That's because (at least in the number of times i've been invited to meetings with these sorts of regulators) the relevant folks are not idiots, and in fact are trying to understand all sides of the issue before deciding what they should do.

This is actually what you want them to do, as there are rarely, if ever, truly disinterested parties in these sorts of things.

As an aside, i'm pretty sure Matthew was not the top antitrust counsel at Google at the time. I believe it was Nikhil Shanbhag. Job titles on linkedin seem to confirm my recollection.

>The Campaign for Accountability (CFA) this week launched the first two of its Google Transparency Projects. One of the projects – a visualisation of the revolving door between Google, the White House and US government agencies – is so dense, the website suggests viewing it on a desktop display.

As well as Googlers leaving the ad giant to join the administration, there’s also a heavy traffic in the other direction, with federal employees leaving to join Google. The project documents 61 staff taking key public positions after leaving Google, or firms working closely with Google, and 171 leaving public office to join [Google].

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/29/google_transparency...

Anti-trust is about companies using their market power to exclude rivals, raise prices, and hurt consumers. It's not about consumers overwhelmingly choosing a product because they like it more.

Can anyone really say that Google's practices are more anti-competitive than, say, the dominant players in broadband or health insurance or wireless telecom or household appliances?

From a health-of-the-system perspective it really should be intolerable that a few large closed-garden platforms control the flow of information. Information monocultures are a threat to everyone, even if one partisan group feels more threatened than the other at any one time.

I happily take the market-efficiency position on most debates, but the risk of Google being anything but neutral is worrying. They appear to have a political bias in their employee base and are under pressure to make judgements about fact v. fiction (might even be an inherent requirement of choosing a sort order for search results) - that is a position somewhat similar to a conventional media organisation.

I support the concept of media being a special case where the risk of an information monoculture outweighs the damage of being inefficient. Laws that basically make it impossible for one media source to control a market are fine. I'd like to see internet search designated as a market where there legally can't be one dominant player, and details get sorted out as best can be done.

Maybe that is already how the market is, I don't know. There are many alternatives not controlled by Google. But something even stronger than antitrust seems appropriate as a matter of law, even if we don't apply it today. I can't see how a platform like Google can be neutral given the ongoing partisan extremes that have developed in American politics and Google's connections to the Democrats.

Apps and games are media. In 2019, that's a glaring truth which is obvious to many in the industry. It's just that society and the culture haven't caught up with technological reality yet.

Antitrust doesn’t care about how you got market dominance. It cares about what you do with it. To use the browser example I used elsewhere: maybe Google’s dominance in search is because it’s indisputably the best. But that doesn’t mean Google can use its dominance over search to get you to use Chrome.

To address your other examples, say health insurance or cellular, that market dominance is absent. Google has 89% of search market share. Verizon has 35% of cellular. Likewise, no health insurance company has more than 15% market share. That’s a completely different market. And I can’t get a discount on cellular because I’m a FiOS customer, nor can I buy car insurance from my health insurance company.

As I said elsewhere, I don’t think an antitrust case against a Google would succeed at this point in time. But lots of things that are common in the web tech space (cross selling products, giving away products for free, etc.), become potential antitrust concerns when you’ve got 90% market share in an industry. For example, giving away Android for free to push Symbian and company out of the market and cement Google search dominance in mobile. You wouldn’t be crazy to try to make a case out of that.

https://www.verizonwireless.com/promos/verizon-fios-installa...

> nor can I buy car insurance from my health insurance company.

https://www.statefarm.com/insurance/health/individual-medica...

and bundling deals: https://www.statefarm.com/insurance/multiline

By "product", I take it you mean their advertising services? Most of the other products are not paid for. In fact, critics are often fond of pointing out that the consumer is the product in this case.

Whether this action is right or not, parallels can be drawn with the Microsoft investigation: Microsoft allegedly used its position within the desktop to "push" their browser; Google is allegedly using its position within search to "push" their browser.

On a personal note, I'm not convinced that this is grounds enough for antitrust action. There could be a personal data related angle to this, but then again that would not come under antitrust.

Windows didn't get to 90% market share because consumers chose it. Windows achieved overwhelming dominance because Microsoft punished computer manufacturers if they sold any competing operating system.

That's anti-competitive, and Google isn't doing anything like that.

Then Microsoft used their illegally-obtained dominant position in operating systems to bundle their shitty browser, essentially forcing every consumer to install it instead of any competitor. And you couldn't uninstall it if you wanted to.

Again, that's not at all similar to Google and Chrome. Windows, Mac, and iOS don't have Chrome pre-installed. Android manufacturers are free to pre-install Firefox or Opera or anything else they want.

Google was doing exactly this until it was forced to into a consent decree with the EU. Manufacturers couldn’t sell Google licensed Android phones and sell non Google Android variants.

Just this week it was announced that Google will disable important features required to implement ad blockers. Google absolutely abuses their monopolies (browser, search, streaming video, possibly maps) at least as aggressively as MS ever did.

Have you ever tried to watch YouTube on Firefox? That’s a deliberately hobbled experience if I’ve ever seen one.

Completely off topic at this point but I’m curious what video card you have and if you’re on X or Wayland.

My Linux box at work is an HP laptop from several years ago with a pretty basic business class AMD graphics card in it, I did have to install AMD’s binary drivers on this machine.

And, using Slackware, it’s X. Not sure if Wayland is easily installable or not on Slack but it’s certainly not part of the base install or supported by Patrick.

Firefox is the only piece of my install that isn’t part of official Slackware-CURRENT.

Other than running it in Windows all of my other computers that use Firefox are running stock, no fancy desktop versions of Slack or OpenBSD. I use calm window manager on both. (Sorry, this contradicts an earlier statement, I also had to compile and install Calm on Slackware from source, everything else is just part of the supported packages for CURRENT)

Maybe my low resource OS’s help?

Whether it’s the government’s role to break that up is a political question, but Google is most definitely a classic monopoly and the internet is worse off for it.

It was the political appointees (from both parties) who shut their recommendation that the FTC begin an antitrust action down.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2013/01/googl...

So what was this "settlement"? Google promised to be nicer and said mea culpa a bunch of times. They did not pay a fine, did not agree to any hard regulations that would carry a penalty if violated, they did not pay any compensation to the entities they kinda admitted they wronged.

With Microsoft there were clear injured parties: Netscape, Samba, WordPerfect, and those results created a chilling effect around Windows.

Google search prefers sites that are fast. Amp makes sites fast.

Non-Amp sites that are equally fast and relevant get equal search ranking.

Is there any evidence whatsoever that Google ranks Amp sites higher because of Amp, instead of speed and relevance?

Nope. Amp ranks above everything else in a page-topping spinner.

>Which raises deep suspicions about the political motivations of this "investigation".

So, if a company was in bed with politician X, and get investigated under a future (opposition) politician Y, it's the ...political motivations of the investigation that you're concerned about?

That sounds totally backwards...

>Anti-trust is about companies using their market power to exclude rivals, raise prices, and hurt consumers. It's not about consumers overwhelmingly choosing a product because they like it more.

Well, Google uses its power over search results to do all of the above.

And that's not what the charges are about either. You're making it way too simplistic. Google has been involved in actual anti-competitive actions, for which they've already been found guilty in Europe that had nothing to do with "users liking their service more" - Google actually downranked competition in the search engine, and other stuff like that.

There even was a story a while ago on HN about ProtonMail being essentially shadowbanned from Google search for the term "encrypted email" for a year before they made a big scandal about it and Google "admitted its error" (the same bullshit excuse Facebook uses every time it's caught tracking users in a new and more nefarious way).

Also, I can't be bothered to look for a link now, but there is a good story out there about how Google killed a map competitor in the US around that time, too (Skyhook was it?). Once again - nothing to do with "users liking Google's maps more" -- Google took real action to prevent a competitor from existing in the market place.

It's also a super-duper coincidence that Eric Schmidt started working for the Pentagon, while also remaining on Google's board and some kind of technical executive, too, not long before Google started working with the Pentagon on Project Maven.

Either people don't want to admit what's happening or they are being way too naive when they see all of this and think it's "nothing but a coincidence". It was well known that Schmidt was one of Obama's besties at the time. And Google is ranking very high in its lobbying efforts, too.

I may not like it, but it's not an anti-trust concern.

> Google started working with the Pentagon on Project Maven

Google shut this down under pressure from employees. Also, not an anti-trust concern.

> Schmidt was one of Obama's besties

Executives at right-wing media are besties with the current president, but that shouldn't result in a future administration launching anti-trust actions against their firms.

> encrypted mail, Skyhook, etc.

Sounds pretty tenuous, but if there's something here roughly equivalent severity to other anti-trust issues then sure, investigate that.

But it looks to me like a piddling pretext to punish perceived political differences in media and infotech.

Selective enforcement is arbitrary, politically motivated enforcement.

No, but I'd love to see antitrust litigation against those monopolies/oligopolies too.

I guess, "not exactly exonerating, but not exactly damning" is à la mode in 2019.

Google's close ties with the Obama administration makes the Trump administration suspicious!

So, there is no swing in policy, at least among the career officials.

The Obama administration shut down and buried the previous FTC investigation. I'd guess not just because of lobbying, but also because google was nice enough to allow a ton of google employees to take some "vacations" to work for the Obama campaign for a bunch of months, and the likes of Eric Schmidt being chummy with Obama[1].

The current investigation is probably motivated not just by those career bureaucrats who had their previous investigation shut down, but also by the Trump administration wanting to hurt SV and Google in particular for being too friendly with Democrats, and to put those social media companies (Youtube, Facebook, Twitter) on notice not to "prosecute" and ban conservatives on their platforms (at leas that's what Trump and a lot of "conservatives" say is happening).

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/06/obamas-...

The DoJ and other state legal offices have rules about excusing prosecutors from cases but this one seems to not be seen as an issue at these regulatory and broader judicial agencies.

This should matter considering the US is disparaging China for having private companies backed by the powerful government bodies, operating under a different set of rules than everyone else.

Here's one:

This dataset includes people like my intern, who left to go join USDS after his internship was up, etc

So there is some amount of flat out silliness here.

It also covers 14 years (2002->2016), and has a fairly small number of people for that number of years.

A significant number are DC people, and, surprisingly, if you want to stay in DC, you are going to work at the government most likely.

During the earlier parts of this timeframe, there was no one other than Google who was local (google opened the office in 2006). During the middle part, 2006-2013, other tech companies were just staffing up policy orgs. Over the entire time period, the government is by far the biggest employer in the region. There were not a lot of even tech companies (let alone local policy orgs for tech companies) in most of that time period, the biggest other one would have been weird things like "livingsocial".

Having been recruiting in DC during the 2006-2012 timeframe , out of the 1000+ resumes i'd reviewed, i'd say 80+% were working at the government.

Like, why is this a conspiracy instead of normal attrition? In particular: where was it you expected them to go that was more acceptable? I think you are seriously overestimating the amount of non-governmental jobs they would have been able go to if they wanted to stay local.

It's a little more true now, but even then you'd just see them bounce between tech company policy departments.

Over the same time period, i'm 100% sure as many policy/legal/etc people in MTV/etc went to go work at Facebook, startups, etc (IE whatever the local industry was).

I'm also sure you'd find the same relative number of facebookers/etc in DC (which again, was very small during that time period) left for the administration, etc.

Talking to the police before you get arrested is just plain stupid. Let the lawyer do the talking. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRNc3Qic-Ks

He is also a laywer, see his profile: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=rayiner

Rayiner may be factually correct, but his comment normalized the great injustice of the situation.

Kid gets caught with a little pot at a parade, and the cops slam his ass to the ground and book him.

Google screws millions and millions daily, and they get a letter.

Lawyers are experts in law... not so much with justice.

Ajit Pai just did this move with robocalls and SHAKEN/STIR:

> Ajit Pai orders phone companies to adopt new anti-robocall tech in 2019 Pai threatens "regulatory" action if carriers don't use Caller ID authentication. (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/02/ajit-pai-orders-...)

This is the advisor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._David_Edelman

See also https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/author/r-david-ede...

It's not like he was Secretary of State but he also wasn't just an intern.

Do you have anything substantive to add to the conversation? Do you want to disagree with anything I said?

In practice, my comment comes more from being in DC for 7 years, not for working for any company.

What i said applies across just about every media outlet these days. Every unnamed white house advisor (sometimes even "senior advisor", because why not!) who isn't an "anonymous source" is usually unnamed because otherwise you'd be able to point out their job title matches what they were doing and is unrelated to the white house (or their attachment to the white house is "tenuous at best").

It's true the white house sometimes has people with the job title "advisor" in it, but you will notice when articles mention real names, if you were to go looking, you'd see that was usually their real title (or they failed at fact checking).

That's not just the white house either. Random low level people at companies become "senior executives", etc.

This even spreads, unfortunately, using those things as sources, and later often becomes "truth".

Here, i'll take a totally non-political thing as an example for you:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Fredinburg (RIP) was a great person and all around good guy (IME), but he was 100% not a google executive. This is an objective fact, by any definition of executive (including Google's). You can see the sources cited for these claims are news articles.

All of which, in order to play up their narrative on a tragedy, decided to give him that title (and various others!)[1]

Thinking that anything else here is happening, in this, or really any other situation, is just naive (or gross application of variants of gell-mann amnesia).

In the situation in the original article, do you seriously believe that if the current administration had the chance to nail a real former obama whitehouse advisor doing something illegal or untoward, they wouldn't jump at the chance do it?

It's not like they don't have white house visitor logs and plenty of people around the DOJ/FTC/etc who can tell them what happened!

[1] As an aside, i find it pretty sad that it appears people find "google executive" to be a more impressive/etc way to memorialize someone than "good person". If i pass away in a news-worthy event, can y'all make sure it says "good father" or something.

Though to be fair, in 2012 Google exerted its monopolistic power far less than it does now.

For the life of me I can't understand why it's good that less than a dozen unelected and non-removable people in this country (Schmidt/Page, Zuck, and the owners of 99% of "independent" media) have the power to decide who wins elections, and what people think about issues.

Regardless, the FTC would have had a much better chance than the DOJ as they have specific broad powers more suitable to this case.

Suffice to say, they have a lot less allies in DC this year, and even Democrats are starting to look negatively on them now.

https://qz.com/823922/eric-schmidt-played-a-crucial-role-in-...

The idea that he utilized Google resources to do the same for Obama while he had more direct influence over Google isn't a crazy idea.

Google has been providing free services to campaigns it wants to help for over a decade, in the open. This started when Schmidt was CEO.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB118489524982572543

The Obama campaign was the first to really realize the importance of IT infrastructure, _and_ their whole shtick (more or less neoliberalism with a friendly face) aligns really well with Google's political goals.

I'm not really sure why you seem to think that this is some conspiracy theory, when everyone involved is openly talking about it.

The two most popular are https://opensource.google.com/docs/releasing/ (which is for open source code, with (C) Google, because with open source you mostly don't have to care much about that line) and https://opensource.google.com/docs/iarc/ (author retains copyright, no open source requirement or association with Google at all).

IARC should be quite suitable for projects on "contentious" topics like politics or religion: Google generally stays clear of these topics (so there won't be a conflict of interest in building something like that, as Google just isn't active in that market), and the company won't have to deal with being associated with one team (versus all the others) through some side hustle they can barely control.

(Disclosure: working at Google, but far from the licensing folks. I found them reasonable to argue with, though.)

It's interesting people here are calling this a "conspiracy theory" when I guarantee you there are hundreds if not thousands of posters here who remember the TGIF and groups discussions where this came up.

>And Google is incorporated in California, which has strict laws that employees are allowed to develop what they like when they're not on the clock using company resources.

Not really. Try to develop a search engine in your spare time and see what happens.

>The Federal Trade Commission on Thursday faced renewed questions about its handling of its antitrust investigation into Google, after documents revealed that an internal report had recommended stronger action.

The 2012 report, from the agency’s bureau of competition, said that the agency should sue the Internet search company for anticompetitive practices, according to several people who saw the report but would speak about it only under the condition of anonymity. At least one other staff report, they said, recommended not to pursue a lawsuit. In early 2013, the agency unanimously voted not to bring charges after an investigation.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/20/technology/take-google-to...

Google has already lost several antitrust actions in the EU. It's not difficult to imagine that the investigation by FTC career officials found sufficient evidence of wrongdoing to recommend taking action.