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I love how few actual proposal there are out there as to what the government should actually do. That is - not just "regulate" or "break them up". I'm talking s

I love how few actual proposal there are out there as to what the government should actually do. That is - not just "regulate" or "break them up". I'm talking specifics. Once you start making concrete proposals it becomes increasingly obvious just how hard it is to come up with something that won't make everything worse.

ryanb 6y ago
1. There needs to be guidelines for what Google can and can't do with search. Ex: Only 25% of the screen real estate can go to Google-owned ad products for allowing it to continue as a monopoly. 2. YouTube should possibly be broken out as a separate company and it shouldn't get favorable placement and treatment in search results 3. Businesses need to have more control over how their businesses appear when users search for them directly
- auganov 6y ago
  > 1. There needs to be guidelines for what Google can and can't do with search. Again that's vague. And once there are such guidelines who enforces them? Will it be law applicable to all companies? Will there be a special govt office enforcing this? What kind of punishments? Fines? > 2. YouTube should possibly be broken out as a separate company and it shouldn't get favorable placement and treatment in search results Who and how will determine if treatment is favorable? Auditing code and internal comms for signs for favoritism? Otherwise if you can go only by appearances then how do you keep this system fair to the companies subject to this scrutiny? > 3. Businesses need to have more control over how their businesses appear when users search for them directly Again how do you codify this into law?
  - tgb 6y ago
    Don't you think you're putting an unreasonably high burden on people? I can argue that I think the lawmakers representing me and other citizens need to figure out the details without myself having figured out the details. I can point out a problem and ask someone to fix the problem without know what the specifics of the solution look like. I know healthcare is absurdly complicated but I still think single-payer is the right idea and I want my law makers to do something about that - and if there's problems, it's on them to try to communicate that with me or to work around it. Same principle here. "Regulate Google as public utility" is actually fairly specific since we've got lots of public utilities already that we can model this off of.
    - auganov 6y ago
      I haven't searched exhaustively, but nonetheless you'd think there would be more specific proposals being talked about given how hot this topic is. There is very little precedent to regulating tech companies on such a granular level. The closest thing I can think of is various EU regulations that usually amount to shaking down US giants for money once in a while. It's hard to compare this to regulating something like electricity or water delivery which is much more stable technologically. Google has changed tremendously over the years and still is innovating rapidly. And as to healthcare, well, I do think people should actually go through the same thought exercise. Tons of totally broken overregulated healthcare systems out there. "Lawmakers" usually effectively ends up being a combination of lobbyists, politicians and public pressure.
      - tgb 6y ago
        So, to be clear, are you saying that someone should make such a proposal or are you saying that advocating for this change requires there to be a proposal? Because I'd be in favor of the former but I think the latter disrupts conversation and is unreasonable. The way you wrote your post sounded strongly like "I have a knock-down argument against any advocates until they have legislation written up." Which would be an unreasonably high bar.
        auganov 6y ago
        Well, I'm merely saying that a lack of proposals indicates a lack of workable solutions. By proposal I don't mean an actual bill ready to be passed, just a high level overview that does talk about the implementation. Obviously doesn't need to be a sound legal document. I think it's perfectly fine and important for people to speak out against perceived injustices committed by tech companies. But yes I do also think that calling for "regulation" while being very vague is also a bad idea. We've seen this play out with GDPR. Tons of people were (and are) calling for more stringent data privacy regulations. So EU came up with this monstrosity nobody fully understands in its consequences (because you can't). Enforcement is totally random. Some websites ended up just banning EU users. Many now come with very annoying cookie popups. Those that try to "comply" can never be sure they fully do. Very few people are happy or have benefited from this thing in any way. I think this is exactly what you get when you want something done but don't know what.
- splintercell 6y ago
  With that 25% of the screen real estate regulation now Google has an incentive to break its search results down on multiple pages. Search results would be available for navigation in a card UI (one screen per result) where 25% of the screens real estate being devoted to Google on a products would get them a lot more impressions.
- bagacrap 6y ago
  Does YouTube get favorable placement in search? I see video results from other sites like Vimeo. I just did a search for a recent sporting event and 6/12 video results were YT. The only "problem" is that YT has such a large share of the online video market. wrt #3, no, I don't want businesses to control the information I get when I search for them, because I want neutral and true-ish information, not ad copy.
MattGaiser 6y ago
Or all the impacts down the line. If they decided to basically seize Google, they would be telling investors that long term investment doesn’t work as the government will come along and ruin it. Watch as companies like Google rapidly stop any innovation spending and become high dividend stocks built only to pump out cash.
- tgb 6y ago
  Hasn't this already happened with Bell and Bell Labs? Why didn't the breakup of Bell stop Google from investing in innovation?
  - stickfigure 6y ago
    Bell was a real monopoly - as in, it was literally illegal to start a competing phone company. This is much different from "monopoly" with quotes, as in "gee whiz they seem so big and popular it must be a monopoly".
    - tgb 6y ago
      I don't see the relevance here. Google knows that both sense of "monopoly" can and have been regulated by the government since Standard Oil was broken up. Hence the threat of regulation did not stop Google from investing in innovation.
      - jeffbee 6y ago
        Does the comparison to Standard Oil stand scrutiny? The case against Standard Oil wasn't merely that they were popular. After all, kerosene is an undifferentiated commodity where consumers have no preference other than price. The case against Standard Oil was that they held such a breadth of natural resources (which are exclusive; no two parties can pump oil the same barrel of crude oil), and capital-intensive assets such as pipelines and railroads where Standard Oil was bribing the operators to get them to charge higher rates to their competitors. So what's the comparable unfair practice? You believe Google is paying Level3 under the table to make sure all its competitors pay more for network transit?
CPLX 6y ago
The proposal of what to do is for the Justice Department to sue them for antitrust violations and for the courts to break up the divisions of the company that engage in unlawful anticompetitive behavior. Not only is it plausible we saw it done with Microsoft, and the result was an explosion of entrepreneurship and innovation in the relevant markets, which were software and internet services.
- auganov 6y ago
  No, Microsoft was never broken up. That was the initial judgment. The case ended in a settlement [0] which didn't require all that much from Microsoft. The obligations have now long expired. [0] https://www.justice.gov/atr/case-document/file/503541/download https://www.justice.gov/atr/case-document/file/503541/downlo...
  - CPLX 6y ago
    That’s correct, they settled before any divestiture was forced on them, and I assume Google might too. But the threat stopped them from dominating the browser market and enabled the first dot-com explosion. We would be way better off today if there was a powerful countervailing force to all this FAANG consolidation. The current environment is deeply harmful to innovation.
    - twblalock 6y ago
      > But the threat stopped them from dominating the browser market and enabled the first dot-com explosion. The first dot-com explosion was well under way at that point. Microsoft's domination of the desktop didn't stop any e-commerce companies.
      - CPLX 6y ago
        The inquiry was opened in the early 90's and Microsoft's first consent decree to stop them from tying was in 1994. They later argued that IE shouldn't count and continued to bundle Explorer with Windows, and the US DOJ plus twenty states sued over it in 1998. So, no. The threats of antitrust enforcement against MS were a key part of the timeline for the first dot-com explosion, as they made MS curtail their behavior and provided startups with a little breathing room to exist without being instantly crushed by Bill Gates. I'm old, I was starting my career and working in and around tech startups at the time, it was a big part of the discussion then. It's hard to overstate how dominant and scary MS was at the time, they didn't have any real rivals.
dnautics 6y ago
Theres also very little discussion about what the fundamental principles are behind what, when, how much, and why government should regulate beyond "it's good for society" or, worse "it's good for the economy". There's a lot of really bad things you can do under the color of that reasoning and it would be nice to have a series of easy-to-understand concrete litmus tests, or at the very least an enumerated list.
schalab 6y ago
Imagine if the internet was started by one corporation. Instead, the internet is an open source set of protocols. The answer lies in converting companies which abuse becoming the standard due to network effect, to an open source set of protocols. Maybe give them a period of 10-20 years to profit. Then they have to expose a public set of standards and protocols which can be used by everyone else. For instance microsoft windows after 15 years, would be forced to release a freeware version of code, which contained all functionality they had at that time. Other companies and users could build on this code and thus microsoft are no longer the standard. Just a version of it.
- Const-me 6y ago
  Nice idea but not sure about the example. > and thus microsoft are no longer the standard 15 years ago was 2005. Imagine MS would open source Windows XP SP2. I don't think anyone would build an OS better than modern Win10 from that code. 15 years is a long time: that WinXP was primarily 32-bit (64 bit build technically existed, but no one used that), it wouldn't support modern hardware, and won't run modern software either. I see why some people would like to have that code (education, research, maybe some embedded applications or servers), but I'm pretty sure Microsoft would remain the standard. To stop being standard, in addition to that law MS need to screw up Windows in a huge way. I wouldn't expect that to happen ever, they're large company managed by reasonable people.
  - a1369209993 6y ago
    > Imagine MS would open source Windows XP SP2. [...] I don't think anyone would build an OS better than modern Win10 from that code. Uh, yes they would? It's literally trivial - you just hit compile. As you note, a 64-bit build did exist, so it's not even limited to now-obsolete hardware, although unless you want to call some of the things at [0] automatically better than XP just because they run on amd64, even that wouldn't disqualify it from being better than windows 10. 0: https://wiki.osdev.org/Projects https://wiki.osdev.org/Projects
    - Const-me 6y ago
wz1000 6y ago
Here's one idea: Make the index open and public, set up a public body to update it, and allow anyone to build a frontend. Access can be charged per query. Other companies/entities/governments will be allowed to mirror the index for essentially the price of data transfer. This is just something I thought up right now, and sure, there might be problems with the approach. But to pretend like there is absolutely nothing that can be done betrays a willful lack of imagination.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  The way that people underestimate the scale and complexity of Google's indexing always makes me chuckle. I'm especially fond of the idea that other parties will just wantonly copy it, like for research purposes or something. Also I'm sorry to inform you that the way the index shards are produced, arranged in memory/on disk, and the manner in which they are queried and ranked are inextricably linked. You can't make a search-neutral index format that can be queried economically.
  - wz1000 6y ago
    > The way that people underestimate the scale and complexity of Google's indexing always makes me chuckle. The same approach that works for Google can also work for a public body supported by public funds. It can also use much of the same systems and maybe even personnel that Google currently employs for this purpose. I'm essentially asking for the search division of Google to be appropriated by the government. > Also I'm sorry to inform you that the way the index shards are produced, arranged in memory/on disk, and the manner in which they are queried and ranked are inextricably linked. You can't make a search-neutral index format that can be queried economically. I'm not asking for a search neutral index - public Google just needs to be (largely) open, transparent and accountable about its ranking algorithm. That's why the stipulation that other entities be allowed to mirror the index - they can optimize the index for their own purposes and rankings on their own hardware. > I'm especially fond of the idea that other parties will just wantonly copy it, like for research purposes or something. Not for research purposes - other entities will be free to copy it for purposes like sovereignty (governments), less/more censorship or to build their own systems on top of it for profit, or any other purpose.
stjohnswarts 6y ago
Google could be broken up pretty easily into 3 or 4 units. Facebook, I don't know how you break it up except instagram/facebook would be pretty clean but insta is a fairly small business compared to the big ol' facebook machine. Apple could be busted up fairly easily phone/computer/accessories companies. I'm not sure how you would break up Amazon. Maybe Amazon sells only and then 3rd party sales could be busted out on its own but I think it would die pretty quickly without easy access to the shipping and logistics part of Amazon.

ryanb 6y ago

1. There needs to be guidelines for what Google can and can't do with search. Ex: Only 25% of the screen real estate can go to Google-owned ad products for allowing it to continue as a monopoly. 2. YouTube should possibly be broken out as a separate company and it shouldn't get favorable placement and treatment in search results 3. Businesses need to have more control over how their businesses appear when users search for them directly

auganov 6y ago
> 1. There needs to be guidelines for what Google can and can't do with search. Again that's vague. And once there are such guidelines who enforces them? Will it be law applicable to all companies? Will there be a special govt office enforcing this? What kind of punishments? Fines? > 2. YouTube should possibly be broken out as a separate company and it shouldn't get favorable placement and treatment in search results Who and how will determine if treatment is favorable? Auditing code and internal comms for signs for favoritism? Otherwise if you can go only by appearances then how do you keep this system fair to the companies subject to this scrutiny? > 3. Businesses need to have more control over how their businesses appear when users search for them directly Again how do you codify this into law?
- tgb 6y ago
  Don't you think you're putting an unreasonably high burden on people? I can argue that I think the lawmakers representing me and other citizens need to figure out the details without myself having figured out the details. I can point out a problem and ask someone to fix the problem without know what the specifics of the solution look like. I know healthcare is absurdly complicated but I still think single-payer is the right idea and I want my law makers to do something about that - and if there's problems, it's on them to try to communicate that with me or to work around it. Same principle here. "Regulate Google as public utility" is actually fairly specific since we've got lots of public utilities already that we can model this off of.
  - auganov 6y ago
    I haven't searched exhaustively, but nonetheless you'd think there would be more specific proposals being talked about given how hot this topic is. There is very little precedent to regulating tech companies on such a granular level. The closest thing I can think of is various EU regulations that usually amount to shaking down US giants for money once in a while. It's hard to compare this to regulating something like electricity or water delivery which is much more stable technologically. Google has changed tremendously over the years and still is innovating rapidly. And as to healthcare, well, I do think people should actually go through the same thought exercise. Tons of totally broken overregulated healthcare systems out there. "Lawmakers" usually effectively ends up being a combination of lobbyists, politicians and public pressure.
    - tgb 6y ago
      So, to be clear, are you saying that someone should make such a proposal or are you saying that advocating for this change requires there to be a proposal? Because I'd be in favor of the former but I think the latter disrupts conversation and is unreasonable. The way you wrote your post sounded strongly like "I have a knock-down argument against any advocates until they have legislation written up." Which would be an unreasonably high bar.
      - auganov 6y ago
        Well, I'm merely saying that a lack of proposals indicates a lack of workable solutions. By proposal I don't mean an actual bill ready to be passed, just a high level overview that does talk about the implementation. Obviously doesn't need to be a sound legal document. I think it's perfectly fine and important for people to speak out against perceived injustices committed by tech companies. But yes I do also think that calling for "regulation" while being very vague is also a bad idea. We've seen this play out with GDPR. Tons of people were (and are) calling for more stringent data privacy regulations. So EU came up with this monstrosity nobody fully understands in its consequences (because you can't). Enforcement is totally random. Some websites ended up just banning EU users. Many now come with very annoying cookie popups. Those that try to "comply" can never be sure they fully do. Very few people are happy or have benefited from this thing in any way. I think this is exactly what you get when you want something done but don't know what.
splintercell 6y ago
With that 25% of the screen real estate regulation now Google has an incentive to break its search results down on multiple pages. Search results would be available for navigation in a card UI (one screen per result) where 25% of the screens real estate being devoted to Google on a products would get them a lot more impressions.
bagacrap 6y ago
Does YouTube get favorable placement in search? I see video results from other sites like Vimeo. I just did a search for a recent sporting event and 6/12 video results were YT. The only "problem" is that YT has such a large share of the online video market. wrt #3, no, I don't want businesses to control the information I get when I search for them, because I want neutral and true-ish information, not ad copy.

MattGaiser 6y ago

Or all the impacts down the line. If they decided to basically seize Google, they would be telling investors that long term investment doesn’t work as the government will come along and ruin it. Watch as companies like Google rapidly stop any innovation spending and become high dividend stocks built only to pump out cash.

tgb 6y ago
Hasn't this already happened with Bell and Bell Labs? Why didn't the breakup of Bell stop Google from investing in innovation?
- stickfigure 6y ago
  Bell was a real monopoly - as in, it was literally illegal to start a competing phone company. This is much different from "monopoly" with quotes, as in "gee whiz they seem so big and popular it must be a monopoly".
  - tgb 6y ago
    I don't see the relevance here. Google knows that both sense of "monopoly" can and have been regulated by the government since Standard Oil was broken up. Hence the threat of regulation did not stop Google from investing in innovation.
    - jeffbee 6y ago
      Does the comparison to Standard Oil stand scrutiny? The case against Standard Oil wasn't merely that they were popular. After all, kerosene is an undifferentiated commodity where consumers have no preference other than price. The case against Standard Oil was that they held such a breadth of natural resources (which are exclusive; no two parties can pump oil the same barrel of crude oil), and capital-intensive assets such as pipelines and railroads where Standard Oil was bribing the operators to get them to charge higher rates to their competitors. So what's the comparable unfair practice? You believe Google is paying Level3 under the table to make sure all its competitors pay more for network transit?

CPLX 6y ago

The proposal of what to do is for the Justice Department to sue them for antitrust violations and for the courts to break up the divisions of the company that engage in unlawful anticompetitive behavior. Not only is it plausible we saw it done with Microsoft, and the result was an explosion of entrepreneurship and innovation in the relevant markets, which were software and internet services.

auganov 6y ago
No, Microsoft was never broken up. That was the initial judgment. The case ended in a settlement [0] which didn't require all that much from Microsoft. The obligations have now long expired. [0] https://www.justice.gov/atr/case-document/file/503541/download https://www.justice.gov/atr/case-document/file/503541/downlo...
- CPLX 6y ago
  That’s correct, they settled before any divestiture was forced on them, and I assume Google might too. But the threat stopped them from dominating the browser market and enabled the first dot-com explosion. We would be way better off today if there was a powerful countervailing force to all this FAANG consolidation. The current environment is deeply harmful to innovation.
  - twblalock 6y ago
    > But the threat stopped them from dominating the browser market and enabled the first dot-com explosion. The first dot-com explosion was well under way at that point. Microsoft's domination of the desktop didn't stop any e-commerce companies.
    - CPLX 6y ago
      The inquiry was opened in the early 90's and Microsoft's first consent decree to stop them from tying was in 1994. They later argued that IE shouldn't count and continued to bundle Explorer with Windows, and the US DOJ plus twenty states sued over it in 1998. So, no. The threats of antitrust enforcement against MS were a key part of the timeline for the first dot-com explosion, as they made MS curtail their behavior and provided startups with a little breathing room to exist without being instantly crushed by Bill Gates. I'm old, I was starting my career and working in and around tech startups at the time, it was a big part of the discussion then. It's hard to overstate how dominant and scary MS was at the time, they didn't have any real rivals.

dnautics 6y ago

Theres also very little discussion about what the fundamental principles are behind what, when, how much, and why government should regulate beyond "it's good for society" or, worse "it's good for the economy". There's a lot of really bad things you can do under the color of that reasoning and it would be nice to have a series of easy-to-understand concrete litmus tests, or at the very least an enumerated list.

schalab 6y ago

Imagine if the internet was started by one corporation. Instead, the internet is an open source set of protocols. The answer lies in converting companies which abuse becoming the standard due to network effect, to an open source set of protocols. Maybe give them a period of 10-20 years to profit. Then they have to expose a public set of standards and protocols which can be used by everyone else. For instance microsoft windows after 15 years, would be forced to release a freeware version of code, which contained all functionality they had at that time. Other companies and users could build on this code and thus microsoft are no longer the standard. Just a version of it.

Const-me 6y ago
Nice idea but not sure about the example. > and thus microsoft are no longer the standard 15 years ago was 2005. Imagine MS would open source Windows XP SP2. I don't think anyone would build an OS better than modern Win10 from that code. 15 years is a long time: that WinXP was primarily 32-bit (64 bit build technically existed, but no one used that), it wouldn't support modern hardware, and won't run modern software either. I see why some people would like to have that code (education, research, maybe some embedded applications or servers), but I'm pretty sure Microsoft would remain the standard. To stop being standard, in addition to that law MS need to screw up Windows in a huge way. I wouldn't expect that to happen ever, they're large company managed by reasonable people.
- a1369209993 6y ago
  > Imagine MS would open source Windows XP SP2. [...] I don't think anyone would build an OS better than modern Win10 from that code. Uh, yes they would? It's literally trivial - you just hit compile. As you note, a 64-bit build did exist, so it's not even limited to now-obsolete hardware, although unless you want to call some of the things at [0] automatically better than XP just because they run on amd64, even that wouldn't disqualify it from being better than windows 10. 0: https://wiki.osdev.org/Projects https://wiki.osdev.org/Projects
  - Const-me 6y ago

wz1000 6y ago

Here's one idea: Make the index open and public, set up a public body to update it, and allow anyone to build a frontend. Access can be charged per query. Other companies/entities/governments will be allowed to mirror the index for essentially the price of data transfer. This is just something I thought up right now, and sure, there might be problems with the approach. But to pretend like there is absolutely nothing that can be done betrays a willful lack of imagination.

jeffbee 6y ago
The way that people underestimate the scale and complexity of Google's indexing always makes me chuckle. I'm especially fond of the idea that other parties will just wantonly copy it, like for research purposes or something. Also I'm sorry to inform you that the way the index shards are produced, arranged in memory/on disk, and the manner in which they are queried and ranked are inextricably linked. You can't make a search-neutral index format that can be queried economically.
- wz1000 6y ago
  > The way that people underestimate the scale and complexity of Google's indexing always makes me chuckle. The same approach that works for Google can also work for a public body supported by public funds. It can also use much of the same systems and maybe even personnel that Google currently employs for this purpose. I'm essentially asking for the search division of Google to be appropriated by the government. > Also I'm sorry to inform you that the way the index shards are produced, arranged in memory/on disk, and the manner in which they are queried and ranked are inextricably linked. You can't make a search-neutral index format that can be queried economically. I'm not asking for a search neutral index - public Google just needs to be (largely) open, transparent and accountable about its ranking algorithm. That's why the stipulation that other entities be allowed to mirror the index - they can optimize the index for their own purposes and rankings on their own hardware. > I'm especially fond of the idea that other parties will just wantonly copy it, like for research purposes or something. Not for research purposes - other entities will be free to copy it for purposes like sovereignty (governments), less/more censorship or to build their own systems on top of it for profit, or any other purpose.

stjohnswarts 6y ago

Google could be broken up pretty easily into 3 or 4 units. Facebook, I don't know how you break it up except instagram/facebook would be pretty clean but insta is a fairly small business compared to the big ol' facebook machine. Apple could be busted up fairly easily phone/computer/accessories companies. I'm not sure how you would break up Amazon. Maybe Amazon sells only and then 3rd party sales could be busted out on its own but I think it would die pretty quickly without easy access to the shipping and logistics part of Amazon.