t do web development, but I have some understanding of the tech involved, and I think many people have reasons to be unhappy with the status quo.

> I don’t want search results to depend on my choice of web technologies (see AMP), or commercial relations between search engine and third parties.

(I work at Google, but not on search).

My understanding is that AMP doesn't actually affect ranking. Performance affects ranking, and AMP affects performance. But so do many other things.

There's also a similar conversation about placement (the "carousel"), which isn't ranking exactly, and that is affected by web technologies, in that certain placements require certain types of structure in the underlying site (metadata, etc.). AMP is one, but not the only, way to achieve this.

> By “fair” I mean I want it to only depend on the content of the site.

This is a definition of fairness, but it's certainly not the only one, and it may not be the best one. As a user, I want my search results to be tailored to me, which means that your ranking would depend on third parties (my priors).

Like, as an alternative, Google could list all search results alphabetically by url, like a phone book. That's fair too. But probably worse. So discussions of fairness don't make sense, because there are tons of terrible but "fair" ranking strategies, and for basically any query, there's someone who thinks they should be higher and that the reason they aren't is that the system is unfair.

> or commercial relations between search engine and third parties.

Do you mean ad space, or something else?

> My understanding is that AMP doesn't actually affect ranking

They tell they use AMP versions to measure performance, and the performance affects ranking. AMP is hosted by the same google who does ranking, they gonna measure better performance because it’s their local network. Not sure it was an oversight, looks more like cheating.

Apparently, they’re planning to revert in 2021, but I think it’s too little too late. I think they only doing it due to public and political pressure. Unless regulated, they’ll continue to implement features which maximize their profit at the expense of everyone else on the internets, both users and web site owners.

> As a user, I want my search results to be tailored to me

I certainly don’t, BTW that’s one of the reasons why I’m using duckduckgo instead. Why would you want personalized results? Doesn’t it effectively limit search space to things you already know, or like? That thing probably ain’t a filter technically, and neither it’s censorship legally, but practically speaking reordering stuff to later pages is as good as filtering.

> Do you mean ad space, or something else?

UX patterns to blur the line between fair and paid results. Try to disable ad.blockers, search for something generic and advertised worldwide like “web hosting”, and compare search result pages between google and DDG. Google’s “Ad” is barely noticeable, DDG’s “Ad” has very noticeable outline. Google doesn’t show URL, DDG does.

Also, too much garbage in general. Google shows maps despite completely irrelevant for online-only services like web hosting. The result is more than a page of garbage before the first fair search result, and that’s on my 27” 4k monitor. Will probably be couple pages of garbage for a user with average display and without ad blockers.

Note that you've subtly changed the discussion from "here's why Google should be a public utility" to "here's what personally perturbs me about Google, and why I dislike it".

> Google’s “Ad” is barely noticeable, DDG’s “Ad” has very noticeable outline. Google doesn’t show URL, DDG does.

This is personal preference (and possibly subject to experiments), but when I searched "android phone", I found it easier to differentiate ads on Google (which shows "Ad" at the beginning of the line) than DDG (which shows "Ad" at the end, or on a second line if the title overflows). Both show URLs.

> here's why Google should be a public utility

I don’t think it’s too important. What’s important is enforceable regulations. There’re many industries that aren’t public utilities but are heavily regulated for safety reasons, e.g. food production and air transportation.

> This is personal preference (and possibly subject to experiments)

http://const.me/tmp/web-search/g1.png Just two “Ad” letters with no other visual cues.

http://const.me/tmp/web-search/g2.png The first fair search result, note the scroll bar position on the right, there’re 2 pages of garbage above. No URLs anywhere. Right click / copy link is broken as well, copies “google.com/url?” something.

http://const.me/tmp/web-search/ddg.png “AD” is uppercase, outlined, also note the “Report Ad” text. The combination of these 3 things makes ads clearly marked as such, unlike google’s result page. Note the initial portion of the result URL is visible, not just the domain. Right click / copy link works. The fair search results start at the top of the page, immediately after a paid one.

There’s no motivation for google to be friendlier towards users or web site owners. Quite the opposite, they have strong financial incentive to mix ads into fair results. The only way to fix that is legal pressure with laws and/or antimonopoly prosecution.

It worked with Microsoft in 1998-2001. In 2000 a court ordered breakup of MS. They won the appeal so it didn’t happen, but they were really scared apparently. They were also forced to change a lot of things in their products, which benefit both end users, and third-party developers. I don’t see how de-facto monopoly in web search is different from de-facto monopoly in PC OSes.

> No URLs anywhere. Right click / copy link is broken as well, copies “google.com/url?” something.

What? "www.techradar.com" is a URL.

> Right click / copy link is broken as well, copies “google.com/url?” something.

No it doesn't, unless you try to copy the link to an advertisement, in which case it uses a link tracker, in the same way that DDG does (try it!).

> Just two “Ad” letters with no other visual cues.

But, unlike DDG, those are the first things you see, which means I can visually filter away ads if I don't want them, while on DDG I have to read the entire result name before I can see whether or not something is an ad.

> Note the initial portion of the result URL is visible, not just the domain.

No actually I have no clue what you're talking about. The URLs look the same to me, unless you mean "https://" being visible which doesn't matter unless you're expecting a result accessible via gopher.

I'm honestly confused now. Your statements disagree with your own screenshots.

> www.techradar.com is a URL.

The result URL is much longer than www.techradar.com. Here’s more information on the syntax: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Identifier#Ge...

> No it doesn't, unless you try to copy the link to an advertisement, in which case it uses a link tracker

Yes, it does. The only difference, URLs from ads start with google.com/aclk as opposed to google.com/url for fair search results.

> unlike DDG, those are the first things you see

That just 2 letters, not even uppercase. And these 2 letters are the only thing to distinguish ads from fair search.

I understand their business is more profitable this way, but as a user I don’t like their design and I’d like them to fix that, despite they gonna lose money doing so. Essentially, they only implemented absolute minimum to comply with the regulations: https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/nat... Nothing inherently bad with the approach, most businesses all over the world do that all the time. The right way to fix that is not public shaming, but adjusting the regulations. Classifying them as a public utility might be a big step in the right direction.

When right click and copy the URL, I get "https://www.techradar.com/web-hosting/best-web-hosting-servi.... So I'm not sure what you're doing, but I can't reproduce that behavior.

> And these 2 letters are the only thing to distinguish ads from fair search.

Like I said, "This is personal preference". You can have a different preference, but you aren't correct. Much like your definition of "fairness" isn't objective. A bold prefix marking something as an ad is pretty clear. For me it was easier to distinguish ads on Google than on DDG. You may have a different subjective experience. That's okay, but we shouldn't base legislation on your subjective experience.

> Here’s more information on the syntax: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Identifier#Ge....

I'm going to leave it at that and disengage.

> Case in point, DuckDuckGo etc

You're missing the point. The anti-competitive behaviour isn't harmful against other search engines - it's against companies in the other domains where Google can leverage its nigh total search engine dominance to push its other products, e.g. Google Flights and Google Shopping. How is a flight booking service supposed to fairly compete with Google Flights when Google owns the top of the funnel where users go to search for these services? It's exactly the same thing that Microsoft did with Internet Explorer in the 90s: leverage their control of the platform (in that case, an OS) to exclude competitors for their other products (web browsers).

The top of the funnel is the url bar. People choose to go to Google.

And people 'chose' to have a Microsoft operating system in the late 90s. What's your point?

No people didn’t choose to have Microsoft. Microsoft forced OEMs to bundle Windows with all of their computers. Even if the OEM decided not to bundle Windows, they still had to pay a license fee.

No personal computer comes with Chrome installed by default unless the OEM made a deal with Google to bundle it along with other crapware. Users have to explicitly download Chrome.

It’s a lot easier to change your default search engine than change your operating system.

The proof is in Google’s dominance. Google became popular when IE was the default browser on PCs and Safari was the default browser on Macs.

The issue isn't how Google achieved its search engine dominance - it's what it is doing with that dominance. No one denies Google became the search platform of choice because it is genuinely better. That doesn't change the fact that Google is now using that position of near total dominance to stifle competition in other areas, such as e-commerce. That's the (sound) basis for the anti-trust charge.

I’m saying that government intervention through anti trust actions were useless the last two times in the modern era - MS and IBM.

Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Google came to prominence by being able to execute. Even MD stayed relevant while the other four were growing through better execution.

Why would anyone think that the government has all of the sudden become competent when it comes to regulating tech when we have forty years that shows just the opposite?

Did you see the dog and pony show when it the government trotted out the 4 tech CEOs? Would you really trust them to be both competent and not corrupt.

Despite the EU ruling, Google Shopping is essentially search ads with pictures. And despite being in search results, retail companies have more platforms than ever before to sell through, such as Amazon, Ebay, Instagram/Facebook, and others.

Google clearly meets the definition of a monopoly. It comes down to 3 things: Market power, Exclusionary Conduct, and Business Justification (1). Microsoft was charged as a monopoly but you could always just use linux. Ultimately it comes down to the fact that Google is harming the consumer by using their dominate market power in search to push their own, worse products.

(1) https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...

How did that work out? 20 years later MS still has the same share of PC operating systems and approximately the same share of the office productivity space.

It seems to have worked well. I doubt you're using Internet Explorer to respond to me.

The antitrust case was about bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. It was called the Browser Wars and related to preventing Netscape from competing. The result is pretty obvious. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

It was also about operating systems and productivity software.

Now instead of having an operating system vendor with 80% market share now we have an ad vendor. Win????

Meet the new boss....

Those investigations were closed. Maybe it's more of a failure of the legal system than anything. The one thing that sticked actually seemed to work in the long run.

Isn't this whole conversation around Google being a monopoly? Yes, a new boss and hopefully a new antitrust case. Hopefully more sticks this time.

How did an antitrust lawsuit that ended in 2002, lead to MS losing browser market share a decade later? Even if you do count that as a victory - it was still only 1 out of 3 areas that the government went after MS for. Since when was 33% score considered a success?

And the largest anti trust lawsuit before that in technology was IBM. It started in 1969 and it was dismissed in 1983 and nothing came of it.

Maybe the government is just incapable of understanding let alone regulating tech?

> their dominate market power in search to push their own, worse products.

This is the central problem. Yes, Google use market dominance to push their products. But by and large their products were also better. Gmail was better than Yahoo/Hotmail. Chrome was better than Firefox/IE. Maps better than MapQuest. Android was better than what non-Apple phone makers were using.

Just like Microsoft did in the 80s/90s, Google has created some awesome products. At some point, it stops being worth it to compete and way easier to leverage existing strengths. For example, any product that relies on Adwords sales, Google can bid infinitely high and take the top spot. Or in the case of search, just putting their widgets in at the top like they've done for flights. It stops being about creating a better product and only about creating a winning product. Competition is really hard and risky. Owning your competitor's sales channel and then pushing them out is so much easier. Google now seems to be crossing this line.

When someone describes search results as “unbiased” you know right there and then they fundamentally do not understand the act of searching.

I take it you refer to "Google started out as an almost benevolent index of the world wide web, showing users ten blue, unbiased links for whatever users were searching for."

Leaving aside whether it's true or not, this could be interpreted more charitably. Search results are necessarily biased to provide relevant links, based on some definition of "relevant". We can interpret "unbiased" in this context to mean that content providers cannot introduce "bad" bias (e.g. by misrepresenting their actual content, by paying for ads to indirectly boost placement, or directly paying for placement, etc.).

Yeah, I was just trying to politely point out that this article is dumb and the author fails to make their case.

Take the example of the basketball dribbling video. The insinuation is that Google serves YouTube results because Google is biased; it owns YouTube. The claim is that Google should mix in results from Vimeo. This supposes that there are worthwhile results on Vimeo, that Google can index them, and that people want to see them. The refutation of this bias claim is pretty easy. If you do the same search on Bing, you get the exact same results, all from YouTube. So whatever causes these results to be 100% YouTube, it cannot be explained by Google's bias.

The second flaw in the argument is the idea, which all SEO people hold dear, that a search engine exists to serve the content providers, and that they somehow owe a debt to middlemen. This is not the case. The search engine serves the querier. When I search for airfares from New York to San Francisco, it makes sense that a search engine serves the underlying data about the flights and their prices. Air travel is provided by airlines, not by Expedia. Travelocity, Orbitz, and Kayak are not naturally occurring "organic results", they are grifting middlemen who use dark patterns to chisel a few dollars out of people who just want to fly.

I don't think the author's issue was that youtube results were ranked highly, but that they took up a much larger amount of screen real estate. Look at the screenshot in the article - half the page is one youtube video, then there's a video bar (all youtube, perhaps coincidentally) which is twice as tall as the last, non-youtube result.

I just produced a search result that puts a Vimeo video in the carousel at the top of the page. It was difficult, because Vimeo sucks and nobody uses it, but it proves that the arrangement of junk on the SERP is origin-neutral. The top result gets a bigger box.

Maybe they meant "not directly biased by deliberate bad actors or by outright selling a top position"?

That is, certain biases are less user-friendly than others.

Do you consider a judge trying to deliver a fair ruling biased towards justice?

>As the founder of an SEO company [...]

Honestly, "SEO" either shouldn't be necessary if content is reasonable and useful, or it's that kind of SEO spam which has had a much worse impact on search results than any of Google's advertisement.

indeed, it's surprising this isn't higher. 5% of SEO is making sure your content is indexable. 95% is tricking a search engine into ranking your site more highly than it should. It's incredibly laughable to think SEO companies want unbiased results. SEO companies are in direct competition with Google for ad spend, ie Acme Corp can either pay Google for an ad (and get detailed metrics for what the money has accomplished) or pay slimy SEO dudes to hopefully trick Google (and just trust that it worked).

This is a weird headline.

"Regulated as a public utility" means, economically, that prices/profits are set by law -- that there's only one electricity provider but they can't jack up prices because there's no competition.

That makes no sense when applied to Google.

The type of remedy appropriate for what the author describes (Google favoring their own products in search) is relatively simple. That Google, Amazon, and others -- anybody who runs any kind of search mechanism, store, etc. -- are not allowed to give their own products preferential priority.

Public utilities are a super-weird and unhelpful analogy.

> "Regulated as a public utility" means, economically, that prices/profits are set by law ...

That's one part of it. Another part - unfortunately not even considered by the article - is customer support.

Utilities must provide customer support. For example, if a customer loses their account password.

Google famously has no recourse for people locked out of an account. If Google were to be regulated as a public utility, that would need to change.

But the article is about Google as search, only, which needs no customer support, since it requires no account.

Whether Google (or other companies) provide support for their free consumer accounts is a totally orthogonal issue -- and I haven't heard anyone claiming that Gmail or Docs or Drive is being anticompetitive and needs to be regulated.

You're right the bulk of the article is focused on Search. However, it also has this:

  There are very specific kinds of businesses and business
  models that should be overseen. The first and most
  important thing is a body [that] oversees the collection
  of user data and privacy and identification.

The "user data and privacy and identification" piece is also important. It's just not something this article really gets into.

This seems excessive. Instead of regulating search, which would have a net effect of entrenching Google as the only de-facto search engine, it is better to let competition take its course. A better technology can always up-end Google's business model (it's more fragile than people think). Let the open market perform its function. After all, it was only 2000 when people thought MS and RIM were too big and needed to be regulated. Nowadays, MS has lost much of its competitive edge in the desktop space and RIM is just a patent-holding shell of its former self.

Mentioning MS in that way doesn’t help your argument. They are doing better than ever before. Who cares about desktop space (which they still have an enormous market share of btw) when you have Azure. I would argue the antitrust settlement actually helped them.

Everyone is basically ignoring them in current “tech-lash” discussions. They got away with a slap on the wrist 20 years ago and are just slightly more careful.

On the contrary, MS is an excellent example of a large company being forced to pivot (to cloud) after their existing business model (desktop software) looked increasingly dead in the water. Year to year earnings showcase how much more reliant MS was on desktop software two decades ago. Changes in technology, user expectations and computing model forced MS to innovate, not regulation, and that’s exactly my point.

When a country regulates Google, they raise borders. Google, like any other global internet compnay, is across borders. I would hate to be blocked form accessing US Google when I live in Canada. Putting up barriers on the Internet is contrary to an open Web.

It does exist for content. For example Netflix content in Canada is different than in the US. You just can't do that for web pages.

In addition, nothing prevents Google from moving outside of the USA. Assuming the US wants to break them up, Google could just turn around and say "I'm moving to another country". The loss of jobs, intellectual property, etc would be too big. The government would back down. In the end the consumer decides which search engine to use. Today, that's Google.

This leads me to this question. What do you do when FAANGs become larger than some countries? Apple revenues for example are larger than the GDP of some countries. Facebook has 2B users. More than any other country. It then only makes sense to regulate them at a international level. Not possible today. Maybe in 100 years. Until then, FAANG will continue growing and gobbing up companies and industries.

I must be misunderstanding your example, because as a francophone living in Canada, google still shoves English-Canadian and French-Quebecois results + articles + maps my way when I search for information on Google.FR.. so I fail to see how Google isn't already doing exactly what you would hate to see them do.

It is but I can switch to Google.US. With borders that won't be possible anymore. Here too Netflix is a good example. Content differs in US vs Canada based on IP. There is a walled garden. It is not open. And that's fine because it is paid for content. However web sites are not.

> What do you do when FAANGs become larger than some countries?

This seems to be a bigger issue than tech companies. The tendency towards monopoly is a problem that every industry faces, where many international trusts hold more power than many of the governments in the countries they do business in. Worse, in some cases these trusts can exert undue influence over these governments. It isn't unreasonable that at some point in the future they could have similar power over even the US.

How exactly to deal with these power imbalances between countries and international businesses seems largely to be uncharted territory.

Last century companies sold or produced physical goods. You could always tie them to a geographical area. With FAANGs it is a digital world without borders. I think it's different.

Your last point is dead on. FAANGs have carte blanche for now.

I don’t understand the comparison of tech companies to countries. It only makes sense on a very superficial level. They provide vastly different goods , services, and roles in society. Their monetization schemes are completely different.

I honestly don’t believe any major tech company, with the exception of Facebook (who tries to acquire every perceived competitor), is anticompetitive and I don’t think any needs to be broken up. It’s not hard to find alternatives to any individual service. They should only be broken up if they abuse their market share to prevent competitors from existing.

I think their "hotels near" is a bad example. The first two results are hotels.com and tripadvisor. These aren't organic results. They're the champions of a fierce SEO battle. Actual sites for the hotels near X have little chance of comepeting. They'll be buried pages deep behind aggregators that are owned by a handful of companies.

Google killing those intermediaries is probably a good thing long term. Of course not so good if they just take their place.

One of the more obvious pieces of misinformation here: ChowNow does not charge any per-order commission fee, it's right on their pricing page -- https://get.chownow.com/pricing. ChowNow is also not the only provider Google Maps works with, restaurants have options.

Did this author do any fact checking at all?

The minimum price to be on ChowNow is $99/mo on a 2 year plan. It's not free.

That's correct but your article says "which charges an added hefty fee to the restaurant for each order", which is simply not true.

The last thing I want is for government to become even more involved with managing what information I receive or how I receive it. We need less of that, not more.

Also, please use competitors such as DuckDuckGo. It's not hard, and they're not bad. It's unconscionable to me that we would resort to government force before taking the obvious step of just not interacting with Google.

That's how you can tell that the SEO people are lying about their motives. They don't want you to switch to DDG, they don't want 1000 search engines to bloom. They want Google to be the big gatekeeper with almost all of the traffic, and they want the government to use regulatory powers to force Google to drive that traffic to their sites.

That's their endgame. They want the EU or whoever to effectively force Google to send flight search traffic to Expedia. They don't get that from a competitive search market, they can only get it if Google remains dominant but becomes subject to a lot of bogus regulation.

Obligatory FYI: DuckDuckGo is pretty much Bing search. If you're trying to support newer competitors in the search engine space, try Qwant or YaCy.

Oh god. If google were regulated like a utility...we would be stuck with them instead of letting them go away by themselves. And yes, one day google will fail and bring a bunch of companies with them.

I've heard this before but I'm not convinced. Not every big company fails and goes away. Not every company is Yahoo.

I don't think it necessarily means the whole company will fail, but over time, large companies become more risk-averse which opens up room for smaller, nimble companies to gain market share. Tesla being a great example of this. Hell, Google itself came up this way.

There is also another factor that isn't discussed as much and that's when companies become spread too thin. When a large company attempts to compete in every market, it will be increasingly difficult to be competitive in any of them. Yahoo is a great example of this, they spread themselves too thin, they didn't do any one thing better than others, and over time they were overtaken by competitors.

This doesn't seem like an argument you can make since A) modern capitalist companies have only been around for 400 or so years B) 'big' companies since then have not lasted more than 200 years at the very high end.

There is literally not enough data to make the point you are trying to make. All evidence available, which isn't much, shows big companies are destined to fail if they keep expanding.

It is essentially an incompletely defined argument that goalposts can be set anywhere from absurdly near term (it won't die in the next five seconds and thus is immortal) to the absurdly far (it almost certainly won't survive in a millenia and is thus already dust). Shell has spanned slavery to fossil fuels in commodities sold but the mortality curve shows only very few outliers can survive historic terms, let alone grow over them.

Nothing ensconces a design---for good and for ill---like making it a utility.

There's a reason so much innovation in the power grid is of the hyper-local or off-the-grid form these days.

This guy is clueless.

He's mad that Google has a partnership with some food ordering app that takes a cut.

If that 3-5% cut he's complaining about was pure waste, then why does Google partner with anyone at all? They could take that 3-5% themselves!

It's because it's not probably not completely trivial. So having a governmental agency in charge of this... It's complete lunacy. They are going to be more cost effective than a profit-motivated company?

And who pays for the government to implement this "Google" public utility? How many HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS in taxes are we talking about, in order to avoid paying a 3% premium for people who don't want to talk to a restaurant on the phone?

I realize the big tech companies aren’t perfect.

But it’s weird to me that when tech is one of the few bright spots of the U.S. economy in our lifetimes, and one of the few industries offering a large swath of employees a path to the middle class and upper-middle class that only previous generations could aspire to, and there are so many people hell bent on capping it at its knees.

That is easy to understand - the old stagnation hates growth with an undying passion and envy. They take what they think they are entitled to (customers) that were never theirs and by doing better make them question their own worth. It is just so much easier to hate than to try to do anything better. And that applies to so many things at all walks of society and the crab-bucket mentality.

The fact it is "nerdy" just ads fuel to the fire given the anti-intellectuslism, that they already committed lives to their existing paths, and that provokes envy far beyond say bankers. They imagine only a lack of money stops them from being rich off of passive income (there are also mentality changes involved including ability to evaluate them but they are ignorant of them) but tech riches? To imagine changing would call for themselves to imagine themselves degraded. Nerds being successful instead of ones to look down upon are abomination to their social order and conception of the world.

The hysteria against "monopolies" with a tortured definition is just an extension of the crab bucket envy. Not wanting help but to drag others down with them.

We do understand that Google is a company, it will make profits at any cost, even if it has to pay fines later? This is what regulation is for. If the customers are harmed and have no recourse, there must be a way for protection of some kind. I'll take a politician over a predator company any time!

> I'll take a politician over a predator company any time!

I don't understand this take. You can use DuckDuckGo right now, without having to invoke a predator politician.

Even if anticompetitive behaviour is clear, I wonder if a USA government would take action against them. Has such a thing happened before? I mean fighting a company that gaves the USA an advantage in a global market, as opposed to local monopolies.

I think this is a reasonable take and I'm sure the government is taking into account.

Yes.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Roosevelt#Trust_busti...

Could you be more specific?

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/chart-evolution-standard-oi...

I'm not sure I explained myself clearly. Was Standard Oil more competitive abroad as a single company than the splitted ones?

I used to use Yandex back in 2012 and DuckDuckGo for a while. I had my browser open up with all three at one point - Google, Yandex, and DuckDuckGo. If I didn't find or feel the results showed what I wanted, I checked all of them.

Another thought, isn't YouTube the largest video streaming service? I think Vimeo has 5% of the registered users, but it is ad-free. Wouldn't it make sense YouTube shows up at top for most searches by sheer number of registered users? Some of my more esoteric searches come up with videos that are only found on Vimeo, and I click on them. Should a single video on Vimeo be given more real estate than the 20 that popup on YouTube?

The western world has just spent decades engaged in a vast project of regulating fewer things "as a public utility." http://www.oecd.org/economy/growth/15172081.pdf. Public utility regulation is hard and often doesn't work very well. Any case for extending public utility regulation into new areas should tackle and overcome those trends to explain why such regulation is warranted in the new space accounting for all the reasons why we have been trying to reduce the amount of such regulation.

Until financial institutions are regulated again, regulating big tech is a big joke.

This is true and FB is the proof. They gladly paid a huge fine and still made billions in the process. This is what regulation is for!

Regulation of all of these services - that affect literally billions of people - is needed.

Trusting the senior citizen center that we call the Senate or White House to get it right - now that's another thing altogether.

But, we've got to start somewhere.

It takes less than a minute of searching to find that the first argument Bednar presents is factually incorrect.

Bednar: "Local restaurants, for example, are forced to use Google’s partner ChowNow in order to have convenient “Order Pickup” or “Order Delivery” buttons in search results for their own name, which charges an added hefty fee to the restaurant for each order, hurting their already thin margins."

ChowNow is all about "unlimited, commission-free orders":

https://get.chownow.com/pricing

I really wish google had public data for something like average page number or something similar for a search term. We have data for what people are searching for, but its hard to determine how successful people are in finding what they're looking for. If you're searching for a niche, it would be great to know what people want but can't find.

I suspect google already has this data, but it's too valuable for them to share.

SEO industry publications suggest that fewer than 1% of all clicks come from page 2 or higher.

Earlier this week when we were talking about FOSS search engines, I thought:

How weird would it be if the Internet Archive expanded its mandate to include search? No that’s dumb. Is it? I don’t know.

It might be good if search were regulated as a utility. And ad free. I don’t know if regulating Google is the way to do it.

The problem is if the government gets too friendly with search then they’ll want the data and holy shit will that be a dark day.

^^This comment is a reminder for everyone to install the Tor Browser or set up Tails, just in case.

There is no "public" here. There is only "government". It might do a better job than Google at this. It might not.

I don’t think the government would be getting quality contractors to do the work to sort this out. They would be getting the lowest bidders who have a political axe to grind or an interest in inflating the contracts into a never-ending project with little to show for it, and offshore workers with little experience.

Just like every other government IT iniative.

Additionally, that would give the government direct access to a lot of sensitive information that people don’t really want them to have. While it probably has under-the-table access right now, do you really think having overt access is any better?

If the thought of having the government running a search engine, even at arms length, doesn’t leave you absolutely shitting yourself in terror, you have issues.

Interesting theoretical case study, but moot point. America is a business, not a country. Will never happen in our lifetimes.

The question I have about public policy in this realm is, "when does something become a service the public has a certain entitlement to?"

Because, if I think about how long Google has been around (and been popular), this is on the order of 15 years. You might even say just 10 years in terms of when it became widely used. That's the blink of an eye in government terms.

If I were to be Google, I might ask, "where do you have the gall to take what we built from scratch, that you didn't even know about 10 years ago, and demand that it serve the public in the way that you want?"

On the other hand, the societal good in me says, "you've affected and changed the world to something new, policies need to take that into account".

I guess, if Google had chosen to be a pay-for-service, private club that only certain people could use, then they wouldn't be in this situation. You make something private enough, and it'll never be so big as to attract attention. But then they wouldn't be worth like $1T.

I guess, when do we have the right to demand that something turn into a public utility? Or that it has changed to effectively become one?

Yeah... But maybe first we should have a coherent system for regulating public utilities. Like just having whatever president shows up appoint someone who basically has full control of how things in their purview are managed... well... there's probably room for improvement

I actually like this article because it identifies specific, changeable behaviors of google that could be corrected. I don't necessarily agree with them all, but he has done some homework rather than just fill a page with "herp derp google monopoly"

The internet should be a public utility. Google should not. This would be insanity.

The article even mentions how the government regulates e.g. movie ratings... Only that's a lie. The MPAA is not a governmental body. It's voluntary.

I'm not entirely clear why the answer is "regulate google" and not "the government builds and provides an internet search mechanism for its people." I.e., an actual utility from the start.

Because even they know the government is not competent enough to create a search service that people would want to use.

Are we sure? We have electric power across the whole country, the government found a way to get that done, even if it involved paying someone else to do it, it got done, and it got done pretty well.

We spent $24 billion on economic development for Afghanistan. What percentage of that would it take for the US government to build a good internet search engine?

I would not trust search provided from the gov, and I suspect most people in the US would feel the same. I can't speak for anywhere else though.

But you do trust search from Google?

If Google decides that it wants the Libertarian party to supplant the Republican party, and begins aggressively tailoring results to that end, what consequences are there? Why wouldn't they do that if they could get away with it? We didn't elect google executives, we have no recourse beyond political theater like the recent congressional hearings.

To be honest, I don't trust either. However, I think I trust government less, if only slightly.

I also don't use Google.

Just curious, what do you use?

Mostly DDG, along with a side cast of others if I can't find what I'm looking for. I've got a list here [0]

[0] http://a-shared-404.com/other-stuff/

Well I just love my friendly neighborhood gas and electric utilities... NOT.

Let's get cable internet regulated like a utility first. Then afterwards we can talk about competing services on the internet.

Anti-competitive behavior should be addressed but let's get our priorities straight.

Why not both? This kind of incrementalism can cause stagnation.

Cable internet providers are relatively inept local monopolies in some, usually the least profitable parts of their service area. They are comparatively harmless to FAANG monopolies, which have global scale and the ability to bully entire countries into complying with their business models.

Tech companies have invested massive amounts of money in lobbying and paid media to convince you to worry about ISPs so you give them more power.

Net neutrality, HTTPS everywhere, etc. all centralize power with Big Tech and gate out their competition from behaviors they already employ. And often even the journalists evangelizing them are directly on Big Tech public policy influence payrolls.

Like, I hate Comcast and AT&T as much as the next guy, but I'm forced to do business with neither (there are three residential wired Internet providers in my area) but nobody on the entire planet can escape Google.

If you live in an area where Comcast has a monopoly, or a pretty strong implied monopoly you pretty much have to do business with them. Most places in the US have at most two ISPs, one that offers reasonable speeds and the other for compliance that offers piss-poor speeds, but hey it's offered so all is well.

You're never forced to use Google. Google has a huge Internet footprint, but you can absolutely use the Internet without Google.

Incorrect: Nearly all business ventures must use Google. If you do not, you do not exist. Doesn't matter if you're a website or a restaurant. No Google presence, no business. Go run ads for your startup on Bing and see where that gets you.

Also, try to be a user on the Internet without using reCAPTCHA...

In increasingly more school districts you have to either give Google your kids' data and a Chromebook account or you have to homeschool, Google Classroom is often mandatory, as it is here.

Again, there are some local areas where one ISP or another might have a monopoly, but it isn't even remotely comparable to what Google is.

If you have one ISP and they decide to refuse you service for any reason, you don't get Google or any other website. You're putting the cart before the horse.

There are also four national wireless carriers, which offer home service, satellite Internet (including, soon, Starlink...)

All of which can legally block, restrict, or charge extra for traffic to Google since net neutrality has been repealed.

Which, of course, could be a reason to switch to a different provider. :)

As someone who has things like a car PC to which I can't afford an Internet connection because all of the service is priced to include people streaming YouTube and Spotify all day... I find net neutrality an appalling concept. It's essentially a way to force ISPs to serve Google and Netflix's needs exclusively. (They are the majority of all US network traffic, and their bandwidth use as they expand to 4K video is basically drowning out everything else.)

Why shouldn't I be able to get a cheap $5-10 Internet service where I have to pay extra if I want to watch Netflix? Most of my Internet devices aren't used for Netflix, but I'd love to be able to afford plans for them.

Regulation priorities:

1. Organized disinfo like this https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/11/qanon-facebo...

2. Cable and telco monopolies that charge extortionate prices for slow internet

3. Facebook

4. Scam robocallers

5. Microsoft forcing Teams, Edge, and dozens of other apps on users by installing them with Windows security updates

It's a little disquieting that our first priority for (public) regulation is "The First Amendment has failed as a construct; let's prevent people from sharing information in public fora that we know is false."

I'd hazard that if that's where we're starting from, we won't end at a good place trying to use the force of public regulation to solve these problems. :(

Let's prioritize bickering about what our priorities should be.

Well, I disagree. I don't think we should bicker about that, that seems like a crazy idea.

Instead, lets prioritize building out our internet infrastructure.

Along with Facebook, internet and cell providers. That alone would add so much value to society.

THANK YOU!! I have been saying this all along. Glad others feel the same way as I do!

I would argue we should regulate the internet as a utility first.

Any company that becomes infrastructure should be nationalized

Why not just make the internet a public utility?

ive never seen any evidence of gov intervention resulting in a better outcome for anyone other than special interest groups.

Gov intervention _should_ be capable of doing so, but as long as lobbying is still legal, it won't.

@freeopinion [0] brought up an interesting idea of setting up more special interest groups, directly in opposition of each other. This may be an effective method of handling this.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24105949

I think wireless carriers should be

Nationalize Google

I would argue Visa and Mastercard and payment processing at large as the top priority by far.

It's crazy that we've given up control as a society of the only mechanisms for electronic payments in an increasingly cashless world to unregulated private entities who continue to jack up fees as often as they can get away with.

Makes everything 3-5% more expensive. Ridiculous.

Unregulated?! IMO they are heavily regulated. I can understand believing that they are under regulated, but they are hardly unregulated.

E.g. https://www.fdic.gov/regulations/laws/rules/6500-2260.html https://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/help/card-act-1... https://blog.payjunction.com/credit-card-processing-regulato...

every industry is regulated to a certain degree, but categorizing an industry as a utility is a step change difference.

in the US we do not regulate interchange fees except via Durbin Amendment (only passed 10 years ago) which regulates debit interchange for large banks only. this is totally different from Europe where interchange is heavily regulated.

There is 100% nothing stopping the Federal government from offering a full-faith-and-credit-backed "America electronic transaction system" for electronic transactions, with those fees handled by taxes.

But much as there's nothing stopping the Federal government from greatly simplifying the burden and toil of tax season by issuing 90% of Americans a pre-filled-out "This is what you owe; sign this and return it or dispute it with your own filing," we won't do that because fully half of Congress is from a party that has, as a plank, that private institutions serve the public interest better than public institutions.

FWIW the Canadian tax system is heading in this direction. With electronic filing programs most things get pre-filled now with data from Canada Revenue Agency based on the information they've received from your employer, your bank, your trading institutions, etc. Then it's more a matter of going through and verifying information and adding in any missing information (for example sale info from my stock units held in my employer's US brokerage) and looking any deductions that might apply (and the set of those is shrinking, which imho is a good thing)

It is a good thing. Private tax accountants are a huge political lobby in the US, so it's a non-starter here.

The US barely got off the ground a free option for public e-filing, and we managed to botch it up by handing it to a private company to implement, which promptly turned around and made it absolutely as impossible to access as they were allowed to by law.

US - the cronyism dream.

One way or another, those free markets always turn out to be really expensive for customers and users.

Canadian here— there's definitely been a movement in recent years away from deductions in favour of direct payments throughout the year. Thinking especially of the child benefit and the carbon tax rebate, and the elimination of boutique credits like one that used to apply to the purchase of public transit passes (https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/programs/about-canad...).

I get that politicians like the psychology of people receiving a cheque or direct deposit vs a tax deduction ("it was my money all along"), but I think it is genuinely a positive step in terms of helping people at the low end of the economy who don't have the means to save receipts or jump through whatever other hoops are necessary to nickel and dime the government at tax time.

I used to run a company in Lithuania and now am a simple employee in US.

It took me about 10 minutes for monthly tax filings and 30 minutes for the annual tax filing for my company and 4 employees. I did not have an accountant - I didn't need one.

It is a nightmare filing taxes in US, even paying $300 to Intuit. It takes about a week of my time... for something that is supposed to be automated. I also never manage to get the tax calculated correctly in advance, because no consumer facing tax company will bother with you before you get your annual statement(W2). I have a very variable income - RSU's and other optional income... so I get hit by underpayment fee from IRS.... and don't get me started on the fact that every state has their own tax authority...

It's extremely naive to think that only Republicans are responsible for that.

They are not, alone, responsible for it, but it is still a fundamental difference in the parties; some Democrats are pro-big-business, but only one party has public-private partnership as a party plank.

Democrats may profess to be anti-big-business, but in practice they clearly aren't.

The Democratic Party is a long-standing "bankers party" and "corporatists party" (a party for big companies and organizations). In that sense, they're just as "bad" as the Republican Party, and due to how the whole democratic system is set up in the USA, Americans are in reality bereft of alternatives. Picking anyone else than those two, is effectively a blank vote. This system can at least in part explain why so many Americans choose to stay at home during the elections, because to them, for whatever reason, it doesn't really make much of a difference who is in power.

This is why it's important to vote in primaries and to cultivate leaders at the local level. The Republicans became a lock-step far right party by building up infrastructure and candidates at the lowest levels and building from there. Too many progressives don't seem to pay attention to any elections below the presidential election (and then whine that things are rigged when their candidate gets less votes than someone they don't like).

The Republicans deliberately built the grassroots top down, with targeted media and subsidised networking. Supposedly grassroots orgs were aggressively seeded and astroturfed.

It's not that progressives don't pay attention, it's that the Democratic machine doesn't do this. In fact it works to sabotage and disempower effective grassroots opposition to its corporatist policies.

There are always a few break outs in every cycle - like Cori Bush this year - but they're there for show, not for policy. If they get too pushy they run into opposition, and if they don't accept a compromise with the party line they're quietly removed by PACs that funnel non-grassroots special-interest money to challengers.

To be fair, the presidential election thing progressives are whining is rigged is that their candidate lost despite getting 3 million more votes than someone they didn't like.

That it happened twice in 3 presidents is icing on the "it's rigged" cake.

I was referring to whiners in the primaries. There are many factors for why trunmp won in 2016 and changing any one of them could have changed the outcome. One of those factors was Sanders voters who stayed home or voted for third-party candidates.

Right, the same government that couldn't get a healthcare website going is supposed to also power every single transaction from internal infrastructure. There are hidden costs that are much higher than 3% to giving the government full control over every transaction in society. It's a single point of failure with no redundancy or decentralization, a large attack vector, and a human rights nightmare. As a general rule, private institutions all too often do outperform public institutions. I'm pretty sure Space X has bipartisan support, for example.

I mean, government does GPS. Sends folks to space. You mention SpaceX, but let's not pretend NASA doesn't exist. Yeah, there was once that website that had a bad launch, but there's nothing inherent in government that wouldn't allow this to work well.

I do think ideally this could be done by NY or CA first. We should test out ideas in the states, where possible.

SpaceX successfully built a capsule to get people into space.

They built it to the specifications that NASA enforced upon them, which were paid for in blood.

And you don't have to look far in the SpaceX organization to see what risks the company is willing to take if an external authority isn't imposing regulation on them.

I think this mixes up low odds of success with risk, the latter rather being an expectation value than a probability (i.e. probability of success or failure times the value of the things at stake). Risk can be low even when the odds of success are not good just by nothing being really at stake.

Think about their rocket landing program: the probability of landing a rocket on a boat in the first attempt might have been low but the risk was almost negligible because the launches that SpaceX practiced landing on had been paid for by a customer already. Now, if SpaceX had bet the company on reusability by paying for all these rockets out of their own pocket instead and hoping they manage to get it right before cash runs out, then this could have been called risky.

Ah, yes, this government right: https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/gps.html

Ah, yes, that one that did the fundamental research which enabled it right: https://www.nrl.navy.mil/accomplishments/systems/gps

With about 70% of their revenue from the US Government in 2018? Those defense companies might as well be an extension of the government with the added "benefit" that it allows individuals to get wealthy off them.

Edit: Further to that and the comment pointing out where GPS was researched and developed, the Air Force still operates GPS block III and contracted these services out to Lockheed. So yeah, ultimately any success Lockheed has with GPS III is ultimately a success for the government..

That's kind of the point though; would this whole arrangement work any better if it was all directly under the DoD hierarchy? Vs. private contractors like this? I was not intending to be snarky in the original comment. I've lived in a system where a lot more of the economy was under the government in the org chart and it was not magically better than the American system.

I'm not sure what point you're making. Yes, the government uses private contractors, but they'd use contractors for this transaction system, too.

GPS is a lot less stateful than real-time financial transaction processing. It takes time corrections from base stations and broadcasts a time signal. End users have no way of mutating state on the GPS satellite; they only listen.

I'm not saying it's easy to make a global positioning system, but it's easier than processing every transaction in the United States.

I was partially responsible for designing a system that could be used to eventually scale to handle processing every global credit and debit transaction.

GPS is harder.

disclaimer: I used to work at Visa.

Were you also partially responsible for designing a GNSS system? Otherwise it isn't clear how you can make any claim as to the difficulty of that, if you're using your experience on the former as your bona fides. I think the difficulty of payment processing isn't in the happy path, but in fraud/anomaly detection, merchant servicing/outreach, dispute resolution, all of which do not have a "set it and forget it" solution.

The platform had to encompass all of those payments infrastructure responsibilities. I'm quite aware of their relative difficulty.

Separately, I did not have to implement a GNSS system, but at the job I had immediately after Visa, I did have to work very, very closely with GNSS vendors who integrated with our AV middleware software (including having to write drivers for them), and in my current role I'm CEO of a company which produces a software platform that provides automated V&V of complex SISoS (including those integrated with and dependent on GNSS).

End to end payments systems are hard in the rats nest of legacy expectations and integration sense. End to end GPS deployment & management seems hard in the science and systems engineering sense.

GPS is more akin to a public lightbulb than any kind of interactive service. The government seems to falter when it has to deal with 1:1 interactions with constituents, not when it is simply building something.

The Federal gov't is vast and is not uniformly ineffective. Even within departments tech performance can vary greatly.

> not uniformly ineffective

Ha, that's a good phrase to use in a performance review.

"On the whole, Bob is not uniformly ineffective ..."

"... and the upside is we gathered some interesting data on personnel performance"

There are plenty of ways to structure a public service like this that isn't fully controlled by the government. USPS comes to mind, though it's obviously not perfect in terms of independence from government control.

I'd honestly love to see something like a credit union at a large enough scale to run it's own payment processing system. Something like that could get you a nice level of independence from government control and give you an organization more incentivized to care for it's members.

To be fair, that was the first time the federal government had attempted to build a modern web application. There's a great interview with President Obama, I believe in FastCompany, where he discusses the approach to building healthcare.gov -- the crux of the issue was with the mindset. When you build large physical infrastructure, you need large companies, but the same is not true of technical infrastructure. This mindset had lead to the use of the mega contractors, but it was ultimately a small team that built the version that worked. This revelation lead to the institution of the US Digital Service.

Among the things that failed in the design for healthcare.gov: the overall plan was to have each component built, to a specification, and then any two teams that were integrating components would test integration, and the whole thing would work.

Three pieces of the puzzle missing:

1) It appears there was no honest-to-God real end-to-end testing in the plan: no team to own it, no chain of responsibility if it didn't work. So cross-functional issues like total system performance were ownerless, and it is the nature of government contracting work to push blame away, not assert ownership where none is demanded by the contract.

2) Even in integration testing, responsibility was unclear when it failed. If the specification itself proved faulty, neither side of the protocol had ownership over fixing the problem; faulty specs led to pissing matches of blame-pushing instead of any party saying "Okay, the spec is now this, just fix it."

3) Since nobody had holistic ownership, no core infrastructure decisions were made. The whole project, under the hood, was a mismash of different databases, languages, messaging services, and protocols, owned by (and chosen by) each contractor with no thought paid to long-term maintenance of the app as a singular service. Each team had their own ad-hoc dashboards with no top-level view to allow anyone to understand why the end-to-end site experience was broken. There was nobody to own a concept equivalent to "Ops" or "Site reliability" who had authority to make judgement calls here; long-term maintenance was going to look like full understanding of dozens of similar systems doing similar tasks.

US space program was mostly privately developed, in any case.

Saying "look as SpaceX" isn't much of a "government failed" as much as "Boeing failed miserably and lobbied hard to cover their failures".

That said - the government can be a facilitator without being the operator, and it shouldn't be the operator in this case.

Beyond that plank, it's important to note that these same politicians are often bought out by lobby money from the private institutions who stand to benefit. They stand aside and let people from private industry, like TurboTax or H&R Block, write the laws that make things harder on their constituents, and then turn to them and and go, "See, government is inefficient!" It's a complete racket!

https://www.propublica.org/article/filing-taxes-could-be-fre...

https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...

> There is 100% nothing stopping the Federal government from offering a full-faith-and-credit-backed "America electronic transaction system" for electronic transactions, with those fees handled by taxes.

That is the plan, albeit the minimal fees involved paid for through users of the Fed’s system.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24103753

I actually like this aspect of the USA. Most parts of the world, specially more socialistic-leaning countries, would have politicians eager to expand their powers and size of the state so that they have control over a bigger cut of the pie. Of course, this is supposedly for the good of the people.

It seems to me that more people is socialistic-minded in the USA these days, to me that looks like a indicator of the decline of the country.

If you want, you can mail Visa a check for 3% of your spending at the end of each month. A small price to pay for your freedom.

The thing that always bothered me about this argument is that in reality the US has many more regulations that apply to regular people than most of what you call "socialistic-leaning" countries (one example look at the regulations for what you can or can't do with your house/yard in many suburbs )

Singapour usually ranks top 5 in these lists and it’s forbidden to buy chewing gum there. What baseline are you comparing against?

People should have feel the burden that taxation places on them.

Payroll withholding already artificially dampens the strain that taxation imposes on everyone that earns a paycheck. Issuing a pre-filled out form is another step backwards.

Paying taxes should be burdensome and uncomfortable.

That is an ideology and a rather twisted one. We were over this when people were opposing anaglesia and anaesthesia. Wanting people to suffer needlessly is a bad thing.

Then stop over taxing us.

I don't think that does what you want it to.

Make taxes burdensome, and you create a market for tax filers who make them easy for you. All youve done is make taxes more expensive then, without getting better government services.

> greatly simplifying the burden and toil of tax season by issuing 90% of Americans a pre-filled-out "This is what you owe; sign this and return it or dispute it with your own filing,

All of Scandinavia does this. Has been doing it for ages.

Most people need do nothing at all. And it works really well even if you do have to make some amendments (income in a foreign country for instance that the tax authorities can't see directly).

It's also one of the reason why the tax office is one of the most popular government agencies in Sweden. It just works.

"There is 100% nothing stopping the Federal government from offering a full-faith-and-credit-backed "America electronic transaction system" for electronic transactions, with those fees handled by taxes."

And there's technically nothing stopping the US from sending humans to mars either.

There are many reasons that it's not done, including the most important one, which is that it's not necessary.

Simply producing or supporting a standard, and then maybe having some regulations around it would be 100x easier.

I can't see this duopoly persisting for that much longer. If I say the phrase "don't leave home without it", what is the first thing that comes to mind? I'm guessing it runs iOS or Android. In the long run, he who controls phones, controls payments. (Which actually strengthens TFA's case, if you think about it.) Visa and MC execs must know this and be scared shitless.

I definitely have concerns about the stranglehold the payment processors have, but does it really make everything 3-5% more expensive?

My understanding was that a good chunk of the 3% fee is given back to consumers as cash back or rewards, and that dealing with cash also had costs for businesses.

This is correct. The best you can usually do is 2% cash back, so really the consumer is being charged 1% for the convenience of using a credit card. Obviously most consider that worth it, which is why credit cards are so popular.

right now we have a situation where the rich (who pay for things with expensive premium credit cards) are being subsidized by the poor (using cash or basic credit cards) because interchange is much higher for the top of line credit cards.

Retail isn't paying 3% on their transactions. It's more like 1% for card present transactions.

Generally cashless is cheaper for the retailer. Fewer losses to employee fraud and robbery. You don't have to pay for employees to deposit cash.

The downside is that you're liable to fraud and chargebacks.

Banks basically break even on interchange after paying out awards and security costs and then the merchant acquirer + network get like .2% - 1% depending on the size of the merchant. V/M is one of the most benign duopolies out there.

I mean, if it wasn't I guarantee some fintech company would come out of the woodwork to disrupt it because the potential upside is huge once you scale.

Most merchants bump their prices to account for the fees, without any discounts for paying in cash. This means that the ~25% of US households that are unbanked or underbanked are paying a 2-3% "tax" without any benefit -- further harming the poorest population to the benefit of those with good finances & credit.

Payment processors and providers are regulated around the world and in the US, if the US wanted too they could cap fees they already do to some extent just not as much as say Europe.

every industry is regulated to a certain degree. making something a utility is a step change difference.

interchange in the US is not regulated outside the Durbin Amendment for debit interchange for large banks.

Visa and MC are way too lightly regulated when they are the gate keepers to a cashless world due to what I would consider a historical accident. No reason why these networks shouldn’t be utilities in a cashless world.

In the long run, overpaying for electronic transactions should only be the case if the major card-issuers collude.

Otherwise, vendors should gravitate to those issuers that yield acceptable service at the lowest price and customers should gravitate toward those issuers that deliver them the greatest value.

Rewards-point/miles schemes are moderately insane, but they allow the customer to express their preferences with greater precision. Want to pay a lower effective transaction fee, perhaps at the risk of higher interest rates if you carry a balance? Choose a cash-back card.

Perhaps 3-5% is actually what compliance/fraud-detection/customer-service/etc. ultimately requires? I was once a huge Bitcoin advocate; crypto transactions absolutely have a place in the world, but the true irreversibility of such transactions (at demonstrably lower costs) opens a huge door for nefarious actors.

it’s not - it wouldn’t be that expensive if interchange (biggest chunk of transaction processing) was more heavily regulated beyond the Durbin Amendment.

right now we have a situation where the rich (who pay for things with expensive premium credit cards) are being subsidized by the poor (using cash or basic credit cards)

While Visa and Mastercard are the big fish in the sea, they do have competition. There is also Discover and American Express. They also charge similar rates, which suggests that 3% fee isn't random. Not sure where 4%/5% came from, fees average out to somewhere between 2%-3% for small merchants.

almost all processors add a fixed fee on top of the 3% eg 30 cents. if you are a coffee shop or convenience store that is a much higher % of the average purchase price than a merchant that sells something more expensive.

It's just price stickiness. Same reason why all music streaming platforms charge $10/month and something like $15/month for a family plan.

> It's crazy that we've given up control as a society of the only mechanisms for electronic payments

It’s no the ONLY mechanism. Crypto currencies solve this issue.

It’s the only mechanism for fiat currency.

ACH and Wire transfers exist. Also the Fed is developing a new instant payments system that will be launched in a few years.

yes i know that. are we going to back to the days where I pay for my groceries by writing a check?

you can’t possibly be arguing that ACH and wire transfers make sense for everyday purchases.

Why wouldn’t ACH make sense for everyday purchases?

are you asking me why it doesn’t make sense to write a check for every small purchase you make?

if the Fed’s faster payment network goes live and makes ACH instantaneous can payments can be done with a QR code or something similar then that is viable but not right now.

beyond that, almost no e-commerce store accepts ACH. It also doesn’t benefit the consumer to bother with the hassle of ACH vs card when there’s no discount...you’re just saving the merchant money. Amazon is the only one I can think of.

I'm always amazed when talking to US friends how far behind the rest of the world the US is with respect to banking. For a long time friends were telling me they were getting their salary, paying their rent etc. by cheque, when I had been using automatic wire transfers or debits for a long time already. With respect to your comment above, here in Scandinavia (where banks are also atrocious for other reasons) as well as much of Europe, with most of the internet payment processors (like Klarna) you can use wire transfer, debit from the account as well as direct internet banking for online shopping. We also have swish, which is a payment system were you essentially wire transfer money by using the mobile number.

That said many people (myself included) also use credit cards for their convenience.

The big problem with the Visa/MC duopoly isn't the lack of regulation or enforcement of antitrust. It's that the US government, unlike many other countries on earth, does not provide adequate and free payment services to citizens itself.

Not just the fees, but how they can suppress free speech and whatever they deem "unworthy."

Granted a lot of it comes from risk management.

I don't think this analysis is correct.

While it's true many merchants pay 1-3% in processing fees, many of the costs involved are real. Building the network, fraud, rewards to consumers, etc.

Visa's net income is roughly $11 billion a year[1], and they process roughly $11 trillion a year[2]. So their take is ~.1%, not 3-5%.

Note that this ignores that banks may make money off these transactions as well. May be better to look at Discover (the lender and the network) instead of Visa. But I'd think the total take from these companies is much closer to .1% than even 1%.

[1]https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/V/financials/

[2]https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/visan...

the 3-5% number is just a reference to the total “tax” merchants pay for payment processing as a whole - I get that most of that is the interchange fee that is paid out to issuers. but Visa and MC are the ones who dictate the interchange fee rates that issuers receive outside of the Durbin Amendment which capped debit interchange for large banks.

You seem to think that Visa is a bigger thing, than it actually is.

That 3% is the total cost to the merchant. Visa is just a payments network. It is not the payment processor(the company that the card terminals connect to). They are not the issuer - the banks that charge as well.

Visa facilitates integration between different payment processors and issuers, they don't even handle fraud or low level stuff.

Yeah banking and ISPs or the network utility need to be regulated as utilities first. They are both "too big to fail" and local monopolies respectively and they are both abusing their position.

A competing banking system through the USPS is a great idea that needs to be remade, it worked well for a long time in the US [1]. It would eliminate the predatory checks cashed industry and credit through the system would be competitive to keep the private systems in check, much like the USPS does other delivery services or Federal student loan rates keep private rates in check. The same needs to happen for healthcare with a public option. When you have public systems, the private ones have to compete more, it is a win for everyone.

The network utility needs to be split, lines handled by power companies that know how to run a utility, and then the servicers on top that are competitive would also be interest aligned with the network utility users.

I have no doubt this "Google should be regulated as a utility" is being pushed by ISPs that know they are utilities but fought to remove that classification. They deserve to lose their local monopolies and right to that because they abused their position and have turned rent-seeking over capacity expansion with data caps, overloaded nodes, prioritization, dropped packets, all incentives to NOT expand the capacity which is a major problem when the market incentives are aligned against the interests of the country, products and innovation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Savings_S...

This is a beautiful implementation of a tactic to shift a conversation.

OP starts with a seemingly related pivot to the topic of how to prioritize the regulation of a company like Google with the regulation of other companies. Such a conversation would obviously involve at least few points about why Google ought not top the list. (And hopefully many points given OP says Google is "by far" not top priority.) I was certainly interested to read such a digression...

Then, like Alan Sokal's prank[1], OP leaves out any argument for that prioritization. Instead, OP moves directly to complaining about the other companies which OP has declared by fiat should take priority.

And, voila! Every single comment below OP at the time of this writing similarly avoids the ostensible discussion about Google's prioritization, instead discussing only the other companies and the efficacy of their regulation. Potential regulation of Google as a topic is completely avoided in any of the child nodes of this OP.

Whether this was intentional or not, it makes an excellent archetype for this tactic.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Sokal

Anyway, there are bigger problems in the world than Google. While I am not sure payment processing is more urgent that regulating Google, there are many other things that are orders of magnitudes more important to tackle than regulating Google.

"Anyway", talking about the relative morality of the discussion is a derail from the ostensible topic.

Anyway, on the topic, none of the reasons presented in the article seem compelling. Government regulation should step in when consumers have no choice but to use something that has achieved a monopoly, and the payment networks mentioned do make a more compelling case.

It seems inappropriate for regulation to step in when something happens to be popular but there are equal or better alternatives easily available, and changing to a different search engine is about the easiest change a person could make in their life.

In the case of mitigating any bad behavior by Google, there's a very easy alternative solution for the problem, which is to convince people to use other search engines. I haven't used Google as mine for over 15 years and I don't believe I've suffered at all for it. I've found DuckDuckGo to perfectly suit my needs. Google run as a public utility could potentially hurt all the other search engines that many would consider to be superior solutions already.

> X is the worst!

> No, look at how bad Y and Z are! They're so bad!

this is a... Sokal? (I think it's pretty easy to read the intent here, and more generally: internet comments are hardly rigorous proofs, and that's probably a good thing.)

"This is a beautiful implementation of a tactic to shift a conversation."

It's just a comment, not a 'tactic'.

Turns out, things can be viewed differently from different contexts. It's both a comment AND a tactic.

It’s not a tactic without intent

And if you hold that something can be a tactic without intent, then anything and everything is a tactic to bring about its related reaction.

HN threads are not 1:1 conversations.

Threads start and branch on different topics, which are varying degrees related to the main post.

Kind of like how you have now switched the discussion to Alan Sokal. That doesn't mean you are making some tactical shift as part of a larger strategy.

The argument for the prioritization is right in OPs post - a vast majority of every person-to-business transaction has a 3% transaction fee layered on top of it.

Google isn't top of the list - because it's way easier for a user to stop using, than MC and Visa networks.

I would argue for an EU type approach and instead of regulating Google or payment networks - force demonopolization and opening up markets to more competition.

If you wish I can even share the priority list in my mind, for what sectors require addressing before Google:

1. Actual local monopolies

2. Local education sectors and their organisations

3. Radio spectrum for local wireless internet and cable providers (to challenge local cable monopolies)

4. Banking and payments systems

5. Construction sector

... basically there's 99 problems and Google ain't one.

Monopolization of any industry isn't high up there on the priority list of issues we should address by far.

Climate change, election interference, and COVID-19 are far more pressing issues than monopolization.

However the fact that these other bigger issues exist doesn't mean we shouldn't care about or take action on the lesser. If one brings up how we should address issue 'x' and are met with "but what about issue 'y'?" it does give the impression of deflection or of whataboutism.

Those issues are all interrelated. We can't solve them because of corporate domination of the political system and the buying off of the American intelligensia.

Where did that assumption come from? Just because people disagree doesn't mean they are bought off. Citation definitetly needed to even remotely approach a pattern like "bought off" let alone a proof.

It comes from years of observation and study of the structure of the government and society. If you're interested there are many books about this from Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Herman to critiques of the academy that shut up after the state started funding them extravegantly after WW2, to the current ossification that is easily observed where no policies are allowed to shift that benefit the wealthy at the expense of society. It is so extensive that one or two citations isn't sufficient and deserves a lifetime of study.

So when Facebook has a monopoly on social media and allows misinformation to spread about _those exact three topics_, what would you suggest we do about it?

I addressed this in the third sentence of my comment:

> However the fact that these other bigger issues exist doesn't mean we shouldn't care about or take action on the lesser. If one brings up how we should address issue 'x' and are met with "but what about issue 'y'?" it does give the impression of deflection or of whataboutism.

The point is that we can care about more than one issue at a time.

But if you really cared about "election interference" then attacking media monopolies would be at the top of your list and you wouldn't make this argument.

You need to pick things that aren't directly connected if you want to deflect, or your argument comes across as being too obviously in bad faith.

If Facebook didn't have a monopoly on social media, would competitive pressure make it stop what you consider misinformation? Of course not. You can find a stream of misinformation in more marginal press outlets. Only larger outlets that have a relative monopoly (NYtimes say), can afford to be relatively free of crude misinformation (but even here they have their very definite spin as does everything).

The only reason people are talking about forcing Facebook to impose some restrictions on communication is because Facebook has somewhat of a monopoly on some communication.

Which is to say that talk of Facebook and regulation winds up being "Facebook is big and powerful and we want the state to have that power instead, damn it". Without liking Facebook's approach all that much, I'm less of a fan of this.

That post is ironically itself misinformation and leading assumptions.

1. Facebook is a monopoly on social media is a false assumption. Even limiting it to the mainstream there is reddit and twitter. Tumblr a prior competitor essentially died by "suicide" after being bought up. 2. That allowing misinformation is a problem and something that "we" should do about it. That is not only contrary to the first ammendment but suffers from watching the watchmen problems. 3. To demand to be able to stop it on a technical level is absued epistemologically as asking bullets to only kill bad people or encryption to let "good guys" in. 4. Misinformation itself is contextual. "Bleach kills the Coronavirus." is true. Saying "Bleach kills the Coronavirus!" in the context of cleaning treatment equipment is still technically true but there may be implementation issues with what may be washed safely and misses nuance when it corrodes fittings. Saying "Bleach kills the Coronavirus" as a treatment itself is misinformation because it will kill the patient before it cures them in the same way a bleach embalming could eradicate infectious agents.

I wanted to say I dont think Googles dominance would be such an issue if they were forced to stop collecting personal data to target ads. IMHO they are already in decline in terms of relevant (to the user) search results.

> This is a beautiful implementation of a tactic to shift a conversation.

Or it is merely contextualizing the debate around what should and should not be considered a public utility by contrasting the case of Google with others. This in turn helps creating consistency and improves our understanding of the matter.

This forum is not the platform where the fate of Google is decided, so "taking attention away" can't really have malicious consequences, if it helps us coming to a principled understanding.

"It's crazy that we've given up control as a society of the only mechanisms for electronic payments in an increasingly cashless world to unregulated private entities who continue to jack up fees as often as they can get away with."

Regarding such jacking up of fees, it seems that nearly every month PG&E, a regulated utility company in California, sends notices of price hikes.

I'm not sure how they manage to get away with this, but it makes me skeptical that merely regulating a company, or even nationalizing it, will be sufficient to keep rates low, since regulatory capture will continue to be a possibility.

Further, its an open secret that the very politicians who are tasked with regulating industry are often former (or future) executives in the very companies they regulate. Political office is a revolving door for industry executives, which regularly land well paid jobs in those same industries after retiring from politics.

I'm not sure how to solve this problem, but we need to look at it squarely in the face and not labor under the illusion that government and corporations are clearly separate nor diametrically opposed entities.

The Dutch payment system iDeal charges between a couple of cents for the big retailers to maybe 15 - 20 cents for small fish.

These fees are absolute, not relative to the purchase amount.

edit : I meant our PIN payments card, not iDeal. But the point is true for both.

Sure but almost all interchange flows right back to the consumer via cash rewards

Payment processor monopolies are also strangling expression and innovation by getting to decide you can't use them for e.g. adult content.

Said as a former brick-and-mortar business owner, if CC fees disappeared overnight, companies with breathe a sigh of relief and proceed to not lower prices one cent.

Nobody is making purchasing decisions based on a 1% different in price for a car, let alone day-to-day purchases.

Both conservatives and liberals are convinced that Google is rigged against them. I don’t trust American lawmakers not to shove their ideologies into a search engine.

If anything, perhaps agreement from these two segments of government indicates that Google is serving public interest as a viable counterweight to the force of government itself?

They don't agree. The left uses Steven Crowder not being banned from Youtube as an example of conservative bias. The right claims Steven Crowder being demonetized is evidence of liberal bias. Right now Google has a profit motive to remain neutral. The fewer people they alienate, the more money they make. It's not perfect, but politicians have very little incentive to keep Google neutral.

They agree that their respective special interests aren't being served. And they're right. Because Google is not in the business of kowtowing to liberal or conservative political interests.

Google is way too innovative to be relegated to public utility status. Much better would be to consider an antitrust breakup.

I don't know how innovative they are these days, it seems like a lot of effective copying.

That being said, I would prefer an antitrust style breakup to them being regulated outright.

maybe something like breaking them into: (GMail/Docs etc.)/(Youtube)/(Search)/(Android/ChromeOS)

On top of search, one of the real issues is that they set their ad prices with no market forces at play.

$50 per click? Why yes, but only because they say so... Fake click? We say its real, pay us...

There are several other competing ad networks, as well as traditional advertising models. Nobody actually has to play Google's ad game; companies continue to crunch the numbers and decide it works out best for them in terms of dollar-per-value-add.

No there is not. There is no competition for Google ad words, just like there is no competition for Facebook. They set the market prices, the middle-men add to that cost and sell their services based on value add...

But AdWords is only one advertising model.

https://www.singlegrain.com/blog-posts/pay-per-click/alterna...

The ad network game is a market. There are many competitors and of course, inventory options. Search keywords are not.

I thought the prices of clicks are determined by auction? So if it's $50 a click it's because your competitors find they can still make money paying that much. Most categories have PPCs in the sub $1.00 range last I checked.

The floor is set by Google or FB or whomever, so there is no real auction. Especially considering the buyer has no other choice if they want to buy that inventory. Its not like you are purchasing a product at market. You're buying from the only supplier.

A true auction would have a zero floor. An open market would have other options.

> Especially considering the buyer has no other choice if they want to buy that inventory. Its not like you are purchasing a product at market. You're buying from the only supplier.

Okay but that's because a specific ad placement served to Bob on 4:32 PM on his google search for "back pain Chicago" is a very specific, limited piece of inventory.

If these are not real auctions then neither are a lot of things I would have considered real auctions:

1. If a Picasso painting is being auctioned off, again it's the only one, there is no exact replacement piece. Yet it can be auctioned.

2. Auctions on ebay can have hidden reserve prices too, as well as obvious minimum prices. Yet I would have considered these to be auctions as well.

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