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> There are other ways to build a business that don't depend on search. There are also other ways to run a household that don't depend on running water. (Heck,
by zeteo 9y ago
> There are other ways to build a business that don't depend on search.
There are also other ways to run a household that don't depend on running water. (Heck, my great-grandpa never complained about having an outhouse.) Are you saying your local water utility should be an unregulated monopoly?
- scarface74 9y agoYes and there are plenty of houses that couldn't get water from the municipality and got their water from a well. My grandparents had a well for 30 years.
- kemiller2002 9y agoActually, I live in the middle of a city, and I still can't get water from the municipality.
- giggles_giggles 9y agoWho exactly regulates the sewer/water monopoly held by a local government? I cannot even begin to explain the insidious local politics surrounding the local water utility in the city where my folks used to live and the way they forced homeowners to hook up to the ever-expanding sewer at cost to the homeowners, regardless of whether their existing septic systems were adequate or not, to pad the pockets of the contractors paid by the city and to aid in further annexation of the area outside the city. A water utility run by the local government as a monopoly is only regulated by local politics, and if you have any experience with local politics you know that's mostly just figuring out who's the biggest good ol' boy.
- zeteo 9y agoLocal politics might be bad, but it'd be far worse to have it run by Google. They'd never pick up your customer support calls; they'd be more concerned with using ML to figure out when you sh*t and when you shower (valuable data for advertisers, you see). Also they'd randomly remove you from the network all the time for no apparent reason.
- giggles_giggles 9y agoI see where you're coming from (and your comment is very funny) however my experience with Google Fiber as an ISP and Google's Project Fi as an MVNO is pretty much the opposite. They've been great, including customer service. And those are utilities, essentially, no? That's the whole argument behind Net Neutrality, that ISPs are providing a utility.
- zeteo 9y agoGoogle Fiber is relatively small. Google itself was not a bad company when it was small ("don't be evil" and all that).
- fixermark 9y agoYou seem to be trying to build an analogy between a person's right to a material necessity and a corporation's right to a convenient market. I don't think the analogy holds. (The flip side would be "Are you saying Google should be a nationalized, government-regulated search engine?")
- rayiner 9y agoMunicipal sewer/water isn't a material necessity, they're a convenience. There are million dollar houses in the D.C. suburbs that have well water/septic.
- fixermark 9y agoThat's true. "Any water" is a material necessity (I think I'd argue "any sewer" too, if you plan to not pick up and nomad yourself around every few weeks). If you can self-supply it, that's fine.
- zeteo 9y agoWell how do we define a necessity? Running water, electricity and telephone service were all a luxury at some point. But now people have come to rely on them, to the point where it would be socially devastating to stop providing these services. Using an Internet search engine is no longer a luxury either. At the very least, Google should have a more transparent and accountable process, since a lot of people and companies have come to depend on its search engine functioning properly.