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.
The real sane option would be nationalization of google under some international body, not breaking it up, or leaving it, and just waiting the market just centralizing itself around some other company that will repeat what google has become and done.
Yes, but it still would be only a momentary stop AND it would create worse service, because many google products are uncompetitive in themselves and can only exist because google steals everybody’s data through these platforms and sells it to advertisers. Like how much does google pay for youtube servers to keep running and how much would it cost for the users for the same thing and it to not be part of google. Every google alternative would either have to be worse service or be subscription based. I know I’m a devils advocate here, but still.
How about some kind of federated alternative instead? But maybe with a better pricing model than what Lemmy does, where instances have 1% of their users tossing in a few bucks, and many smaller instances have the operators paying for most of it out of their own pocket. This would take a lot more bandwidth, storage, and CPU/GPU than a Lemmy instance would.
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:
- Defense Department consistently fails audits
- Healthcare.gov was completely unusable at launch
- this list of high risk programs
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.
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.
We have been in this moment before in the past.
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.
free markets internal logic will create monopolies no matter what you do
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:
- DMCA - protects host from liability for illegal content, while preserving their profits, at the expense of individual users
- net neutrality - ends up putting the network costs onto users; it’s the same idea as road construction being funded by income taxes instead of road users (i.e. higher registration costs for heavy trucks)
- complete lack of privacy laws - no real liability for breaches, data sharing, etc, unless it’s something related to medicine or finance
- network effect - closed APIs lock in users, so once you get past a certain level of users, you essentially have a monopoly; this would be like a bank only supporting internal transfers of cash and having no mechanism like ACH or check writing, which would encourage users to flock to a single bank
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.
You wouldn’t have that with a government institution.
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.
With monopolies it’s either suffer or make them work for you.
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.
