It is up then to each person reading the records to decide if a crime is old enough or unimportant enough to not matter. That should not be the decision of internet censors or courts who want to sweep their traces under the rug. Or criminals wanting to do that.
If most people think that drug use is not something a person should be trialed for, then the laws need to be changed. Censoring doesn't remove the fact. It just removes discourse to the realm of gossip.
"He who controls the past controls the present, and he who controls the present controls the future."
A private monopoly is accountable to only the owner. May as well be feudalism. In a liberal democracy, government monopolies have accountability to the people. When that is subverted or corrupted, it sucks, but at least there's a mechanism.
There's no such mechanism with a private monopoly.
Third parties bake this into things like Web Application Firewall (WAF) rules. For example, Azure App Gateway WAF has a policy category for “known bots” which includes Google but excludes your tiny AI startup.
It’s a moat built by giant corporations to keep tiny players in their place.
Google "helpfully" publishes their bot source IP addresses: https://developers.google.com/static/search/apis/ipranges/go...
AWS also provides named rules such as "bot:name:googlebot": https://docs.aws.amazon.com/waf/latest/developerguide/aws-ma...
Would you host your e-commerce or social media site on a cloud provider that blocked Googlebot?
It's not Microsoft giving Google a handout out of the goodness of their hearts; it's Azure customers demanding that functionality. (Those Azure customers also don't care about a random little search startup and probably don't want to pay any egress fees to serve traffic to it.)
AWS offers it: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/waf/latest/developerguide/waf-bo...
Oracle as well: https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/WAF/Bot/good_bot_...
Akamai as well: https://www.akamai.com/products/bot-manager
So why should we take Satya's testimony seriously? Azure is a Microsoft product and if what you're saying is true, Microsoft is part of the problem.
Respectfully disagree in Google's case. Indexing is not their only advantage - having full, unfettered access and control over email, maps, Android play, cloud, and the other myriad divisions plus knows what else via side deals is too much and fully justifies breaking up the business.
Your suggestion works if we were still 2002-ish, before they got too big
Bing, Outlook, Bing Maps, Microsoft Store, Azure, Windows, Edge, Office, OneDrive, XBOX division, and more.
If they can't compete with Google, then maybe they aren't offering as good a service for most of these, and it's not for lack of trying to manipulate the market into using their services.
I do agree with what you said though, both Alphabet and Microsoft should be broken up, and I don't mean just having multiple separate companies that operate closely together, but proper separation. This also goes for META and Amazon.
You literally can't make a mobile phone today without having support for all Google services. Native support is better than 3rd party. And now all of your user's data is in Google's hands.
Yes, there are some extreme ... fanatics(?), who can live with a phone that doesn't have YouTube, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Drive or Play Store in it, but the Joe/Jill Regular will never ever go for that today.
Of all the companies beside Apple, Samsung is the only one I can think of with the muscle to maybe do a device with all of their own services.
I would fit your definition of fanatic and I have a friend who does too. The only google service we still use is YouTube because that’s the hardest one to replace entirely unless you want to cut yourself from a lot of very interesting and entertaining content. Otherwise it’s not so hard. Gmail is hardly the best offering on the market, Apple Maps are good enough for most tasks (Google Maps still has better POI data sadly), etc. You don’t need to be a “fanatic” to de-googleify your life, even if only partially.
My point was that there's a snowball's chance in hell for a third party in addition to Google and Apple to come on to the market with a de-googled mainstream device.
Microsoft had a chance with Windows Mobile, but they messed it up.
But sure. Kill your software industry. Does the US even know to do anything else? Does the US even manufacture anything physical anymore? Last I checked tiny little Denmark produces more wind turbines than the US and tiny little Switzerland produces more CNC machines than the US.
The US economy is a complete dumpster fire for those of us worth less than seven figures. Big tech monopolization does not strengthen our productive capacity, and breaking up the big tech companies won't weaken it. If anything, it will strengthen the economy by making it more viable to found a tech startup without the explicit goal of being bought out. We aren't "killing" our software industry; we're revitalizing it.
Not sure what you mean, you can invest in VTI, wait 30 years, and hit 7 figures real. The US economy is stronger than almost every other economy on the planet and is so even for the non-rich.
Look at the risks a poorer person in the US has to contend with, many of them life-ending expensive, as well as the difficulty of finding places to live that offer decent job markets, services, amenities, and are affordable.
Life here can get really ugly for people that are well above the 'poverty line'. That's not to say it's really the overall economy making things hard for them, but more like microeconomic constraints. However, that's the lens they see the economy through.
I think a better parallel is the late-20s early-30s Robber Baron breakups. There's been much ink and elections spilled over how that anti-trust era contributed directly to the proliferation of post-war innovation (e.g. https://bookshop.org/p/books/goliath-the-100-year-war-betwee...)
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/manufactu...
These "internal" purposes included growing your social network, monitoring or reverse-engineering the algorithms of competing search engines, and now, it includes training ML.
Which is funny given that when others are doing it to them, they go to great lengths to stop it, and sometimes complain loudly or threaten lawsuits.
I think the main reason the big players don't sue each other is that it's a bit of a Mutual Assured Destruction kind of a deal. Google is doing it to Microsoft, Microsoft is doing it to Google...
That can add up to a serious percentage of the web.
The government forcing restrictions on companies that people choose freely is extremely dangerous and will definitely be used for political reasons.
First of all, no website owner in their right mind is going to block Bing.
Second of all, they have to detect that you're a bot in the first place. Most sites don't employ sophisticated anti-bot technology. Simply running a headless browser (which you need to do anyways for JavaScript) with a common user-agent, and slow enough browsing not to be rate-limited, will let you index 99.9+% of sites.
If you have a wide low-traffic website then bots of all sorts will make a majority of your traffic and subsequently a majority of your AWS costs.
If you see money spent on search engine X indexing and very few users incoming from that search engine it's a rational decision to block it. Or ask for money (that actually happens).
Overall it's a systematic problem with building a search competitor: 1) Your costs are largely proportional to the size of your index 2) Your income is proportional to your userbase 3) You need a huge index to be competitive even if you don't have any users yet
So, very hard to bootstrap even when you exclude all other advantages of the existing monopoly like browser-based distribution.
Microsoft has the money to beat the indexing problem so they argue about distribution in court but all the small players can't even get to that level of failure.
If by "many" you mean "less than 0.1%". Nearly all sites want traffic, which search engines provide.
And you're moving the goalposts from the commenter I was responding to.
Nobody disputes it takes a large capital investment to create an index in the first place. But this is the business world -- that's what investors are for.
But the idea that websites provide their public content to Google and leave other crawlers with no way to access it is simply untrue. That is not a factor hindering competition.
You don't seem to grasp the problem of indexing. If search engine fetches 100M pages but only brings 100 users it's a net loss for the website because of server costs. This means that a marginal player cannot index a big website.
I'm aware of at least one website from top20 that actively blocked crawlers other than Google citing this as a reason. And this website has tons of high-quality ugc that ranks at the top on many nontrivial queries. A huge blow to search quality when absent.
Having said that, it's true that for big search engines the issue is mostly distribution. However for small players it's distribution AND indexing and in the end they have to resort to buying the search results from big players.
How can that be blamed on Google?
No, I don't think that's true. I am writing a web crawler, not for search purposes, and I haven't seen preferential treatment for GoogleBot compared to others. Sure, some might be banned outright (though bad crawlers just ignore robots.txt and do whatever they want), but in most cases new bots have the same access rights than GoogleBot.
Also, your sentence doesn't pass the sniff test: you claim Google has better access than all other crawlers; but robots.txt is solely in the hands of the webmaster. How does Google coerce most website owners to block other bots? There is no conspiracy at play here.
I've often said that the "breaking up" of Google that makes the most sense is to split the crawling/indexing service from the rest of the company. Similar to the way telecoms companies were forced -- in some countries -- to open up access to e.g. DSL infrastructure.
Because Googlebot is actually _friendly_.
O boy are there bad bots out there for search engines that often DDOS your site to shit.
Yandex is probably the worst out there from experience. Not only will it hammer you, they put in extremely aggressive retries such that even if you ban it temporarily for 4 hours, the literal second your IP block of their spiders expire, they will flood you with requests, and they don't even know how long the ban is, their bots just keep trying and trying.
Just imagine TikTok, then have that applied to Search, Mail, etc.
Do you want this?
The problem is bigger the other way around I would say. That Google, AWS, Azure and so on use the same AS numbers for private and public cloud. It is not easy to detect if it really is the Google bot or some low-lifes performing DOS-attacks from GCP. Many attacks, especially state sponsored attacks, comes from trusted clouds.
This makes it literally impossible for anyone to make a competing search engine because millions of doors are slammed in their face. There is no practical way to negotiate access at this scale either leaving no options for small startups — e.g.: AI-based search!
One possible anti-monopoly measure would be to force Google to mask the identity of their bots. E.g.: force them to use a random IP address pool that third parties can also use without their permission.
IMHO breaking up corporations is a bit heavy-handed and not the only remedy available.