Google is excelling again - as the whole “uncensored” Big-Tech IT now.
The short summary is that for nearly a year, Google was hiding Proton Mail from search results for queries such as ‘secure email’ and ‘encrypted email’. This was highly suspicious because Proton Mail has long been the world’s largest encrypted email provider.
No, that’s an insane option. Look at how the government runs other services and ask yourself if you really want Google to be run that way:
Do you really think the government is capable of running something like Google if they can’t even keep up with tax returns?
No, nationalizing it would likely just make things worse, breaking them up makes a lot more sense.
Government should stick to things where it can actually make a difference a commercial company can’t, like welfare programs, policing, etc.
On today’s episode of “underfund government agencies so we can argue govt doesnt work and privatization is bae”
Are you suggesting that this time would be different? The reason things are inefficient and crappy isn’t particularly relevant, just that they are and adding to that mess isn’t going to suddenly make it better.
I said what I said. Properly fund shit and put people in charge that understand it instead of politically charged appointees.
Big tech has done nothing but hemmorage money and make everything worse, why are you celebrating them instead of calling it busted when they do it?
Big tech has been making money hand over fist, especially Google. If you want to know how Alphabet (Google’s parent) is doing financially, you can look at their financial statements, but basically they’re making tons of profit.
The thing that’s busted isn’t that they’re unable to turn a profit, but because they’re so obsessed with profit that they’re breaking anti-trust law. Breaking them up should help competitors and eliminate a lot of the issues that have been created due to their anti-competitive behavior. Nationalizing it would likely just result in the service sucking after a few years, and may encourage lawmakers to protect it from competitors. It’s a lot easier to break up a commercial company than a government agency.
Google has, Google isn’t the only tech company.
Google also wouldn’t survive being broken up. Their entire business model revolves around the strangleholds they have. Somebody would absolutely pick up the search product if it went under and I’d rather it be public than owned by another Musk who will just decide that only fox news and breitbart can be displayed on the first few pages.
Some things SHOULD be publicly owned, in everybody’s best interests.
Some things, sure, but I think that list of things is fairly small and completely unrelated to services Google provides. I don’t want government anywhere near something as important to free speech as search.
And I think Google would be just fine, they’d just have to adjust their business model a bit. That means they’d probably have to raise/introduce prices to certain services to make them viable. For example:
Each of Google’s businesses is absolutely viable on its own, but if they can’t be sold together, they’d have to adjust some prices down and other prices up, which is good for competition.
I don’t think it’ll be that easy. Once people have to pay (or the functionality is reduced to compensate) there are plenty of alternatives waiting to provide better products for the same price if not better. The Google singularity depends on being a whole suite of premium product being offered for free, once that’s gone it won’t have the same oomph as a brand.
How do you feel about Musk owning Twitter? Because that’s (depressingly) considered important to free speech, but the “free speech” crowd happens to cheer as Brosef openly censors things he doesn’t like and promotes baseless falsehoods and whatever else tickles his whims. I don’t want to assume you’re in that camp, but 9 out of 10 “Keep govt out of my free speech” folk tend to celebrate Musk’s particular brand of it and consider it “free speech” when he censors but oppression if it’s done to somebody who agrees with them.
Do you think search would be free and open under the ownership of some private equity group or another billionaire with money to burn like Musk? Hell, do you think it’s free and open NOW under Alphabet? They play dirty ALLLLLL the fucking time with search. If we brought Google (or some other search engine, or hell built a new one) under a government team we could just…pay the engineering team to build and maintain a product without all the games of profit and clout chasing that gives you relevant results instead of specifically engineered middling results designed explicitly to make you have to run another search (and all the other crap they do.)
Meh. I’ve hated Twitter since it was created, so him owning it doesn’t really impact me in any way. Twitter also had its own moderation issues like pretty much any social media company, it just had a liberal bias instead of a conservative one.
I’m absolutely in favor of free speech and I agree with Musk’s criticisms of Twitter, but I also agree with the criticisms of Musk on the same grounds. He’s not better for free speech, and he’s arguably worse.
I don’t think search can ever be free and open, at least not in any real way. There are just far too many motivations to slant it one way or another, whether that’s for profit, political gain, religion, etc. It’s a more meta version of the issue of news media, and the solution isn’t to have government own it, the solution is to make sure there’s competition.
Free speech is guaranteed not through policy, but by ensuring nobody has a monopoly. That’s why I’m here on Lemmy despite not agreeing with the majority here politically (most of you seem to be quite far left), it’s why I use Odysee and Rumble despite not agreeing with the majority there (they’re a lot more conservative than me), etc. We all need to do our part to combat centralization, and I think the government has a place in breaking up centralized services when they get too influential.
If we did that, there’d be political pressure each election to boost certain causes over others. There’s a good reason I don’t use Yandex, I’m worried about ties w/ the Russian government. I don’t think any government should be a gatekeeper to information in any capacity, I think it does a much better job policing other groups’ abuse of their position.
Hm, but Twitter started with the censorship. It was published under Twitter files - that they actively banned anyone who didn’t supported their worldview and it as on order from the Government.
It’s documented in Twitter Files (how it internally worked) and also recently Mark Zuckerberg admitted the same type of censorship.
Brave Search and Brave browser is my favorite.
Google is basically a government in itself regarding it’s resources, GDP, personnel and the power that it wields, and they can do it just fine. Actually they are doing it so well and smoothly, that nobody notices being fucked by them. Your government just sucks in general, we know this. Instead of demanding less government, singing praises of private companies and people as fixes to everything, and then watching everybody getting railed by private interests twice as badly as before, you should instead demand better government.
Following any “let’s chop up google” replace it with another platform is just a game of fools whack-a-mole. No matter how small you would chop up google the same monopoly would still form under a different name, maybe in a little different configuration. We have been in this moment before in the past. You can’t kill monopolies, no matter the field because free markets internal logic will create monopolies no matter what you do and then it seizes to be a free market and you get all the anti-consumer, anti-competition, gatekeeping, general parasitic behavior that you got before. it’s not that google is run by bad people or is inherently evil now. it’s current tricks are what is required by the market and it’s investors because they want every single cent out of it’s customers. It’s that maximizing profit no matter the cost that is combined with cornering market on several sectors that is the real problem and creates that anti-user behaviors. You wouldn’t have that with a government institution.
With monopolies it’s either suffer or make them work for you. That is what a nationalization would be, since even a sham democratic control and following of social goals would be improvement on private interests doing the same and worse. If you are worried about governments spying on you, then don’t be. They already pay google to do that for them already. the real problem really is that companies like google and Microsoft are so big and influential that global politics would enter into play if US did anything to their pseudo independence from the state, no matter how benign their intentions.
Have we though?
If we look specifically at search, it went from MSN/AOL (i.e. captive to your browser or internet service) to Yahoo to Google, and each was a step up from the prior. The problem with Google is that they’ve snapped up enough marketshare in enough types of products that competitors can’t compete with the whole suite (i.e. search, email, browser, and ads). Breaking them up would enable other companies to succeed in one of those areas since it’s no longer all bundled together.
This has absolutely worked in the past. Look at the anti-trust lawsuit against Microsoft and look at browser marketshare, before the anti-trust suit, IE ate Netscape’s lunch, then a few years after the anti-trust suit, Firefox jumped to 30%-ish market share before Chrome started taking off. IE beat Netscape because of antitrust, then Firefox beat IE because of features, and Chrome beat Firefox and IE because of performance. That’s how the market should work. However, Chrome cemented its dominant position through bundling with other Google products and Chrome-only extensions (i.e. much the same strategy that IE had), so people get frustrated with non-Chrome browsers and use Chrome.
I disagree, both with the premise (that we have a free market) and the conclusion (that a free market results in monopolies). We have a lot of protections for large tech companies, and that promotes monopolies. For example:
A truly free market have a high likelihood of self-correcting once one group gets too influential. In the late 90s, it really looked like Yahoo was going to take over the world (everyone seemed to have a yahoo email address, used yahoo search, etc), and that existed until Google found a way to do search better, and bundled direct competitors to yahoo’s services. That is an example of the free market working as intended, Yahoo sat on its hands and was punished for it. These days, however, Google is sitting on its hands, yet it’s not getting punished for it because it has successfully locked in users. That tells me it’s not a free market, and if you look closely, there are a lot of anti-competitive practices.
I can find a lot of evidence where a dominant party sits on its hands and a competitor eats its lunch. For example, Intel kept its position early on through anti-competitive behavior (massive lawsuit w/ AMD, which AMD won), and AMD later ate its lunch with Ryzen because Intel stopped innovating. These days, ARM is threatening to take marketshare on laptops from both because neither has a particularly compelling mobile CPU. If Nvidia stops innovating, Intel and AMD are ready to eat its lunch on GPUs. Steam is encroaching on Switch’s dominance on handhelds (and has reinvigorated a whole PC handheld market), and I wouldn’t be surprised if they could make inroads into XBox and Playstation console dominance, just like how XBox essentially filled in where Dreamcast failed.
There are healthy, relatively free markets, and there are unhealthy, unfree markets. The government’s role should be to catch companies when they cheat to keep markets as free as possible.
Wouldn’t you? Government programs often lead to stagnation, as well as legal barriers to competition. Look at the train system in the US, it used to be a really healthy, private ecosystem, but that was destroyed when the government heavily subsidized road infrastructure, making road transit cheaper than rail transit (which is absolutely nuts to me). If the government wants to promote a service, it’ll subsidize it with income taxes so alternatives can’t realistically compete.
I don’t know what nationalizing Google would look like, but I expect to see some anti-competitive behavior from the government agency in control of it, and you can’t really sue the government for anti-trust.
Or the alternative: lower the barrier for others to compete. For example, to break a monopoly on ISPs, either strip out bureaucracy so competitors can come lay lines (only attracts big companies), or provide infrastructure for companies to provide service on (e.g. muni fiber). I wouldn’t want my city to be my ISP, but I’m happy with it owning the infra and private companies competing to win service contracts.
I don’t see how government getting involved in search, email, or hosting makes any sense though. If they do search, there are huge ethical concerns (esp. around elections and partisan searches). If they do email, it’s going to end up looking like TreasuryDirect or IRS.gov, as in incredibly dated and crappy to deal with. If they do hosting, they’ll sit on upgrades and you’ll be stuck on outdated hardware. That’s just how governments operate, they only update things if there’s enough political will to do so.
Government is most effective as a police to shut down bad behavior, it’s really ineffective at actually providing services IMO (look at wait times for simple things, like processing a passport). Governments should set and enforce the rules, and then let the market provide the services.
It never will. You libertarian types say that it will, but it never has and never will. First there are no mythical pure free market and also when you have a lot more capital, resources and bulk. They can comparatively throw endless amounts of money towards a problem and RnD. They can afford to fuck up and have a money buffer, they might just generally stagnate and be ok. When your potential challengers can only usually have one chance and, when they fail they will get bought out and usually by the same monopoly that they were trying to challenge and thus enforcing that monopoly with whatever innovation that the up with, or they just take the patent just so that nobody else gets it. And what has alphabet for example doing. it’s been shopping smaller tech and IT companies all around the world and it integrating them into itself.
how will you lower the capital cost that would be required to challenge google/alphabet? Servers, battalions of code monkeys and engineers and RnD don’t just drop from the sky for free you know. That is the biggest problem of challenging any monopoly, it’s just too damn expensive to try when it reaches a certain point. There comes a point when you can’t just anymore get into the market with two shovels and some elbow grease and you need massive loans for fleets of excavators and trained crews to run them just to be competitive. There is also the problem that at some point nobody will fund your venture to dethrone the market leader, because A) it’s expensive as fuck B) there is 1% chance that you will succeed and the investment will provide 100x return and 99% chance that failure awaits and the money will be lost. No sane bank or financier takes that bet and nobody does that kinda things for charity.
Again, your government just sucks. You draw the incorrect conclusion that therefore every government must suck as badly as yours.
I gave you examples where it has. Yahoo’s massive search lead was completely destroyed by Google, who offered a much better product at the time, and they even tried the “one-stop shop” thing that Google is known for today.
But that’s not what companies tend to do. Once companies get a commanding lead, they take their foot off the gas and try to rake in profits. That happened to Intel, and look where they’re at now. As long as there’s no anti-competitive behavior, the system will eventually correct itself, because the dominant company will take its foot off the gas. If it doesn’t, then it really doesn’t matter if they have a massive marketshare because the customer is happy (e.g. Valve), but that’s incredibly rare.
In a fair market, you won’t just have one challenger though, you’ll have tons. Investors love underdog success stories because going from nothing to significant market share makes a lot more money than maintaining a lead, so there will always be support for challengers to the status quo. Look at cars, Tesla ate everyone’s lunch on EVs to become the most valuable car company. People thought the car market was largely impossible to break into, yet Tesla was able to do it. Why? Lots of capital and a strong, new-ish tech (yes, EVs weren’t new, but fast EVs were).
Yeah, monopolies will try to buy their smaller competitors, and it’s on regulators to block those sales if they’re anti-competitive, and it’s also on those smaller competitors to say no because they believe in their product.
By separating the various components so they don’t have as much power.
Right now, a competitor can’t really win at search because it’s not the default everywhere, and Google has basically paid to be the default everywhere. So breaking that anti-competitive behavior is the first step. A company also can’t win at video because Google subsidizes YouTube with its profitable search business, so if that’s forced to be profitable on its own, it’ll have to raise prices, which creates an opportunity for a challenger to step in. For web browsers, Google basically has massive intertia, which it maintains by having Chrome be default on Android, and Chrome is the lynchpin to pretty much everything. The solution there is to force Android to be self-sufficient (i.e. provide it’s own, non-Chrome browser), and for Chromebooks to also be independently successful (i.e. separate it from the Google Search product).
If each of Google’s products had to be profitable on their own merits, competitors would have a realistic shot.
If you’ll look at the market though, there are competitors that are ready to start taking marketshare:
So if you break up Google, the market is ready for competition, they’re just being suppressed because of Google’s anti-competitive behavior.
That’s how business generally goes. The successful ones don’t attack the golden goose directly, but instead chip away at the edges. That’s what Proton, Kagi, etc are essentially doing, and AFAIK they are commercially successful, they just have a hard time competing with “free.”
I’m not talking about every government, I’m talking about this one specific government, because that’s the one that’s relevant in this discussion.
I do think that other governments also suck, they just suck differently. I just think the motivations for governments just don’t align properly for certain classes of services. But to make that case, I’d have to talk in the context of a specific government and a specific service, and in this case I’m talking about the US government and services Google provides.