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An enormous thread on alleged Google Facebook collusion
- latchkey 5y agoImagine being paid to write code for all that.
- vadfa 5y agoImagine imagining everybody shares your morals and values.
- swat535 5y agoThe truth is that the majority of people on this website get handsomely paid to maintain and grow these companies. I don't think it's too difficult to leave all your sense of ethics out of the window if your compensation is high enough and the FAANG executives know this too well. I'm not going to take a moral high ground here because I acknowledge that it's difficult to look yourself in the mirror with rigor and question one's decisions when you can live a very comfortable life if you simply turn a blind eye. Just read the comments and you will some great mental gymnastic to justify immoral actions. This is why we need strong laws and regulation in society because without them, there is no limit in ethics for these companies and their employees.
- pietrovismara 5y agoTime to abolish all corporations for the greater good or prepare for a new age of corporate serfdom.
- DLA 5y agoTwitter threads suck so bad from a UX perspective. Long form “article” in a zillion tiny chunks with all the UI control cruft repeated over and over and over and over providing no value whatsoever. An enormous post, page, or article would be so much better. So over threads.
- jeffbee 5y agoThe UI is the least of the problems with this thread. The author is freely mixing cherry-picked statements quoted from google documents with statements made by the other side of a law suit. It looks like a pile of smoking guns but that’s because most of it is misleadingly attributed, intentionally.
- mikeytown2 5y agoThread https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1451619916994396164.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1451619916994396164.html
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mattowen_uk 5y agoThank you! Why DO people insist on posting essays as 1,001 tweets!? The mind boggles.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- zffr 5y agoI think because Twitter is where their audience is. As annoying as it is to read on Twitter, posting it as multiple tweets also allows people to like/retweet individual and multiple parts of the essay which probably increases the essay’s overall reach/engagement.
- raydev 5y agoYep, people who are interested can immediately and directly engage with the author of the thread on any single point. Medium had the right idea allowing people to highlight specific items in a post and comment on them, but I think people prefer a forum over long form articles.
- twic 5y agoIt's the only popular publishing platform that permits true hypertext features such as nonlinear text, and comments on and transclusion of individual paragraphs of a post.
- mattlondon 5y agoIronically enough, Google Docs would allow that :)
- rStar 5y agoif we had a functioning government, and if all the rich republicans in california weren’t pretending to be democrats, we wouldn’t have this problem.
- brian-armstrong 5y agoIf a frog had wings he wouldn't bump his ass a-hoppin'
- kwertyoowiyop 5y agoIf my grandmother had wheels, she’d be a bicycle.
- smoldesu 5y agoWe have a functioning government, it just so happens to hate us and let companies accrue trillions of dollars without social recompense.
- willvarfar 5y agoI remember when google was the shining light of “be nice company” that we all dreamed of working for, at odds with the evil that was M$crosoft. And, from reading all the “why I left google” posts and hearing about them leaving China, the old google of 20 or even just 10 years ago was the good or even just a better google. With how google went from “do no evil” to this, with how Facebook has always been profits over ethics, with how Amazon treats employees generally, etc: Which employers are the “nice company making nice things and you’ll be able to sleep at night” tech companies nowadays? Who should we safely not feel bad about wanting to work for?
- oth001 5y agoEpic Games seems like one of the good guys for the most part at least.
- alaeraky 5y agoThere is no safety in Corporate America. Exploiting the weaknesses of the largest group possible has been the name of the game for such a long time, that for many well meaning corporate robots it has become automatic behaviour. They defend, justify and most importantly have no roadmap to how corporate america can reduce exploitating knowledge gaps, info assymetry, biases, weaknesses at scale.
- bsenftner 5y agoThe moment I saw "Don't be evil" as their motto/slogan back in the 90's. I rolled my eyes and said out loud "What a load of shit, I bet they are evil incarnate."
- MandieD 5y agoAs my (devout but quietly Baptist) boss at my childhood town’s local ISP told me, “if you ever run into a businessman who is eager to tell you what a strong [Christian] believer he is, or has a [Jesus] fish on his signs or business cards, watch your wallet!” (Things in [square braces] as added context for people who didn’t grow up as Evangelicals in the South)
- cblconfederate 5y ago> Because "we can," executive said in 2016. "Smaller pubs don't have alternative revenue sources." And 90% of publishers and small websites suffer because of this. These are more damning than anything that has been said about these companies, because it affects their real business, not the antisocial apps they give for free. Is it even called a monopoly when you control so much of both the Supply and the Demand? It's like a black box telling advertisers "give us your money and we will tell you we did what you think we did".
- xuki 5y agoAccording to the thread, they're the biggest seller, the biggest buyer and they own the biggest exchange. I can't see anything would go wrong with that.
- cblconfederate 5y agoSad thing is, this is well known for a decade and more, the new thing here is the confirmation of collusion with facebook
- polytely 5y agoGoogle seriously needs to be broken up into small pieces or disolved entirely. Their leadership just cannot be be trusted and the internet would be better off without them around.
- blntechie 5y agoFrom a staunch opposer to government regulation in tech 4-5 years back, I have turned into someone who will cheer a break up of these big tech companies.
- globular-toast 5y agoEveryone needs time to grow up. I too started out thinking it was all so simple and the "free market" would take care of everything etc. Then your world view grows. Your list of "known unknowns" dwarfs your list of knowns. You become more pragmatic. It is clear to me now that some level of top-down coordination is necessary for success. Even national-level coordination is not going to be enough, though. It now needs to be at a global level.
- feanaro 5y agoFree market is still a good idea, it's just not enough. What's missing is that we somehow need to ensure all market actors are at most 2-3 orders of magnitude in size/power of each other. Google (and other FAANG type companies) are becoming comfortable in power to whole states. The "free" market just becomes a tyranny of the powerful in this situation.
- feanaro 5y ago> are becoming comfortable Ugh, comparable, not comfortable.
- mrweasel 5y agoUnlike Microsoft, where at least some of the business units could do pretty well on their own, if the company was broken up, I doubt the same would be true for Google. Other than search and ads, I doubt other part would do particular well. Breaking up Google would result in a lot of people losing their job. I’m not arguing that you’re wrong in the idea of breaking up Google, but I doubt it will happen.
- bserge 5y agoGMail's mark as spam feature has become "report spam". Meaning, you just report something as spam to Google. They decide what it actually is. And indeed, it works perfectly. I've marked Twitter/Facebook/Amazon/Freelancer/YouTube as spam and they always come back to the Inbox.
- bawolff 5y agoOr you know you could just undubscribe from those. Its not like major tech companies are ignoring unsubscribe requests.
- bserge 5y agoYeah, so every unsubscribe link I tried led to a page that's convoluted (likely on purpose, like GDPR cookies) and it was hard to actually unsubscribe. That was quite a while ago tbf. Since then, I just mark everything as spam. I just tried to unsubscribe from Twitter and... I need to login to my account. That I never used. To unsubscribe to spam I never signed up for (Twitter did not send these kinds of "come back" emails before). Also Gmail for Android doesn't let me search through specific folders anymore. It's just "Search in mail". Idiocracy.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- caskstrength 5y agoIt is 2021 and people are still fearlessly clicking on links in random spam emails?
- jerrygoyal 5y agothere's an option to "Block" instead.. works perfectly.
- eecc 5y agoI wonder how that code managed to stay secret so many years. How did they keep all the mass of data, the tickets, the user stories and pitch decks from being spilled online and get publicly dressed down? I guess that’s the one single major threat to effectively WHF: the need for maximum security secrecy and infrastructure control.
- phendrenad2 5y agoGoogle is known to develop stuff in an RPC-first kind of way. Makes me wonder if higher-ups are able to just write a quick script to do this, without lower level employees even knowing.
- tommek4077 5y agoBecause the code itself is much simpler than you would think.
- eecc 5y agoWhat about the rest; the presentations the executive summaries… all the paperwork that suits babble around… it takes some serious “terrorist organization” opsec to perform like this
- heurist 5y agoThey have to do that whether they are being evil or not just to prevent competitive intelligence and other damaging info from leaking. So the systems are there
- bob1029 5y ago> How did they keep all the mass of data, the tickets, the user stories and pitch decks from being spilled online and get publicly dressed down? Legal agreements and extremely valuable employment contracts, most likely. My understanding is that some (most?) of the developers out there today are in it for the money. If someone promised you enough income to retire by age 31, and all you had to do was keep your mouth shut for the interim, I think you may comply and even go out of your way a bit to protect your employer. This all explains it in my head. Its not that there is some vast, elaborate conspiracy, its that everyone involved is being heavily-incentivized to do the wrong thing.
- pverghese 5y agoAre we going to trial on Twitter nowadays? What is this nonsense
- comex 5y agoNo, a Twitter user is quoting a document from a court case that will (unless it's settled) go to actual trial.
- heartbreak 5y agoA court case brought by a corrupt, indicted attorney general whose own senior staff publicly accused him of more corruption last year before he fired them.
- ryan93 5y agoPeople claiming its hard to read twitter threads has gotten cliche on hacker news.
- londons_explore 5y agoThe bits about the ad auction are all what I expected as a user... Obviously they can adjust their fee up or down to further their interests. Obviously they have the right to set the 'floor' auction price, and can set it to maximize profits. Obviously they can take on business from Facebook, and limit how much they take on if they like. It doesn't include stuff about their recent switch to first price auctions, which make many of these complaints moot. It's really hard to make a first price auction unfair. Why was any of this a surprise?
- secondcoming 5y agoThey rejected bids with higher bid prices to prefer their own inventory. The auction was rigged.
- londons_explore 5y agoIf there was even a single instance of that, a bidder would know... Every losing bidder gets information about the winning bid. Nobody is saying "I bid $1.00, yet the winning bid was $0.90". You could almost argue that the auction time limits lead to this case "I would have bid a dollar, but you finished the auction before I could say that!". But the time limits are 100 milliseconds plus, which in computer terms is an age. If you can't get your bid in in that time, it's just badly written software that hasn't precomputed the bid ahead of time.
- p49k 5y agoYou only have access to non-Google bids, which makes it impossible to have enough information to know if the auction is unfair. Google is the final arbiter of what ad gets shown, Google does not disclose its own bid if it's the winner, and you have to trust Google that it did not improperly advantage itself in the auction (which the complaint reveals that it did in fact advantage itself).
- londons_explore 5y ago> Google does not disclose its own bid if it's the winner Citation needed. See https://developers.google.com/authorized-buyers/rtb/downloads/realtime-bidding-proto https://developers.google.com/authorized-buyers/rtb/download... The "minimum_bid_to_win" field of the BidResponse message contains this info for all first price auctions.
- richardfey 5y agoThe biggest findings in this thread are (for me) these two: - gTrade and Bernanke program - WhatsApp backups not encrypted on Drive
- capableweb 5y ago> - WhatsApp backups not encrypted on Drive Hasn't this been clear since long time ago? For as long as I can remember, the message on the backup screen for Whatsapp on iOS has said that backups are not encrypted.
- jerrygoyal 5y agoI don't remember it was the case on Android at least.
- capableweb 5y agoHere are two articles with screenshots that show both times that the statement existed there too: - 2017 - https://www.recovery-android.com/back-up-restore-whatsapp-messages.html https://www.recovery-android.com/back-up-restore-whatsapp-me... - 2020 - https://www.androidcentral.com/how-restore-your-whatsapp-chats-iphone-android https://www.androidcentral.com/how-restore-your-whatsapp-cha...
- im3w1l 5y agoIt's not been secret but hardly common knowledge either.
- capableweb 5y agoI'm not sure what more you can ask for than Whatsapp putting a descriptive text about encryption not being applied if use the export functionality, right next to the button to enable export functionality.
- im3w1l 5y ago
- colordrops 5y agoI just can't get worked up over this. Advertising is at best amoral, and inherently a shady activity. I've always assumed that advertising is a cut throat industry full of sharks. This doesn't really come as a surprise that google, the king of advertising, would partake in cutthroat activities in a cutthroat industry full of sharks to dominate and extract maximum value. So they acted like sociopaths among a society of sociopaths, so what.
- curiousgal 5y agoIt's silly but the only reason I can't get worked up over this is because it was presented in a Twitter thread. I just can't take anything presented in batches of x characters seriously.
- heisenbit 5y agoIn a world where R&D is now often dwarfed by ad spend it is really a threat to progress.
- google234123 5y agoSo what? Humans also spend almost 400 billion a year on cosmetics. Progress is being made anyway. Obviously the ad spend brings some value to those companies.
- izacus 5y agoDon't worry, USA will continue investing orders of magnitude more money into R&D for killing people so progress won't stop.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- rossmohax 5y agoHow exactly Google killed header bidding (routing of inventory to multiple exchanges)? Is it because publishers don't interact with exchange directly, but engage via sell side brokers, which google bought and changed they way the route orders?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ArtTimeInvestor 5y agoAre there any publicly traded competitors to the ad exchanges Google and Facebook run?
- p49k 5y agoYes, but you can't effectively use them unless you run them through Google Ad Manager, which gives Google special privileges/rights for their own ad inventory versus the competitor. For example, Google gets to look at the ad impression before anyone else, Google is required to win all tie-breakers, etc.
- ArtTimeInvestor 5y agoYou can't use another ad exchange without Google? Why? Can you give an example?
- p49k 5y ago> Why? Because Google requires it. Google is the only major ad network that requires that you use their own ad serving product (GAM) in order to have full access to their inventory. So your options are to use GAM and have Google inventory plus those of all other companies, or use any other ad server and have access to inventory of all companies except Google. The latter is essentially financial suicide since Google controls more than 50% of publisher demand.
- ArtTimeInvestor 5y agoIt seems you are looking at it from the perspective of an advertiser? Why would it be financial suicide to only advertise on non-google inventory? Isn't that like saying advertising only on certain media and not on other media (say only newspapers but not billboards) is suicide? I am sure there are companies out there who never advertised on Google property but did not die?
- p49k 5y ago
- greatgib 5y agoBest part for me: <<In 2015, Google signed agreement with WhatsApp to give users option of backing up their messages. Users were led to believe they were encrypted. They were not. @MikeIsaac Google knew users were mislead. See quotes: >>
- josu 5y agoWow, I was sure they were encrypted. I just checked and encryption is turned off by default. I just turned it on, thanks for the heads up.
- cpeterso 5y agoThe document says the “encrypted” files were encrypted using keys held by WhatsApp or Google and that Google Drive’s terms of service allowed Google to scan users’ WhatsApp conversations for advertising purposes. https://twitter.com/bcrypt/status/1452312761342496795?s=21 https://twitter.com/bcrypt/status/1452312761342496795?s=21
- jeffbee 5y agoWhy is that the best part? Isn’t that 100% the fault of WhatsApp and has more or less nothing at all to do with google?
- greatgib 5y agoNo 50% whatsapp fault and 50% Google. As an user, all claim to defend users and privacy, and users think that they have some features because it is in their interest. But in fact, they only care about their business objectives and would usually screw you if that can be in there interest. But with a very nice sugar coating. For example, this kind of things explain why there was no backup alternatives except google.
- pyrale 5y agoI wonder how many such scandals before people in office accept the logical conclusion that the only way to deal with this is to use the Standard Oil method.
- throwaway29303 5y agoOnline advertising is enormous. Google's Exchange process processes 11bn online ad spaces / day. We can now understand the motivation behind Google's wish to move the whole internet ecosystem (QUIC, BBR, AMP et al) into a huge optimized and abstracted Remote Procedure Call (RPC) system. From the outside people will see this as something new, shiny and as an improvement (which it is!) but at the same time they'd profit off of it.
- jeffbee 5y agoOh no, God forbid anyone would profit from faster software!
- throwaway29303 5y agoThere's no problem with profiting from (faster) software. However, there's clearly a HUGE problem profiting from monopolizing the market the way Google is doing. Moreover, it shows that Google's motives were clearly never about the end user but their ad exchange instead. Two birds, one stone. (But leave out the ugly and shameful details to the public until now.)
- jeffbee 5y agoYou think an open standard TCP congestion control algorithm is part of a big conspiracy? Listen to yourself.
- throwaway29303 5y agoNo, I don't. I think Google invested heavily in those technologies to profit from its ad exchange monopoly.
- andygrd 5y agoNo surprises there at all, it's all about the doh ray mee for that crowd.
- EdwardDiego 5y ago> Google's response - "secretly made its own exchange win, even when another exchange submitted a higher bid," complaint alleges. Their competitors knew this was happening. It's pretty easy to see occurring when you run a system that competes in Google header bidding for a publisher you also control.
- munchbunny 5y agoGoogle being on both the sell and buy sides and the “advantages” of using Google for both were things practitioners just sort of knew and had to live with, like “npm is a mess” and “A/B testing is often more storytelling than rigor“. I suspect the reason it wasn’t a bigger bombshell is that ad exchanges are hard to understand beyond the surface level “it’s an exchange for ads”, and other ad exchanges were also dirty. Google wasn’t the only one doing questionable things being on both sell and buy sides of transactions: https://www.businessinsider.com/guardian-takes-legal-action-against-rubicon-project-2017-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/guardian-takes-legal-action-... One of the most astounding things I learned in my time in ad tech was just how wide the gulf is between how much the advertiser pays and how much the website owner gets. It’s one to two orders of magnitude difference, mostly made up in fees for all of the platforms and data and other value add in between.
- EdwardDiego 5y ago> and other ad exchanges were also dirty Bingo. I'm glad to be out, tbh. I built some cool stuff, but Jesus.
- FabHK 5y agoWow. We've just had a thread on how Facebook chooses profits over people (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28955579 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28955579) and here's Google complaining that FB "at times" doesn't choose profit... > Google was frustrated @Facebook was not aligning with it to reduce users’ privacy. “We’ve had difficulty getting FB to align on our privacy goals and strategy, as they have at time[s] prioritized winning on reputation over its business interest in legislative debates."
- actually_a_dog 5y ago> Wow. We've just had a thread on how Facebook chooses profits over people (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28955579 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28955579) and here's Google complaining that FB "at times" doesn't choose profit... These are not incompatible statements. Any corporation, once it gets large enough, inevitably veers toward "profits over people," if only in the more benign sense of "if it doesn't make money, it doesn't make sense." Yes, I know, "goodwill" is a thing that corporations strive to cultivate, but, even the concept of "goodwill" has been financialized in modern corporate finance.
- jacob55555 5y agoThere’s no such thing as people: just “users”.
- Hnrobert42 5y agoPersonally, I don’t care that FB puts profits over people. That’s what I expect. They are a public corporation. FB’s board has a legal obligation (fiduciary responsibility) to make money for shareholders. Capitalism may suck, but it’s the law. Speaking of the law, Google’s abuses listed in this thread are what gall me. In Gulliver’s travels, the Lilliputians don’t strongly punish a common thief. You can just build a higher fence to thwart them. They severely punish “white collar” crimes. Outsmarting those criminals may prove impossible. We now have some of the greatest minds of our generation figuring out how to enrich Google even if it means breaking anti-trust/anti-collusion laws and even just basic breach of contract. I get that Google is a huge company and not all bad, but its primary revenue model is so morally bankrupt, I question how anyone can justify working there.
- chiefalchemist 5y agoCollusion? Conspiracy theories? Etc.? All are completely irrelevant. Simply because even a proven absence of them creates a false sense of security. It doesn't make us any safer. It doesn't take nefarious off the table. Entities with common means and ends don't have to collude or conspire. Their shared means and ends will force them to gravitate together. Starlings are a great example: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=V4f_1_r80RY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=V4f_1_r80RY For starlings I believe it's call murmuration. https://www.wonderopolis.org/wonder/what-is-a-murmuration https://www.wonderopolis.org/wonder/what-is-a-murmuration There's also a more scientific name / area of study, tho' that name escapes me atm.
- jamespwilliams 5y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence
- chiefalchemist 5y agoThat is it. Cheers!
- throwaway4good 5y agoIs this what caused the big sell off in the sector Friday? If half of what is alleged is true, it will be enough to bring down big companies (but perhaps maybe not as big and powerful as Google).
- sseagull 5y agoI think that was more Snapchat’s earnings and realization that Apple’s privacy changes can actually cause significant problems for these companies.
- throwaway4good 5y agoI can understand Snapchat getting stuffed by Apple and having trouble against tiktok but Google and Facebook are either not big on apps or require the user to be logged in and thus have enough id on the user not to be effected by apple’s measures.
- mips313 5y agoRegarding companies putting profits above all else, which companies are doing things better, and how we create better cultures, I thought I might have something valuable to add to the discussion: I work at one of Elon's companies and, yes, he cares about profitability, but I really appreciate the way he frames it, which is to use profitability as a forcing function for getting things done and as a feedback signal about whether you are working on and doing the right things. If you aren't profitable you should ask yourself, "Why don't other people find value in what I'm producing?" Additionally, we view profitability as a mechanism for allowing us to keep working on the ambitious ideas that we care about. In part because of the people who are attracted to his companies, and his particularly strong influence on company culture compared to most founders, I think his companies have a pretty healthy (thought not perfect) perspective on profitability in the grand scheme of things.
- sanderjd 5y agoIn my experience this is always the framing. The hard part is figuring out when you're being BS'd. I agree that a strong founder personality impressing their personal philosophy on the company leads to very different outcomes. I think Google's slow loss of its founders' day to day impact over time is very relevant to this conversation.
- cletus 5y agoThis is pretty damning stuff. Here's the question I have: there are a ton of quotes in here from employees. In what context were these statements made? In depositions? I would guess not. I'd guess they were made in emails, Google docs and presentations that were a result of discovery (or a whistleblower I guess). If so, I really want to find these people and ask them "what were you thinking?" Any big company has required training on communicating with care. So who are these people who seem to be so careless or oblivious to how those statements might be viewed when exposed? Leadership? Product? Engineering? ICs? Managers? I'd be interested to know more about the allegation that Google declared itself the winner of an auction even if there were higher bids. If that has any substance, that's... a problem. I really wonder how such a thing could be implemented by engineers without someone raising eyebrows. Oh and once again can we just kill the meme of Twitter threads? I mean seriously.
- belter 5y agoMaybe inverting binary trees and real intelligence are not related?
- mysterydip 5y agoWhen I started a new job, one thing in orientation was "the 'e' in 'e-mail' stands for 'evidence'."
- roland35 5y agoThat's a good way of thinking about it. When I was a kid I remember hearing "imagine reading everything you write down to grandma" or "read on the morning news". I try to keep that in mind to this day.
- gdsdfe 5y agoNothing will happen ... These tech giants have been misbehaving for years nobody is doing nothing
- captainmuon 5y agoIf the margins are so high for an ad exchange (~20%), I don't understand why nobody opens a new independent one. Sure, such a thing is hard to get off the ground, but if you have VC backing or contacts with a few classical media sites and industry associations, it seems definitely possible. Also, I don't think the advantages of targeted advertising and ad auctions are as big as people think. Maybe people should start placing ads via the sites' thematical context instead of the users' browsing history. Finally, I would also look into serving ads first-party, that is embedded in the page and from the same domain. A lot harder to block, more performant, and you might be able to get rid of the stupid cookie banners.
- ibn-python 5y agoI believe The Trade Desk is the alternative ads exchange platform to Google and Facebook. But I agree, we need more.
- nemothekid 5y agoI looked into this a long time ago and here’s what I realized. 1. You need to be really well capitalized. AdOps engineers work for the most lucrative business model in these companies and you need large scale to convince publishers to integrate with you. While you are building this out you are burning money so you need to convince VCs to pour millions to fight the darlings of SVs. 2. The publishers don’t have any choice and are already struggling. Not many of them are going to take a chance integrating a new platform that might make them less money so you need to have sellers ready to go. Ultimately it’s in Googles best interest that publishers struggle because it prevents them from experimenting with other exchanges. 3. Sellers are largely unsophisticated. They might have a hunch that GOOG/FB might be bordering on useless but nobody has been fired for spending 10MM on Facebook ads. Trying to get a piece of that spend so you have something to give publishers leads to a chicken and egg problem. Ultimately, GOOG has a massive moat that lets them protect that 20%
- whoevercares 5y agoThere are always always enough people who are willing to do anything dark/illegal with a 500k+ salary, let alone gray
- throwawaysea 5y agoThese companies need to be broken up, and regulated as utilities where they are not broken up. This particular collusion isn’t the only issue. The real issue is that collusion is a symptom of extreme market power that distorts society in many different ways. It prevents competition, hurts customers (for example undermining privacy laws), and undermines our basic values (for example most of societal speech takes place on their private platforms). Clarence Thomas and others were right about applying common carrier regulation to social media. But for things like ads collusion or illegal hiring agreements or whatever, the fix is simply to break them up due to their size. Companies that are worth hundreds of billions of dollars are simply too big.
- boopmaster 5y agoWho could have imagined that ad tech built with principles such as confusing UIs tricking customers into ad clicks, that fingerprint us and resell our personal info, that punish creators on the web by scraping answers from their sites, that built platforms like amp that diverted traffic away from sites, that’s okay with dragnets getting their customers scooped by the fuzz for being near a crime, that’s alright with censorship in China, that’s not into that “do no evil” garbage [just ask those employees that would publish papers on AI/ML ethics…] would ever have been caught up in something like this?