I will continue to believe that this is another tentacle of William Barr's political harassment of Google and tech in general until he leads the same crusade against other 'monopolies' of the same degree like Comcast, Apple, Boeing, Amazon, United Airlines, etc.
Not saying google isn't a monopoly, it classically is, same with facebook. But I wonder if Goog wasn't a majority "blue" company would he aggressively go after them. The problem is there are so many oligarchy's controlling industries. Chips, well its a two or three company game(intel, amd, ARM). Lets look at airlines, well its united, delta, american etc. Communications(cell phones), ATT, Verizon, Sprint/Tmobile. America is increasingly becoming a land of large companies controlling industries where the consumer almost always loses, think higher prices due to less competition. I point out google/facebook as they are the only companies in their space (search, social media) that control more than 75% of the space by themselves.
The government intentionally created the Airline oligopoly by banning foreign airlines from operating domestic flights in the US, and further by allowing United, American and Delta to form joint-ventures with foreign airlines to control prices/schedules between continents.
Is Google really a monopoly? Many people use Outlook, iPhones, Apple Maps, AWS, Bing, HERE maps etc...
The antitrust investigation is focused on online advertising. So Outlook, iPhones, maps, AWS doesn't really apply there. "Many people" might use Bing, but Google dwarfs it in market share.
I'm not particularly familiar with the infrastructure of the ad business, but my layman's view is that alternatives are slim outside of Google for search engine and the more general web and Facebook for specifically social media.
> The antitrust investigation is focused on X so Y doesn't really apply there.
Antitrust prosecutions are heavily dependent upon shaping the "market" which supposedly is being monopolized.
There is no good argument for antitrust against the Apple App Store if the market is "all transactional marketplaces where software can be purchased", but there is a good argument if the market is narrowly defined as "all transactional marketplaces where software can be installed onto iOS mobile devices".
Look for similar shaping of the market by both sides (the prosecutor will attempt to narrow the market and the defendants will attempt to broaden the market).
Also worth noting that Amazon already chipping away at Google's market share dominance in online advertising[1]. By the time the DOJ's prosecution goes thru the courts, the market is likely to be significantly changed from where it was when AG Sessions (who started these investigations) started crafting an anti-tech-giants strategy.
> "all transactional marketplaces where software can be installed onto iOS mobile devices"
This is clearly the case though? The App Store doesn't sell, say, Windows software, and iOS devices refuse to run software from (for example) the Google Play store.
Yes it's clearly the case, but it's not clear that there are any market benefits by the government forcing all app stores to sell all software, irrespective of the platform the software runs on. This would effectively deny all businesses the ability to work just in their niche/forte and destroys the "competitive advantage" (economics term) of most/all businesses.
Actually its worse that I thought!
Google controls 91.89% of the search market [1]
G controls 68% of the browser market [2]
G's android is on 84% of phones operating systems [3]
G has 73% of the search advertising market [4]
These numbers are really scary, if you care about fair competition and a just, balanced society.
Exactly. The Federal government speaks out of both sides of it's mouth. If monopolies fail to spur innovation as is suggested by many, then regulatory burdens such as the Jones Act do even more explicitly.
Is there something fundamentally wrong with creating the Airline oligopoly though? Maintaining domestic ability for commercial airline traffic seems like a smart idea. Having a singular search and ad network company doesn't.
I think the snarky response here would be “When did Google buy Facebook?” If you’re willing to restrict the scope of the “internet advertising market” to just specifically the things that Google dominates, then duh, Google has total control of “internet advertising”. And yet, there’s another multi-hundred billion dollar company that makes most of its money by advertising on the internet. Scoping markets in this way is nonsense. It a marketer wants to market products on the internet, are they going to put all of their money into Google because it’s the only way to advertise on the internet? Obviously not. And further, therefore there is obviously not a monopoly.
> America is increasingly becoming a land of large companies controlling industries where the consumer almost always loses
Increasingly? When wasn't that true? You have to go back to pre Civil War, where the economy was heavily geographically split due to movement/transport limitations, which mostly voids the discussion (it was very much a local and regional, agriculture-heavy economy, with limited manufacturing and a very limited consumer goods market as we know it today; not very comparable to anything that exists now). Once you get near to or beyond the Civil War and firmly into the industrial era, the combinations begin essentially immediately and they dominate their segments rapidly. Vanderbilt got so rich by aggressively creating monopolies in his day, in transport. It was far more brutal than anything you can imagine today, in all respects including the options/alternatives that consumers had. From US Steel in 1901 to the few giant railroads to Standard Oil to American Tobacco to the couple remaining giant auto companies (eg GM, Ford, Chrysler) that survived that industry's shakeout in the following decades. Further, you had a small group of industrialists and financiers that cross-controlled everything regardless (and they had few laws limiting their behavior), as with eg Rockefeller heavily dictating terms with the railroads to crush his competition.
Leap forward in time: Sears, PAN-AM, IBM, General Electric, General Motors, Ford, AT&T, US Steel, US Rubber, Bethlehem Steel, Armour & Co., Kodak, Polaroid, a very small number of giant media companies like CBS, and so on.
Yesterday was dominated entirely by massive corporations. It doesn't matter what decade you select. Whether it's 1910, 1950, 1980, or 2020. It wasn't better in the past.
Markets always do this consolidating naturally. Your only option to prevent that is to use the government to prevent or interrupt it.
This is an excellent point. Markets consolidate because mega-corps enjoy massive economies of scale. Do people remember what e-commerce was like before Amazon? You waited a week to get products in the mail. It was Amazon’s massive scale that made next day free shipping possible.
*Free with purchase: There's a membership fee and inflated prices for Prime. I'm glad for the competition since multiple retailers drastically improved their offerings.
> America is increasingly becoming a land of large companies controlling industries where the consumer almost always loses
I stand by this statement, here is a more detailed argument, its from 2018 but still has lots of information about consolidation and how it has become alot worse recently, say the past 30 years:
https://beta.trimread.com/articles/16432
> Not saying google isn't a monopoly, it classically is
Most people I've seen equate monopoly with "95% of people use", which really isn't a monopoly. As far as I'm aware, dominating a market is not the sole criteria of a monopoly (although I am aware it is a sign of successful one, correlation/causation).
For someone who doesn't follow this kind of thing, can anyone point to concrete examples of "no other company does this" monopoly or "actively stifling competition" anti-trust practices taken by google without just scoffing and saying its obvious?
It's a monopoly (or monopsony) if it's prohibitively difficult to function in the market if you refuse to do business with them (or, more commonly unless a regulator is currently assessing monopoly status, they refuse to do business with you).
For example, Google doesn't have a monopoly on search; I can use DuckDuckGo just fine (although patent trolling complicates this a bit). Google does, however, have a monopoly on search traffic; if Google delists your site, it has effectively disappeared from 90+% of peoples' (mis-)conception of the internet[1]. A government the purports to support a free market must[0] regulate the latter case.
0: in the sense that not doing so directly communicates that they do not in fact support a free market
1: and this could be true to a lesser degree even if it had only, say, 45% market share
Edit: there might also be regulations that should apply to de-facto infrastructure like search engines regardless of monopoly status, but those are, by specification, not based on monopoly status.
> Google does, however, have a monopoly on search traffic; if Google delists your site, it has effectively disappeared from 90+% of peoples' (mis-)conception of the internet[1]. A government the purports to support a free market must[0] regulate the latter case.
As much people talk about Google's monopoly, I've not seen anyone bring up this point, which is what I was talking about in my previous comment. And I would absolutely agree with you that this could represent an issue of abuse of your position in the market. Would the next step be to prove this abuse occurs? For instance, if I google "maps" I'll get google's maps first, for sure. But I'll also get apple's maps, bing's maps, open map, and mapquest on the first page.
> But I wonder if Goog wasn't a majority "blue" company would he aggressively go after them.
"Majority blue" is in a majority of their employees vote Democrat? That's just what happens when you're headquartered in California, in a metro area, with a workforce that skews younger.
I don't think that Google is somehow pushing liberal objectives in a meaningful way.
Google checks all of the boxes to be an enemy of conservatives in America’s current culture war, even if they have no particular interest in fighting a culture war. Previously they could have relied on protection from the faction of the conservative movement that defaulted to respecting large successful American businesses, but that faction has been seriously weakened. Ever since Google fired James Damore for writing an anti-diversity memo conservatives have been out for blood.
> I don't think that Google is somehow pushing liberal objectives in a meaningful way.
But true or not, it is perceived that way by those who are aggrieved (social conservatives in the USA)... which is what your comment's parent was discussing.
I'm not disagreeing with your comment, but you aren't disagreeing with your parent comment either.
Google consistently makes headlines for culture war stuff from the blue side, it's the perfect foil for Trump.
It doesn't matter if they're biasing search results or not, that's complicated anyways, highly visible culture war stuff is what his audience is primed for.
Google also controls Youtube - an important political battleground. Conservatives have been overtly critical of "censorship" and critical of social media "deplatforming" of certain personalities (on the political right). Expect this consideration to be in the minds of YouTube & Google executives as they navigate this political minefield, intended or not.
A study showed that Google News returned links to CNN vastly more often than links to Fox News, even though Fox News has triple the market share of CNN.
> How else to explain why Google has restricted more than half of our 15 videos that are pro-Israel—even one by former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper?
Google may or may not be doing this intentionally; it may be some byproduct of the algorithm plus unconscious bias from left-leaning Googlers. But the result definitely pushes liberal objectives. Your typical Googler reviewing YouTube videos living somewhere like San Francisco simply isn’t equipped to figure out what is and isn’t within the mainstream of acceptability.
Might be based on user preference influencing weighting for search results. I've know I've personally done all I can to block Fox News and other low quality sources from Google News.
Or, it just the people doing the algorithm decided to rank Fox News lower than others. I have noticed that Fox news is showing up more on Google Top News RSS feed after commotion started to be made.
And, come on man. Seriously, every news network except Fox News for the past almost 3 years pushed the Russian collusion narrative and it's turning out to be almost the exact opposite. So, you really need to rethink what you view as quality news. I'm not saying that I think Fox News is the best quality, prefer Bloomberg to be honest.
Just because you don't agree with political ideology of a news network doesn't mean it's low quality.
Fox News is by a large margin the #1 cable news network. If search results were weighted based on user preferences you’d expect it to show up more, not less.
There might be less overlap between people who passively leave their TV running on Fox News and people looking up articles on the internet than you think. It's ranked #21 in News and Media sites[1]. CNN is ranked ninth, so actually it'd be pretty questionable if Fox News were returned in search results more than CNN.
Why is that the correct metric to use? CNN is a global news outlet, while Fox is primarily domestic. Unsurprisingly, CNN ranks highly on a measure of global website visits. What does that have to do with preferences in the US?
I mean, one possibility is that Google’s algorithms are causing the politics of web site visitors people in France to affect the search results of people in Kansas. That seems like an unintentional form of pressing liberal agendas.
You can drill down into US traffic, sure (and I'm sure Google delivers results that are ranked appropriate to region), but Fox still doesn't win there - it's beaten by Huffington Post, CNN, Google News, and Yahoo News.
Note that "cable news network" is an important qualifier in that statement. The network newscasts (ABC, CBS, NBC) each see 3x Fox's news programming viewership.
> Barr is a longtime proponent of the unitary executive theory of nearly unfettered presidential authority over the executive branch of the U.S. government.
> Barr as attorney general in 1992 authored the report The Case for More Incarceration, where he argued for an increase in the United States incarceration rate
> Having criticized the Mueller investigation before taking office, Barr did not recuse himself from overseeing the investigation as attorney general. After receiving Mueller's report he issued a four-page letter to Congress, describing what he said were its principal conclusions, and adding his opinion that the evidence presented did not establish obstruction of justice by Trump. Special counsel Mueller privately responded that Barr's letter had misrepresented the report.
> Barr intervened in the criminal case against convicted Trump associate Roger Stone, recommending a lighter sentence for Stone than the career prosecutors who had worked on the case. In May 2020, the Justice Department under Barr announced the dropping of charges against ex-Trump adviser Michael Flynn despite an earlier guilty plea by Flynn, which he later filed to withdraw.
So yeah, he's a hatchet man for the president, through and through. This is just revenge for tech's left leaning donations and stance, at the bidding of Trump of course. Big tech has long been in the sights of conservatives and this is just another shot in what's been a growing conflict.
As someone who is on the liberal side on incarceration issues: what does arguing in favor of higher incarceration rights have to do with being a “hatchet man” for the President? Especially when the President in question has made strides in reducing mass incarceration that even Vox had to admit were extremely significant: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/12/18/18140973/state... (
Bush senior was big on incarceration and the war on drugs was a central tenant of his platform. It's pointing out that he [Barr] has a long history of doing what the President wants for political purposes.
Is it? Or is it evidence that Barr is a traditional, religious, law-and-order conservative, writing at a time when law and order was in vogue even among Democrats? It should be noted that in 1992, the increase in crime rates compared to 1960 was still significantly larger than the increase in incarceration rates over that same period. (In 1992, crime rates had increased by a factor of 5x, while incarceration had increased by a factor of 3x.)
Likewise for your point that Barr endorses a theory a unitary executive. So do many people. What does that prove? It’s not a controversial idea. The very first sentence of Article II of the United States Constitution says: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” It doesn’t even say something like “there shall be an executive branch and the President shall be in charge of it.” It vests the executive Power (capitalization in original) in a single person. Article I and Article III, by contrast, “vest” the legislative and judicial powers in institutions (Congress, and the Supreme Court). The choice of phrasing appears pretty deliberate. And notably absent from Article II is any mention of career bureaucrats who can exercise the executive Power" of the United States independently of the person in whom that Power is vested.
Yes. Barr was well known as a controversial politician even in those times. You can find numerous news reports affirming this. His entire political career is one giant walking controversy. While I agree that his words and opinions were more mainstream at the time, he was at the storm of more than a few scandals. Iran contra pardons are another obvious one.
> "{Are his actions} politically motivated? {Or} self-serving? I'm asking myself those same questions," said one key Justice Department official
> Much of what Barr has done since his confirmation seems to benefit the administration politically. He pleased conservatives by reversing policy and offering Justice Department help to states that want to get out from under court-ordered prison population caps.
> if Goog wasn't a majority "blue" company would he aggressively go after them
Certainly can't help them. However, I think that's a moot point if everyone can agree they are the most troublesome company in the "land of large companies". It seems like every few months I see outrage on HN over "Google increased pricing for $X service, but there aren't really any other options" situations.
Cable companies have taken billion in federal subsidies, lied about universal deployment and speeds, and unless there is local competition have taken customers to the cleaners, forced the purchase of bundled channel packages, charged rentals for modems they were not renting (I should know - I called in every month to have charge removed) etc.
I can think of a long list of other large / monopoly type companies that regular abuse consumers at far higher levels than google does.
Consumer spend on google is actually pretty small.
You spend a lot of time in an echo chamber that specifically like to talk about niche topics and specifically likes to complain about Google. Do you remember the “Google Cloud is getting shut down” hysteria? HN is a bubble.
I agree with Comcast, they need to be broken up, and Amazon could do with some scrutiny. But Apple, Boeing and United Airlines? The aren't monopolies by any definition.
Breaking up a regional monopoly into smaller regional monopolies doesn't work (see baby Bells).
What would be better is requiring the owners of any last mile infrastructure to lease said infrastructure to any other interested operator at cost. This worked with DSL, but the mandate ended when we moved on to other technologies like cable and fiber that had no such requirements.
Instead, we now do the opposite. We give ISPs tax breaks and incentives and piles of cash to "build out the infrastructure" (read: we pay them to invest in their own business), because they threaten to not build it otherwise (read: they're threatening to deliberately decline to grow their business), and for the privilege of paying them to increase their customer and revenue base, we (get this) give them the exclusive right to be the only operator of any similar last mile infrastructure in that area.
How fucking stupid can we get?
We should not allow these agreements to happen, and we should retroactively void any that are currently in place.
I’ll believe it when I see it. Nothing wireless comes close to The experience of a wired fiber connection, especially getting through walls of various materials.
Apple's monopoly is unusual, because what they did was create a wall around a section of an ancillary market (apps) which caused it to be its own market. Walmart doesn't have a monopoly on bread because anybody can buy bread from Costco instead without having to buy a new toaster. Once you make buying $1 apps from not-Apple require people to replace their $1000 phone, that makes apps for that kind of phone its own market which Apple has a monopoly on. That wouldn't be the case if they had competing app stores, but they don't.
Boeing has a serious lack of competition. Their only meaningful competitor is Airbus and that's a foreign company. They have no domestic competition at all, which is inherently problematic, especially for a critical industry like that.
I don't understand why United Airlines is on that list either. Airlines are a weird market because it's extremely capital intensive but also aggressively competitive, so they sort of alternate between all going bankrupt from relentless price competition and all colluding to raise prices enough that they don't all go bankrupt and then getting in trouble over it.
> Boeing has a serious lack of competition. Their only meaningful competitor is Airbus and that's a foreign company. They have no domestic competition at all, which is inherently problematic, especially for a critical industry like that.
This isn't due to monopolistic behavior; the McDonnell Douglas company, the last big American competitor to Boeing, would probably have ceased to be a going concern had the merger not happened. Modern aircraft cost billions and billions of dollars to develop; Bombardier just threw in the towel and sold to Airbus, and Embraer almost did the same with Boeing were it not for COVID. There are only so many aircraft manufacturers with the resources to invest in development of brand new commerical aircraft.
That might mean they haven't violated antitrust laws but that doesn't make them any less a monopoly. We might also want to start looking at how that somehow happened without them doing something untoward, because it implies that something else has gone wrong -- why is it now prohibitively expensive to design a commercial aircraft when it didn't used to be?
Monopolies also aren't allowed to do certain things no matter how they got that way. (Many of the things Apple does come to mind.)
1. Aircraft is not a monopoly, it's a duopoly between Boeing and Airbus in certain aircraft segments, and there are other manufacturers like Embraer. Airbus has manufacturing lines in the US and sells plenty of aircraft to American customers so it's not even a monopoly on manufacturing in the US.
2. Aircraft development has always been really expensive. Lots of iconic companies have shuttered, merged, or otherwise ceased to exist because aircraft development is fucking hard. Historically:
* McDonnell Douglas merged into Boeing (or the other way around, depending on your view) after they failed to build the MD-11 up to the performance advertised to customers and suffered billions in costs and delays, and that was formed from an earlier merger of McDonnell and Douglas after Douglas struggled with the costs of developing the DC-8 and 9, both airliners that are considered to have sold fairly well.
* Airbus was formed from scavenging various European national aircraft manufacturers because they would all lose money if they tried competing individually vs MCD and Boeing.
* Lockheed Martin exited the commercial aircraft market decades ago after spending billions of dollars on a delayed aircraft that airlines said they were interested in, but then got cold feet about buying.
More recently:
* Bombardier sold its aircraft lines to Airbus because it spent billions of dollars trying to fix mistakes and delays.
* Embraer tried to sell stakes in its aircraft lines to Boeing because despite having airplanes that sell well they could not cope with the cost of developing updated versions of their aircraft.
* China, Japan, and Russia have each had state-backed programs to try and take some of the lucrative airline market. All of the programs have cost billions of dollars, were delayed, and on top of that non-domestic customers are not really interested in these planes since they have worse efficiency and performance characteristics than competing aircraft products.
Even the big two have had problems; every single recent aircraft line has seen delays and cost overruns. Boeing and Airbus are just big enough that they can eat the cost of it without needing lots of government subsidy, but the MAX8 crisis has shown that might not even be true anymore.
If it were possible to reduce costs, someone would have done it by now, because aircraft manufacturing can be a very lucrative industry resulting in millions of direct and indirect jobs. As it turns out, aircraft are expensive because the ever-increasing requirements for fuel efficiency and safety from airlines and regulators have resulted in aircraft that get harder and harder to develop and build each generation. Rolling any of this back is not a good idea, because
* for various reasons, using more fuel than you have to for air travel is not good
* every single safety regulation for aircraft is written in blood, and in general people do not want to fly in planes created via "move fast, break things"; see the MAX8 crisis.
> Monopolies also aren't allowed to do certain things no matter how they got that way. (Many of the things Apple does come to mind.)
What is something Boeing has done that they should not be allowed to do as a result of their position in a duopoly?
The Apple iPhone has very close to 50% market in the US and you simply cannot have a successful mobile software business without releasing your app on the iPhone.
Democracy is about setting the rules for society, including how to reallocate some fraction of private resources according to a popular mandate.
This doesn't mean its corruption. You need more qualification to call it that.
(Not saying that the Trump admin isn't corrupt. I'm rather saying that your statement is too broad, and it fits almost all generally accepted democratic governance.)
It’s possible to be corrupt with a democratic mandate. Levying taxes is one thing, sending the justice department after companies because they are out of favor with the current administration is obviously another.
Precedent is tricky. Democrats removing the filibuster for judges came back to haunt them.
There was a recent (last few weeks) SCOTUS decision that came out with numerous opinions by different coalitions. You could tell that they were all maneuvering around this idea of precedent.
Liberal justices who ended up on either side (majority or minority) were couching their votes as upholding a prior precedent, even when they definitely weren't.
Conservative justices ended up on either side of the case while subtly arguing that overturning precedent, or at least modifying it, was okay and normal.
Both are presumed to be setting up for the next challenge to Roe vs. Wade.
EDIT: mistakenly put that the democrats removed filibuster for SCOTUS judges, that was for other nominations
Democrats didn't remove the SCOTUS filibuster, the Republicans did that to get Gorsuch on the bench. The Democrats removed the filibuster for regular judicial appointments during Obama's tenure because Republicans blocked all of his nominations, using the judicial filibuster more in two years than all previous Congresses combined.
I don't buy that. The Republicans would have killed the filibuster when they were next in power. This was simple acknowledgement by Democrats of the changing nature of the Republican party.
"We struck first because the other side was going to strike first if we didn't!"
Who knew that first-mover advantage existed in politics? Or perhaps this is better seen as a example of mutually assured destruction playing out in real life?
Yes. The filibuster is allowed to exist because of a mutual consensus to reserve it for contentious issues, and not to simply filibuster 100% of the time. Republicans broke the disarmament agreement by filibustering (essentially) the entire appointment process, so the Democrats re-armed. It just goes to show how important norms and not breaking them are to the functioning of society. If you insist on living by the letter of the law in contravention of the spirit, expect the law to change.
Precedent is tricky. Democrats removing the filibuster for SCOTUS judges came back to haunt them.
Did it though? Legal precedent is different (for now) from political precedent, and I think the Republicans have proven they’re happy to steamroll through almost anything they can to seat a Justice. They would have instantly dropped the filibuster if it hadn’t already been done.
This is no excuse to be the aggressor. "Republicans might do this" allows you to steamroll over anything set up to force compromise and bipartisanship. Once they're already doing something you don't have to feel bad about doing the same thing when it's your turn, but whoever is the first to tear down a barrier to naked partisanship is the party doing wrong.
At least with respect to judges, it's not so much "Republicans might do this" as "Republicans are already doing this". Don't want to get too deep into the weeds here, but take a look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXl5A9EdLtU&t=2015
Democrats didn't remove the filibuster for SCOTUS judges, Republicans did that (McConnell). Democrats (Reid) removed the filibuster from federal judges, because Republicans were refusing to seat Obama nominees, and over 100 vacancies had piled up.
The courts, and in particular the supreme court, have increasingly been weaponized as ways to both advance agendas and preserve inviolable causes of both parties. Since the justices are appointed by political processes, that appointment has also become increasingly political, to the point that people justify voting for a presidential candidate they dislike because of the supreme court vacancies the candidate will presumably be able to fill.
The libertarian answer would be to reduce the power and discretion of government officials so it won't be such a high-stakes, partisan process.
It’s more like “how strictly do these judges interpret and apply the Constitution.” The more creative interpretations are what have allowed for progressive, or liberal rulings.
Market concentration for all of those companies is much less than for Google. Google has 91% of the search market. Boeing has 45% of the global airline market. Amazon has a similar percentage of the e-commerce market, and an even smaller percentage of the retail market. Apple had 39% of the domestic airline market. United has 15% of the domestic airline market. Comcast’s market penetration is under 50%. (That means they have less than half the market in the areas they serve.)
I don’t know if there is a political angle to this or not. But Google is objectively differently situated than the other companies you mention.
Matt Cutts Google's infamous SEO boss, you know he was only doing his job and trying to rank literally millions of websites on the internet. Ranking algorithms are black box btw no way somebody will completely understand them any time soon.
Google ought to scare you a lot more than the other companies you listed. One not need bring politics into the picture to understand why surveillance capitalism-based companies may require distinct scrutiny.
I mean, your choices for flying somewhere are what - Delta or United? Some small regional carriers? What about for internet service - just a single ISP in most areas. Sometimes a monopoly by law, where no one else can lay fiber and they're free to charge as much as they want.
Your choices for searching something on the internet, hosting a video, doing email, etc. are innumerable.
So you'll have to qualify what you mean by "negative impact" before I can answer that.
I don't think transportation is a good analogue because it is very easy to make substitutions. There are lots of ways to get from point A to point B with no single entity blocking your path.
How many ways are there to publish a mobile app, for example?
I generally describe myself as libertarian but I'm struggling to have a laissez-faire attitude about some aspects of big tech. I think the most frustrating thing is the lack of "due process" in the way that big tech deals with customers. Look at the recent story about the ridiculous review process for Chrome extensions. I could tell similar stories about the app stores.
> I’ve never had my searches for coronavirus related content restricted in any way by my ISP for example.
Your ISP isn't a search engine. It's also regulated more like a utility, unlike Google. If your ISP started black-holing IP addresses for reason of the content they carried, there would be Congressional action (if the FCC didn't get there first).
Because of network effects that turns out to be a lot weaker protection against much more powerful companies.
Edit: Perhaps network effect is the wrong term - but it’s a bit like saying if you don’t like guns don’t buy a gun - that doesn’t really limit the negative impacts from guns...
The capital costs might actually be similar (or higher for AWS). The margins, of course, are much lower for an airline.
The best data point I can find is that Google spent 13B on datacenter and office construction in 2019, which is about the same as the purchase cost of all 130 of Delta Airlines' 737-900ER aircraft (which is about 1/6 of Delta's entire fleet).
> The best data point I can find is that Google spent 13B on datacenter and office construction in 2019
It’s hard to do a fair comparison like this between high growth companies and normal companies - for example what fraction of that cost for Google is growth based vs to maintain exisiting services?
Boeing's 737 Max debacle killed two plane-fuls of people. It's pretty hard to argue that either Amazon or Google has had negative effects on that magnitude.
I don't think it's particularly useful to compare across industries like this, especially when invoking an "appeal to worse problems" to justify ignoring a problem under discussion.
> > > Are any of those companies (except Amazon) even in the same league in terms of negative impact as big tech?
> > Boeing's 737 Max debacle killed two plane-fuls of people. It's pretty hard to argue that either Amazon or Google has had negative effects on that magnitude.
> I don't think it's particularly useful to compare across industries like this, especially when invoking an "appeal to worse problems" to justify ignoring a problem under discussion.
Interesting sequence of comments. Perhaps you placed yours at the wrong level but it certainly doesn't look like good faith at the moment.
No, it's not; it's just tedious and requires math and statistical/actuarial concepts like quality-adjusted-life-years. (The TL;DR would be that google inflicts significantly less harm per person to vastly larger numbers of persons.)
Unpleasant and time consuming is not the same as difficult.
I don't have an example at hand directly involving Google or Amazon (though these may well exist), but if you'll accept a case in which another cavalier tech monopoly has directly contributed to massive loss of life, there is the case of the ongoing Myanmar genocide:
In August 2018, a study[86] estimated that more than 24,000+ Rohingya people were killed by the Myanmar military and the local Buddhists since the "clearance operations" started on 25 August 2017. The study[86] also estimated that more than 18,000 Rohingya Muslim women and girls were raped, 116,000 Rohingya were beaten, 36,000 Rohingya were thrown into fire,[86][87][88][89][90][91] burned down and destroyed 354 Rohingya villages in Rakhine state,[92] looted many Rohingya houses,[93] committed widespread gang rapes and other forms of sexual violence against the Rohingya Muslim women and girls.[94][95][96] The military drive also displaced a large number of Rohingya people and made them refugees. According to the United Nations reports, as of January 2018, nearly 690,000 Rohingya people had fled or had been driven out of Rakhine state who then took shelter in the neighboring Bangladesh as refugees.[97] In December, two Reuters journalists who had been covering the Inn Din massacre event were arrested and imprisoned.[97]
is Facebook really doing all it can to try to halt the spread of violence? Not according to the United Nations’ Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, which released its own report on Tuesday looking into the causes of the genocide that has taken place against the Rohingya in that country. Among other recommendations, the UN report says any commercial entity doing business in Myanmar should not “enter into an economic or financial relationship with the security forces,” including the military police, known as the Tatmadaw.
With no absolution at all to Beoing for its impressive death count, 24,000 souls, and tens of thousands of rapes and beatings,, in which Facebook's negligence played sufficient role for the UN to specifically call it out, is more than a couple of planes-full, and is why what happens online is in fact as serious and consequential as can be.
