If Google can't influence this, then there will be other platform owners who will the ones with all the margins. A world where Microsoft and Apple just squeeze all the profit out of the internet is not obviously (at least to me) better than one where they can't.
Market power is a difficult thing to wrangle. There isn't going to be any policy which can't eventually be worked around by some party. The policy has to evolve with the landscape.
It's more like you know that someone is manipulating the bets on the horse race, possibly even forcing results by paying off the competitors. If you do nothing, you are picking winners (the betting house) and loosers (the betters), if you do something you reverse that.
So which is it? Can you help me out here?
As for myself, I'm certain that silence is not consent. It's a freely-made choice not to take part in something.
Thus, doing nothing is not equivalent to picking winners. Picking winners is when you ... wait for it ... pick winners.
Not in all situations, doing nothing is doing nothing. Take the famous trolley problem. By doing nothing you pick 5 people to die, if you do something you pick 1 person to die. One of those will come true, either inaction or action will determine which. But that also means your inaction is an action of yours to force an outcome. This doesn't necessarily mean it's the outcome you want or the outcome that is preferred. Inaction can be the worst type of action to take in some scenarios, but it is the action of non-intervention that creates an outcome regardless. Inaction doesn't mean you consent to the outcome either.
If you are not in a position of authority, whoever is in that position can’t take your silence as consent of their choices.
For the former, the idea (I think) is that if you don't consent to something, speak up to make a difference.
In the latter, it's more that one should not assume consent on the part of another, presumably in the context of a sexual partner.
Governments are nowhere near that level of rigour or coherency, especially if you look at EU anti-trust. The USA at least requires the government to demonstrate some actual harm to consumers in court. EU anti-trust requires a single bureaucrat to decide that competitors were harmed, and they can then levy any fine they like which goes straight into the EU Commission's coffers. It can only be appealed in some sort of court after the fine is paid, and the court is packed with judges who want to see the EU expand (via spending), so that's cold comfort.
That approach is incoherent: the whole point of capitalist competition is that the better firm in some sense harms the weaker firm by taking away its customers. And giving the referee the power to transfer money from the competitors to their own pockets at will, without needing to convince anyone else at all, is clearly an enormous conflict of interest.
Many arguments about anti-trust do implicitly assume the US model, which at least has some tenuous connection to harm to the general public. That isn't really true internationally, yet ramped up anti-trust in the USA would absolutely be taken as a green light by other parts of the world to whack US firms with enormous fines for conduct that isn't actually bad in any way.
Have you ever watched sports? The referee always has an impact whether they blow the whistle or not. Every rule requires some level of interpretation or fitting to a given situation. Some sports (mainly soccer) don't have rules, they explicitly have "laws of the game" because it's understood that they are to be interpreted.
> That approach is incoherent: the whole point of capitalist competition is that the better firm in some sense harms the weaker firm by taking away its customers. And giving the referee the power to transfer money from the competitors to their own pockets at will, without needing to convince anyone else at all, is clearly an enormous conflict of interest.
...you know regulators don't get to keep any money right? Their job is to set market rules, enforce them, and break up any competitor who gains too much market power. Where exactly is the conflict of interest? Historically, most shareholders wind up making more money off the future value of the broken-up interests than they did with the original conglomerate.
It seems like you are arguing from an EU standpoint, and I don't know anything about their antitrust history, so I'm not going to try and defend or interpret what Europe does.
This is exactly my point. They don't ... in America. In the EU anti-trust fines are both created by and collected by the Commission, specifically, a high ranking Commissioner. Those people are selected not for any particular expertise in their subject area but rather nominated by countries and selected for political reasons. The money goes straight into the general budget of the Commissioner's employer, and then handed out in "solidarity" payments, subsidies, bureaucrat salaries and other priorities of the Commission.
One of the reasons Americans are so “anti-bureaucracy” is because of precious bureaucratic oversteps.
It’s pretty well established the EUs administrators strongly value the influence I’d their own agencies (with some exceptions).
A good US example is the military. Army, Navy, Marines, etc. are in constant competition. Do any of the generals or admirals get to take home their funding?
It's an interesting point. To me it has merit.
If you look at the breakup of Ma Bell, I think you’ll doubt the government’s ability to break up a company properly.
Did busting kingpins solve the drug problem?
Who in their right mind decided that the solution to a national monopoly is a handful of regional monopolies...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Bell_Operating_Compan...
> In the early 1970s, American antitrust regulators became suspicious that Bell was abusing its monopoly power, and in 1974 the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice brought a lawsuit against Bell claiming violations of the Sherman Act. In 1982, feeling that it could not win, Bell agreed to a Justice Department-mandated consent decree that settled the lawsuit and ordered it to break itself up into seven "Regional Bell Operating Companies" (known as "The Baby Bells"), which it did in 1984, ending the original company's existence. These "Baby Bells" are now independent companies, and several of them are very large corporations in their own right, such as AT&T, Verizon Communications, and CenturyLink.
I'm not thrilled by the idea either, but I'd prefer it to another round of IE6. When it comes to dealing with monopolies I think you're solidly in the realm of looking for the least bad choice.
I’m surprised no ones even noticed that Portals are basically AMP Supercharged to where you’d never leave Google. Truly dystopian future they’re trying to slowly cement.
Reminds me of the Browser Wars of yesteryear, when Microsoft and Netscape invented their own unnecessary, easily abused, proprietary HTML tags, such as blink and marquee.
But my memory at the time is that there were essentially no effective, consensus-based evolutions of web standards, because everything was so new.
Even the idea of running executable code in a browser at all was "That's weird. Is this a thing we want to do?" and resulted in 10+ variations (of which javascript ultimately triumphed).
It was certainly a worse time for the consumer, and web developer, as essentially everything was broken on every platform but your target w/ your target plugin installs.
uhhhh, doesn't Google pay Apple billions to be the default search engine on iOS? That's not "forced to pay for access", but "choses to make a business deal that costs them billions to make them billions more"
"Forced" here doesn't mean coerced, more in the sense of "forced error"; ie., as a move within a game than an opponent forces you to make.
[0]https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/15/21370020/mozilla-google-f...
The "issue" is that they are charging for something the users would set themselves, and otherwise, already want.
Google is being "forced" into paying for this only because apple is willing to act against its users preferences, and eg., set a Bing default.
> If the platform invited the user to set a default, or was "biased towards their user's preferences", as most would select google, google would be the "natural default".
You almost make it sound like defaulting to Google without making people aware of the alternatives is “open” and unbiased.”
I get that iOS is closed down, but I'm a bit confused how being "open" would resolve the fact that a default search engine for Safari is set? You can still change your search engine on iOS (to one of few the browser ships with, Google, Yahoo, Bing and Duck Duck Go in UK)
Firefox is completely open/open source (isnt it?), yet Google pays Firefox for being the default search engine.
Open vs Closed has nothing to do with this. Google wants to be the default in browsers, and it choses to pay for the luxury.
If the platform invited the user to set a default, or was "biased towards their user's preferences", as most would select google, google would be the "natural default".
There is a sort of mild rent-seeking / racketeering in asking google to pay to configure a service Apple provides, to a default Apple's users would chose for themselves.
Google is quite fortunate that Apple doesn't block web ads or intercept web payments and charge a platform fee for that.
Google pushes Chrome EVERYWHERE
Now that Chrome is the leading browser they are turning off targeting for everyone else, so that only Google has access to target users
The solution is to STOP the monopoly of Search
So that a new thing like Google Chrome can't happen i.e. Search can't be used to take over another space
Consider that Verizon and AT&T, the two largest mobile phone providers in the US, are both Baby Bells resulting from the break-up of Bell Telephone Company in an anti-trust action. They compete strongly against each other, in a way that would absolutely not be true if they were still the same company.
If someone who owned a share of Search Google managed to get a controlling interest in Ad Google and was operating it to benefit Search Google to the detriment of Ad Google's minority shareholders, that would be one of the rare cases where a court would intervene.
That's fine, but "fiduciary duty" is a specific legal concept and you are misusing it. Making shareholders angry enough to vote you off the board is not the same thing.
Also, it's worth noting that institutional investors often rubber-stamp the board's recommendations in shareholder votes. One side effect of the rise of passive funds is that there is less shareholder opposition to board moves nowadays.
No, they don't. In fact, I can't find any that involve maximizing anything.
Also, filing a lawsuit is trivial. Succeeding is a whole other kettle of fish.
That's exactly the myth the above link is about, btw.
What - in detail - does this mean?
Because it doesn't appear true in anyway I can see. I can still buy ads exactly the same way targeting the same characteristics I've always been able to.
Meaning there will be a ton of news about their case but the whole thing will disappear in a puff of settlement-smoke ten months after an incoming president takes office?
I remember trying to figure out how to intervene as a non-lawyer and eventually giving up without filing anything. After giving a pitiful offer of a few dollars per class member, they had it such that the rest would be donated to the schools (Apple's last stronghold at the time) and could only be used for new, whole computers, not peripherals or other stuff. This was such a bogus restriction to put on the money that it made my jaw drop. But not being a lawyer, all I knew was that a pro se filing was likely to be ignored.
If I had to do it over again, I would love to have argued about how the settlement was calculated to create a new anti-trust injury and would have requested relief by having a guardian ad litem for the class, after rejecting the current offer. Still not sure it would've gone anywhere, but maybe it would've at least pushed back at the nonsense.
Entertain the rest of us, of course!
If that ever happened, I think that would be a vast improvement. There is much more to the internet than just the web and a handful of ports used by browsers.
Internet advertising mainly lives on the web; it's maninly delivered through those ports opened for the web/apps.
And those are way more annoying, since they're baked into thected by ad blockers...
Google is able to invest in and made Chrome popular using cash from their advertising business, and Chrome's popularity allows Google to shape the web environment for their advertising business. If Google were to lose Google Chrome, there is nothing that would prevent them from directly or indirectly evolving Chromium. If Google is prevented from making a browser, then they could even move the focus of computing away from the web browser with power from their search business.
Therefore, antitrust oversight is required to curb the types of behavior that lead to the antitrust situation in the first place.