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I think a more fundamental problem is a single private company having a near-monopoly on various public communication channels, and having financial interests i

I think a more fundamental problem is a single private company having a near-monopoly on various public communication channels, and having financial interests in various global dictatorships. The Founding Fathers could not have predicted this. Google's "We're a private company" get-out-jail-free card cannot continue to apply.

shadowgovt 6y ago
But is it replaced with "I'm an American company?" There's a deep rabbit-hole of hyper-nationalism right next to the deep rabbit-hole of hyper-corporatism. Does a YouTube beholden to the US government get banned from being used in China at all? And if it does, what happens when China creates a competing product that is more successful than YouTube, and YouTube gets displaced globally by a product that is beholden to China's censorship policies in general, not just in isolated cases?
- dathinab 6y ago
  What if the laws against censoring content would be quite strict, then a censoring Chinese YouTube clone wouldn't even be possible. (In the countries where it's strict. Which could be the EU, US, Kanada, Japan and more. Through it would be more tricky for smaller China dependent countries or autocratic powers. But the other countries could push that through in the way they currently push through commercial interest like copy right).
- op03 6y ago
  Wikipedia is the way to go. Why have the hypercorporatists and hypernationalists not replaced it??? Because fuckers in both those camps think it has to make money as a condition to exist. It's their weakness. Requires imagination to exploit.
  - deyan 6y ago
    Wikipedia is very easy to game unfortunately.
    - hiram112 6y ago
      I don't consider Wikipedia a valid reference for anything more trivial than sports statistics or Hollywood trivia these days. I'd imagine the amount of blatant organized 'revisioning' by nation states, NGOs, for-profit corporations, and politically biased individuals is now dwarfing the objective individual contributors who once were the majority of Wikipedia's editors.
  - DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
    > Why have the hypercorporatists and hypernationalists not replaced it??? It’s not profitable. Nowhere near as many people would donate money/time/edits/content to Wikipedia if it wasn’t a registered non-profit - nor would they receive donated/subsidised hosting services from their providers - and if it’s for-profit they would need to run ads - and there’s no money in generic ads so they have to be either content-based ads (which immediately creates a perverse incentive for articles to be edited or biased in favour of the advertiser, which devalues the content of the encyclopaedia - or behavioural/tracking ads, which won’t be here for long due to expected incoming changes in browser handling of cookies and cross-site content) - which leaves behind only paywalling the encyclopaedia - and we saw how well that worked-out for Britannica, Collier’s, and Encarta. Wikipedia has a high-value because it’s a non-profit - as contradictory as that sounds.
    - adventured 6y ago
      > Wikipedia has a high-value because it’s a non-profit - as contradictory as that sounds. No question. It's the primary reason its community stuck with it across the many years it took to build it up, whereas the editor communities abandon for-profit content farms like Quora or Answers.com. > and there’s no money in generic ads Wikipedia could operate the encyclopedia side of itself with generic advertising. There is a lot of money in generic ads, relatively speaking, when you're dishing out static text content and some images at a billion page views per day (especially when the bulk of your platform's expansion is over, so your situation re expenses is increasingly stable). Could you run the encyclopedia thin for ~$20 million per year? Based on their budget history, you absolutely could. So could you bring in at least $20m in revenue via generic advertising, against several hundred million page views that you're able to show ads on (a bit larger than the English edition's daily page views; ie I'm heavily discounting monetizable traffic down from their global figures to tilt this even more conservatively)? You need a CPM of around a range of $0.10 to $0.15 to at least have a shot at making it work. It's a very low number for a super premium property that sits at the top of nearly every Google search result. You could make ten phone calls and trivially fill $20m in generic advertising every year. Pick up the phone and call: Google, Amazon, Walmart, Microsoft, Coca Cola, Procter & Gamble, Comcast, Unilever, Samsung, AT&T. At $2m each, you'd have to fight them off with a stick at those CPM rates for that reach. Procter & Gamble spends $10 billion globally on advertising, they wouldn't take $2m to slap their brands on Wikipedia? They'd probably take that every month if they could. Would any and all manner of advertising turn off visitors and editors? Probably. That's the far bigger problem than whether Wikipedia could bring in $20m per year in advertising on their massive traffic base. Not to mention that Google might (would) start viewing them as a competitor and might (would) downgrade their content placement to neuter that risk.
  - fennecfoxen 6y ago
    Comments like these have limited meaning in the context of a conversation about Google and YouTube. Wikipedia does not aspire to be YouTube. Wikipedia does not aspire to be Gmail. Wikipedia does not aspire to be a general-purpose search engine. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. You may be thinking of the various wiki brands run by the Wikimedia Foundation, which doesn't aspire to be any of these things, either, but at least entertains the aspiration of being a better Google News with WikiNews. (But do not confuse WikiNews with WikiTribune, the latter of which is a non-WMF project of Jimmy Wales, originally aspiring to be news, now aspiring to be a social network).
    - pasquinelli 6y ago
      I think they're saying that wikipedia is an example of media not designed to be profitable. Maybe there couldn't be a similar youtube, but there could be other platforms, like wikipedia, that aren't built for profit but to inform.
- 11thEarlOfMar 6y ago
  Hyper-nationalism is a backlash to globalism due to the recently realized risks of opaque governments exploiting transparent governments. The intentions were good: Reduce the risk of global nuclear war. The globalism outcome is good for trade and relations with nations that have transparent governments, bad with the opaque.
  - pokepim 6y ago
    Was it really bad for US until China started working on 5G and trying to become independent in semiconductor sector? Because until that time globalism was pretty profitable in terms of trade and relations for US.
    - jacquesm 6y ago
      > Because until that time globalism was pretty profitable in terms of trade and relations for US. It still is.
      - remarkEon 6y ago
        It's profitable for certain strata of economic classes and is destructive for most of the rest. But "in the aggregate the pie gets bigger", so Macroecon 101 is conserved. Yay.
        Avicebron 6y ago
        You're being downvoted for being right. People without stock market share or who work as FTE for the hyper-successful tech companies are the only ones befitting under the guise of "lifting up underprivileged people around the world". It's disingenuous at best, nefarious at worst.
    - bobthepanda 6y ago
      People have been going on about China in the US since their ascension to the WTO. Plenty of federal politicians have been elected on platforms for pushing hawkwish trade policy with China. Obama and Romney both ran with the policy of designating China a currency manipulator in 2008: https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/03/currency-manipulation-china-trump-000347/ https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/03/currency-manip...
- philwelch 6y ago
  I don’t consider that likely. There are many Chinese social media properties inside the Great Firewall but they haven’t ever had much success outside of it. Think about it, if a Chinese social media site could outcompete YouTube, they would just do it already anyway. If they can’t, they have to either block YouTube and have a Chinese clone propped up by an effectively protectionist policy or else try and get YouTube to cooperate with them.
  - knolax 6y ago
    tiktok.
- sho 6y ago
  > Does a YouTube beholden to the US government get banned from being used in China at all? You know YouTube is already banned in China, right?
JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> a single private company having a near-monopoly on various public communication channels Does Google rise to this level? Facebook, Twitter, cable TV and every newspaper and blog would seem to present a decent front of competition.
- cryptonector 6y ago
  Before 1988 in the U.S. we had "equal time" laws that required that broadcast media present both sides of political debates with "equal time" for each side. That's because for decades there were three sources of content: ABC, CBS, and NBC. Then cable and alternative radio ended that oligopoly for a while and those laws were removed. Now we have just a few mass media content producers and a few mass social media outlets. The situation is beginning to resemble that which existed for decades, from the 20s to the 80s, in broadcast media.
  - CamperBob2 6y ago
    Every individual is a "side," so the equal-time concept in broadcasting doesn't scale. It never really did, and this would only be more apparent if we tried to re-institute such a doctrine today.
  - akersten 6y ago
    Those "equal time" laws, more collectively the Fairness Doctrine, was struck down as unconstitutional because it forced broadcasters to host speech they did not agree with. Why would we expect to be able to force Google to host speech they disagree with?
    - ThrowawayR2 6y ago
      > "Why would we expect to be able to force Google to host speech they disagree with?" So what Google is doing with this particular epithet is fine is what you're saying? Sure hope there's no other cause that you champion that Google decides they disagree with someday.
    - bosswipe 6y ago
jshevek 6y ago
That is a bigger issue for our society, yes. But it's also understandable that people might be very interested in alleged problems that strike closer to home for them. In this case, if there is an issue worth considering at HN, exploring it could give insight into the larger issue as well.
toolz 6y ago
We have loads of communication channel alternatives. People freely choose google and should be allowed to continue freely choosing whatever platform they please. The idea that some governing body can better choose my communication platform for my personal needs than I can for myself doesn't seem logical from my point of view.
- artificial 6y ago
  The argument is a popular Authoritarian viewpoint that isn't viewed as such. Meanwhile the work towards decentralization continues, one day I hope it'll get the network effect akin to Bittorrent.
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    BT has about 170 million users (depending on who's counting). Hardly nothing. But in terms of network effect... YouTube has two billion users.
- teknologist 6y ago
  I don’t think it’s about a governing body making that decision for you. If all the policies and processes around censorship were laid out in the open for that to be considered when weighing up the options, people would be able to make more informed choices.
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  Ah yes, the idea that profit driven management is a better juror of freedom than our democratic society. Whatever they decide, they owe you no explanation or recourse. After all, these people are 'accountable' to wall street. To them 2008 and Boeing 737 were an unforceable turn of fortune, and they should bear no harm from it.
  - fieryscribe 6y ago
    Whatever the government decides, they rarely, if ever, provide an explanation or recourse either: the Patriot Act, Ahmad Arbury, TBTF, the assassination of Awlaki, snooping on Americans, Operation Fast and the Furious, the Pentagon's missing billions, Epstein's death, etc. I'm as pro-democracy as they come, but the belief that the government is somehow (and always) more accountable than companies strains credulity. Companies are accountable to Wall Street, which implies they're accountable to their consumers too. Shake Shack did not have to return the funds they received recently, but they did, because of media attention.
baq 6y ago
google search is a utility class service at this point, a tier below tap water and electricity. the world would be an objectively worse place without it for billions of people. with great power comes great responsibility is how the saying goes, but i can see them fighting tooth and nail to not be labeled as such. same for facebook and others like them.
- pb7 6y ago
  You're putting the cart before the horse. Google and Facebook are utilities but the Internet service you need to access them isn't. Seems a bit ridiculous, no?
  - baq 6y ago
    my bad for assuming that it goes without saying i guess? or that most people except us here can't tell the difference?
    - pb7 6y ago
      It is your bad for assuming. Telecoms will fight to the death to prevent Internet service from becoming a utility and you're acting like it's all but guaranteed. We're not even close to this reality.
      - baq 6y ago
        never said anything to the contrary, actually agree with everything here.
- root_axis 6y ago
  The suggestion that google search is comparable to water and electricity is absurd IMO. Google search is not needed to survive. There are also alternatives to google. Nothing about google's popularity precludes someone from using bing.com instead.
  - pirocks 6y ago
threwr234434 6y ago
The very first multi-national companies were neck deep in looting India and smuggling opium to China. The American founding fathers were very aware of this.
- Ericson2314 6y ago
  We were fanboys enough to use the East India Company flag, too.
- koheripbal 6y ago
  I don't see what this has to do with this conversation. Those companies were not censoring coffee shop or bar conversations of citizens WITHIN the United States. We aren't talking about economic monopoly exploitation - we're talking about monopoly control over domestic communications.
ashtonkem 6y ago
I’m always really worried about the unintended consequences of having the government regulate what Google can and cannot moderate on their platform. That strikes me as a larger free speech issue than our current system. I’d recommend just breaking Google’s monopoly; which is an idea that has more benefits and less downside risk.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > I’d recommend just breaking Google’s monopoly Would an independent YouTube be less susceptible to these requests?
  - koheripbal 6y ago
    Probably, as it would have fewer conflicts of interests and relationships with foreign dictatorships. ...but ideally, we would have multiple YouTube competitors, that would allow content creators vote with their choice to use Google.
    - JAlexoid 6y ago
      YouTube has multiple competitors. One of them is even a heavyweight - Facebook. Did you not realise that Facebook hosted videos? Maybe you're unaware that Instagram has Instagram TV section...
  - christophilus 6y ago
    This is the reason I really hope we see an uptick in distributed applications.
  - acituan 6y ago
    We don’t know, because right now youtube is one black box in Google’s finance sheets. We don’t know if it is a loss leader, which I think is very likely. Imagine youtube was a separate company that always ran in the red and another private company solely footed their bill. Would you trust YouTube’s neutrality then? Wouldn’t that explicate why competition is having difficulty emerging? Or imagine YouTube were to split into two; YouTube the distribution platform and YouTube the recommendation engine. Imagine Youtube the platform had to license content publicly. Now it is much more likely to have competition emerging and end users benefiting from it.
eeZah7Ux 6y ago
> a single private company having a near-monopoly on various public communication channels > The Founding Fathers could not have predicted this. Financial, political, religious entities controlling newspapers and book publishers is a problem known (and well documented) across thousands of years. Same for near-monopolies of means of transportation, materials, water, and other.
- acituan 6y ago
  None of those combined instantaneous planet-wide distribution of spoken word, produced by anyone, shoveled to everyone, individually based on what they would be most likely to want to hear. If founding fathers had netflix this wouldn’t even make to a black mirror episode of their time.
jonny_eh 6y ago
> The Founding Fathers could not have predicted this. Who cares what a bunch of dead slave owners thought. We should be able to decide for ourselves what kind of laws we have, let's stop second guessing these guys that rarely even agreed with each other.
- koheripbal 6y ago
  My point was that the Constitution does not handle the current situation - not specifically that the authors thought of it or not.
  - streb-lo 6y ago
    OK, but why is there so much Constitution/Founding Father worship in America? It's a flawed document that has lead to a flawed nation. It does not have Messiah-like abilities to deal with current problems so why be surprised it doesn't have modern solutions to modern problems.
    - UnpossibleJim 6y ago
      But they did have the foresight to make it a document that could be edited. That part did take forethought and was revolutionary by men who were very much ahead of their time. I understand that judgement of figures of the past by modern ethics is the newest trend, but history has to be given a bit of context and what is a given now was blasphemous at the time. Some of the things, like a constitution that could evolve, was not the norm.
      - not2b 6y ago
        Every country that has a constitution has a mechanism to modify it, but the US Constitution is set up in a way that its most severe flaws can't be fixed (small rural states are over-represented but have a veto over any attempt to change this because 3/4 of the states must agree to any amendment).
        6y ago
harpratap 6y ago
> having a near-monopoly on various public communication channels Since when did Google became the defacto public communication channel?
- gerland 6y ago
  I would say from approximately 2008
  - harpratap 6y ago
    Last time I checked Facebook, Whatsapp and fake news outlets were being used by bad actors to manipulate elections in various countries. If Google holds monopoly in public communication channels, this shouldn't have even happened?
    - gerland 6y ago
      That was a bad joke, but truth be told there are not that many outlets. The word "monopoly" is thrown around very lightly, although if you have just a few big players on the market then there is always a real possibility of cartel-like operations. Small platforms are eliminated or bought out very quickly. The way in which all the classical media reacted to Gab getting bigger was a bit suspicious, because it was not their direct competitor. From their point of view it should be an enemy of an enemy. It's much more likely, that existing internet molochs do not like competition that much. Maybe Gab was a special case, but ask yourself this - how many video platforms created from 2008 onwards can you name and how much of them are still around, not owned by big G and having a reasonable market share? There is only YT, nothing else comes close. This format - medium to long, usualy rich in content, videos are something that cannot be easily replaced in public discourse. Maybe facebook groups or reddit fill some of the gaps, but definetely not tictok or instagram. Communication does not equal communication. A well made video can have a lot more impact than all conversations that you can possibly start on WhatsApp in your life. Twitter is too shallow to fill this gap in my opinion.
      - harpratap 6y ago
mbostleman 6y ago
>>The Founding Fathers could not have predicted this.>> Sure they could. They had the East India Tea Company. I'm not a legal expert but it seems like the fundamentals are pretty simple and timeless. If they have a monopoly, then their private get-out-jail-free card no longer applies.
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  As I read it, "this" refers to "a monopoly on communication/speech", not "a monopoly [of any kind]".
  - blaser-waffle 6y ago
    Messages had to be transmitted by hand until the telegraph era. The British (or Dutch) India Companies had a stranglehold over shipping -- and thus over communication -- to colonial holdings for much of their existence.
    - throwaway894345 6y ago
      I wasn't aware of this, but I still don't think this is a compelling analogy. I doubt that these companies were able to efficiently parse the content of these messages in order to manipulate the distributions of certain messages, for example. Further, there's simply no way that post had nearly the same share of communication as do digital systems today (most communication was certainly by word of mouth and print).
    - koheripbal 6y ago
      The majority of communication was still local - and importantly, B/D India Company wasn't opening and reading and censoring all the letters they were transporting.
  - cat199 6y ago
    No barrister or legal historian here, but fairly certain that a monopoly on permissible communication/speech was and is still held (in title at least) by the Crown this is pretty much precisely what the 1nd amendment is about and why it was so radical at the time.
madengr 6y ago
They are using public right-of-ways an spectrum to carry their data, so free speech ought to apply.
subsubzero 6y ago
Here are some numbers to keep you up at night, they are very scary: Google controls 91.89% of the search market [1] G controls 68% of the browser market [2] G's android is on 84% of phones operating systems [3] G has 73% of the search advertising market [4] [1] https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/544400/market-share-of-internet-browsers-desktop/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/544400/market-share-of-i... [3] https://beta.trimread.com/articles/16433 https://beta.trimread.com/articles/16433 [4] https://www.geekwire.com/2019/amazon-gaining-google-search-advertising-market-share/ https://www.geekwire.com/2019/amazon-gaining-google-search-a...
- giancarlostoro 6y ago
  Honestly about a year ago I decided to switch to an iPhone once the "contract" is up. I have used iOS and I didnt find it anymore special, but it isn't really that much different to me to be bothered by using either one. I will also take that moment to ungooglify my life including email and such.
  - coronadisaster 6y ago
    Apple is only better because it is smaller but it does a lot of the same things and often lies about it... A pure and open Linux phone is the only way that it could get better.
    - mattcrox 6y ago
      "but it does a lot of the same things and often lies about it" Can you provide evidence of this? Not that I don't believe you (nor do I have any financial interest in Apple), but I'm not a fan of seeing baseless accusations on HN.
      - coronadisaster 6y ago
        Sorry, I thought that it was well known... did a quick search and found this: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/18/imessage-qualcast-security-weakness https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/18/imessage-... duck.com for more examples...
notaphilosopher 6y ago
Google can do whatever they like. They're a company, not the government. And as such, they will always bend to the mercurial whims of both rich investors and the government (who is also owned by the rich). The only way to fix that is a nearly-uncensored#, non-profit& communications and streaming platform that is globally-distributed and doesn't have a SPoF. Trying to get a content creators' union is all-well-and-good, but it doesn't solve the fundamental problem of reliance on corporate greed that will never assure access to speech. # There are only a few topics that shouldn't be enabled like child porn and actually planning mass murder. & Nonprofit itself while it supports monetization for creators with only minimal fees to cover costs.
sio8ohPi 6y ago
The founding fathers gave the USPS a monopoly on the major communication channel of the time. Maybe it's time to update those laws to give them a monopoly over online communication, too? I see no way this could go wrong.
- koheripbal 6y ago
  USPS wasn't opening and reading everyone's messages, and then refusing to deliver certain content. That's why envelopes were sealed.
- anticensor 6y ago
  US Telecom?
mikorym 6y ago
I think the solution to this is simple: Pay for every service you use. The question was historically then how do teenagers (or the developing world for that matter) pay for electronic services and cue Facebook and Google.
- 7786655 6y ago
  How would that solve the problem at hand (Google having a near-monopoly on search and video)?
  - root_axis 6y ago
    Other than waiting for a superior product to emerge, nothing can be done to stop their monopoly besides seizing the google.com and youtube.com domains and permanently shutting them down.
  - mikorym 6y ago
    Email: Protonmail, Tutanota, etc. Storage: AWS, Box, pCloud, etc. Search: DuckDuckGo, a few open source projects, etc. Video: Not sure if there is one. My point is just if you pay for something, you are less likely to be gamed for advertising cash. For search you should be paying for the indexes in some way, or for the algorithms in your company. I am just presenting this as a philosophy. Not trying to solve the world's problems on a forum.
golergka 6y ago
Right-wingers are afraid of power of governments, while left-wingers of power of multinational corporations. Both are right: we should be afraid of any organization that gets that big. Sadly, there's no political ideology that has a coherent plan to keep both in check.
- tehjoker 6y ago
  You forgot socialists and anarchists (also known in the US as libertarian socialists for historical reasons) which advocate for a classless democratic society. The former advocate for a transition state and the latter demands a direct immediate transition as far as I understand it.
peterwwillis 6y ago
> having a near-monopoly on various public communication channels > Google's "We're a private company" get-out-jail-free card cannot continue to apply You're upset that they have a monopoly on their own website/business? What the hell are you even talking about? Do you even remember the internet before Google? I do. You know how I found new websites? By typing random domain names into the URL bar and trying different combinations of TLDs. Then I used Yahoo. Excite. AltaVista. Lycos. Ask Jeeves. Dmoz. Alltheweb. They all kinda sucked in their own unique ways. And then Google came around, and I could actually find what the hell I was looking for in one go. Your outrage is pure entitlement. You don't like the way the world works, so you think you deserve to change everything to function exactly the way you want. As if that's in any way rational, fair, or ethical. Presumably you think of yourself as a good person. How is it good to demand unreasonable things from people who do not owe you anything? Do you really think this is the best way to effect societal change?
klyrs 6y ago
This is a problem with monopolies, not censorship. When private companies are forced to publish content, you have fundamentally lost the notion of a free press.
- koheripbal 6y ago
  I don't entirely agree that companies operating public discussion forums is equivalent to "forced speech", but I do agree that the problem can be fixed by eliminating the monopoly/oligopoly.
  - klyrs 6y ago
    Forbidding companies from moderating the content on their own public forums is forced speech. An easy test is when government officials participate in those forums: if you must publish what the government tells you to, that's literally forced speech. Similarly, the Fairness Doctrine was overruled because requiring companies to air opinions they disagreed with was found to infringe free speech.
Udik 6y ago
It would be very interesting to see a complete list of all the banned words, could some google employee leak it?
jotm 6y ago
Pretty sure they were aware of the East India Company (both Dutch and British), and other powerful mercantile organizations.
ChuckMcM 6y ago
That would be why the US Justice department is looking at an antitrust suit, Anti-trust is the remedy that came about in 1890 when the Standard Oil trust seemed unstoppable. That said, I see this sort of thing a bit differently. If Google is all powerful and a monopoly and never in danger of being killed, why comply with an authoritarian foreign nation to remove comments that are amplifying an anti-government sentiment? Why should Google care if the government of China is feeling a bit insecure about their own population's loyalty? I worked at Google during "China Debacle #1", where Google went to China as an uncensored search engine, left in the middle of China Debacle #2, when China infiltrated Google's infrastructure to use it to track dissidents, and watched from the outside (as many here did) for China Debacle #3, when Google tried to create a censored search engine for China. Why does Google need China so badly, that they are willing to compromise their values (debacle #3 and this comment censoring behavior)? I don't think you need the antitrust legislation. I think Google is slowly dying and as they die their ideals wash away. Clean user experience, gone, Useful free services with return only positive feelings for the brand, gone. Employee perks, fading away. Lofty slogans of not being evil, gone. This compliance, sometimes forced by edict in the EU's antitrust case, sometimes forced by coercion, tells me that Google isn't powerful, it is weak. It has lost its way and may not survive if it is unable to find its way back to something good.
- whack 6y ago
  Google certainly doesn't need China, but it wants it. It's a heckuva lot easier to do business and make money in a country, when you're chummy with the people in charge. Even if it goes against your ideals, free speech, or public interest. Even if Google dies, its replacement will still be equally tempted to censor dissenting voices, in order to please the people in charge.
  - ChuckMcM 6y ago
    I understand where you are coming from here, I see it a bit differently. But I recognize that I see it differently because I have a weirdly particular definition of the word 'need.' I have come to define the magnitude of need to represent how far out of your internal value system and the law are you willing to ago to satisfy a "need." I'm not sure what the units are, desperation perhaps. For example, I "need" to eat to live but at the present time my need is modest because I have enough money to buy food to eat. At my current level I wouldn't steal food (go outside the law), or misrepresent my state of poverty to a food bank (go outside my internal values) in order to acquire food. So the magnitude of that need is "small." However, if I was unemployed, out of savings, and behind on my bills, the calculus changes. I really need to eat, and in that situation might do things I would not normally do (like rummage around in trash cans for discarded food). It is clear to me that Google, like every company, needs revenue in order to survive. The stronger the need for that revenue, the more willing they become to compromise the user experience, the law, and/or their internal values. To me, their actions of the last few years appear to directly contradict what at one time were core internal values. Whether its the level of monetization of their own properties, or their willingness to cooperate with an authoritarian state to keep information away from their population. I see their taking of these steps as an outcome of their great need for revenue. China is the second largest economy on the planet, and Google does not appear to be willing to hold true to their values and forego the revenue that economy could potentially produce for them. That is the reasoning by which I come to the conclusion that Google needs China.
oh-right_but 6y ago
Not that long ago, capability (yes, some dictionarys show also; skill, appearance, behaivior and other around orchestrated topics ^^) btt: capability wons importance, cos growing globalisation and toughening competition - in terms of the commerce, with shorter product life cycles, higher complexity and much more influences. In such a environment, a premise for life is a permanent monitoring on all levels of performance, to have the option to bring on steering and governance, if a discrepancy in goal-reaching or goal-setting occurs. no, that was'nt english enough, let me try better: "'Sharks' are speaking of 'satisfied' when a half of the profits result by dividends and from Performance." Exploiting the central-bank-agitation so big on a global scale, more in detailed,... now you... Do you want to continue to support art, like 'google will eat itself'? (-;
jiveturkey 6y ago
> Google's "We're a private company" get-out-jail-free card cannot continue to apply. It can, should, must and most importantly, will. What's really not acceptable is their monopoloy position on information, not that they, as a private company, have a right to decide what to publish.
kilo_bravo_3 6y ago
>The Founding Fathers could not have predicted this. The Founding Fathers used this to their advantage. They colluded with the handful of major publishers of the time to orchestrate a rolling, synchronized release of the Federalist Papers, saturating the already-monopolized (due to the massive expense of presses and paper) media market with their ideas. The authors of the Anti-Federalist Papers had no such deal. They had to print out their responses on their own and distribute them by hand. The country probably would not have even gotten to the point of needing a debate about a constitution, one-sided as it was, if it hadn't been for publishers telling non-conforming opinions to fuck off. And please, nobody chime in with "publisher v. platform": it is irrelevant, you're wrong.
b0rsuk 6y ago
Sure, a more fundamental problem. But many people don't have enough imagination and foresight and for them concrete examples are more convincing. Same with the country I'm currently in - democracy has been rotting for the last several years as the ruling party has been busy disabling protection mechanisms and pulling out screws. It's only now that the government is blatant in its abuse of law and police fine people with no chance of appeal and straight up beat them, nurses get pay CUTS... that citizens realize what suckers they've been. That laws and procedures exist for a reason. Maybe they're not just stupid, but have a different way of thinking. Bottom-up versus top-down.
Causality1 6y ago
We desperately need a Post Office of internet content. At-cost hosting and completely content-agnostic.
- smegger001 6y ago
  good luck with that, congress has been trying to slowly kill the real post office for years and now the head of the executive branch is been trying to kill it as a way of punishing a perceived rival/critic. despite the consitution specficly calling out that we need to run it. getting them to build a modernized digital equivalent.
- vikramkr 6y ago
  Total content agnosticism is not going to fly once illegal stuff starts getting hosted, and then you go down that sliding scale of what content is allowed vs what isn't. If you ban some highly illegal content, you'll probably need to ban some other illegal content, and then start picking what countries laws count to enforce (recognizing that you'll be banned in some countries if you dont comply), and you'll end up back where you started. If you decide you dont care and will let literally anything be hosted, you might find yourself in jail, and very few people will feel comfortable hosting their content on the same service that hosts some of the most despicable content in the world.
  - Causality1 6y ago
    True, but to me the difference is the focus on the user rather than the platform. If somebody mails a package of child pornography to someone else the news doesn't attack the Post Office. Since it'd be government-run I wouldn't have a problem with each account being tied to a specific social security number. A true federal public utility that doesn't have to worry about crossing borders.
    - vikramkr 6y ago
      If the post office didn't comply with/lead an investigation into who mailed it (or something like a mail bomb - there are ways to do direct damage with the platform as well, imagine the site being used to host viruses) and instead said that they didn't moderate what went through the mail, they will protect free speech, mailing is a form of speech, and that they won't enforce anything for the spirit of the platform, the platform would be eviscerated and the we must protect the children backlash would be enough to get a law passed saying that every single bit of mail must be opened or read. For the internet platform, they'd have to start having questions about what they enforce and what they don't, and when they do or don't work with law enforcement. Just look at how Apple is going up against the justice department and multiply that conflict by 100x
freeflight 6y ago
It's not only Google, some argue we have been slowly moving from an Internet to a Trinet where GOOG-FB-AMZN control the majority of the web traffic while staying out of each others way [0] [0] https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.html https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.htm...
signal11 6y ago
I agree with you and the commenter who replied with the market share stats that the numbers are worrisome, but literally no one laid a gun to the commenters’ heads and asked them to leave a YouTube comment. They could embed the video (or link to it) and offer a comment on their blogs. There was an article about RSS on HN recently — in the end, people voted with their feet away from a decentralised web to the YouTubes and Twitters and Facebooks of today. Maybe we need more actions like these to remind ourselves of the perils of lease-holding.
JAlexoid 6y ago
It's not "We're a private company" as much as "Google cannot practically force you". Google also doesn't have anywhere near a monopoly position in consumer markets. YouTube isn't an absolute majority of online video and strong alternatives are right in front of you - Twitter and Facebook offer free video hosting. You could even build a private one, or rent space from Vimeo or Dailymotion. The Founding Fathers can go &&*k themselves. Invoking their name is literally appeal to authority.
undersuit 6y ago
The Founding Fathers totally predicted this. The USPS existed in some form before the founding of the nation. The postal service was vital for allowing communication and dispersal of news through the nation. Without this neutral party a private mail carrier could opt to not deliver for any reason, like after they've opened your mail and read the contents they find politically disagreeable.
- abecedarius 6y ago
  Historically the monopoly of the mail was abused for censorship (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_laws). If there've been comparable consequences from competing private mail services, I haven't heard of them.
  - undersuit 6y ago
    Mail is to Data as Video is to Data. Youtube is a private data service. We are in a discussion of the comparable consequences of competeing private mail services.
neves 6y ago
Google even more outrageous qet-out-of-jail-free card is the "our servers aren't in your country so we don't have to obey your laws"
ccktlmazeltov 6y ago
Am I crazy or was there a comment in this thread calling out the moderators of HN and their own censorship? Did it disappear as well?
- jb775 6y ago
  Discussion was buried low the comments because it was "down-weighted" by the moderators: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23223555#23225685 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23223555#23225685
- koheripbal 6y ago
  I don't remember exactly, but originally my comment wasn't top-level. Did the mods do that, or is that automatic with high karma comments or something?
  - dang 6y ago
    We sometimes do that to protect an on-topic subthread from suffering the fate of its on-topic parent. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23225522 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23225522
- dang 6y ago
  The thread you're referring to is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23223555 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23223555. There is ample explanation there of what happened.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - ccktlmazeltov 6y ago
    thanks for the hard work here dang, I really appreciate your moderation. I hope you can appreciate our inquisitions from time to time. I think this kind of model works well in general to keep both sides accountable.
zouhair 6y ago
We need to redefine what is considered a public space.
sandworm101 6y ago
>> The Founding Fathers could not have predicted this. HA! The founding fathers were all lawyers and newspaper owners. They were very aware that private interests, through control of available media, could exert influence all manner of public debates.

shadowgovt 6y ago

But is it replaced with "I'm an American company?" There's a deep rabbit-hole of hyper-nationalism right next to the deep rabbit-hole of hyper-corporatism. Does a YouTube beholden to the US government get banned from being used in China at all? And if it does, what happens when China creates a competing product that is more successful than YouTube, and YouTube gets displaced globally by a product that is beholden to China's censorship policies in general, not just in isolated cases?

dathinab 6y ago
What if the laws against censoring content would be quite strict, then a censoring Chinese YouTube clone wouldn't even be possible. (In the countries where it's strict. Which could be the EU, US, Kanada, Japan and more. Through it would be more tricky for smaller China dependent countries or autocratic powers. But the other countries could push that through in the way they currently push through commercial interest like copy right).
op03 6y ago
Wikipedia is the way to go. Why have the hypercorporatists and hypernationalists not replaced it??? Because fuckers in both those camps think it has to make money as a condition to exist. It's their weakness. Requires imagination to exploit.
- deyan 6y ago
  Wikipedia is very easy to game unfortunately.
  - hiram112 6y ago
    I don't consider Wikipedia a valid reference for anything more trivial than sports statistics or Hollywood trivia these days. I'd imagine the amount of blatant organized 'revisioning' by nation states, NGOs, for-profit corporations, and politically biased individuals is now dwarfing the objective individual contributors who once were the majority of Wikipedia's editors.
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  > Why have the hypercorporatists and hypernationalists not replaced it??? It’s not profitable. Nowhere near as many people would donate money/time/edits/content to Wikipedia if it wasn’t a registered non-profit - nor would they receive donated/subsidised hosting services from their providers - and if it’s for-profit they would need to run ads - and there’s no money in generic ads so they have to be either content-based ads (which immediately creates a perverse incentive for articles to be edited or biased in favour of the advertiser, which devalues the content of the encyclopaedia - or behavioural/tracking ads, which won’t be here for long due to expected incoming changes in browser handling of cookies and cross-site content) - which leaves behind only paywalling the encyclopaedia - and we saw how well that worked-out for Britannica, Collier’s, and Encarta. Wikipedia has a high-value because it’s a non-profit - as contradictory as that sounds.
  - adventured 6y ago
    > Wikipedia has a high-value because it’s a non-profit - as contradictory as that sounds. No question. It's the primary reason its community stuck with it across the many years it took to build it up, whereas the editor communities abandon for-profit content farms like Quora or Answers.com. > and there’s no money in generic ads Wikipedia could operate the encyclopedia side of itself with generic advertising. There is a lot of money in generic ads, relatively speaking, when you're dishing out static text content and some images at a billion page views per day (especially when the bulk of your platform's expansion is over, so your situation re expenses is increasingly stable). Could you run the encyclopedia thin for ~$20 million per year? Based on their budget history, you absolutely could. So could you bring in at least $20m in revenue via generic advertising, against several hundred million page views that you're able to show ads on (a bit larger than the English edition's daily page views; ie I'm heavily discounting monetizable traffic down from their global figures to tilt this even more conservatively)? You need a CPM of around a range of $0.10 to $0.15 to at least have a shot at making it work. It's a very low number for a super premium property that sits at the top of nearly every Google search result. You could make ten phone calls and trivially fill $20m in generic advertising every year. Pick up the phone and call: Google, Amazon, Walmart, Microsoft, Coca Cola, Procter & Gamble, Comcast, Unilever, Samsung, AT&T. At $2m each, you'd have to fight them off with a stick at those CPM rates for that reach. Procter & Gamble spends $10 billion globally on advertising, they wouldn't take $2m to slap their brands on Wikipedia? They'd probably take that every month if they could. Would any and all manner of advertising turn off visitors and editors? Probably. That's the far bigger problem than whether Wikipedia could bring in $20m per year in advertising on their massive traffic base. Not to mention that Google might (would) start viewing them as a competitor and might (would) downgrade their content placement to neuter that risk.
- fennecfoxen 6y ago
  Comments like these have limited meaning in the context of a conversation about Google and YouTube. Wikipedia does not aspire to be YouTube. Wikipedia does not aspire to be Gmail. Wikipedia does not aspire to be a general-purpose search engine. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. You may be thinking of the various wiki brands run by the Wikimedia Foundation, which doesn't aspire to be any of these things, either, but at least entertains the aspiration of being a better Google News with WikiNews. (But do not confuse WikiNews with WikiTribune, the latter of which is a non-WMF project of Jimmy Wales, originally aspiring to be news, now aspiring to be a social network).
  - pasquinelli 6y ago
    I think they're saying that wikipedia is an example of media not designed to be profitable. Maybe there couldn't be a similar youtube, but there could be other platforms, like wikipedia, that aren't built for profit but to inform.
11thEarlOfMar 6y ago
Hyper-nationalism is a backlash to globalism due to the recently realized risks of opaque governments exploiting transparent governments. The intentions were good: Reduce the risk of global nuclear war. The globalism outcome is good for trade and relations with nations that have transparent governments, bad with the opaque.
- pokepim 6y ago
  Was it really bad for US until China started working on 5G and trying to become independent in semiconductor sector? Because until that time globalism was pretty profitable in terms of trade and relations for US.
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    > Because until that time globalism was pretty profitable in terms of trade and relations for US. It still is.
    - remarkEon 6y ago
      It's profitable for certain strata of economic classes and is destructive for most of the rest. But "in the aggregate the pie gets bigger", so Macroecon 101 is conserved. Yay.
      - Avicebron 6y ago
        You're being downvoted for being right. People without stock market share or who work as FTE for the hyper-successful tech companies are the only ones befitting under the guise of "lifting up underprivileged people around the world". It's disingenuous at best, nefarious at worst.
  - bobthepanda 6y ago
    People have been going on about China in the US since their ascension to the WTO. Plenty of federal politicians have been elected on platforms for pushing hawkwish trade policy with China. Obama and Romney both ran with the policy of designating China a currency manipulator in 2008: https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/03/currency-manipulation-china-trump-000347/ https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/03/currency-manip...
philwelch 6y ago
I don’t consider that likely. There are many Chinese social media properties inside the Great Firewall but they haven’t ever had much success outside of it. Think about it, if a Chinese social media site could outcompete YouTube, they would just do it already anyway. If they can’t, they have to either block YouTube and have a Chinese clone propped up by an effectively protectionist policy or else try and get YouTube to cooperate with them.
- knolax 6y ago
  tiktok.
sho 6y ago
> Does a YouTube beholden to the US government get banned from being used in China at all? You know YouTube is already banned in China, right?

JumpCrisscross 6y ago

> a single private company having a near-monopoly on various public communication channels Does Google rise to this level? Facebook, Twitter, cable TV and every newspaper and blog would seem to present a decent front of competition.

cryptonector 6y ago
Before 1988 in the U.S. we had "equal time" laws that required that broadcast media present both sides of political debates with "equal time" for each side. That's because for decades there were three sources of content: ABC, CBS, and NBC. Then cable and alternative radio ended that oligopoly for a while and those laws were removed. Now we have just a few mass media content producers and a few mass social media outlets. The situation is beginning to resemble that which existed for decades, from the 20s to the 80s, in broadcast media.
- CamperBob2 6y ago
  Every individual is a "side," so the equal-time concept in broadcasting doesn't scale. It never really did, and this would only be more apparent if we tried to re-institute such a doctrine today.
- akersten 6y ago
  Those "equal time" laws, more collectively the Fairness Doctrine, was struck down as unconstitutional because it forced broadcasters to host speech they did not agree with. Why would we expect to be able to force Google to host speech they disagree with?
  - ThrowawayR2 6y ago
    > "Why would we expect to be able to force Google to host speech they disagree with?" So what Google is doing with this particular epithet is fine is what you're saying? Sure hope there's no other cause that you champion that Google decides they disagree with someday.
  - bosswipe 6y ago

jshevek 6y ago

That is a bigger issue for our society, yes. But it's also understandable that people might be very interested in alleged problems that strike closer to home for them. In this case, if there is an issue worth considering at HN, exploring it could give insight into the larger issue as well.

toolz 6y ago

We have loads of communication channel alternatives. People freely choose google and should be allowed to continue freely choosing whatever platform they please. The idea that some governing body can better choose my communication platform for my personal needs than I can for myself doesn't seem logical from my point of view.

artificial 6y ago
The argument is a popular Authoritarian viewpoint that isn't viewed as such. Meanwhile the work towards decentralization continues, one day I hope it'll get the network effect akin to Bittorrent.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  BT has about 170 million users (depending on who's counting). Hardly nothing. But in terms of network effect... YouTube has two billion users.
teknologist 6y ago
I don’t think it’s about a governing body making that decision for you. If all the policies and processes around censorship were laid out in the open for that to be considered when weighing up the options, people would be able to make more informed choices.
ClumsyPilot 6y ago
Ah yes, the idea that profit driven management is a better juror of freedom than our democratic society. Whatever they decide, they owe you no explanation or recourse. After all, these people are 'accountable' to wall street. To them 2008 and Boeing 737 were an unforceable turn of fortune, and they should bear no harm from it.
- fieryscribe 6y ago
  Whatever the government decides, they rarely, if ever, provide an explanation or recourse either: the Patriot Act, Ahmad Arbury, TBTF, the assassination of Awlaki, snooping on Americans, Operation Fast and the Furious, the Pentagon's missing billions, Epstein's death, etc. I'm as pro-democracy as they come, but the belief that the government is somehow (and always) more accountable than companies strains credulity. Companies are accountable to Wall Street, which implies they're accountable to their consumers too. Shake Shack did not have to return the funds they received recently, but they did, because of media attention.

baq 6y ago

google search is a utility class service at this point, a tier below tap water and electricity. the world would be an objectively worse place without it for billions of people. with great power comes great responsibility is how the saying goes, but i can see them fighting tooth and nail to not be labeled as such. same for facebook and others like them.

pb7 6y ago
You're putting the cart before the horse. Google and Facebook are utilities but the Internet service you need to access them isn't. Seems a bit ridiculous, no?
- baq 6y ago
  my bad for assuming that it goes without saying i guess? or that most people except us here can't tell the difference?
  - pb7 6y ago
    It is your bad for assuming. Telecoms will fight to the death to prevent Internet service from becoming a utility and you're acting like it's all but guaranteed. We're not even close to this reality.
    - baq 6y ago
      never said anything to the contrary, actually agree with everything here.
root_axis 6y ago
The suggestion that google search is comparable to water and electricity is absurd IMO. Google search is not needed to survive. There are also alternatives to google. Nothing about google's popularity precludes someone from using bing.com instead.
- pirocks 6y ago

threwr234434 6y ago

The very first multi-national companies were neck deep in looting India and smuggling opium to China. The American founding fathers were very aware of this.

Ericson2314 6y ago
We were fanboys enough to use the East India Company flag, too.
koheripbal 6y ago
I don't see what this has to do with this conversation. Those companies were not censoring coffee shop or bar conversations of citizens WITHIN the United States. We aren't talking about economic monopoly exploitation - we're talking about monopoly control over domestic communications.

ashtonkem 6y ago

I’m always really worried about the unintended consequences of having the government regulate what Google can and cannot moderate on their platform. That strikes me as a larger free speech issue than our current system. I’d recommend just breaking Google’s monopoly; which is an idea that has more benefits and less downside risk.

JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> I’d recommend just breaking Google’s monopoly Would an independent YouTube be less susceptible to these requests?
- koheripbal 6y ago
  Probably, as it would have fewer conflicts of interests and relationships with foreign dictatorships. ...but ideally, we would have multiple YouTube competitors, that would allow content creators vote with their choice to use Google.
  - JAlexoid 6y ago
    YouTube has multiple competitors. One of them is even a heavyweight - Facebook. Did you not realise that Facebook hosted videos? Maybe you're unaware that Instagram has Instagram TV section...
- christophilus 6y ago
  This is the reason I really hope we see an uptick in distributed applications.
- acituan 6y ago
  We don’t know, because right now youtube is one black box in Google’s finance sheets. We don’t know if it is a loss leader, which I think is very likely. Imagine youtube was a separate company that always ran in the red and another private company solely footed their bill. Would you trust YouTube’s neutrality then? Wouldn’t that explicate why competition is having difficulty emerging? Or imagine YouTube were to split into two; YouTube the distribution platform and YouTube the recommendation engine. Imagine Youtube the platform had to license content publicly. Now it is much more likely to have competition emerging and end users benefiting from it.

eeZah7Ux 6y ago

> a single private company having a near-monopoly on various public communication channels > The Founding Fathers could not have predicted this. Financial, political, religious entities controlling newspapers and book publishers is a problem known (and well documented) across thousands of years. Same for near-monopolies of means of transportation, materials, water, and other.

acituan 6y ago
None of those combined instantaneous planet-wide distribution of spoken word, produced by anyone, shoveled to everyone, individually based on what they would be most likely to want to hear. If founding fathers had netflix this wouldn’t even make to a black mirror episode of their time.

jonny_eh 6y ago

> The Founding Fathers could not have predicted this. Who cares what a bunch of dead slave owners thought. We should be able to decide for ourselves what kind of laws we have, let's stop second guessing these guys that rarely even agreed with each other.

koheripbal 6y ago
My point was that the Constitution does not handle the current situation - not specifically that the authors thought of it or not.
- streb-lo 6y ago
  OK, but why is there so much Constitution/Founding Father worship in America? It's a flawed document that has lead to a flawed nation. It does not have Messiah-like abilities to deal with current problems so why be surprised it doesn't have modern solutions to modern problems.
  - UnpossibleJim 6y ago
    But they did have the foresight to make it a document that could be edited. That part did take forethought and was revolutionary by men who were very much ahead of their time. I understand that judgement of figures of the past by modern ethics is the newest trend, but history has to be given a bit of context and what is a given now was blasphemous at the time. Some of the things, like a constitution that could evolve, was not the norm.
    - not2b 6y ago
      Every country that has a constitution has a mechanism to modify it, but the US Constitution is set up in a way that its most severe flaws can't be fixed (small rural states are over-represented but have a veto over any attempt to change this because 3/4 of the states must agree to any amendment).
      - 6y ago

harpratap 6y ago

> having a near-monopoly on various public communication channels Since when did Google became the defacto public communication channel?

gerland 6y ago
I would say from approximately 2008
- harpratap 6y ago
  Last time I checked Facebook, Whatsapp and fake news outlets were being used by bad actors to manipulate elections in various countries. If Google holds monopoly in public communication channels, this shouldn't have even happened?
  - gerland 6y ago
    That was a bad joke, but truth be told there are not that many outlets. The word "monopoly" is thrown around very lightly, although if you have just a few big players on the market then there is always a real possibility of cartel-like operations. Small platforms are eliminated or bought out very quickly. The way in which all the classical media reacted to Gab getting bigger was a bit suspicious, because it was not their direct competitor. From their point of view it should be an enemy of an enemy. It's much more likely, that existing internet molochs do not like competition that much. Maybe Gab was a special case, but ask yourself this - how many video platforms created from 2008 onwards can you name and how much of them are still around, not owned by big G and having a reasonable market share? There is only YT, nothing else comes close. This format - medium to long, usualy rich in content, videos are something that cannot be easily replaced in public discourse. Maybe facebook groups or reddit fill some of the gaps, but definetely not tictok or instagram. Communication does not equal communication. A well made video can have a lot more impact than all conversations that you can possibly start on WhatsApp in your life. Twitter is too shallow to fill this gap in my opinion.
    - harpratap 6y ago

mbostleman 6y ago

>>The Founding Fathers could not have predicted this.>> Sure they could. They had the East India Tea Company. I'm not a legal expert but it seems like the fundamentals are pretty simple and timeless. If they have a monopoly, then their private get-out-jail-free card no longer applies.

throwaway894345 6y ago
As I read it, "this" refers to "a monopoly on communication/speech", not "a monopoly [of any kind]".
- blaser-waffle 6y ago
  Messages had to be transmitted by hand until the telegraph era. The British (or Dutch) India Companies had a stranglehold over shipping -- and thus over communication -- to colonial holdings for much of their existence.
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    I wasn't aware of this, but I still don't think this is a compelling analogy. I doubt that these companies were able to efficiently parse the content of these messages in order to manipulate the distributions of certain messages, for example. Further, there's simply no way that post had nearly the same share of communication as do digital systems today (most communication was certainly by word of mouth and print).
  - koheripbal 6y ago
    The majority of communication was still local - and importantly, B/D India Company wasn't opening and reading and censoring all the letters they were transporting.
- cat199 6y ago
  No barrister or legal historian here, but fairly certain that a monopoly on permissible communication/speech was and is still held (in title at least) by the Crown this is pretty much precisely what the 1nd amendment is about and why it was so radical at the time.

madengr 6y ago

They are using public right-of-ways an spectrum to carry their data, so free speech ought to apply.

subsubzero 6y ago

Here are some numbers to keep you up at night, they are very scary: Google controls 91.89% of the search market [1] G controls 68% of the browser market [2] G's android is on 84% of phones operating systems [3] G has 73% of the search advertising market [4] [1] https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/544400/market-share-of-internet-browsers-desktop/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/544400/market-share-of-i... [3] https://beta.trimread.com/articles/16433 https://beta.trimread.com/articles/16433 [4] https://www.geekwire.com/2019/amazon-gaining-google-search-advertising-market-share/ https://www.geekwire.com/2019/amazon-gaining-google-search-a...

giancarlostoro 6y ago
Honestly about a year ago I decided to switch to an iPhone once the "contract" is up. I have used iOS and I didnt find it anymore special, but it isn't really that much different to me to be bothered by using either one. I will also take that moment to ungooglify my life including email and such.
- coronadisaster 6y ago
  Apple is only better because it is smaller but it does a lot of the same things and often lies about it... A pure and open Linux phone is the only way that it could get better.
  - mattcrox 6y ago
    "but it does a lot of the same things and often lies about it" Can you provide evidence of this? Not that I don't believe you (nor do I have any financial interest in Apple), but I'm not a fan of seeing baseless accusations on HN.
    - coronadisaster 6y ago
      Sorry, I thought that it was well known... did a quick search and found this: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/18/imessage-qualcast-security-weakness https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/18/imessage-... duck.com for more examples...

notaphilosopher 6y ago

Google can do whatever they like. They're a company, not the government. And as such, they will always bend to the mercurial whims of both rich investors and the government (who is also owned by the rich). The only way to fix that is a nearly-uncensored#, non-profit& communications and streaming platform that is globally-distributed and doesn't have a SPoF. Trying to get a content creators' union is all-well-and-good, but it doesn't solve the fundamental problem of reliance on corporate greed that will never assure access to speech. # There are only a few topics that shouldn't be enabled like child porn and actually planning mass murder. & Nonprofit itself while it supports monetization for creators with only minimal fees to cover costs.

sio8ohPi 6y ago

The founding fathers gave the USPS a monopoly on the major communication channel of the time. Maybe it's time to update those laws to give them a monopoly over online communication, too? I see no way this could go wrong.

koheripbal 6y ago
USPS wasn't opening and reading everyone's messages, and then refusing to deliver certain content. That's why envelopes were sealed.
anticensor 6y ago
US Telecom?

mikorym 6y ago

I think the solution to this is simple: Pay for every service you use. The question was historically then how do teenagers (or the developing world for that matter) pay for electronic services and cue Facebook and Google.

7786655 6y ago
How would that solve the problem at hand (Google having a near-monopoly on search and video)?
- root_axis 6y ago
  Other than waiting for a superior product to emerge, nothing can be done to stop their monopoly besides seizing the google.com and youtube.com domains and permanently shutting them down.
- mikorym 6y ago
  Email: Protonmail, Tutanota, etc. Storage: AWS, Box, pCloud, etc. Search: DuckDuckGo, a few open source projects, etc. Video: Not sure if there is one. My point is just if you pay for something, you are less likely to be gamed for advertising cash. For search you should be paying for the indexes in some way, or for the algorithms in your company. I am just presenting this as a philosophy. Not trying to solve the world's problems on a forum.

golergka 6y ago

Right-wingers are afraid of power of governments, while left-wingers of power of multinational corporations. Both are right: we should be afraid of any organization that gets that big. Sadly, there's no political ideology that has a coherent plan to keep both in check.

tehjoker 6y ago
You forgot socialists and anarchists (also known in the US as libertarian socialists for historical reasons) which advocate for a classless democratic society. The former advocate for a transition state and the latter demands a direct immediate transition as far as I understand it.

peterwwillis 6y ago

> having a near-monopoly on various public communication channels > Google's "We're a private company" get-out-jail-free card cannot continue to apply You're upset that they have a monopoly on their own website/business? What the hell are you even talking about? Do you even remember the internet before Google? I do. You know how I found new websites? By typing random domain names into the URL bar and trying different combinations of TLDs. Then I used Yahoo. Excite. AltaVista. Lycos. Ask Jeeves. Dmoz. Alltheweb. They all kinda sucked in their own unique ways. And then Google came around, and I could actually find what the hell I was looking for in one go. Your outrage is pure entitlement. You don't like the way the world works, so you think you deserve to change everything to function exactly the way you want. As if that's in any way rational, fair, or ethical. Presumably you think of yourself as a good person. How is it good to demand unreasonable things from people who do not owe you anything? Do you really think this is the best way to effect societal change?

klyrs 6y ago

This is a problem with monopolies, not censorship. When private companies are forced to publish content, you have fundamentally lost the notion of a free press.

koheripbal 6y ago
I don't entirely agree that companies operating public discussion forums is equivalent to "forced speech", but I do agree that the problem can be fixed by eliminating the monopoly/oligopoly.
- klyrs 6y ago
  Forbidding companies from moderating the content on their own public forums is forced speech. An easy test is when government officials participate in those forums: if you must publish what the government tells you to, that's literally forced speech. Similarly, the Fairness Doctrine was overruled because requiring companies to air opinions they disagreed with was found to infringe free speech.

Udik 6y ago

It would be very interesting to see a complete list of all the banned words, could some google employee leak it?

jotm 6y ago

Pretty sure they were aware of the East India Company (both Dutch and British), and other powerful mercantile organizations.

ChuckMcM 6y ago

That would be why the US Justice department is looking at an antitrust suit, Anti-trust is the remedy that came about in 1890 when the Standard Oil trust seemed unstoppable. That said, I see this sort of thing a bit differently. If Google is all powerful and a monopoly and never in danger of being killed, why comply with an authoritarian foreign nation to remove comments that are amplifying an anti-government sentiment? Why should Google care if the government of China is feeling a bit insecure about their own population's loyalty? I worked at Google during "China Debacle #1", where Google went to China as an uncensored search engine, left in the middle of China Debacle #2, when China infiltrated Google's infrastructure to use it to track dissidents, and watched from the outside (as many here did) for China Debacle #3, when Google tried to create a censored search engine for China. Why does Google need China so badly, that they are willing to compromise their values (debacle #3 and this comment censoring behavior)? I don't think you need the antitrust legislation. I think Google is slowly dying and as they die their ideals wash away. Clean user experience, gone, Useful free services with return only positive feelings for the brand, gone. Employee perks, fading away. Lofty slogans of not being evil, gone. This compliance, sometimes forced by edict in the EU's antitrust case, sometimes forced by coercion, tells me that Google isn't powerful, it is weak. It has lost its way and may not survive if it is unable to find its way back to something good.

whack 6y ago
Google certainly doesn't need China, but it wants it. It's a heckuva lot easier to do business and make money in a country, when you're chummy with the people in charge. Even if it goes against your ideals, free speech, or public interest. Even if Google dies, its replacement will still be equally tempted to censor dissenting voices, in order to please the people in charge.
- ChuckMcM 6y ago
  I understand where you are coming from here, I see it a bit differently. But I recognize that I see it differently because I have a weirdly particular definition of the word 'need.' I have come to define the magnitude of need to represent how far out of your internal value system and the law are you willing to ago to satisfy a "need." I'm not sure what the units are, desperation perhaps. For example, I "need" to eat to live but at the present time my need is modest because I have enough money to buy food to eat. At my current level I wouldn't steal food (go outside the law), or misrepresent my state of poverty to a food bank (go outside my internal values) in order to acquire food. So the magnitude of that need is "small." However, if I was unemployed, out of savings, and behind on my bills, the calculus changes. I really need to eat, and in that situation might do things I would not normally do (like rummage around in trash cans for discarded food). It is clear to me that Google, like every company, needs revenue in order to survive. The stronger the need for that revenue, the more willing they become to compromise the user experience, the law, and/or their internal values. To me, their actions of the last few years appear to directly contradict what at one time were core internal values. Whether its the level of monetization of their own properties, or their willingness to cooperate with an authoritarian state to keep information away from their population. I see their taking of these steps as an outcome of their great need for revenue. China is the second largest economy on the planet, and Google does not appear to be willing to hold true to their values and forego the revenue that economy could potentially produce for them. That is the reasoning by which I come to the conclusion that Google needs China.

oh-right_but 6y ago

Not that long ago, capability (yes, some dictionarys show also; skill, appearance, behaivior and other around orchestrated topics ^^) btt: capability wons importance, cos growing globalisation and toughening competition - in terms of the commerce, with shorter product life cycles, higher complexity and much more influences. In such a environment, a premise for life is a permanent monitoring on all levels of performance, to have the option to bring on steering and governance, if a discrepancy in goal-reaching or goal-setting occurs. no, that was'nt english enough, let me try better: "'Sharks' are speaking of 'satisfied' when a half of the profits result by dividends and from Performance." Exploiting the central-bank-agitation so big on a global scale, more in detailed,... now you... Do you want to continue to support art, like 'google will eat itself'? (-;

jiveturkey 6y ago

> Google's "We're a private company" get-out-jail-free card cannot continue to apply. It can, should, must and most importantly, will. What's really not acceptable is their monopoloy position on information, not that they, as a private company, have a right to decide what to publish.

kilo_bravo_3 6y ago

>The Founding Fathers could not have predicted this. The Founding Fathers used this to their advantage. They colluded with the handful of major publishers of the time to orchestrate a rolling, synchronized release of the Federalist Papers, saturating the already-monopolized (due to the massive expense of presses and paper) media market with their ideas. The authors of the Anti-Federalist Papers had no such deal. They had to print out their responses on their own and distribute them by hand. The country probably would not have even gotten to the point of needing a debate about a constitution, one-sided as it was, if it hadn't been for publishers telling non-conforming opinions to fuck off. And please, nobody chime in with "publisher v. platform": it is irrelevant, you're wrong.

b0rsuk 6y ago

Sure, a more fundamental problem. But many people don't have enough imagination and foresight and for them concrete examples are more convincing. Same with the country I'm currently in - democracy has been rotting for the last several years as the ruling party has been busy disabling protection mechanisms and pulling out screws. It's only now that the government is blatant in its abuse of law and police fine people with no chance of appeal and straight up beat them, nurses get pay CUTS... that citizens realize what suckers they've been. That laws and procedures exist for a reason. Maybe they're not just stupid, but have a different way of thinking. Bottom-up versus top-down.

Causality1 6y ago

We desperately need a Post Office of internet content. At-cost hosting and completely content-agnostic.

smegger001 6y ago
good luck with that, congress has been trying to slowly kill the real post office for years and now the head of the executive branch is been trying to kill it as a way of punishing a perceived rival/critic. despite the consitution specficly calling out that we need to run it. getting them to build a modernized digital equivalent.
vikramkr 6y ago
Total content agnosticism is not going to fly once illegal stuff starts getting hosted, and then you go down that sliding scale of what content is allowed vs what isn't. If you ban some highly illegal content, you'll probably need to ban some other illegal content, and then start picking what countries laws count to enforce (recognizing that you'll be banned in some countries if you dont comply), and you'll end up back where you started. If you decide you dont care and will let literally anything be hosted, you might find yourself in jail, and very few people will feel comfortable hosting their content on the same service that hosts some of the most despicable content in the world.
- Causality1 6y ago
  True, but to me the difference is the focus on the user rather than the platform. If somebody mails a package of child pornography to someone else the news doesn't attack the Post Office. Since it'd be government-run I wouldn't have a problem with each account being tied to a specific social security number. A true federal public utility that doesn't have to worry about crossing borders.
  - vikramkr 6y ago
    If the post office didn't comply with/lead an investigation into who mailed it (or something like a mail bomb - there are ways to do direct damage with the platform as well, imagine the site being used to host viruses) and instead said that they didn't moderate what went through the mail, they will protect free speech, mailing is a form of speech, and that they won't enforce anything for the spirit of the platform, the platform would be eviscerated and the we must protect the children backlash would be enough to get a law passed saying that every single bit of mail must be opened or read. For the internet platform, they'd have to start having questions about what they enforce and what they don't, and when they do or don't work with law enforcement. Just look at how Apple is going up against the justice department and multiply that conflict by 100x

freeflight 6y ago

It's not only Google, some argue we have been slowly moving from an Internet to a Trinet where GOOG-FB-AMZN control the majority of the web traffic while staying out of each others way [0] [0] https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.html https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.htm...

signal11 6y ago

I agree with you and the commenter who replied with the market share stats that the numbers are worrisome, but literally no one laid a gun to the commenters’ heads and asked them to leave a YouTube comment. They could embed the video (or link to it) and offer a comment on their blogs. There was an article about RSS on HN recently — in the end, people voted with their feet away from a decentralised web to the YouTubes and Twitters and Facebooks of today. Maybe we need more actions like these to remind ourselves of the perils of lease-holding.

JAlexoid 6y ago

It's not "We're a private company" as much as "Google cannot practically force you". Google also doesn't have anywhere near a monopoly position in consumer markets. YouTube isn't an absolute majority of online video and strong alternatives are right in front of you - Twitter and Facebook offer free video hosting. You could even build a private one, or rent space from Vimeo or Dailymotion. The Founding Fathers can go &&*k themselves. Invoking their name is literally appeal to authority.

undersuit 6y ago

The Founding Fathers totally predicted this. The USPS existed in some form before the founding of the nation. The postal service was vital for allowing communication and dispersal of news through the nation. Without this neutral party a private mail carrier could opt to not deliver for any reason, like after they've opened your mail and read the contents they find politically disagreeable.

abecedarius 6y ago
Historically the monopoly of the mail was abused for censorship (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_laws). If there've been comparable consequences from competing private mail services, I haven't heard of them.
- undersuit 6y ago
  Mail is to Data as Video is to Data. Youtube is a private data service. We are in a discussion of the comparable consequences of competeing private mail services.

neves 6y ago

Google even more outrageous qet-out-of-jail-free card is the "our servers aren't in your country so we don't have to obey your laws"

ccktlmazeltov 6y ago

Am I crazy or was there a comment in this thread calling out the moderators of HN and their own censorship? Did it disappear as well?

jb775 6y ago
Discussion was buried low the comments because it was "down-weighted" by the moderators: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23223555#23225685 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23223555#23225685
koheripbal 6y ago
I don't remember exactly, but originally my comment wasn't top-level. Did the mods do that, or is that automatic with high karma comments or something?
- dang 6y ago
  We sometimes do that to protect an on-topic subthread from suffering the fate of its on-topic parent. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23225522 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23225522
dang 6y ago
The thread you're referring to is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23223555 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23223555. There is ample explanation there of what happened.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ccktlmazeltov 6y ago
  thanks for the hard work here dang, I really appreciate your moderation. I hope you can appreciate our inquisitions from time to time. I think this kind of model works well in general to keep both sides accountable.

zouhair 6y ago

We need to redefine what is considered a public space.

sandworm101 6y ago

>> The Founding Fathers could not have predicted this. HA! The founding fathers were all lawyers and newspaper owners. They were very aware that private interests, through control of available media, could exert influence all manner of public debates.