Comment by wonder_er | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wonder_er | Hacker News Reader

At least Google's monopoly isn't based on coercion and threats of violence.

I with the US Government didn't have a monopoly on coercion and threats of violence.

It's hard for me to give a sh*t about the Department of Justice's take on _anything_ when they still prosecute drug possession.

Repeat after me:

- Google cannot legally kill people or put them in boxes.

- The DoJ and it's subsidiaries kills people and puts them in boxes, "legally".

Google has a 'natural monopoly' on search and tech-related things, by virtue of better services and spending money. Google doesn't have a _legal_ monopoly on anything.

Department of Justice has a _legal_ monopoly on everything it cares to monopolize, but is actually pretty bad at its job.

It's likely this entire issue is politically motivated to distract/contribute to political goals for the upcoming US election.

As far as models for governence and large-group coordination, I'd trust Google way more than I'd trust the US Government.

So why does everyone think the government will save us from Google?

The best thing the DoJ could do would be disband itself and go permanently out of business.

For example, another top HN thread right now talks about how "behavioral nudges" caused the NYPD to arrest 30,000 LESS people than they otherwise would:

> Each year, millions of Americans fail to appear in court for low-level offenses, and warrants are then issued for their arrest. In two field studies in New York City, we make critical information salient by redesigning the summons form and providing text message reminders. These interventions reduce failures to appear by 13-21% and lead to 30,000 fewer arrest warrants over a 3-year period.

Holy shit! Sending TEXTS causes the police to issue 30,000 less arrests?

From the article:

> Over 10 million people are arrested each year in the United States, and millions more are issued summonses that draw them into the criminal justice system and require court appearances.

Let's move that from passive to active tense:

Law enforcement agencies arrest 10 million people every year in the United States.

Has Google arrested even 1% of that number? Why or why not?

Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. There's nothing new that an internet forum can discover about these things—it's not the medium for it. People just repeat the same points over and over and eventually get mad at each other. That's predictable, therefore tedious, therefore off topic here.

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

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

History has shown that the monopoly on violence always exists. If the government did not have it then someone else would. I would advise you to live somewhere outside of the West before you relish the possibility of the state relinquishing its monopoly on violence.

That's a nice soapbox you've got there. I wonder who wants to see this type of discussion under a Google antitrust lawsuit article...

This is a red herring fallacy.

The government can be more evil than Google and Google can still be evil. Does that mean we should not care that Google is evil?

The government is the only tool we have to fight Google. And while there are lots of problems with our government, we still have the ability to enact change by voting. You can't really do that with Google, even as a shareholder. The founders have supervoting rights, so even if every investor voted against them they don't have to listen.

> The government can be more evil than Google and Google can still be evil. Does that mean we should not care that Google is evil?

You're conflating two things.

1. The government is more evil than Google.

2. Google may still be evil.

therefore... use the more evil thing to fight the less evil thing?

I disagree with this assessment.

I'd say we should focus on mitigating the _most_ evil thing, using _less evil_ tools.

> The government is the only tool we have to fight Google.

The missing piece here is - we have plenty of tools to "fight google". Everyone could up and leave, stop using their service, and boom. no more revenue. Google is gone, irrelevant, de-monopolized.

The government is indeed the only _coercive_ tool available to fight Google, because the government can make credible threats of violence against the Google leadership.

There are plenty of other non-coercive tools we can use to "fight" google, and it's called "competition".

For example, notice that we're talking about Google right now, and not Microsoft. This is because Google "fought" Microsoft's monopoly by _making better tools_.

I cannot wait to see what company comes along and beats Google at their own game.

The entire premise of your argument is that there is a free market, but the entire premise of this lawsuit is that Google has a monopoly.

Sure, in a perfect world (or really, your idea of a perfect world) that might work. But I'm much more interested in practical solutions than idealistic truisms.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough.

Also by your own logic, unless you believe the US government is the most evil thing in existence, we shouldn't even be focusing on that. So you should go fight whatever you consider to be the greatest evil and keep knocking the top off the totem pole.

> There are plenty of other non-coercive tools we can use to "fight" google, and it's called "competition".

Coercion works pretty well though. I don't see why we should not use this effective tool, when we agree that Google is doing a lot of wrong things that should be stopped.

If you believe the government is doing other bad things, against other people, fine you can argue that. But that is not particularly relevant, and is just a non-sequitor.

I don't see how, in this particular situation, using coercion against Google is bad. Seems like it would be pretty good to me.

It can both be true that the government is doing bad things against others, but that in this particular situation, using a monopoly on violence, to use coercion against the Google leadership is a good thing.

To argue otherwise is just an irrelevant point, that is not directly related to the immediate situation.

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