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Justice Dept. plans to file antitrust charges against Google in coming weeks
- zapita 6y agoOther comments have pointed out that he is pushing the timeline against the advice of career lawyers. Everything this Attorney General does should be scrutinized for underlying partisan motivation. My guess is that he has ulterior political motives linked to the 2020 presidential election, and he wants to build leverage with Google in relation to those motives.
- EricE 6y agoCareer lawyers can’t have underlying partisan motivations either? This article is scant on real facts, instead it’s just more rumor and innuendo from “anonymous sources”. Which apparently is just fine even though in the majority of these stories once the bombastic claims are dropped and more facts come out later, revealing thatthe claims are either grossly overstated or outright lies it doesn’t matter because everyone has moved on to the next “ooh shiny”. People used to ostracize organizations that take such continual gaslighting to performance art levels, but apparently its the new normal because “orange man bad” or something.
- vharuck 6y agoBarr is a political appointee who replaced Sessions, who was dismissed by Trump for being "disloyal." Barr plays the public political game well. Career workers in Federal agencies can be partisan, but it's harder to think they're more influenced by politics than the politician. Secret conspiracies are really hard to believe, because they're really hard to pull off. I'm more willing to believe investigators always want more time, and this is a case where our hunger for political reasoning colors our interpretation. Not saying this is the case, just my Occam's Razor.
- beervirus 6y agoCareer workers in federal agencies have routinely worked toward anti-Trump ends.
- zapita 6y agoSure any lawyer can have ulterior motives. It just so happens that this particular AG has a well established track record of politicizing his work in public office, dating back to the Nixon and Reagan years. It doesn’t seem like a stretch to take that track record into consideration when analyzing his move against Google.
- Jtsummers 6y agoI'm not a fan of the man, but if you're trying to make a case against him you should make it accurate. He did not hold any public office position under the Nixon administration, he was in college during it. He then became a civil servant in the CIA starting in 1973.
- zapita 6y agoYou are correct. It's Roger Stone who was a Nixon advisor. Stone is the federal felon which AG Barr recently freed from prison by overriding his sentencing guideline, for purely political reasons. I had my criminals mixed up.
- rat87 6y ago> Career lawyers can’t have underlying partisan motivations either? They can, we know that the current Attorney General is a hack that eagerly ignores betrays his duties to play politics, doing offense/defense for Trump Anonymously sources are standards procedure and the majority of these stories are verified. And yes it is an undeniable fact that Trump is terrible, putting it in baby language (orang man bad)doesn't change it one bit. And it's a fact that he has abused the law and his office to go after his perceived opponents, even if regulatory action is needed if it comes from corrupt motives it's much more likely to be overturned in court.
- neonate 6y agohttps://archive.is/Jlixq https://archive.is/Jlixq
- tobsmagoats 6y ago"The attorney general is said to have set a deadline over the objections of career lawyers who say they need more time to build the case." all you need to know
- neonate 6y agoAll? One would at least like to know how common this is. In a corporate environment, it would hardly be unusual for a manager to insist on a faster schedule than developers would prefer.
- eropple 6y agoIt isn't at all common for the AG to override his department's attorneys' investigative schedules, let alone for political reasons related to his boss's reelection campaign for reasons and stemming from his crew's inability to Stop Lying All Of The Time.
- EricE 6y agoReally? So the AG’s position is more of figurehead rather than supervisor? Fascinating.
- eropple 6y agoHe is a political appointee in an organization that, for the most part, leaves its civil servants alone once they are emplaced. Doing otherwise is a historical oddity.
- neonate 6y agoAre you sure? If so, how? Because all the reporting on all of these topics is extremely politicized, and anyone on one side of the equation is guaranteed to say something like this.
- Jtsummers 6y agoThere's no "rush to market" for filing charges like these. It's not like the competing US governments are pressing ahead with their own charges.
- xibalba 6y agoI am surprised Google is the highest priority. I would've assumed Amazon or Apple would top the list of antitrust targets.
- SaltyBackendGuy 6y agoOr like the ISPs
- paxys 6y agoOr credit reporting agencies. Or credit card companies. Or banks. Or defense contractors. Tech is always the soft target for governments worldwide.
- creddit 6y agoBanks aren’t really concentrated, though. Lots of competition in the area.
- qppo 6y agoBecause tech has monopolies over specific markets (or duopolies) engaged in anti-competitive practices that harm business and consumers while being comically unregulated. Banking, credit, and defense all have a pretty good balance of competition and regulation. That's not to say there aren't areas that should be targeted by governments, but tech is hardly a "soft target." It's never been hit!
- thebradbain 6y agoWell, except for all the 90s/00s Microsoft + Internet Explorer antitrust drama -- though admittedly Microsoft came out of it mostly unscathed, if a bit humbled.
- Barrin92 6y ago>Tech is always the soft target for governments worldwide. lol. Take a look at credit card regulation in Europe and the amount of regulation passed on banks in the last 20 years alone (for good reasons). The only thing that's soft about tech is the industry's constant whinging because they're finally recognizing that the good old days of getting away with everything might be over. Credit cards are actually a good example. Let's slap the 0.2% interchange cap that is the legal limit in the EU on the Apple store and see what happens then.
- marta_morena_25 6y agoIt's funny to watch (and also lucky for us), how Trump in his attempt to utilize everything at his disposal in his own favor and solely in his own favor, manages to self-sabotage himself at every turn through stupidity.
- nlh 6y agoI read this story just now and I found it incredibly frustrating -- it reads like a gossip column. Lots of details about who wants to do what and when and who objects, but incredibly light on actual details. What laws are they going to claim Google has broken? Vague hand-waves about "advertising" and "Google is involved in your life" doesn't cut it for me. Does anyone have a source or a hunch of what specific anti-trust laws Google is violating with what specific actions?
- paxys 6y agoThat info doesn't exist publicly because the charges haven't been filed yet.
- ntsplnkv2 6y agoWhenever the case is made you will see what they argue.
- cblconfederate 6y agoGoogle controls advertising on both the supply side and demand side. It's not hard to think ways in which this is anticompetitive. A ton of stuff is black boxes. E.g. are adsense chargebacks real? Are keyword bids fair?
- donor20 6y agoDo billboard work? Does a fox ad work? Come on - the company spending the money has MORE visability into what their google ad spend buys them then in almost any other area. I don't even care if I overpay on a "bid" for a spot - the metric I'm using is return on spend. And trust me, the mainline media companies driving this do not promise advertisers "fair" bidding. They have sales people trying to extract every nickle they can (through sometimes horrible accounting practices where they pay different divisions to drive up various "costs").
- cblconfederate 6y agoMaybe for you ad price is not an issue. That's like saying the price of steak is not an issue for you. There are a ton of billboard companies and TV channels, so competition is presumed to lead to price discovery and low prices. Google has no competition.
- waynesonfire 6y agoA vaccine and this.. what else needs to make it through before the elections?
- ardy42 6y ago> A vaccine and this.. what else needs to make it through before the elections? Terrifyingly, the census: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/24/us/census-bureau.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/24/us/census-bureau.html: > The count faces two crushing deadlines — to compile an accurate tally by Sept. 30, and to process and double-check the numbers in time to deliver population totals to the president by Dec. 31. The Census Bureau earlier had told Congress it needed to push the delivery of population totals to April 2021 because of the pandemic. > The Trump administration ordered the speedup, critics say, because it wants to subtract undocumented immigrants from the totals before sending them in January to Congress to reapportion the House. That plan — which faces multiple court challenges — would reshuffle House seats to give a modest advantage to the Republican Party. > It comes as the administration has installed political appointees in the Census Bureau’s top ranks — two in June and a third named last week to a new post: deputy director for data. Critics say the administration wants to change crucial statistical methodologies to give Republicans an even greater edge.
- tathougies 6y agoThe Vaccine that has already gone through normal stage 2 trials ensuring safety? All this talk about a vaccine being 'rushed' is so anti-science, it's a joke. The vaccine may certainly be ineffective or undereffective if rushed through phase 3 trials, but the idea it'll be unsafe is hogwash.
- bleepblorp 6y agoStage 1 and 2 trials establish safety in generally healthy people. Stage 3 is primarily to establish efficacy, but is also vital to establish safety in the broader population, including among people with existing diseases. For their own safety, unhealthy people are not generally admitted into stage 1 and 2 trials. Curtailing stage 3 testing for political gain is dangerous.
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- mark_l_watson 6y agoI don’t like the timing of this, obvious political motivation. That said, I think it would be a good thing for Google, Apple, Amazon, and maybe Microsoft to go through this process. When the process works well, the companies may make needed adjustments to the way they do business, and get this all over with in a few years. I am a very happy paying customer of Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft. I would still like them all to be investigated and adjustments made. Capitalism and free markets work very well with the appropriate amount of government oversite - set guardrails for allowed behavior.
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- donor20 6y agoThe article reveals the real concern - google has impacted "telecoms and media companies". These groups are VERY powerful. They don't want things like net neutrality, they want to hoover up broadband subsidies without actually delivering service (and often faking coverage maps etc). And despite all their claims, they are enormous monopoly like groups, now under republican administrations with much GREATER concentrations across both content libraries and internet access (time warner etc). Under this administration, massive anti-competitive consolidation has been permitted and encouraged in areas with much much greater consumer harm, by companies who IMMEDIATELY go back on their promises. "How Trump’s Department of Justice Just Gave Hollywood Megacorporations Unlimited Power" https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/09/hollywood-paramount-decrees-streaming-netflix-disney https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/09/hollywood-paramount-decre... "On August 7, US district judge Analisa Torres granted the Department of Justice’s request to terminate the Paramount Consent Decrees" The absolute ridiculous irony here is the govt is hand over fist screwing consumers, and now is going after... google!? ... has having ripped folks off? Do I believe my cable co was both selling my data for profit and jacking up my prices because I had no choice? Sure, even when their service was terrible I was stuck. Any enforcement? Bare minimum (I had to call monthly to get them to remove their modem rental fee - I wasn't using their modem, but a year after I started they added the charge and insisted I had their modem but wouldn't tell me the device ID). Australia / New Zealand are going to be some good examples here. Very arbitrarily (vs principles based) rulemaking coming.
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- ideals 6y agoIt's going to make the next Bilderberg meeting a little awkward for a few people after they do this.
- throwaway5752 6y agoThis is so grossly political that it's disgusting. Clearly the administration sees Google through the lens of an adversary, which is astonishing enough. When reading something like this, "according to five people briefed on internal department conversations." is the first clue. You have mass leakage of internal discussions, with career ending consequences. You can't have any greater signal that something is very wrong, and that people believe the chain of reporting is compromised. The question of whether Google represents a monopoly is critical for every software professional in this forum, and it is a trillion dollar US company that represents most people's discovery platform for information. It has has nuance, and there are gray areas that are going to have generational impact when they are litigated. It an important legal question and not well served by a thin case served out two months from an election.
- tathougies 6y agoHacker news is so bipolar on this. I've seen calls on this site for immediate antitrust law cases against google, and now that the Trump DOJ is doing it, immediately, there's a rush to defend Google. It's getting nauseating really. Something being 'political' is not bad, especially when it being 'political' enforces the will of the people against those who ought to be subject to the will of the people. In particular, many Americans believe Google to be engaging in anti-competitive practices, so being political by following what the American populace wants cannot and should not be used as an insult.
- AJ007 6y agoThese comments are bizarre. This topic has been discussed ad nauseam in hacker news for many years. The discussion on here was justifiably more extensive and explained more deeply than anywhere else. People on hacker news have used Google services for 15+ years. They’ve built businesses around Google’s platform. They’ve built businesses which compete with Google. They’ve seen Google do things which dismantled other businesses so that Google could earn some incremental revenue in order to continue to pay their executives and employees wildly bloated salaries (e.g. Anthony Levandowski paid over $100m; that’s insane.) Google has a lot of deep problems. They managed to kick the US regulatory can down the road over and over again. Now they have to deal with it. All but 1 state AG was on board for this. They were very cozy with the Obama White House so there is very good justification for this to happen now.
- hiram112 6y agoFunny how the tone of the comments, so far, is negative. I wonder why. If the exact same investigation were ramping up in 6 months, under a Biden controlled DOJ, I'd imagine it'd be one comment after another praising the decision. Regardless, this should be an easy case if they want to win. I can't think of a company in modern times which has obtained so much power and has behaved so poorly in the past few years.
- TheMblabla 6y ago> I can't think of a company in modern times which has obtained so much power and has behaved so poorly in the past few years. Off the top of my head Nestle. Halliburton. Comcast. Monsanto. The Weinstein Co. Foxconn. Fox news. I could go on..
- Nasrudith 6y agoName their actual bad behavior then - instead of going with the techlash style vaucous talking point "assertion that something must be done" and then locking up when asked about any details. It is amazing at how propaganda talking points cause humans to fail a Turing test like that by acting indistinguishable from bots.
- ummonk 6y agoThe DoJ obviously shouldn't rush into a case poorly prepared. At the same time though, antitrust issues with Google have been known for so long, and the DoJ itself has been preparing the case for so long... At some point I'd like to see the actual case filed. After all, after being filed this case will take years to work its way through the courts. Sure it could be for political reasons but it's also possible that Barr just set the deadline to ensure that the lawyers get a move on already instead of dragging their feet.
- RickJWagner 6y agoIt seems like most of the article is a hit piece against the government officials, rather than news about Google and the potential suit. I feel the headline is at least a bit misleading. It's the old bait-and-switch.
- throwawaymanbot 6y agoThis is what happens when Authoritarians ask you to push their agenda exclusively and you dont follow along. They open up BS investigations in to your company to harass you. Authoritarians need to realize that they are temporary. Google will outlast them all.