Some people in politics really do care; but at least in the US, it's hard not to look at the state of things and come to the conclusion that the system lends itself to corruption that goes so deep that nobody with any real influence has a vested interest in "virtues" outside of using them to curry favor with the general public.

Again, I apologize for how jaded this sounds... but it's really hard to feel any other way.

Is this an indication of some sort of tipping point being reached? Have most people regardless of politics come to the same conclusion about the reality of the silicon valley surveillance-fueled power grab?

"I don't care who does the electing, so long as I get to do the nominating."

-Boss Tweed

“Most people here are pretty upset and pretty sad,” Google cofounder Sergey Brin says as the meeting begins. “I find this election deeply offensive, and I know many of you do too. It’s a stressful time, and it conflicts with many of our values. I think it’s a good time to reflect on that. ... So many people apparently don’t share the values that we have.”

https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/09/12/leaked-video-googl...

There are almost 8 billion of us. You don't speak for everyone. And I say that as a non-american who has no horse in the race.

We let our Android app lapse because their automated tools incorrectly picked up a compliance error. I couldn't figure out a way to escalate that--their support was crazy bad.

That led me to look harder at our revenue. Android was 1/10 of the revenue that iOS brings in, with much lower retention, higher support costs, higher rates of credit card disputes.

So that pretty much sealed the deal for us--there's no reason to invest in the Google ecosystem.

> Google has its hands in too many pies...

That's one of the reasons anti-trust is such a difficult case to make. Besides search, Google doesn't really have a dominate market share within any of their other offerings (not even Android counts since it's open source and comes in many flavors from phone companies). Their search service is free, so the only party that is effected by their market dominance (in how we've typically defined trusts) are advertisers. Before they can have a strong anti-trust strong case, the government needs to define data as an asset and the disclosure of that data as a cost to the data owner (the Google user).

The success of the other Google offerings is due more to the benefits of network effects, you'd need more than a decrease in Google ad subsidies to be competitive.

I've been wondering the last couple days how people can best support Mozilla, aside from simply switching to Firefox. And how to best share the message with others who aren't technical or normally wouldn't care, like my friends and family. I'm willing to put up with some conveniences from not using Chrome, but that might be enough for them to not care.

It seems to me that a purely organizational split would be nothing more than something on a piece of paper. The two corporations could still rent buildings next to each other, have lunch meetings together, gift each other money, and continue as before.

Even if they were forced to use a different physical building, they could form a corporate alliance and share customer loyalty.

What makes them choose to compete, when given the choice?

Seems easy enough for the broken up Instagram and whatsapp to instantly declare insolvency and close up shop while conveniently getting jobs for the newly formed Facebook photos app that would also be conveniently released at the same time.

Microsoft seems safest of all, almost as if they see the coming investigations and regulations.

At some point soon I will (re-)learn the search bar syntax just so I can cull the damn Amazon results.

cats -site:example.com works on both DuckDuckGo and Google, except... Google Shopping doesn't give a shit about -site when there are sponsored links to be shown.

Search for, say, Anker, on google and -site:amazon.com removes amazon, -site:bestbuy.com removes Best Buy (nothing against Best Buy, it's just the first result I saw not including Amazon, so the easiest to check).

Flip over to Shopping and it's wall-to-wall Amazon.

So I have a new skill, but at the cost of knowing I'm screwed instead of not knowing. Fuck.

Heh - it's almost as if hindsight is 20/20.

Similarly, I think what Amazon does with their Basic brand as well as them blocking Google products and other competitors off their stores could very well be a target. Them using financial tricks to pay some of the lowest taxes also won't help them with democrats.

I think there is a serious chance, no matter who wins the election. The tech companies have pulled off the difficult feat of allying both parties against them. Democrats, in addition to their historical opposition to big business, blame them for the spread of misinformation that allowed Trump to get elected, and Republicans blame them for censoring Republican opinion. The fact that these companies have very outspoken employees who publicly oppose conservatives (see Kay James) does not help.

In the past, big business could rely on Republicans to shield them. However, for the most part, big tech entered the culture wars opposing Republicans, and I think a lot of Republicans will happily support their breakup.

There's no allying against them, they've been sweet talking lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.

The amazing part is that both sides hate them for their own political reasons, not because of any common ground.

Literally every Google product has a competitor and the cost of switching is very low unless you're talking about their hardware, which is hardly successful much less dominant.

Windows and Internet Explorer always had competition. The cost of switching to Netscape and later Firefox was extremely low. That did not stop people from referring to Windows and IE as monopolies in the past. With Windows, some still call it a monopoly today.

The most disgusting part is they are unfairly using their search and ads (i.e. data) to set up subsidiaries to compete with their own ad customers and bid up the price of ads to their own customers.

Say you are an airline or airfare aggregator. Google knows the market size (search), they have a good idea of your marketing budget and online ROI. Once they see you have a thriving business/product/industry they create their own competitor. Organically Google's competitor will float to the top of Search, if they don't outright make a "native" interactive tool that appears above ads and organic search results. As if thats not shady enough, they start buying their own ads (money is just going from their left hand to their right hand) which now the cost of ads for you has increased because you are competing with a Google company that is getting them for free. Now your options are spend more on ads for a smaller slice of the market or just packup an go home leaving Google as the industry leader (which based on history they really didn't even want in the first place as they are likely to deprecate their product, leaving the market with no product/service provider).