1. It is nearly impossible to "choose to just no use Google". Tell me how long you can go without getting through reCaptcha or AMP for example (with AMP, often you don't even realise you're using it).
2. From what I hear, it seems that in the US many ISPs operate mostly in a situation of monopoly but this is rare in many other countries (with the exception of remote/rural areas). I know it's just anecdotal but I used to move frequently for work and I lived in many different countries in Europe/Asia/South America/Oceania and it never happened that I couldn't choose from at least a couple different broadband providers, except in one single case (village in a rural area in a South East Asian country).
I know this is not the same thing, but my example is meant to highlight the logical fallacy.
As to your second question, I end up on AMP pages by following links shared with me.
To say nothing of websites’ Google Analytics suites phoning home your whereabouts.
No it isn't. I live in the Netherlands and I can choose from 13 different ISP's on fiber alone. Add to that cable (Ziggo) and another dozen or so ISP's on DSL.
Not sure where you live in NL but in most places there is a LOT of choice. Even my parents who live in the middle of nowhere have several options including cable and fiber.
I'm a big "ISP enthusiast", so it pains me to see that in my home country, Serbia, Telekom Srbija owns EVERY SINGLE phone line in the country, so any and all DSL goes through them.
You can buy DSL from someone else, but it stills goes through their infrastructure, the "virtual" ISP just buys DSL access from Telekom.
Not even actual line access, just routing. You still HAVE to pay for a LANDLINE to Telekom directly, which is 5€ per month.
All other ISPs are either mobile broadband, WISP, or one single CDMA ISP that offers 128/32 Kbps Internet.
Cable ISPs have hidden non-compete contracts so if you have SBB (owned by United Group), you don't have Radijus Vektor, Kopernikus, Masko, etc., because of the non-compete.
By the way, main 2 plays on fixed broadband access are Telekom Srbija (Supernova, which owns almost all cable providers that aren't owned by SBB, mts (for ADSL and fiber)) and United Group (SBB and Beogrid, and others via Cable).
Orion Telekom does fiber in a few % of apartment buildings in Belgrade and Novi Sad, Exe Net in Niš and Leskovac, and that is basically it.
DSL is mostly up to 10/1 Mbps, a number of lucky people have 20/4 Mbps (upload is usually cut back to 2 Mbps) with VDSL, and a really tiny percentage have 50/8 Mbps VDSL and an even smaller number of people have 100+ Mbps with FTTH.
Mobile broadband is limited to up to 200 GB with Vip mobile, and that is a fixed wireless package which is limited to one location. Their speeds are terrible in most urban areas, and it's mostly 800 MHz with 15 MHz channel in rural areas. 4G+ is rare.
WISP (Fixed wireless over 802.11n or ac standard) is apsolutely atrocious, as is everywhere else in the world, with speeds reaching up to 20 Mbps except on dedicated links, mostly 10/2 Mbps for most users.
CDMA deserves no mention, being literally unusuable, and only marginally better than dial-up.
Fiber is extremely rare. Speeds are good, the most affordable ISP is Orion Telekom, but if you want TV, their TV offer is very poor (slow and low quality rebranded wholesale Android STB with a really bad Wowza headend which is overloaded and has poor bitrate leading to abysmal picture quality).
Given that Fiber is not available to most people, DSL being slow and unreliable (up to 10 Mbps), CDMA useless, mobile broadband expensive and limited (often not available due to overloading of cell towers), the only actual posibility for (good) Internet for most people is Cable. And that is a shared medium that is oversold and bundled with CATV.
Although for both countries I now just use mobile data. Depends on your usage, but for me (dev, netflix, youtube) it is more than enough. I have an unlimited EU package stuck on a SIM which I put in a Glocalme. Works well.
Unless you mean western Germany I recommend you pay more attention to the news.
The "last mile" should be owned and controlled by the government, for similar reasons why roads and power lines are. Then handfuls of ISPs would compete for the business of your household. Here in New Zealand that's exactly how it works. I can choose from at least 20 ISPs and net neutrality is a non-issue because free market competition drives the providers to give us what we want.
Thus my stance on net-neutrality is neither for nor against. I think both stances are equally bad, and the root of the problem is ISP monopoly.
I still can't entirely opt out of Google.
And certainly can't opt out of their tracking.
They are inescapable.
This seems like a great simplistic unit of measurement for classifying what antitrust action is supposed to target.
When it's extremely difficult, if not practically impossible to escape a private company from extracting/exploiting profit from unwilling persons at scale. When you basically can't opt out.
I'm not sure that would fit the current anti-trust legal definition (as in: not a lawyer so don't know answer - not that I think it doesn't fit). Equally, I'm not sure it fits under the more general principles of anti-competitive practices. They - I believe - presume willingness on the part of the consumer to access products or services, but where supply is unfairly limited.
Notwithstanding all that, your statement is an excellent principle and very neatly articulates the problem. I don't know what rule of law it would come under, but it's a succinct illustration.
Special mention to reCaptcha, you just doomed to train there AI and it seems to intensify once you start moving away from google. And I bet it's even worst from the 3rd world...
I guess the "don't be evil" way would be to make all those data public. Or just to provide an alternative way to prove your humanity online, without enslaving the whole world.
And I don't mean that they're hard to make sense of or something. But if I encounter a recaptcha on one of my specific devices that's not logged into any Google accounts, recaptcha will simply reject all of my clearly correct answers. It'll ask me to pick all of the fire hydrants, show another screen, show me another, show me another, stop for a second, then tell me I failed and repeat. I pick everything correctly, but it fails because somewhere along the line, the absolute clowns at Google decided an auto-rejecting AI would be a good idea for a user validation system.
We need Google out of the internet. As their evil influence continues to expand, they'll use their powers to lock people who don't willingly buy into their ecosystem out of everything. And worse, since Google is the biggest lapdog around for government-led oppression of speech, they'll just filter out anything that doesn't agree with the status quo. And they'll be able to brush it away as an "oops, sorry, your behavior just makes you seem like a bot. Nothing we can do."
You can be tracked by every android app, plus DNS and connectivity checks - it's only visible part. Sure any advanced security audit will show much more.
How would breaking up Google prevent tracking?
So yea, tracking will continue until people regulate it.
Brin and Page always stated that search is not the end goal. A real AI is. If these actions happen, it‘s pretty much guaranteed that China will get there first. We don‘t have the global regulations in place yet to discourage that arms race.
2030 to 2040 will be the earliest AGI could happen realistically.
How are you going to stop tracking?
Whenever you interact with a business, online or offline, you're supplying information that can be tracked.
I've asked this question twice now. We can't just break up companies because they collect data. That's not anti-trust.
While tracking and anti-trust are only loosely coupled, both are symptoms of an anti-social company.
Then there's the direct cell phone tracking-
> Investigators who spoke with The New York Times said they had not sent geofence warrants to companies other than Google, and Apple said it did not have the ability to perform those searches. Google would not provide details on Sensorvault, but Aaron Edens, an intelligence analyst with the sheriff’s office in San Mateo County, Calif., who has examined data from hundreds of phones, said most Android devices and some iPhones he had seen had this data available from Google.
My solution lately has been to feed them junk data until they either give up on me or erroneously perceive my input as non-erroneous (not sure which it is). Takes some time, but to me it’s worth it. If we can get enough people doing this they might have to get rid of it all together. (Vastly unlikely, but a guy can dream, right?)
Through browser fingerprinting that is shared via channels which are undetectable and unlockable via browser scripts.
Through hundreds of many tiny mistakes you make every day and unknowingly let down your guard.
_Oops, damn, I forgot I disabled uBlock when accessing that important page for work._
You cannot opt out.
As long as there's a very popular communications service / social networking service / etc., or even a few of them (none of which dominates the entire market), you can't stop other people from turning in your data (unless you have no connections whatsoever in this world, or you and all your connections live in a cave). And if you use any popular service or visit any popular website yourself, your data will be collected, it's only a matter of the level of details.
Sure any 3rd party app I install can track me to some degree, but it can't compare my usage against my entire email history, my travel history, recordings of my voice...
GGP was talking about data collected involuntarily, and I was responding to that. Google (or any other company) can't have your entire email history, your travel history, and recordings of your voice without your voluntary participation in one of their services or services of a "partner". Those are way beyond drive-by collection.
There is no way to only use a Google service and also disable drive by collection. And because they're so huge and cover so many categories, that drive by info is more meaningful in their hands than just a dozen random unconnected companies. Because of that, drive by collection by other 3rd party doesn't really concern me as much. They can't do nearly as much with it.
(Yes, people do this anyway at differing levels, from betting they won't get charged with jaywalking to betting prosecuting/defending companies won't show to small claims to ..., but purely ordering by alleged damages would give a much stronger guarantee of whether crimes actually got charged, and thus whether you could safely assume you'd get away with them.)
Consider also: if you have a priority system with no disincentive to falsely inflating priority, then people will optimize for whatever matters to them getting done, e.g. finding ways to inflate the priority.
Sorry for the nitpick, but this part really irks me. It could only be true if you define "society" as "people in the US".
American ISPs target American citizens. Google targets pretty much everyone who uses the Internet, regardless of their country. Of course, it's understandable that the US justice system only targets people in the US, so I'm only being nitpicky because you've used the term "society" there. American ISPs, regardless of how shitty they might be, will never be more damaging to the society than a company that impacts the whole world.
This sounds like Comcast's argument, which is that there is already sufficient competition due to wireless carriers. The fact is, a fixed line will always be faster.
> You can feel the tech clock slow down in the last ten years
Sorry, but a lot has happened in the last 10 years, in terms of new languages, frameworks, and software.
> Imagine what the hordes of rest-and-vest half-working Google Ph.D.'s could be doing if they weren't hoarded by Google because of monopoly money
Are Google employees not free to do as they please now? If anything, they're being funded to go off and start their own companies. They're not enslaved by high salaries, lol. Quite the opposite.
No. The ISPs’ argument for breaking neutrality is the tech giants’ capturing of the majority of the profit pie. With competition, those margins should decrease. That, in turn, makes fighting net neutrality less lucrative.
Add on the fact that ISPs are more regulated, federally and at the state level (California can regulate Comcast in a way it can’t Google) and the more-imminent threat is revealed.
You must be joking. In the US, broadband ISPs are regional monopolies that can and do charge whatever they want while delivering lousy service. This happens while net neutrality is in place.
Without net neutrality, ISPs are now free to make whatever deals they want with content providers, double dipping, and providing fewer options for consumers.
AT&T is now offering uncapped access to their video services [1]. Without net neutrality, nothing stops them from throttling Netflix & charging Netflix money for "high speed access", thereby passing costs to the consumer. ISPs can profit more from their regional monopolies simply by forcing services like Netflix to pay more. Consumers will not benefit because the broadband ISP has no incentive to improve service or lower costs. They are regional monopolies.
[1] https://potsandpansbyccg.com/2019/02/13/isps-are-violating-t...
This is too narrow understanding of monopoly power. Market failures happen even when there are multiple suppliers
If some corporation gets into position where customer 'Can always choose' a option that provides less value for them and it's the monopoly power that provides the advantage (size and network effects) markets are not efficient anymore.
The idea that two-sided market can't have market failures because one side gets free services is not very strong one.
You can also make case about collusion between FB and Google emerging around 2010-2013. They have divided the markets and have stopped competing. It's hard to find evidence that it's intentional. It can be just understanding emerging from single meeting or natural development. Whatever the reason they seem to avoid direct competition.
A customer can, a company cannot. Similarly to how a customer can choose another ISP, but Google cannot choose to just not to business with ISPs: if a business cannot be connected to their customers, that business cannot live.
"You" are not Google's real customers, the advertisers are, and most of them most definitely cannot opt out of Google and remain viable.
I don't know how that would play out with a federal anti trust setup.
It's pretty simple: as you say, they're local. Google and Amazon are the big evil corporations on the other side of the country, but Comcast has an office in your town, and your neighbour's son works for them. They're a significant provider of relatively well-paid low-skill jobs in every community in the country. It's incredibly difficult to come down on that.
It seems more like the actual interest in actually doing any anti trust stuff for any consumer type product just faded away mostly ...
Remaking federal regulation to preempt states is laborious and fraught with difficulty; see Obamacare.
Probably not for the Department of Justice. Some problems with that approach:
1. If you are trying to address the issue of limited choice in ISPs, I don't see how breaking them up addresses that. If you split an ISP that has a monopoly in a state, say, into separate ISPs for, say, each county...you've just gone from having one monopoly to having several monopolies. The limited choice is because there is only one cable coming into my house, and splitting up the company that owns that cable doesn't change that.
Addressing that probably requires something like making the last mile data transport a regulated utility that ISPs operate on top of. That would probably require Congressional action and a new President to do nationwide or to allow states to do individually.
2. Competition among ISPs in a region can vary dramatically city to city, and even neighborhood to neighborhood. I've not extensively researched this so maybe this is wrong, but the impression I've gotten is that an ISP's prices in a region tend to be pretty similar between those places within the region where they are the only choice, and those places within the region where there are alternatives with similar performing alternatives. That could make it hard to show that the ISP is abusing its monopoly in those parts of its territory where it does not have competition.
3. Aside from rural areas that only have DSL via the phone company, in most places there are multiple ISPs available. It's pretty common to have both cable and DSL, and in many cities there is also a fiber option. There's also wireless options, ranging from the regular consumer service of AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon, and the various MVNOs that are built on those networks, and many places also have wireless available that is not based on the cellular networks.
You might argue that, say, cellular wireless is not really a viable option to Comcast or Charter or whoever the cable company is in a given area, due to the vast difference in speed. But you will have to actually make the argument. You won't be able to just say that they speed difference makes them different markets. You'll have to actually look at how people are using these various services and show that they really are not comparable.
I think that the factors in #2 and #3 make it almost impossible to win an antitrust case against a major ISP as a whole. The DoJ would have to bring smaller cases alleging monopolization in specific regions, tailored to the specific way the factors in #2 and #3 play out in that region.
Having to do this region by region, or even city by city in some regions, would make this a very long, expensive pursuit. (And where they win, there is still the question of whether or not there is an effective remedy they can apply).
Thus, it is probably better for the DoJ to leave this issue to Congress to deal with via legislation.
Are ISPs favoring Google, Facebook, Amazon etc. ? If so, I agree with you. If not, then...
>>Plus, you can always choose to just not use Google.
Not as simple as you make it. Google for one is hurting competition and using their platform, mainly search, to do so. Different rules apply to companies with a certain market share. No one forced people to use Microsoft Windows either: Apple, Linux, or new companies could have invented many new OS-es.
No, ISPs favor their own services. See zero rating,
> AT&T is openly advertising that cellular customers can stream the company’s DirecTV Now product without it counting against monthly data caps. Meanwhile, all of the competing video services like Sling TV, Paystation Vue, YouTube TV, Netflix or Amazon Prime count against AT&T data caps [1]
[1] https://potsandpansbyccg.com/2019/02/13/isps-are-violating-t...
And no, I don't think the justice department can or will "do both". It's clear this admin is anti-net neutrality, catering to Comcast's whims.