Nearly Every State Is Launching An Antitrust Investigation Of Google (buzzfeednews.com) 38
Attorneys general for 50 U.S. states and territories today officially announced an antitrust investigation of Google, embarking on a wide-ranging review of a company that Democrats and Republicans said may threaten competition and consumers. From a report: The bipartisan group, led by Ken Paxton, the Republican attorney general of Texas, referred to Google as an "online search juggernaut," on the steps of the Supreme Court. State regulators from California, where Google is based, and Alabama did not join the probe. In a blog post published on Friday, Google senior vice president of global affairs Kent Walker wrote, "We have always worked constructively with regulators and we will continue to do so."States have the ability to levy fines or receive damages from companies found to be engaging in anticompetitive practices but, according to Matt Stoller, a fellow at the Open Markets Institute, the most important aspect of the investigation is that it will reveal how exactly Google works. "The trial is the remedy. Exposing the deals and how the companies use customer data, etc, will have a salutary effect," Stoller told BuzzFeed News.
Shame on those states (Score:1, Offtopic)
Actually Facebook too. After the FTC (Score:2)
The Texas-led coalition is actually investigating Facebook too. This is after the FTC has already done so for things within the FTC purview.
I don't know about other states, but here in Texas the attorney general can be a high-profile office that gets this done. The Texas AG started the Sony rootkit investigation, for example.
Our current governor, Greg Abbot, was Attorney General until he ran for governor. One quote from him made me chuckle. When asked about a typical day at the AGs office, he replied "I
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TL;DR version - 50 states are launching joint anti-trust probes against Google...AND Facebook
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Per your username and UID, you ought to know that reading, particularly TFS or, FSM have mercy, TFA is forbidden.
That'll be 2 soups, thanks.
Ignoring the real monopoly (Score:5, Informative)
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For the umpteenth time, the cable/ISP monopoly problem is a government-created problem. ISPs do not have a natural monopoly like Google. Your local government sold you out and gave your cable company a monopoly. Usually in exchange for concessions like a guarantee to cover low-income areas. Although the last city I lived in did a straight payola kickback - Verizon had to
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Government is usually the cause of problems when it is captured by (instead of po
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A natural monopoly is perfectly legal, but it still places you in the position, as a monopoly, where you have to be careful not to use that monopoly to affect and branch out into other industries. If a company with some monopoly wants to branch out, they should buy companies that do that other thing, and then only act as an investor, but allow the other company to manage themselves and never use the monopoly to gain market share in that other industry.
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Hello, Sundar.
Re:Google? What about Facebook and Amazon? (Score:4)
None of these three companies are fully horizontally or vertically integrated. They all have other competitors in their primary markets and the bulk of their services are computer services and none of them mine their own materials or manufacture their own computer chips.
Facebook's bought out both Instagram and Whatsapp, so they're doing a bit of horizontal integration, but there's plenty of other competition in the social media market; it's not as though they're the only player. I don't think they're in any danger of running afoul of antitrust suits.
Google's the third (fourth?) biggest cloud services provider and the biggest ad services provider. They're able to self-host a lot of their web services on their cloud hosting and most of their other services are there to host ads on. However, they're not really making any further moves to take ownership of the other parts of their supply chain, and while they're the biggest ad services provider, they're far from the only one. I think they'll probably be able to resist this.
Amazon's the biggest cloud services provider (EC2/AWS), the biggest digital marketplace (Amazon), and they've got a substantial first party delivery network, though it's not their only delivery option. They've got substantial vertical integration going on, though they still don't manufacture their own goods or the hardware that hosts their services, so it's not as though they're fully vertically integrated.
This is all layman's understanding of antitrust regulations based on a high school education from over a decade ago, so take it with a grain of salt. My main point is that you can have a big company that does awful things (Facebook) and still not run afoul of antitrust laws. You have to remember that antitrust laws were set up to bust the big trusts that owned all of the supply chain, from mining to point of sale, or bought out all of the competition in a market and then sold at a massive loss to cause the remaining competition to go out of business before jacking prices back up to way above what they were originally. These are the kinds of behaviors antitrust laws try to curb, and they're very specific. Being big and bad doesn't necessarily mean you're engaged in monopolistic behavior.
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Google, has been getting flack because Right Wing Nuts (who are in charge of the country) think because it tries to portray accurate information that the Right Wing Propaganda is being targeted and down voted because it is Right Wing, not because it is is inaccurate.
Google is also getting flack because the Left Wing Nuts (who are also in charge of the country) are annoyed that such Right Wing Propaganda is still on the site, and accessible to anyone looking for it.
Facebook is Fake News Source so politicall
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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BTW isn't it funny that the MSM pushes the "Republicans are the party of big corporate" narrative when the five biggest corps in the USA, Aapl, Goog, MSFT, FB, and Amzn all give exclusively to the DNC?
Wouldn't the correct way to analyze this be seeing which side both gets the most corporate donations in total and pushes said corporations' agenda through the most?
California giving a wink, wink, nudge, nudge (Score:5, Insightful)
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Google is already a major player on behalf of the Democrats, so it is not in their interest.
And what interest is that anyway? Not anti-trust. The interest of pols in both parties is hurting business so they can get donations. This is why government exists outside democracy. It's foolish to think it isn't the primary driver behind the noble sentiments here.
Proof: Pols should be running around with joy about Uber crushing medallion cartels, which can only exist with regulatory capture of politicians, but
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The State that one of the worlds largest company in the world head quarters is, who hires a good percentage of its voting age residence, who pay a lot of taxes to the state, isn't opting in?
You will also note that other states who have a major company in their borders seems to give them some leeway while other states press on them. Don't think for a moment that Hypocrisy is only a California or Democrat thing. It will happen nearly universally when Self interests conflicts Moral Stance, When this moral st
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Don't think for a moment that Hypocrisy is only a California or Democrat thing.
I don't think that and am fully aware it happens all the time, not just in California. However, I am curious to know why you felt the need to preemptively try to dissuade me from thinking there are a ton of Democrat-voting hypocrites in California. Hmmm....
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Re: California giving a wink, wink, nudge, nudge (Score:2)
Warning: This company is known to the State of California to be cancer.
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Inevitable, and long overdue (Score:5, Insightful)
As a collection of engineers with a bit too much computing power and goodwill Google did OK... But the DoJ, FTC, and FCC allowing Google to purchase YouTube and DoubleClick, and then go hog-wild with one infrastructure acquisition after another led to the inevitable when too much power is concentrated.
And honestly, the problem was identifiable at the start. The future was always going to be information-controlled, and its mission statement ("to organize the world’s information") forces an explicit requirement of first *gathering* it.
"Don't be evil" indeed.
Re:Inevitable, and long overdue (Score:4, Funny)
"Don't be evil" indeed.
That's not Google's motto anymore!
They changed it to, "Don't be evil . . . and get caught at it."
Dear Google (Score:4, Interesting)
As you may know, 2020 is a very important election year, and your continued support is desperately needed.
Signed
50 States attorneys and a couple political parties,
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Yep good old election year,
When the roads get paved, and pressure goes on large companies.
Where after the season is over, things go back to normal.
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You paint that in a cynical way "they just want to do it so they can get reelected". The thing is, that's how democracy is supposed to work. They should do what we want in order to get reelected. If they didn't have to then the system would be broken. Expecting politicians to have your best interests at heart by default is naive. If that were the case then having a King or other tyrant would be fine. But humans don't work that way. So we built a system that incentivizes working for the people. Pointing tha
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Alas, attacking Google isn't "working for the people", unless you define "the people" as "the people running for elected office next year"....
Which is not to imply that Google is a bunch of saints. But there's really not much the governments can do other than threaten with the right hand while holding out the left hand for bribes. Because even if you break Google up into tiny pieces, the pieces will come back together within a few years, just
Re: Dear Google (Score:2)
No bro, no one is talking about breaking Google into 17 different search engines. The idea is to make Alphabet divest some of the 200+ companies they bought up. And to break up Android, Search, Maps, Chrome, Gmail, Docs, etc into separate companies with a strong legal prohibition against data sharing and other forms of collusion.
Big Brother Google is in the surveillance business, and uses free (like beer) services as bait. They want _everything_ you do on the internet to involve some or another Alphabet-own
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Politicians are like diapers, they need to be changed often, and for the same reasons. - Robin Williams in the 2006 film “Man of the Year,”
Anti-trust investigation against my state (Score:4, Funny)
I guess.... (Score:2)
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...Applying an outdated set of principles is like requiring Jews to explicitly observe Deuteronomy 23:13...
I had to look that verse up. Thanks for confirming that the bible is full of shit :-)
Just run uMatrix to see how integrated Google is (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Just run uMatrix to see how integrated Google i (Score:4, Insightful)
This is what scares me. Microsoft tried in the 90's to completely control the internet. Google is actually achieving it.
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The one that gets me is how many sites today will refuse to load either key elements or anything at all if you try to block Google reCaptcha. Or how many retailers utterly fall apart with their store locators if you refuse to load Google Maps, never mind that they can tell me which stores are within 50 miles of my ZIP without needing Google’s help in my browser to do so. Don’t forget Google’s domain for user submitted content or the one that they use to serve up AJAX libraries, both of whi
But...why Alabama? (Score:3)
Re: But...why Alabama? (Score:2)
Two possible reasons I can think of:
1. Wasn't paying attention, too much Jack Daniels the night before.
- or -
2. Suitcases full of cash in a dark parking lot