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Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a public utility

• mikestew 5y ago
  A Republican seeking to "nationalize" a private company? Sounds a little...socialist, don't ya think?
  • jjcon 5y ago
    The horseshoe strikes again https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory
  • theandrewbailey 5y ago
    What do you mean by "nationalize"? It doesn't seem like Ohio wants Google to be owned and/or run by a government. Most utilities in America aren't nationalized. Why would this be any different?
  • question000 5y ago
    If you want to talk about specific political parties on HN you have to use coded phrases or you will get flagged and downvoted. The current ones are "college educated" (democratic) or "average American" or "not city dwelling" (republicans)
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    Regulation != ownership.
• wayneftw 5y ago
  We usually have to pay for utilities, no? If Google search were a utility what would my search bill look like?
  • frockington1 5y ago
    Not saying I agree with it but, per the article: "In lieu of a fee, Yost argues in the complaint, Google collects user data that is monetized primarily by selling targeted advertisements."
  • asymptosis 5y ago
    There already exist paid search services which you can compare Google to. I use infinitysearch and it costs US $5 per month. It's true that their coverage isn't as good as google, but around $1 per week feels very cheap. And the decreased coverage is at least partly compensated by being treated like a customer instead of a product.
    • istjohn 5y ago
      Interesting, never heard of that before. If I can ask, why do you use Infinity Search over Duck Duck Go?
      • asymptosis 5y ago
        I don't not use DDG. I also don't not use Google. I tend to mix it up depending on what sorts of results I'm after and how private the search should be. One thing I like about IS compared to DDG is that DDG is still funded by advertising. This means that people are still paying to bias the results I see. By paying money to a search engine which doesn't rely on advertising at all, I have more trust that IS are really vested in showing me the results that I think are best. (They don't always succeed, but I trust that it's not about the results being undermined by third parties, it's just that they are still fairly small.)
• jbgreer 5y ago
  Interesting approach, especially given that they don't seem to be concerned about having internet service providers declared public utilities.
  • bilbo0s 5y ago
    especially given that they don't seem to be concerned about having internet service providers declared public utilities. Which is why it will obviously fail at actually doing anything useful. However, the intended purpose may not be so much to do anything useful, as it is to score some points for incumbent politicians. In that, it could succeed brilliantly. It's actually a very smart move if you consider the political benefits accrued to politicians.
    • tolbish 5y ago
      What a smart, optimal use of taxpayer dollars. Ohio residents should be proud.
    • jeffbee 5y ago
      Name even one way in which Google resembles a public utility. When I build a house, do I have to pay $25k to get my Google pipes hooked up? Seriously where are the parallels?
      • ketzo 5y ago
        It's a service with which essentially every person living in present-day America needs to interact on a day-to-day basis. And yes, they need to. I think it is hugely disingenuous to pretend otherwise. We can talk all day about how DuckDuckGo and ProtonMail exist. But for a huge, huge majority of people, Google simply is the internet.
        • bananabreakfast 5y ago
          Hard disagree. Gmail maybe. Providing email as a utility service is a strained argument but could be made as there is a parallel to actual mail service. Literally everything else Google does has a mainstream alternative that is a click away.
• sabhiram 5y ago
  "Google declares Ohio backwards, and restricts their access"
• Hamuko 5y ago
  So Republicans have completely flipped on the sovereignity of private companies? Or is this just posturing to please the number one of the GOP (Dave Yost filed a “friend of the court” brief in support of invalidating 2020 votes in Pennsylvania)?
  • dimitrios1 5y ago
    This is the beginning of the Republican rebrand to be the people's party again, since democrats have abandoned that cause long ago. They simply seek to be the in charge political force, and they are winning, as evidenced by every major corporation seemingly overnight bending over to satisfy democratic candidates and democratic voting blocs.
    • dane-pgp 5y ago
      > the Republican rebrand to be the people's party again Or at least the party of some people. If they thought they had the majority on their side, they wouldn't be afraid of the popular vote, or need to gerrymander every map they get their hands on.
    • Jcowell 5y ago
      Not that I want to get into politics on HN but care we seriously forgetting which party didn’t vote to pass a stimulus bill for the people a couple a months ago?
      • dimitrios1 5y ago
        Also not to get into politics, but this one is near to me -- Is anyone in our ___ing government ever going to actually care about this insane debt we've accumulated? Do you know how long HN made fun of Uber for burning through investor cash? What about our Government? Are they beyond critique? What's wrong with not passing a stimulus bill? It was the correct move in my opinion. What in god's green earth are we doing adding trillions more to our deficit when we are rapidly approaching 30 trillion in the red? We are sacrificing many future generations. No one has stopped to think if the long term trade offs are worth it. No one stopped to think if all this damage to the mental health of our young ones, our future, is worth it, if the isolation is worth it. No one stopped to think at all. Arguably if the federal government would stop being everyone's baby sitter, it may push states and local governments to do their own jobs instead. But alas, no one thinks like this anymore. They just think there's an infinite well of money, and big daddy government is always going to be there to give me a loan, and it will always continue to be this way, when there are many, many examples of this not being the case. Rome will fall.
• jklinger410 5y ago
  Be careful what you wish for, Ohio.
• emidln 5y ago
  How exactly is Google.com different from a phone book in 1990? Phone books, to my knowledge, were not prohibited from advertising Southwestern Bell or Ameritech junk at the beginning, they were just incentivized not to do so because selling ads was more profitable.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • ericmay 5y ago
    I don't have a great answer for you, but I have another question: if Google isn't different than a phone book in 1990, why were phone books never a top 10 business in the United States?
    • jonny_eh 5y ago
      > why were phone books never a top 10 business in the United States? They were always hyper local, or just offered by the telephone companies themselves.
    • gpm 5y ago
      Too hard to monetize, too high costs, competition by the phone company. Everyone had one, they were ubiquitous. Without the internet ads are much harder to sell, huge barrier to entry for customer acquisition compared to google. Without real time auctions and targeting ads are worth less, i.e. you can't target search terms in a phone book, only prefixes, let alone things like demographics. The cost to distribute a book to everyone is a lot higher than the cost to serve some traffic. I suspect ad density was too low too.
• MarkusWandel 5y ago
  Well, a public utility also doesn't have the right to do this: "You did something wrong, we won't tell you what it was, there's no chance of appeal, and you are now banned from receiving water service again, ever, for the rest of your life, no matter where you move. And don't try moving in with someone else who's still receiving service, because they'll get banned too."
  • fatnoah 5y ago
    I feel like this is becoming a thing with banks now, too.
    • elliekelly 5y ago
      I suspect that has more to do with AML programs becoming significantly more automated/data-driven and the increased information sharing between financial institutions. Twenty years ago one bank would ban you. Now they all do.
  • thera2 5y ago
    Although I understand what you're saying, email and YouTube access is not the same as water. Depriving someone of water would be the same as depriving them of life, which is not true of email, YouTube, and whatever g-services.
    • bobbylarrybobby 5y ago
      It’s pretty much impossible to function in modern society without an email address that you can rely on.
      • jolmg 5y ago
        But Google isn't the only provider of email addresses. In contrast, water utilities typically hold monopoly over their region. EDIT: Many people are replying with some variant that the problem is that Google can block the email account that people have tied to their financial and government services. But the same is true of any other email provider. If Google is somehow turned into a public utility, how does that solve the problem for those that are locked out of their email accounts by Fastmail, for instance? Make Fastmail a public utility too, or somehow regulate it? But it's an Australian company, so kind of outside of American jurisdiction. Or regulate the addresses themselves? Put up a law that says that only US public utilities can administer emails on the .com domain? I don't really understand what people are proposing. Or is the proposal just to regulate gmail.com addresses in particular? Treat them as the exception and incentivize more people to use that one provider so they get the protections offered by the proposed regulation.
• obnauticus 5y ago
  So why aren’t we doing the same thing to Comcast again?
  • ocdtrekkie 5y ago
    Comcast isn't a global monopoly. It's a small regional monopoly in some rural areas where it's mostly unprofitable for other ISPs to build out. Comcast just lacks Google's PR flair, and doesn't have an army of paid lobbying organizations entirely focused around making them look like a public good. (And yes, TechDirt is one of these paid organizations.)
    • the_only_law 5y ago
      How is google a global monopoly, there are other search engines out there, other mobile operating systems, other cloud providers, etc. EDIT: not even trying to bicker, there are multiple comments calling Google a monopoly, but I have no idea what market they dominate, or perhaps I’m misunderstanding what I monopoly is.
      • ocdtrekkie 5y ago
        So, for one, "monopoly" doesn't technically concern "literally only one", but that it has a "dominant market share". Monopoly is a term that feels a bit too narrow, but it's understood to apply to the issue a bit more broadly in law and legal discussions. In many cases, you're understood to be a monopoly if you have say, 70% of a market or more. Google is over 85% of all search traffic. Now, you might argue as Google has, that sure, anyone can change their default search to Bing. However, the issue with dominant companies is the network and second order effects of how they impact everything else. For example, Google's search data is primarily refined by "the fact that everyone is searching with Google". So the more popular Google becomes, the better it's data becomes... and the less possible it is for other search engines to compete. It's not a talent problem, it's a data problem. But another big aspect is the other side of a search transaction: The websites you find with Google. Since Google is 85% of search, Google search rankings determine if businesses survive, pretty much singlehandedly. It doesn't matter if you're first on Bing, because people who find you on Bing aren't enough to sustain your business. You must be findable on Google. Often, that means businesses must do business with Google: The first "search result" on Google search is almost always a paid advertisement. Businesses are forced to do business with Google to exist, and the fact that other search engines exist is... mostly irrelevant to them. This also means Google can dictate what websites can and can't display, what technologies they must and must not use, etc. AMP is terrible but Google was giving preferential treatment to websites with AMP, so AMP is understandably all over the place now. Mobile operating systems is an intriguing one, because believe it or not, if you understand the market they're in Android is a total monopoly. Android is 100% of the mobile operating system market. The default question to ask is "what about iOS", and the answer is simple: iOS isn't on the market. Because the market isn't consumers, it's phone manufacturers, and Apple iOS is only available for the Apple iPhone. If you're Samsung or HTC or Lenovo or Huawei or ZTE or Motorola, you have one option to sell phones: Sell Androids. Sure, Huawei has forked Android because it got banned by the US, but it's still Android. The only competitor in the mobile OS space that had any traction at all was Windows Mobile and it's dead. If you go into a cell carrier store today, they'll sell you an iPhone, or they'll sell you two dozen phones that all run the only operating system on the market: Android. Android has an "other side" aspect too: App developers. Even if iOS exists, businesses have to develop Android apps to reach consumers on mobile devices, and that means they have to do business with Google. And not just app development companies either. Imagine if Allstate Insurance said their app was only available on iOS: Pretty much every business in every category of industry ends up having to do business with Google. And that's a monopoly. Google isn't a monopoly in cloud providers, it's actually in like fourth place. Apparently they're just... not good at everything. *shrug*
• Aunche 5y ago
  While Google is functionally a public utility, it's not something that I want to be regulated like a public utility. If the government can't be trusted to law lines on a map that aren't blatantly rigged to favor their own political party, I can't trust that they won't tamper with search results the same way.
  • ziftface 5y ago
    Unfortunately that skepticism is warranted today. American politics were always somewhat broken in the past, but the blatant partisanship today makes any kind of progress almost impossible.
  • epigen 5y ago
    The cost-per-search is negligible even if every user had to pay. Instead of running the search the government could implement policies that make search advertising illegal and thus forcing another business model. Pay-per-search would be cheap enough for municipalities to negotiate subscriptions for their entire broadband network as a part of broadband service.
    • qxga 5y ago
      > Pay-per-search Yeah, the last thing I would want my search history to be tied to is my payment information.
    • amadeuspagel 5y ago
      What an awful idea. A municipality would probably only have one search engine, search engines would serve municipalities which could pressure them to suppress stories, there'd probably be one search engine targeting republican municipalities and one targeting democrat ones, there'd be pressure groups trying to get municipalities to use another search engine that doesn't show results they don't like and it would be incredibly hard to start a new search engine.
  • leafmeal 5y ago
    At least with government we have the powers of oversight and political organizing. It seems like a better bet then a corporation who's accountable to a bottom line, or owners.
• the_only_law 5y ago
  Wake me up when they decide the same for ISPs
• trothamel 5y ago
  While I'm not sure that a lawsuit like this is the right venue, companies like Google arguably deserve to be treated at least something like a public utility. The power and phone companies are allowed to dig or put up poles and wires where they want to - that's necessary for them to do their business. Companies like Google (and Twitter) require special rules to function - a generous view of fair use, and things like section 230 for exemptions to copyright liability. I think they should probably get those - I'd argue that both companies improve the world, in the same way that having power lines does. But it's worth considering if stipulations should be attached.
  • takeda 5y ago
    This doesn't have any real goal. The point is to start it, and once it will fall, blame it on Democrats. If they were serious about it, they would start with declaring ISPs as utilities. Also by all means I think that Google, Amazon and others should have be split into smaller companies.
• shadowgovt 5y ago
  Public utilities generally have regulation commensurate with their status as local monopolies. There are constraints requiring they offer service because if they refuse service, a consumer can't just walk down the street and get water from the next water company over. For this reason, it's going to be difficult to argue this case in the affirmative when google.com, bing.com, and duckduckgo.com are exactly as far away from the end-user in terms of "digital distance."
• Buttons840 5y ago
  > the lawsuit seeks a legal declaration that Google is a "common carrier," like phone, gas and electric companies, which must provide its services to anyone willing to pay its fee. How can something on the internet be a common carrier when the internet itself is not a common carrier?
  • Splendor 5y ago
    Yeah, that's bizarre.
  • epigen 5y ago
    > How can something on the internet be a common carrier when the internet itself is not a common carrier? Because it hasn't happened yet doesn't mean that it shouldn't happen. Maybe Google is the last straw that leads to proper governance of utilities in the public's interest.
    • babypuncher 5y ago
      The problem is that the Republicans trying to declare tech companies "common carriers" pretty much lied through their teeth 4 years ago when they argued that ISPs are absolutely not common carriers, in opposition of overwhelming popular opinion to the contrary.
      • epigen 5y ago
        Yes, the problem is Republicans. And yes, that problem has yet to be solved.
        • adamcstephens 5y ago
          Republicans are a problem, but so are Democrats. We need more than two parties.
      • zackees 5y ago
        ISPs aren’t censoring people, Big Tech is, and BigTech were always exempt from all net neutrality laws. So your comment is factually wrong.
• duxup 5y ago
  So google would be a public utility... but not my ISP?
• Animats 5y ago
  Hm. Here's Ohio's definition of a public utility.[1] It might be argued that Google is a telephone company or a messenger company, but that's a stretch. Regulating Google as a common carrier would make more sense. Common carriers (which, by the way, UPS and FedEx are not, but Union Pacific is) are required to accept and deliver cargoes for anybody who ship according to their posted rates and terms. [1] https://codes.ohio.gov/ohio-revised-code/section-4905.03 https://codes.ohio.gov/ohio-revised-code/section-4905.03
  • abeppu 5y ago
    But that concept of common carrier implicitly assumes that carrying for party X doesn't harm party Y. You can put a lot of stuff on a train, and if you need to you can run a lot of trains. Shipping is non-rivalous or whatever the economics term is. But Ohio is pointing out that _ranking_ of results in response to a search (e.g. for flights) is giving preferential placement for Google's own offerings. And only one thing can be shown at the top of the page for "flights to chicago" or whatever. Ranking kind of intrinsically means rivalry. And further, the common carrier idea is based around serving any customer that pays a posted rate. But the point of search results (as versus ads) is that it's not supposed to be the case that sites need to pay a fee to appear anywhere in the rankings. I think maybe if the existing laws and categories don't describe this situation well, then we should make new laws and categories.
  • selimthegrim 5y ago
    Seeing what the electric utilities did in terms of essentially buying passage of referenda and laws to their satisfaction in Ohio [1], I'm expecting Google to just open its wallet. [1] https://energynews.us/2020/03/05/dark-money-dominated-ohios-nuclear-subsidy-saga/ https://energynews.us/2020/03/05/dark-money-dominated-ohios-...
• Grimm1 5y ago
  I don't want more utilities, I want more competition, failure, and new players to fill spaces where old players died. Crony protectionism, and lax acquisition constraints are why we have a lot of these companies at where they are. When the seeming majority of exit plans for companies is an acquisition by a larger existing entity you have a problem. If our laws were better, people would be able to compete against <FAANG HERE> because they wouldn't have a hand in a crazy amount of markets and able to easily fend off good newcomers without a good amount of resources being expended. I heavily disagree with making things like Google a utility when the reason they're where they are today is largely artificial. They are not a natural monopoly they just took advantage of a weak government and pulled up the ladder behind themselves.
  • zaptheimpaler 5y ago
    The world is increasingly winner-take-all, so its hard to do that. Very few people want to use the second best search engine instead of the best, or constantly use multiple search engines. Seems like a natural monopoly to me. How can you complain about a weak-willed government in a post showing the opposite anyways?
    • Grimm1 5y ago
      One instance of a single state showing teeth means nothing about the strength of our federal government which matters much more here. How is Google a natural monopoly?
      • istjohn 5y ago
        It could be a natural monopoly if Google is able to use their user's click traffic to out-manuever SEO spam and their competition is unable to reach the necessary scale to obtain sufficient volume of user click traffic to compete with Google on quality.
• adrr 5y ago
  But I have multiple choices for email, search, video hosting and browsers. I don’t have any choice for water, electricity, sewer, on any other public utility. I am sure there are a bunch of people on here that don’t use any Google products and are using DuckDuckGo, Firefox, ProtonMail, Vimeo. There are many choices.
  • caslon 5y ago
    Google-avoider checking in! It's actually really easy to avoid it. DuckDuckGo's search quality is better, Firefox is deteriorating daily but still looks and feels better than Chrome does, email should really be avoided but there are dozens of really good email services, and their ad service doesn't need a replacement for obvious reasons (just block it).
    • neuronflux 5y ago
      I imagine you avoid Google because you don't want to get locked into their centralized closed source ecosystem and don't want them to track your entire online presence. So I'm surprised to see you say email should be avoided, as a completely open decentralized communication protocol. Your stances on these two topics just seem to be in contrast with each other, would you care to elaborate?
      • caslon 5y ago
        I don't care about centralization or their tracking particularly much on their own. I don't like to use bad software. It bothers me, fundamentally. I naturally ended up far away from Google by virtue of not liking things that waste computational resources, which all of their software does, and has for years. This is the same reason I stopped using Windows and OS X. I like to use software that makes me feel good, and megabytes being wasted by tracking scripts and terrible Javascript frameworks does not make me feel good, so I avoid their standalone services and block their parasitic services. However, email isn't really a good decentralized protocol. All federation fails at being meaningfully decentralized given enough time. There are great decentralized protocols; email is not one of them.
• scardycat 5y ago
  right ... ISPs are not a public utility but a web service provider is? If you want to tackle this, best to start with the most common sense place, the ISP
• JoeAltmaier 5y ago
  Reminds me of Snowcrash, the novel by Neil Stephenson. Technology was so far ahead of conventional people that the US govt became vestigial and largely ignored.
  • jbgreer 5y ago
    “When you are wrestling for possession of a sword, the man with the handle always wins.”
• Andrex 5y ago
  I'd rather they target the ISPs first, personally. I realize it's not zero-sum.
• tclancy 5y ago
  “Ohioans simply don't want the government to run Google like a gas or electric company. We can prove this based on your search history and emails!”
• theknocker 5y ago
  I can’t wait to hear from a bunch of idiots about how it’s ok for an oligarchy to rape our human rights since it’s private.
• polskibus 5y ago
  Yes please, while you're at it, require separation of cloud providers from other software services (ie. Computation utility companies)
• sigzero 5y ago
  What a waste of resources to sue like that. They aren't going to win it.
  • AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    They don't have to win it. They have to make Google think carefully about what boundaries exist for them, politically, and make sure that they don't cross them to the point that Ohio (or whoever) can win. And if that restrains Google's behavior, Ohio may have in fact won, even if they don't win the lawsuit.
    • Keverw 5y ago
      If I was Google, I'd just say screw Ohio when considering future expansions. I'd view them as being business unfriendly.
• okareaman 5y ago
  It's terrible how people are locked in to Google and they won't let you switch browsers or search engines
• bsimpson 5y ago
  It's interesting when they use examples like Google Flights. You can certainly make the argument that Google Flights is just a flight-specific results page for Google Search. The lines between search and many other Google products are pretty blurry.
• supernova87a 5y ago
  A big problem with software and people who write software (often) is that software doesn't like all the ways that human beings misbehave, change their minds, don't have immutable states, and don't fit into the categories you build for them. So any system that has a duty to serve everyone eventually ends up with an operational component that has almost as much human interaction and problem solving required as the software side of it. Or the software has to be really smart or complex. Tech companies don't like that because that increases a lot of costs. For some companies, they manage to convince their users to behave well enough to fit into the box. Other companies have to reduce their profits, or go kicking and screaming down the path of accepting the cost of business. Example: Public electric company wants to switch people to smart meters to reduce the cost of going to read every meter, more reliable operation, easier billing, turn on/shut off, etc. Reduce the number of legacy billing systems. People turn out to irrationally not want smart meters. Now utility needs to maintain 2 systems, and an exception list of people who don't want the smart meter system, and still have to run trucks and meter readers, and procedures for people with old meters. If something is to be declared a utility, the tech company had better gulp in fear of what's required. But we better as well, if we're thinking of wanting our software to be turned into something that involves those obligations and costs too. There's a reason that Google (well, maybe other tech companies) bring you new things, and the electric company doesn't. It's not all roses.
  • ErikVandeWater 5y ago
    Earnest question - Why does the utility have to honor the request of the owner? Doesn't the utility own the meter and is allowed to make changes to it as it sees fit?
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • quickthrowman 5y ago
      The large utility in my state provides the meter, the customer provides the meter socket and everything downstream of the meter. For 400A (really 320A, 80% of 400) and larger services (commercial) the customer supplies everything beyond the transformer (service disconnect and CT cabinet, typically), but the utility will provide meters or CTs depending on how it’s being metered.
• thegrimmest 5y ago
  Why can't we all collectively show an attitude of humble gratitude to an organization that has done so much to advance our civilization and improve our quality of life?
  • quotemstr 5y ago
    Because that organization has abused its power and gone from serving the public to ruling it.
    • thegrimmest 5y ago
      Can you point out exactly when they crossed this line? Seems to me like they're pretty much doing what they've always done, and being punished for being the best at it.
  • YinzerNxtDoor 5y ago
    Who’s ungrateful? Ohio rocks!
    • thegrimmest 5y ago
      Should I parse that to read you disagree with my characterization of Google? Care to elaborate?
  • bumby 5y ago
    Can you expound on your opinion about what Google has contributed? Not that I don't think they have, but I can think of a lot of corporations that have contributed more to civilization and quality of life, yet we are okay regulating them. So I'm not sure that's the best barometer for this discussion.
• ddingus 5y ago
  Wow! I feel strongly about there being an process associated with accounts. Deleted, banned, suspended, and more all have significant ramifications. Lessig wrote about all this in "CODE" where code acts like law.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
  For those who find scribd.com annnoying, here is a PDF of the complaint (SNI required): https://aboutblaw.com/XXw https://aboutblaw.com/XXw
• justicezyx 5y ago
  Given the use of information search, and its importance as the tool for gather factual data, conventional search indexing should be a public utility. Like rail road, motor road, electricity, which were started as private enterprises, and eventually turn into public utility. Information search appears on the same route. But, the catch is that "Internet" the physical infrastructure should be turned into public utility first. And then we can discuss the fundamental services running on Internet. So I support this direction. But I think the focus of the effort to be on turning Internet into public utility, right now.
• metalman 5y ago
  Guggle has little place in my life. Android phone that has been heavily fiddled with,no pay store,no jeemail,etc. This is hard to maintain ,as so many services are interlinked and useing heavy duty add blockers ,etc breaks a lot of sites. Living in a low population rural area,mobile intetnet is the by far best choice for me. And so I am in the process of choosing a new phone that will be my main device,it will be very tame and to my liking,and my current phone will get a talk and text sim with no data and be reset to factory level awfulness and used for those occasions where its just much easier to let the algorithyms play with each other and hold my nose untill its switched off. I will delay getting an actual guggle account as long as possible. So here I am a hardcore lemyalone Ill mind my own buisiness type,doing all the workarounds ,and just finding that non viable and costing me what has become basic access to goods and services.
• ChrisArchitect 5y ago
  this stupidness always ends up lost in people's lack of understanding about what Google is, how the internet works, what SEO is etc. Waste of time and Google's right, not grounded in any kind of legality.
• mullingitover 5y ago
  We can't even get ISPs regulated as public utilities.
• justbored123 5y ago
  This is simply g*rbage.I wish all my utilities were as cheap and amazing as google. Why don't we go the other way and make a law demanding that? - Google services are free. If they are a utility they should charge you like any utility, go ask Texans and Californians about their recent power bills. - There is an endless amount of comparable alternatives to Google, here you have 17 https://www.searchenginejournal.com/alternative-search-engines/271409/ https://www.searchenginejournal.com/alternative-search-engin.... The idea that google is just as important and monopolistic as you power provided is just incredibly stupid. Sorry about been rude but I have heard from the same crowd that "facts don't care about your feelings" and that door swings both ways. - Nobody forces you to use Google, its not the first option installed in a Windows computer, that would by Bing.com and I don't see any complaints. Users go out of their way to go to that site because is the best option. It's a perfect example of the free market. And even in the case of android phones the different brands like Samsung or Motorola make that call. Google gives you an amazing OS completely free.
  • ndesaulniers 5y ago
    > go ask Texans and Californians about their recent power bills. FWIW here in Santa Clara we have not-for-profit municipal power that costs less than half the surrounding area for residential service: https://www.siliconvalleypower.com/svp-and-community/about-svp/area-rate-comparison https://www.siliconvalleypower.com/svp-and-community/about-s...
• throwawaysea 5y ago
  This is exactly what needs to happen, and not just because Google is steering people towards their own products preferentially. All the big technology companies are providing services that are fundamentally necessary to live and operate in our modern society. Their ability to act outside the laws that constrain public agencies or other regulated private organizations is simply not acceptable. I am specifically thinking of their role in information exchange - whether that is books sold on Amazon, results shown on Google search, social media accounts/posts on Facebook, or other examples. These companies are simply too big and powerful to be allowed to continue operating as unregulated private companies. They are more than just another random company, given that they have billions of users and control the public square as it exists today. The fact that they have massive network effects with billions of users limits their exposure to competition - for example, it's not possible to make a viable competitor to YouTube given that Google has an existing platform with a large number of content creators, advertisers, and users. The same network means that Google's decisions (to ban content, demonetize content, lock user accounts, etc.) are as impactful as a government agency or any other utility making such a decision, because there isn't a good alternative. And in many ways, the tech companies are more powerful than governments because they have more users than most nations have citizens. In comparison, a power utility can't just arbitrarily turn off your electricity because they disagree with your speech or political position. The water company can't withhold service without explanation. Virtually all laws that companies have to abide by constitute "regulation". There's nothing stopping us from tweaking how companies like Google are treated.
• einpoklum 5y ago
  Good on them - even if they may be totally hypocritical in doing that. Search should be a public utility. Perhaps even an international public utility. Google's statement that "Google Search is designed to provide people with the most relevant and helpful results" is untrue. Google Search is designed to benefit Google (or rather Alphabet) Corporation. That involves providing relevant and helpful results - to some extent, but it also involves promoting results Google favors and demoting or filtering out results it disfavors. For example, political content which Google does or does not approve of, respectively: https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-google-interferes-with-its-search-algorithms-and-changes-your-results-11573823753 https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-google-interferes-with-its-... this includes explicit conscious censorship of specific news and commentary websites (such as the World Socialist Website, AlterNet, etc. and sites on the political right as well, IIANM).
• failwhaleshark 5y ago
  That would make their Google Fiber ISP a utility too... hmm.
• cwkoss 5y ago
  Do states have the power to file antitrust actions against companies, or is that only a federal power? It seems like an antitrust suit would have much better chance of success than this. Is this just meaningless political posturing or is there actually chance of success?
  • bumby 5y ago
    Yes, in the case of Ohio it’s the Valentine Act. It’s a contemporary of the federal Sherman Antitrust Act.
• musicale 5y ago
  Why on earth would I want Google to be a government-enforced monopoly? I already have a government-enforced cable monopoly operated by a private company, and it's terrible.
• psvj 5y ago
  this is pretty dumb, does anyone actually think public utilities provide quality service? Im baffled why anyone would want to create more of these zombie organizations.
  • bootlooped 5y ago
    My water, trash, sewer, gas, and electric utilities have always met my expectations.
• aptxkid 5y ago
  Internet is a utility. Google/Facebook is not. It’s like water is utility but having ice delivered to you is a service not a utility.
• schainks 5y ago
  Ah, yes — at best, politicians playing dumb, at worst politicians actually being that dumb. Also, the railroad companies have been actively screwing with transportation in the US for over a century, so it's pretty rich of AG Yost to use them as an example.
• Keverw 5y ago
  Pretty hostile of Ohio. I feel like the governor and other state leaders are out of touch with tech. Don't know how this could help the state or Columbus attract tech. They should try to learn a lesson or two from Texas or Utah. Idiots running the state will continue the brain drain problem.
  • sarora27 5y ago
    Agreed. This was my biggest reason for leaving Columbus as soon as I could. Most of the folks who "talk tech" have no idea what they're talking about. Just a sea of Professional Services Consultants configuring software for "clients".
• jaimex2 5y ago
  More countries need to start doing this.
• thunkshift1 5y ago
  Well, isn’t this a fun filled comment section
• amadeuspagel 5y ago
  If we ignore all this culture war bullshit for a minute there's a really fascinating issue here. The concrete issue is flight search. When you google "flight from a to b", rather then seeing search results linking to websites for flight search, the first thing you see is the results of Google's own flight search. Is that wrong? What about image search? When you search for "skyline berlin", you'll see images of berlin's skyline, before you see links to other image search sites. Same is true for a lot other stuff. If you search "timer", you'll see a timer, not links to various timers that look ugly as shit. As a consumer, I love it. So much easier. On the other hand, google could take over almost any business like this. At least, any business that is "functional" in the sense that the only thing you really want is to get some output based on your input. There's a clear tradeoff here between what's good for consumers, and concerns about democracy, the concentration of power, etc.. And also innovation. Why start a new company, if google can just take over everything? There are only two clear, non-arbitrary rules: Search engines are only allowed to show a list of links, or search engines can show whatever they want.
  • foolfoolz 5y ago
    no one is forcing you to use google. you could always pick a different one if you want different results
    • heisthefox 5y ago
      For flights, you could just query the source directly: https://matrix.itasoftware.com/ https://matrix.itasoftware.com/
      • astrange 5y ago
        Not sure if that's "the source" since the airlines are the source for their own data (and Southwest doesn't allow ITA to search their flights.) On the other hand, Google owns ITA and I think the airline websites are typically frontends for it anyway.
    • kdmccormick 5y ago
• joelbondurant 5y ago
  Commies gonna commie.
• psilo 5y ago
  Brave Search have plans to charge for searching and no ads. Seems an interesting model.
• wait_a_minute 5y ago
  Is this good or bad or irrelevant from a data/cookie security perspective?
• rta5 5y ago
  Can anyone point to any Ohio legal precedents where something not regulated by PUCO has been considered a common carrier? Per the original "An entity can be a common carrier and/or public utility under Ohio common law,even if it is expressly excluded from regulation by PUCO" I'd be curious what precedent makes Google a common carrier in Ohio law. From a US federal standpoint individual websites appear to me more akin to radio broadcast stations, which according to Ronald Coase had a failed attempt to be declared common carriers. I am not a lawyer, so I'd be happy to be corrected on that.
• scottyvg 5y ago
  How do people not see Google search as an advertising platform? Google search may act like an advanced dewey decimal system, but it is not at all the same thing.
• dlsa 5y ago
  I'm not sure what public utility means in this context. Does it still mean privately owned?
• dragonwriter 5y ago
  Actually, a common carrier, which is a private utility. If they wanted Google to be a public utility, they’d have to seize or buy their assets; the former of which is prohibited by the 5th Amendment, and their ability to compel the second is absent because the relevant assets aren't within Ohio’s reach for that purpose.
• uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh 5y ago
  Goddamn sue cox first, this is just politicians polluticking
• DubiousPusher 5y ago
  Sincere question, are most utilities even treated as public utilities in Ohio? When I was a kid in Montana, the very popular statewide public power utility was deregulated by conservatives and it ceased to operate in the public interest at all. It was quickly replaced by even less scrupulous businesses after it bankrupt itself pursing telecom.
• activehuman 5y ago
  can we donate to support this lawsuit? :P
• ayushchat 5y ago
  Google is not the same as railroads or electricity companies. Nobody pays for Google, and it's not owned by a government. I see the anti trust issues because of Google dominance, but the answer to that is not to make Google a public utility. If governments care about protecting local businesses, they should make their own directories so good that people go there to search instead of Google. Google is a private company which has made a great product for over 20 years. And now it's benefiting off of it. That's what private companies do
• johbjo 5y ago
  Let's say the electric company wants to start a restaurant. So they shut the power to the competing restaurants in the neighbourhood. Everyone agrees it would be outrageous. Now, what about Apple dictating payment policy on apps in the app store? Google premiering their own services in the results? Forcing their own apps onto all Android devices, impossible to remove? These platforms turn themselves into natural monopolies, and therefore they can not be treated as "private companies". Decentralisation would be a technical solution, but meanwhile I think regulation is what will happen.
  • ben_w 5y ago
    They have the capacity to be bad, but for example Apple (who are in a similar place WRT this) started with apps you can’t remove and has now made most of them removable; and last time I looked (a while ago now) many unremovable Android apps came from the phone vendor. I’m all in favour of keeping companies under a close eye to make sure they don’t become an abusive monopoly — my naïve political philosophy is that power should be conserved, so the more e.g. economic power you have the less e.g. free market choice you should be allowed — but I don’t see in Google[0] what you see in them. Also? If they can easily become a natural monopoly, decentralisation won’t solve anything in the long term. [0] nor Apple, Netflix, Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter, or Microsoft; but that is how I see Facebook and Amazon.
    • silasdavis 5y ago
      > If they can easily become a natural monopoly, decentralisation won’t solve anything in the long term. I don't follow the reasoning here.
      • ben_w 5y ago
        Saying something is naturally a monopoly is equivalent to saying it’s naturally not decentralised. They’re opposites.
  • krisoft 5y ago
    How do these services turn themselves into natural monopolies? There are many non-Apple phones available. There are also non-google search engines. What makes these natural monopolies then?
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• known 5y ago
  Isn't it against Capitalism ?
• simonjgreen 5y ago
  The status of Google, and additionally AWS and Azure, is feeling very reminiscent of the early days of electricity companies, and the early days of (in UK at least) telco. Bit by bit the world is realising that the global economy and system is now at the mercy of these businesses to a defacto point where there's no option any more. I believe it's a responsible direction for governments to legislate to control them, if nothing else then purely to guarantee risk management and sustainability for the population at large. Suspending for a moment how unlikely it is to happen, imagine if Amazon decided tomorrow they were shuttering AWS. Or Google was ceasing providing search. These things are so essential to everyday life now the impact would be staggering. Governments should be looking at these threats with open eyes in the same way they have had their eyes opened to global pandemic prep.
• tibbydudeza 5y ago
  Why is US laws applicable to Google ???. What if Google simply relocates it's incorporation domicile to Lichtenstein or sometime to Mars instead ???. I am baffled as I can access and use Aliexpress based in China and they don't have any paperwork filed in my country to operate there.
• valprop1 5y ago
  The big tech giants have grown too big for Governments and Lawmakers to regulate. Adding to this problem is the lobbying that runs around these premises. The following article highlights how big tech remain untouchable. https://www.citizen.org/article/big-tech-lobbying-update/ https://www.citizen.org/article/big-tech-lobbying-update/
• Maursault 5y ago
  It surprises me that a lot of the comments here seem to be oblivious to how Google's PageRank algorithm ranks search results. [1] PageRank works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is. The underlying assumption is that more important websites are likely to receive more links from other websites.[1] The results of a Google search may not be as one expects because PageRank is the primary algorithm used to return Google search results. If owners of a website want to improve their Google result ranking, they are really required to tune their website to show up in Google search, but more importantly, they need other sites to link to their site, and presumably, the more popular the site, the more links there are to it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank
• eddof13 5y ago
  I support this. I think once the platforms become large enough, Facebook, YouTube, Google, etc, they should be regulated as a utility.
• hellotomyrars 5y ago
  I fail to see how it is possible to present a good faith argument about how Google is a public utility when the required infrastructure that Google is built on is not. If ISPs aren’t a utility then Google can’t be. I also don’t think this is being pursued in good faith which is the sadder part.
• greyhair 5y ago
  I find it hilarious the Red State Ohio wants to increase government oversight of corporations. Populist sentiment has completely rolled on through at this point.
• warmfuzzykitten 5y ago
  Backing up just a bit, what right does a state have to declare a web application a public utility? The jibber jabber about how Google might affect Ohio businesses seems just a distraction from the basic issue. A public utility is generally a business within the state that delivers essential services, like water and power, to areas in which there is no reasonable alternative, i.e., as local monopolies. If the internet itself is not considered a public utility - and indeed companies like Comcast and AT&T that deliver the internet as mostly local monopolies are not regulated as public utilities - how can a mere application on the web be considered a public utility? Even if it were, this would seem to be a matter for federal, not state, jurisdiction. The lawsuit seems more a publicity stunt than a serious action.
• grae_QED 5y ago
  >Google said Google Search is designed to provide people with the most relevant and helpful results and the Ohio lawsuit would make it harder for small businesses to connect directly with customers Why do multi billion dollar companies keep pulling the "small business" card. Does anyone actually fall for this?