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Is it ignorant of me to wonder if the majority of the issues raised in this piece are either portrayed/worded poorly or just not very compelling? >First, Googl

by _dibly 6y ago

Is it ignorant of me to wonder if the majority of the issues raised in this piece are either portrayed/worded poorly or just not very compelling? >First, Google has the incentive and ability to favour the adoption of Fitbit over rival wearables on the user side, and to simultaneously undermine the ability of others to offer competing products to insurers and health providers. I guess the argument is that Google buying Fitbit would mean other non-Apple wearables would be at a disadvantage by nature of there being a first-party alternative, but is that inherently monopolistic or anti-competitive? Isn't that essentially what Google has been attempting to do with Nest or the Pixel phone line? After multiple reads, I fail to understand what blocking this merger does other than temporarily delay Google from doing what the tech industry is going to continue to do, exploit the ignorance of policy-makers and the general public to harvest and sell our personal information. Does blocking this merger even accomplish anything other than delaying what will be inevitable without legislative action? E: forgot some words

rStar 6y ago
> Is it ignorant of me to wonder if the majority of the issues raised in this piece are either portrayed/worded poorly or just not very compelling? I think you’re just missing the overarching point that googles position becomes stronger in a nonlinear way when you plug persistently updated pollable health data into what they already have. without resorting to name calling your argument seems to be: “we’re going to hell anyway so why shouldn’t we let google take us there as fast as possible?” my naive response would be that we should slow our descent into hell by any of the few means possible, while we wait for more humans to understand the danger to them that google, amazon, microsoft, apple ... are.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  It becomes stronger in a nonlinear way, but not in any fashion that American antitrust would block. European antitrust is a different story, and if the concern that FitBit being a "blessed" device on Android pushes out other biomonitors has teeth, so be it. I personally find that flavor of reasoning too conservative (by that model, GMail bundled with the Android OS is a faux pas because it makes it harder for other email providers to compete), but there are differing theories of what antitrust is for.

by _dibly 6y ago

rStar 6y ago

> Is it ignorant of me to wonder if the majority of the issues raised in this piece are either portrayed/worded poorly or just not very compelling? I think you’re just missing the overarching point that googles position becomes stronger in a nonlinear way when you plug persistently updated pollable health data into what they already have. without resorting to name calling your argument seems to be: “we’re going to hell anyway so why shouldn’t we let google take us there as fast as possible?” my naive response would be that we should slow our descent into hell by any of the few means possible, while we wait for more humans to understand the danger to them that google, amazon, microsoft, apple ... are.

shadowgovt 6y ago
It becomes stronger in a nonlinear way, but not in any fashion that American antitrust would block. European antitrust is a different story, and if the concern that FitBit being a "blessed" device on Android pushes out other biomonitors has teeth, so be it. I personally find that flavor of reasoning too conservative (by that model, GMail bundled with the Android OS is a faux pas because it makes it harder for other email providers to compete), but there are differing theories of what antitrust is for.