Conflating AT&T to Google is incredibly misleading. AT&T had become a defacto monopoly approx. 20 years prior to that consent decree, not to mention being subje

Conflating AT&T to Google is incredibly misleading. AT&T had become a defacto monopoly approx. 20 years prior to that consent decree, not to mention being subjected to an anti-trust lawsuit ten years prior to the decree. The article makes the conceit of equating an online data store to the telephone infrastructure. Google is not preventing other companies from indexing the internet in any way, shape or form. There is no barrier to another company building a similar data store from scratch using the existing internet infrastructure. On the other hand, laying out your own wires has physical limitations, especially when another company has claimed the most optimal route. In such a scenario, your costs will always exceed theirs (more infrastructure to reach the same consumers). Regarding forcing Google to use the same index: How does DoJ plan to enforce this? How would DoJ ever be sure that Google is in compliance? I once again assert that the law magically assumes new technology to solve old technology problems without fundamentally understanding how computers work. Computers are copy-on-write by design. Delete always requires an extra step, and the verification that only one copy exists is impossible to make in the digital domain.