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An alternative approach to regulating google's search monopoly would be to require google to either compensate users for harvesting their metadata, or prohibit

An alternative approach to regulating google's search monopoly would be to require google to either compensate users for harvesting their metadata, or prohibit google from harvesting metadata. This approach would have different consequences to the DOJ's approach. It would leave intact google's ability to provide useful services that Tim Bray and others like, whilst redressing the economic tidal wave that flows google's way, for the better. How would this work? There are many possibilities. Here are just 2, one of them individualistic and consumer oriented, the other social and community oriented: 1. Google gives coupons to users as compensation for harvesting their metadata. So if a user performs say 5000 google searches per year, google gives them coupons for say $500 which they can redeem on purchases made with vendors who advertise through google. 2. Google funds journalism by paying the metadata harvesting fee into a trust administered by an independent org that facilitates journalism. Like PBS or the BBC but not owned by the British Government, owned independently by a worldwide org that is affiliated with journalists associations. The logic behind #2 is that pre-google, advertising revenue funded the news business. Post-google, the news business has shrunk by more than 50% of journalists and so the quality of the 4th estate has suffered.

cblconfederate 6y ago
> require google to either compensate users for harvesting their metadata This. Youtubers get compensated, why not ordinary users. Search, shopping and social media is work... It's the current year and billions are stuck home , many without even jobs. > How would this work? First you need a legal framework that allows users to sell their metadata. GDPR makes it illegal, but that's wrong. If this data has value (apparently it has a lot of value) , it should be tradeable for services. Incidentally, i think one of the benefits of the DoJ action is that it gets people talking about solutions that people called 'crazy' until yesterday.
- alphager 6y ago
  > GDPR makes it illegal, but that's wrong. Where does the GDPR make that illegal?
  - cblconfederate 6y ago
    Because a business cannot ask for private data in exchange for an unrelated service. The service has to be rendered even in the user does not give them. It can only be part of a contract for which they are necessary
    - srtjstjsj 6y ago
      GDPR does not ban selling data. It bans using data as currency.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
jonstewart 6y ago
This seems a cure to privacy, not necessarily to antitrust. I think most technologists here believe that the current regulatory and legal environment is wholly inadequate in the face of surveillance capitalism and something like your approach is needed to solve it, but it doesn’t seem to pertain to the DOJ’s antitrust complaint.
UncleMeat 6y ago
Lots of businesses have shrunk in the last 20 years. Forcing a big donation to a specific industry seems odd. And can you imagine the whinging if conservatives view the funding as going to left leaning outlets?
- oblio 6y ago
  Lots of businesses that were direct competitors to the internet. It makes 0 sense for journalism to shrivel in the age of the internet, it's just dying because its revenue (selling ads, newspaper prices were never what covered expenses) was disconnected from the value it provides. It's a public service, we should have a way to fund it somehow.
  - wombatmobile 6y ago
    Journalism is also the only main thing that holds lawmakers to account. Lawmakers are what set the rules by which google et al operate.
  - UncleMeat 6y ago
    I can agree that funding journalism is important. I'd love more government funded work like PBS and NPR. I just see it as independent of this context.
bogwog 6y ago
I don’t like 1 because then it creates the issue of price negotiations. How can you put a standard price on privacy? Also, privacy isn’t really the focus of this lawsuit. And I don’t like 2 because the news isn’t the only industry being negatively affected by Google’s monopoly.
- wombatmobile 6y ago
  > How can you put a standard price on privacy? Interesting question, with a lot of scope for answers. Different people have different feelings about privacy. The Nobel prize for economics this year was awarded for auction theory. Google's ad revenue model implements a form of Vickrey-Grove auction. https://www.adviso.ca/blog/tech/google-adwords-what-kind-of-auction-is-it/ https://www.adviso.ca/blog/tech/google-adwords-what-kind-of-... One possibility for "pricing privacy" is for google to compensate users for their metadata using a price that is derived from the commercial gain yielded from harvesting the metadata. Google already has a vast IT infrastructure for managing every individual's metadata history. The price dividend could simply be an output of that IT infrastructure, paid to users in some form.
  - bogwog 6y ago
    > is for google to compensate users for their metadata using a price that is derived from the commercial gain yielded from harvesting the metadata But then the compensation users receive depends on whether Google gets a good deal or not, and it still leaves Google with immense power and control. And what about the users who value their privacy higher? They might decide not to use Google, but that's only useful if there is an alternative that can actually compete with Google. Maybe the compensation thing will increase Google's costs and make it easier for others to compete, but that seems unfair; why should Google have to compensate users, but not others? Any ruling would have to apply to everyone, because that's how common law systems work. So if everyone has to compensate users, then no one will gain an advantage over Google. So the end result is just that Google makes less money while still maintaining their monopoly, and innovation doesn't happen.
abdullahkhalids 6y ago
The human right to privacy, like other human rights, should not be saleable.
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  It's not commonly one of the inalienable rights. In fact some degree of un-privacy is required in order to be a citizen anywhere. And if some private property like your metadata is not sellable, is it really yours?
  - abdullahkhalids 6y ago
    I agree that we need to discuss how inalienable is the right to privacy, especially digital privacy. But note that you can not sell your organs, because that will (and does on the black market) quickly create highly coercive contracts between individuals, or worse organ robbery. You can, however, donate your organs. I would see a similar scheme for your digital data. That, most of it cannot be sold [1]. It can be donated by your positive assent, but the receiver (businesses and such) are highly regulated to ensure they don't exploit you or society using that data. [1] I concede that there might be certain types of data that could be sold, though I cannot think of an example.
  - Enginerrrd 6y ago
    I disagree strongly. Look at the 3rd and 4th amendments. They are rooted in privacy. The problem is at the time such rights were being enumerated, such as done by the founding fathers in America, they never imagined a world in which a third party would read every letter you send to another party, a world where a man who chooses not to identify himself in a city he's never been to would be tracked with cameras and facial recognition, a world where camera automatons automatically catalog his whereabouts based on cameras & license plates, a world where he has on him at essentially all times in order to function in society a tracker that records his location data to be sent off to a powerful third party with ties to government intelligence agencies for analysis. I find it greatly detached from the reality of what is known about the historical personalities that framed the constitution to imagine anything other than them being absolutely horrified. Privacy has been an assumed right for a LONG time. And if you, right now, went up to someone on the street and offered them $20 to learn their GPS whereabouts for a day, to learn what their voice sounds like and record it, to learn what their face looks like and be able to search it in photos, to learn when they are menstruating, what kind of condoms they like to buy, who all their friends are, who they hook up with, and where they live, hiw many kids they have and where they go to school, I assert that you would find the vast majority of the population would be deeply offended you even had the audacity to ask such a thing, and a few might even call the police. Privacy is deeply ingrained in our basic social interactions and assumed by most. I think most people just don't have a clue how much it's being invaded because the collectors of such information are careful to hide it behind free gifts, and bury the truth in long, overly broad, complex, highly veiled and obscured EULA's. Then they are more careful still to try and never quite reach the level of using that information in a way that creeps people out by carefully hiding relevant advertisements in enough noise so you won't notice, trading and selling all that information in secret, all while carefully trying to systematically normalize ever more collection and otherwise creepy uses of that data.
hankchinaski 6y ago
funny enough bing does offer coupons for searches and possible redemption prizes such as skype credits, xbox and other stuff... too bad bing sucks
CivBase 6y ago
Who evaluates the value of metadata?
- wombatmobile 6y ago
  > Who evaluates the value of metadata? Currently, users give it away for free, or else they can't access google's services. Google uses the metadata to supercharge its advertising business, which outperforms all other forms of advertising previously invented, because google knows that ads users will click on as a result of analysing their metadata. William Randolph Hearst, Lord Northcliffe, Ted Turner, Rupert Murdoch and all the other media barons who went before google could only ever dream of this sort of control. Google's advertising revenue is in the order of $162 billion per year.
  - CivBase 6y ago
    I think your solution is better than what we currently have, but the real question is whether or not it's better than the DOJ's solution. To compare the two, it is necessary to understand what constitutes metadata and how the monetary value of that metadata would be determined.
  - treis 6y ago
    >Currently, users give it away for free, or else they can't access google's services. More accurate to say that users give it away in exchange for Google's services.
ridaj 6y ago
?? According to TFA, the complaint does not hinge on user metadata harvesting.
shadowgovt 6y ago
As a user, I consider myself compensated for my metadata harvesting by the fusion of that data into products I use. Assistant knows a hell of a lot about me and does a pretty decent job keeping up with what I ask of it.
tjpnz 6y ago
Slightly tangential to the original discussion but why can't I just pay them for the service they (or their competitors) provide?
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  You can. Why don't you?

cblconfederate 6y ago

> require google to either compensate users for harvesting their metadata This. Youtubers get compensated, why not ordinary users. Search, shopping and social media is work... It's the current year and billions are stuck home , many without even jobs. > How would this work? First you need a legal framework that allows users to sell their metadata. GDPR makes it illegal, but that's wrong. If this data has value (apparently it has a lot of value) , it should be tradeable for services. Incidentally, i think one of the benefits of the DoJ action is that it gets people talking about solutions that people called 'crazy' until yesterday.

alphager 6y ago
> GDPR makes it illegal, but that's wrong. Where does the GDPR make that illegal?
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  Because a business cannot ask for private data in exchange for an unrelated service. The service has to be rendered even in the user does not give them. It can only be part of a contract for which they are necessary
  - srtjstjsj 6y ago
    GDPR does not ban selling data. It bans using data as currency.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

jonstewart 6y ago

This seems a cure to privacy, not necessarily to antitrust. I think most technologists here believe that the current regulatory and legal environment is wholly inadequate in the face of surveillance capitalism and something like your approach is needed to solve it, but it doesn’t seem to pertain to the DOJ’s antitrust complaint.

UncleMeat 6y ago

Lots of businesses have shrunk in the last 20 years. Forcing a big donation to a specific industry seems odd. And can you imagine the whinging if conservatives view the funding as going to left leaning outlets?

oblio 6y ago
Lots of businesses that were direct competitors to the internet. It makes 0 sense for journalism to shrivel in the age of the internet, it's just dying because its revenue (selling ads, newspaper prices were never what covered expenses) was disconnected from the value it provides. It's a public service, we should have a way to fund it somehow.
- wombatmobile 6y ago
  Journalism is also the only main thing that holds lawmakers to account. Lawmakers are what set the rules by which google et al operate.
- UncleMeat 6y ago
  I can agree that funding journalism is important. I'd love more government funded work like PBS and NPR. I just see it as independent of this context.

bogwog 6y ago

I don’t like 1 because then it creates the issue of price negotiations. How can you put a standard price on privacy? Also, privacy isn’t really the focus of this lawsuit. And I don’t like 2 because the news isn’t the only industry being negatively affected by Google’s monopoly.

wombatmobile 6y ago
> How can you put a standard price on privacy? Interesting question, with a lot of scope for answers. Different people have different feelings about privacy. The Nobel prize for economics this year was awarded for auction theory. Google's ad revenue model implements a form of Vickrey-Grove auction. https://www.adviso.ca/blog/tech/google-adwords-what-kind-of-auction-is-it/ https://www.adviso.ca/blog/tech/google-adwords-what-kind-of-... One possibility for "pricing privacy" is for google to compensate users for their metadata using a price that is derived from the commercial gain yielded from harvesting the metadata. Google already has a vast IT infrastructure for managing every individual's metadata history. The price dividend could simply be an output of that IT infrastructure, paid to users in some form.
- bogwog 6y ago
  > is for google to compensate users for their metadata using a price that is derived from the commercial gain yielded from harvesting the metadata But then the compensation users receive depends on whether Google gets a good deal or not, and it still leaves Google with immense power and control. And what about the users who value their privacy higher? They might decide not to use Google, but that's only useful if there is an alternative that can actually compete with Google. Maybe the compensation thing will increase Google's costs and make it easier for others to compete, but that seems unfair; why should Google have to compensate users, but not others? Any ruling would have to apply to everyone, because that's how common law systems work. So if everyone has to compensate users, then no one will gain an advantage over Google. So the end result is just that Google makes less money while still maintaining their monopoly, and innovation doesn't happen.

abdullahkhalids 6y ago

The human right to privacy, like other human rights, should not be saleable.

cblconfederate 6y ago
It's not commonly one of the inalienable rights. In fact some degree of un-privacy is required in order to be a citizen anywhere. And if some private property like your metadata is not sellable, is it really yours?
- abdullahkhalids 6y ago
  I agree that we need to discuss how inalienable is the right to privacy, especially digital privacy. But note that you can not sell your organs, because that will (and does on the black market) quickly create highly coercive contracts between individuals, or worse organ robbery. You can, however, donate your organs. I would see a similar scheme for your digital data. That, most of it cannot be sold [1]. It can be donated by your positive assent, but the receiver (businesses and such) are highly regulated to ensure they don't exploit you or society using that data. [1] I concede that there might be certain types of data that could be sold, though I cannot think of an example.
- Enginerrrd 6y ago
  I disagree strongly. Look at the 3rd and 4th amendments. They are rooted in privacy. The problem is at the time such rights were being enumerated, such as done by the founding fathers in America, they never imagined a world in which a third party would read every letter you send to another party, a world where a man who chooses not to identify himself in a city he's never been to would be tracked with cameras and facial recognition, a world where camera automatons automatically catalog his whereabouts based on cameras & license plates, a world where he has on him at essentially all times in order to function in society a tracker that records his location data to be sent off to a powerful third party with ties to government intelligence agencies for analysis. I find it greatly detached from the reality of what is known about the historical personalities that framed the constitution to imagine anything other than them being absolutely horrified. Privacy has been an assumed right for a LONG time. And if you, right now, went up to someone on the street and offered them $20 to learn their GPS whereabouts for a day, to learn what their voice sounds like and record it, to learn what their face looks like and be able to search it in photos, to learn when they are menstruating, what kind of condoms they like to buy, who all their friends are, who they hook up with, and where they live, hiw many kids they have and where they go to school, I assert that you would find the vast majority of the population would be deeply offended you even had the audacity to ask such a thing, and a few might even call the police. Privacy is deeply ingrained in our basic social interactions and assumed by most. I think most people just don't have a clue how much it's being invaded because the collectors of such information are careful to hide it behind free gifts, and bury the truth in long, overly broad, complex, highly veiled and obscured EULA's. Then they are more careful still to try and never quite reach the level of using that information in a way that creeps people out by carefully hiding relevant advertisements in enough noise so you won't notice, trading and selling all that information in secret, all while carefully trying to systematically normalize ever more collection and otherwise creepy uses of that data.

hankchinaski 6y ago

funny enough bing does offer coupons for searches and possible redemption prizes such as skype credits, xbox and other stuff... too bad bing sucks

CivBase 6y ago

Who evaluates the value of metadata?

wombatmobile 6y ago
> Who evaluates the value of metadata? Currently, users give it away for free, or else they can't access google's services. Google uses the metadata to supercharge its advertising business, which outperforms all other forms of advertising previously invented, because google knows that ads users will click on as a result of analysing their metadata. William Randolph Hearst, Lord Northcliffe, Ted Turner, Rupert Murdoch and all the other media barons who went before google could only ever dream of this sort of control. Google's advertising revenue is in the order of $162 billion per year.
- CivBase 6y ago
  I think your solution is better than what we currently have, but the real question is whether or not it's better than the DOJ's solution. To compare the two, it is necessary to understand what constitutes metadata and how the monetary value of that metadata would be determined.
- treis 6y ago
  >Currently, users give it away for free, or else they can't access google's services. More accurate to say that users give it away in exchange for Google's services.

ridaj 6y ago

?? According to TFA, the complaint does not hinge on user metadata harvesting.

shadowgovt 6y ago

As a user, I consider myself compensated for my metadata harvesting by the fusion of that data into products I use. Assistant knows a hell of a lot about me and does a pretty decent job keeping up with what I ask of it.

tjpnz 6y ago

Slightly tangential to the original discussion but why can't I just pay them for the service they (or their competitors) provide?

srtjstjsj 6y ago
You can. Why don't you?