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Comment by mindslight | Hacker News Reader

First, there's no mention of the legal theory under which they're claiming damages. Is this something to do with caching, aggregation, AMP, or what? The only thing the article touches on is Google being a monopoly for ads, but that would seem to be a very small part of how Google contributed to undermining the news industry.

Also even if these newspapers are successful, does anyone foresee any of the damages actually going towards reporters' salaries for doing real investigation again? It would seem that the case is really just an attempt at extracting some money for whatever private equity firms are currently feeding on the carrion.

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I agree. Any time I see daydreamy claims like "treble damages", I feel confident that someone is getting scammed.

Either newspapers are trying to extort the runaway success of Google and Facebook or lawyers are trying to loot what remains of the newspaper industry. Given the lack of legal basis here, I'm inclined to believe the latter.

> private equity firms

Well that's clever.

PE is known to do interesting things. I would not have thought that part of the value they saw in dying newspapers is a well-timed lawsuit against big tech. Even if it only has a 25% chance of winning, I could see PE taking that bet and baking it into the value of the scraps they bought.

Here's a good, long read about what's been going on with newspaper ownership.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/alden-g...

My guess/gut is this is a legal theory/stretch and it's unlikely to work.

But my understanding of anti trust law is it's always running into new situations that need to be adapted to.

Even anti trust law itself was new/controversial at one point, and the concept of forcing or breaking apart private businesses was novel.

IMO all this talk of "antitrust" with regards to big tech is a red herring. At best, it will just facilitate the synergy of government and corporate power, through a "do this or else" cudgel.

What we need is strong privacy legislation (ala GDPR) so that we can actually opt out of being data subjects, and mandated interoperability (through open protocols and published APIs) such that companies have to compete for each user's business rather than just abusing Metcalfe's law.

That legislators don't understand this feels like it's because they don't want to understand this. They see a growing power and their focus is on how they themselves can control that power, rather than how to prevent it for the benefit of all (ie preserve freedom).

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