Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a public utility

Re:Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a... by whimsicalism on Tuesday June 08, 2021 @05:50PM (#27441384)

I would rather be governed by a public actor with constraints than the arbitrary interference of a private actor.

This is the core republican (as in the political philosophy: Discourses on Livy, Philip Pettit, etc.) insight. If you want a stable society, you cannot leave space for arbitrary private individuals to become domineering forces on the rest of society. It's literally textbook how civilizations will fall, yet as a species we seem incapable of avoiding our own mistakes.

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Re:Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a... by wyager on Tuesday June 08, 2021 @06:12PM (#27441706)

Google is more effectively constrained than, say, the US federal government.

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Re:Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a... by whimsicalism on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @11:58AM (#27449412)

Google is effectively unconstrained, so hard to see how that could possibly be the case.

Sure, the government has more power, but it is also more constrained. There is no public control of Google, it is not a publicly sanctioned power.

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Re:Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a... by wyager on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @04:45PM (#27453003)

> Google is effectively unconstrained

Google is many orders of magnitude less likely to kill someone (legally or extralegally) or seize their assets than US government.

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