You're talking about elected officials. Transparency of beliefs is exactly what you should want. That's the entire point.
> Right now, it almost feels like "We don't like Google, and we gotta throw the book at them so that at least some page sticks". This attitude is akin to selectively weaponizing the law.
Senator Warren is a lawmaker. She makes the laws. Throwing the book is the job of the executive or judicial branch. Hopefully Senator Warren has a good reason to justify her beliefs that the people agree with, but if she believes Google is bad for society in specific ways, it is literally her job to create laws that make it more difficult from them to do that. This article is about the justice department doing things and Senator Warren is mentioned as encouraging them to move faster as an aside.
> it explains why, for example, no one cares about Comcast
Senator Warren does. https://thegrio.com/2019/12/20/elizabeth-warren-blasts-comca...
I don't have any particular thoughts on Warren. But I do think large tech companies wield too much power and should be broken up to reduce this power. I would vote for lawmakers who felt similarly. That's about it. I'd be down for a political platform that is exclusively just wanting to reduce the influence of a handful of specific companies.
A big reason companies like Comcast largely stay under the radar is that they donate to many legislators in both parties in Congress, and they have money to mount challenges to legislators that don’t toe the line. Comcast maintains stability of their influence. Going after Comcast wouldn’t likely yield much while risking political capital.
Google OTOH has created a lot of enemies in both parties. There’s political momentum to knock them down a peg by the progressive left and the far right, albeit for different reasons. When you start to see that kind of consensus forming, the likelihood of action taken against them increases.
> The government has a lot of power, and often for good reason, but that power can only be respected when it is wielded dispassionately, not to settle personal scores.
This statement fundamentally ignores the reality of politics, particularly in our current era. To suggest that government is capable of acting dispassionately is to ignore the long and deep personal conflicts that have existed throughout history. It ignores the reality that money and influence, both of which are deployed to deeply personal ends on both sides of the political spectrum. Political power can not be wielded dispassionately because political power can not be attained dispassionately.
Government is a massive beast doing all kinds of things at the same time. For example only 12% of all US governmental employees work for the federal government, it’s 24% at the state level, and 63% at the local level. The overwhelming majority of what the government does is run schools, libraries, maintain infrastructure etc in a rather banal fashion.
What makes the news are the rare exceptions which people actually find interesting. The 600,000+ bridges making life a little easier are generally background noise, but when just 1 fails that’s potentially national news etc.
There's already a lot of regulation addressing traditional telecommunication, as the result of past lawsuits or FCC action, so I don't think this statement holds much water.
Say for example the numerous regulation on advertisement in children's programming[1] which had huge impact on the business of cable tv. No such thing exists for Youtube Kids, say. Compared to the wild west that is digital advertising, traditional telecoms actually are subject to a huge amount of constraints already.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulations_on_children%27s_te...
I for one am happy to see the outcome of a fair and legal trial, whatever the impetus.
In that scenario, I'd say 6 parties are acting improperly: all 5 companies plus the government.
The biggest chunk of US S&P 500 market cap is FAANG stocks.
Politicians are supposed to represent their constituents. I only wish my senator was as passionately outspoken as Senator Warren.
It's ok for lawmakers to dislike a specific corporations and make specific laws against that corporation. Matter of fact, many on HN (self included) would be well represented by a politician introducing law to specifically disband Alphabet.
> The government has a lot of power, and often for good reason, but that power can only be respected when it is wielded dispassionately, not to settle personal scores.
Than how should the people settle scores against these companies? Do you recommend torches or pitchforks? I thought law makers representing the people and passing popular laws was a more democractic way?
I don't know if you work at google but no one (except a few extremists) had suggested anything more than a profit loss for your company.
To clarify further, I have severe disdain against google due to their arrogance pattern of very dangerous and harmful anti-consent activites that undermines the very concept of individual freedom.
You might have a score to settle with a (former) friend for sleeping with your sibling as a breach in etiquette but that isn't a matter for the law. Score is too expansice a term. Apply it in politicians context and the abuses become horrifying as in "we testified before congress that the bill was an ill considered mess so now face retaliation". Allowing that strong arming is not justice.
The alternative is that nothing will ever stick against them.
If politicians never engaged in polically motivated anti trust enforcement, then no anti trust enforcement would ever happen.
And that sounds much worse.
There’s a largely apolitical organization that is supposed to bring antitrust cases under a structure set up by congress.
Sore, politicians can and do champion specific issues (in the case of antitrust, Teddy Roosevelt comes to mind) but by and large you’d prefer that the politicians remained high level (let’s have a structure to help keep the air clean) and the bureaucracy remained low level (let’s see what we can do about NOx emissions).
If all antitrust had to originate in congress there would hardly have been any, ever.
And yet here we are, living in a world where anti trust action is long past due.
That would be great if they were taking more action against blatant violations of anti trust law.
But that's not happening enough. And since it is not happening enough, we should support any possible wins that we get.
You should not be advocating against these anti trust enforcement acts. Instead, you should be arguing that more anti trust enforcement is done.
> you’d prefer that the politicians remained high level
How about, we all just support more anti trust enforcement, because clearly there isn't enough of it happening.
Anti-trust regulations are not supposed to be used as generic legal cudgels against corporations you don't like. They are supposed to be, you know, for making sure that the market remains sane.
Right now, it almost feels like "We don't like Google, and we gotta throw the book at them so that at least some page sticks". This attitude is akin to selectively weaponizing the law. Kinda like the landlord finding a reason to evict you so he combs through the lease agreement and finds a clause that your curtains need to be white but you actually have pale yellow ones. Sure, you are technically in violation of the lease, but it's very clear why this is being done, and the curtains have little to do with it.
And it explains why, for example, no one cares about Comcast or the fact that a handful of payment processors basically run their personal fiefdoms about who or what they will allow on their platform, while we are asked to be over-worried by vague claims of 'Russian tampering'.
Application of these regulations should again focus on the actual harms rather than getting some kind of cruel pleasure 'destroying' companies. The government has a lot of power, and often for good reason, but that power can only be respected when it is wielded dispassionately, not to settle personal scores.