Google To Buy Data Analytics Company For $2.6 Billion Despite New Antitrust Scrutiny (nytimes.com) 27
Just as government officials step up their antitrust scrutiny of the American tech giants, Google had a surprising announcement on Thursday: It is buying another company. From a report: Google said it planned to buy the data analytics company Looker for $2.6 billion [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source] in a bid to catch up to rivals in the business of cloud computing. The transaction, which is subject to government approval, will be an immediate test for regulators.
"A few years ago, this deal would have been waved through without much scrutiny," said Paul Gallant, a tech analyst with Cowen who focuses on regulatory issues. "We're in a different world today, and there might well be some buyer's remorse from regulators on prior tech deals like this." A primary argument against the tech giants' power is their history of gaining size by acquiring other companies, and some politicians have suggested breaking up corporations like Google and Facebook.
"A few years ago, this deal would have been waved through without much scrutiny," said Paul Gallant, a tech analyst with Cowen who focuses on regulatory issues. "We're in a different world today, and there might well be some buyer's remorse from regulators on prior tech deals like this." A primary argument against the tech giants' power is their history of gaining size by acquiring other companies, and some politicians have suggested breaking up corporations like Google and Facebook.
WTF do they do? (Score:3)
Re:WTF do they do? (Score:4, Interesting)
just applied statistics on large data sets, looking for patterns and trends to support decision making.
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no, this isn't about what one person would do but bulk things such as demographics and markets
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What scares me is I have no idea why a company like that is worth $2.6 billion. WTF do they do?
They scrape together data on you and millions of others wherever they can get it. Websites are assumed to consent to Google's crawling tool scraping every single URL, image and database unless the site owner deliberately opts out and puts up defences. If they collect enough data it enables them to infer things about your personal life using data mining techniques, things that you do not necessarily want everybody to know, like sexual orientation, political beliefs, how you voted, your financial situation, v
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>oh totally forgot. Amazon Athena is going to be positioning itself as the new Redshift replacement, and is inspired by Snowflake's data lake.
Greek mythology, physics, meteorology and fishing. Nice. But what does it have to do with technology?
"Analytics" (Score:2, Informative)
Euphemism for "spyware"
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Which is why politicians will move to break up Google, their power is becoming greater than US intelligence agencies and they do truly need to be broken up, like yesterday. The only reason they survive, they supply information to the deep state, keep the extortion control of politicians going.
There's no actual anti-trust scrutiny (Score:2)