Unfortunately a lot of HN readers are dismissing this or calling it partisan grandstanding, just because it's Texas that filed it.
I don't doubt they "won" in the end, but I'm baffled that they brag about "competing" like that.
Oracle for years secretly lobbied states, Justice Department to sue Google - Bloomberg (2020-12-23)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-23/oracle-fo...
where can I read more on why they allowed this?
To think, just a decade ago, this article seemed paranoid, to the point where even the author seemed to think it was an oversight in the Terms of Service:
https://techland.time.com/2012/04/26/will-google-drive-snoop...
Interestingly, they give (gave?) themselves redistribution and performance rights for Drive contents at the same time. How long until they start openly using those rights, I wonder?
Drive is unencrypted because it is indexed for personal search. What is the snooping part?
> redistribution and performance rights for Drive
This is completely standard and required so that they can provide syncing and sharing.
I am aware that Whatsapp does this and have avoided Whatsapp’s Google Drive backup overall.
This is really not true. I was able to find the previous discussion on HN where someone linked to the Github issue about this design decision: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/3133 . Note the root goal of this was actually to get non-AMP ads to run faster. This was all fully transparent, and was not some nefarious hidden functionality that Google tacked on in the hopes of tanking other ad networks.
Look, I hate AMP as much as your average HN poster, and I don't really disagree that Google is willing to make "technological improvements" as long as they hurt the other guy, and not Google. But I think the discussion gets better, not worse, when folks are more honest about the real reasoning behind why something is implemented the way it is.
My fear is that they are not going to jail or paying fines, they are being exiled... to our universe!
Not on AMP pages. AMP's design prevents user-visible reflow.
(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself.)
AMP had several design goals, one of which was that it should be impossible to create pages with certain types of bad user experience, including reflow. An AMP page requires that every element on the page be sized only by information directly visible in the HTML (including inline CSS, but no inline JS) which allows the browser to lay the whole page out immediately. When an ad loads off screen there can be a request to the AMP runtime to resize the slot, but the runtime will reject the request if the resize might cause user visible effects.
More details: https://blog.amp.dev/2020/04/16/cumulative-layout-shift-in-a...
Example ad networks that work well with delayed ads (that don't jump) include Mediavine and AdThrive.
It’s literally changed my internet experience in my home.
I had multiple instances of sites just not working because of the pihole was blocking something. This would result in me putting it in non-block mode for a little bit, rinse and repeat. I can't have that kind of hassle when non-technical people use the internet too. At least with per-device adblockers it's a single click to disable/enable the adblocker if a site is acting funny.
Basically, it wasn't any faster than just blocking ads on the device itself & added another thing on the network for me to manage.
It took about 2/3 hours of work though.
Or of hanging an air freshener on your rearview mirror: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/04/12/us/police-shooting-air-fr...
I don't know, but the US penal system needs a revamp anyhow.
When some character fudges a spreadsheet or sets up a viscous cycle in business, it is more abstract. We’ve all done it to some degree (received an undeserved discount, more change than owed, etc), and the black and white “wrongness” varies.
Another consideration is that the punishment for white collar crime is very severe in terms of loss of agency and autonomy. Once you’re convicted of a felony, you’re kryptonite — you’re trading your comfy middle class existence for something riskier and worse. Typical suburban punter is losing most of your friends and probably your home and spouse. The kids lose their nice school or get stuck in a grubby apartment. White collar criminals have more to lose, so the punishment standard is different.
> "I Worked It Out. You Have Killed Two Point Three Three Eight People," said the golem calmly.
> "I have never laid a finger on anyone in my life, Mr Pump. I may be–– all the things you know I am, but I am not a killer! I have never so much as drawn a sword!"
> "No, You Have Not. But You Have Stolen, Embezzled, Defrauded And Swindled Without Discrimination, Mr Lipvig. You Have Ruined Businesses And Destroyed Jobs. When Banks Fail, It Is Seldom Bankers Who Starve. Your Actions Have Taken Money From Those Who Had Little Enough To Begin With. In A Myriad Small Ways You Have Hastened The Deaths Of Many. You Do Not Know Them. You Did Not See Them Bleed. But You Snatched Bread From Their Mouths And Tore Clothes From Their Backs. For Sport, Mr Lipvig. For Sport. For The Joy Of The Game.”
White-collar crime has effects. Every time people are encouraged to clock out, then clean up their station, that's 15 minutes of wage theft. Heck, sometimes this becomes so common that the criminals work to make it legal. Every time that Amazon has their mandatory daily exit screening, that's 30-60 minutes of time that should be on the clock, but is completely unpaid, legal and SCOTUS-approved, and wildly unethical.
The parent comment quoted saying they were loading their ads before ads from competitor networks. Noone said anything about Jan 6, or anything touching on the event.
You are obviously trying to shift the conversation away from how Google controls AMP and apparently used it to gain an advantage in the ad market (basically an antitrust issue) to a partisan political conversation.
On the other hand, Wall Street put many people's loved ones in clear danger, leaving them in the street, without jobs and without health insurance in 2008 and none of them went to jail.
Yeah, no, you really couldn't. It sounds like you've never been the victim of direct, physical violence, and the psychological effects it causes.
If it's not going to be imprisonment, then the fines need to be much quicker, and much higher; enough to threaten a corparation's viability. For some perspective the largest fine/court settlement in the past few years is VW US's, which was 37 billion, and vs. a tech firm the 2012 FTC settlement with facebook at 5 billion. EU's largest antitrust fine ever (vs. google in 2017) was just 2.4 billion. Those kind of costs are so low that they're unlikely to be preemptively discouraging, especially given how rare they are; alphabet's revenue in 2020 was 180 billion, and it's market cap is a little less than 10 times that.
Of course absurd fines that are rarely imposed are more like a reverse lottery than anything else; not exactly ideal either, really.
Which is why in new legislation, fines are proportional - GDPR has fines at max 4% of global yearly revenue or 100 million euros, whichever is higher.
Then of course there's the fact that the GDPR - possibly due to a bit of regulatory capture - very strongly encourages venue shopping, and with resources like that, bending a small venue (like Ireland) to your will even slightly is conceivably feasible, and valuable. Personally, I'm not too impressed by the implementation of the GDPR, even if the fact that it's finally on the agenda is a good thing. It may even exacerbate misuse of personal data, because the burdens it imposes are much harder to bear for small parties than for large ones; and that's a competitive moat that encourages centralization of private data, and that encourages shifting the balance of power toward the corporation away from the individual (who says no to google's privacy policy?), and the combination of "willing" users, a lax privacy policy, and huge centralization encourages misuse. Proportionally your local sports-club is likely more impacted than Google, which is absurd.
In other words, laughably low.
> or 100 million euros
Unless you're a small business, in which case they'll happily bury you.
And if you claim that the workers don't deserve it, well, then exactly who DOES deserve it?
Really the possibilities of solution to some of these issues are endless, limited only by our creativity. We're just stuck as a society with what we already have and there is huge push back against anything out of the ordinary or creative or different when it comes to government and our governance models.
The idea that white collar crimes don't damage people's lives is easily debunked: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/economic-do...
Seems like a horribly awful world to me - would you extend this to Ad blockers as well? And when was the last time you've seen how horrible mainstream web is, with its autoplaying video popups?
AMP isn't the best solution, but what you're proposing is just horrifying. If anything, we should standardize this behaviour in browsers and make sure the ads never interfere with loaded contents. Let's not destroy the web even more so ad peddlers get more money.
The parent comment quoted saying they were loading their ads before ads from competitor networks.
Noone said anything about when the content was loaded. Google is the largest ad peddler.
You are obviously trying to shift the conversation away from how Google controls AMP and apparently used it to gain an advantage in the ad market (basically an antitrust issue) towards a generic conversation of ads are bad, but Google is good.
The parent was complaing about corporations being large enough to ignore antitrust legislation.
That is a really horrible accusation of something I haven't done. The OP is the one proposing jail-like punishment for actions that only lower the ad revenue and actually benefit the customer. It has nothing to do with defending Google (especially since I'm also talking about AdBlockers, which could easily fall into "coporation allows adblockers to lower revenue" interpretation).
Please don't look for hidden agendas where there aren't any.
False, it only does that for their competition.
> The good news gets even better; non-AMP pages make considerably more revenue per pageview than AMP pages. Initially, I assumed this was due to the nature of how ads load on AMP, however, recent Antitrust lawsuits have proposed that hindering ad competition was a feature and that all non-amp ad tags, such as my company, Ezoic’s, were delayed by 1 second to make them less effective. It is also alleged that Google let their own exchange win, even when someone else bid more!
Somewhere, in a parallel universe, people are going to jail and paying substantial fines for this behavior. In this universe, however, politicians don’t seem to think there is a moral hazard in the fact that those of us who work in this industry see what happened and think, “if you get big enough, it doesn’t matter if you get caught.”