Some news on the Google front: while the U.S. vs. Google Ads case has yet to be ruled on, there’s been some developments in the U.S. vs. Google Search case. Via the BBC:
It is one of a series of remedies proposed by the DOJ in a court filing late on Wednesday aimed at stopping the tech giant from maintaining its monopoly in online search.
Government lawyers also recommended that District Judge Amit Mehta force the firm to stop entering into contracts with companies – including Apple and Samsung – that make its search engine the default on many smartphones and browsers.
The proposed remedies stem from a landmark anti-competition ruling in August, in which Judge Mehta found Google illegally crushed its competition in online search.”
This was kind of the expected outcome of that ruling. Obviously, Google will appeal – that’s a given. But now that there’s to be a change in administration come January, it’s difficult not to wonder whether Judge Mehta’s proposed remedies will quietly dissipate into the ether under a, uh, more business-friendly DOJ.
The short answer is: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The longer answer is in that BBC article above. Quote below the jump [bolding is mine]:
“The DOJ case against Google was filed in the closing months of the first administration of Donald Trump.
With the President-elect set to return to the White House on 20 January, questions have been raised about whether his new administration would take a different approach to the case.
‘It would be odd for the second Trump administration to back off a lawsuit that they filed themselves,’ said Rebecca Allensworth, associate dean for research and anti-trust professor at Vanderbilt Law School.
Even if Trump sought to stop the case from proceeding, which Prof Allensworth said is unlikely, the states listed as plaintiffs could proceed on their own.
‘So, given that, they can’t make it go away,’ she said. ‘I think that the federal government will stay on it but just how hard they’ll push and what they’ll ask for, I think, is really uncertain.'”
It would be odd! But when has that ever stopped the rolling kakistocracy from taking a chance, Professor Allensworth?
The ruling in the Google Ads case, BTW, is due in January sometime. I’ll try to get back on the ball here for y’all.
Open thread.
Baud
There’s been a lot of antitrust activity under Biden. Something else we’ll probably lose, even if Google is the exception.
Kirk
Google’s leadership has not been as openly friendly to 45 as other tech leaders. No thumbs on scales, no obvious algorithms diminishing reports of ethical violations show up.
I think he’ll keep this one to encourage the others, and in a bit to say, “So, you remember last time you didn’t do things my way, right?”
@mistermix.bsky.social
@Kirk: I think this is where it’s going. Sundar Pinchai kowtowing to Trump, bending the algorithm to benefit R’s, in order to save Chrome.
NotMax
Haven’t used Google for searching for several years. I understand that following the melding with AI its level of crapitude has escalated.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
It’s deja vu all over again ala DoJ attempting to force M$ to sell IE back in the day.
Belafon
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Which ended because the Bush administration got to decide.
Geo Wilcox
@NotMax: I use Duck Duck Go
cain
I created a bluesky account. Mostly because I have no business doing anything on twitter and finally Tom Nichols moved to bluesky so I’m going to go there. My bluesky handle is https://bsky.app/profile/sramkrishna.bsky.social.
I also have a mastodon bridge – I mostly will use this one so that it just gets reposted on bluesky.
https://bsky.app/profile/sri.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
cain
@@mistermix.bsky.social:
There are other search engines.
I like using https://www.mojeek.com/.
Martin
@Baud: I don’t think it’s that simple. There’s a really weird dynamic in tech that’s hard to map onto other trends. Vance is a fan of Lina Khan and a fan of tech breakups. Now, some of that is just the sentiment that tech is censoring Republicans, but there’s a whole bunch of really, really fucking weird beliefs within tech leadership, particularly AI.
One problem is that the US LOVES that CA tech companies as a group effectively control global tech, and hate that they control national tech. If you think breaking them up with increase domestic competition, it’s going to reduce US dominance globally. The EU is going after tech with a more explicit goal of creating space for EU tech companies. Giving up global tech dominance has a whole pile of downstream consequences.
I’ve argued that breakups are a mostly useless exercise as many of these are simply natural monopolies. They’ll just reform under different names. As such, they’re better suited to be regulated like utilities than broken up. Maybe force standards to be opened so you can get more federated systems, etc.
Mostly I think that tech antitrust will be handled completely differently from all other industries. Trump is unlikely to block the Kroger-Albertsons merger, for instance.
The bigger problem is that if there is no underlying economic theory behind these actions, it just becomes arbitrary and capricious, and that’s bad all around. Currently there’s a theory. I don’t think spinning off Chrome/Android is a bad remedy. But some of the other breakup suggestions I’ve seen – like around app stores – is not just useless but counterproductive.
Martin
@cain: The problem with search is that there is something close to an ideal solution to the problem. And as such, it becomes impossible to compete because all the competing services are doing is duplicating the cost of the best service. It’s cost without benefit. These aren’t like physical businesses that serve geographic areas and can have varying levels of service – these are global and if you are closer to optimal, you just win, and the opportunity space to be better gets ever smaller and more expensive.
There’s no benefit to more services crawling the internet. That creates all manner of problems on the provider side. Search looks like a utility and should just be treated as one.
Baud
@Martin:
I think it remains to be seen how much influence Vance actually has with Trump or in the administration.
I agree that tech is sort of this weird thing compared to other industries.
Bill Arnold
For the headline. Paywalled, but the price chart is before the paywall.
Cannabis Stocks Drop on Matt Gaetz Withdrawal (WSJ, Jasmine Li, 2024/11/21)
Rose Judson
@NotMax: It’s terrible. There was a workaround for hiding the AI results for a bit, but that recently stopped working for me. Two sources I rely on for getting started with market research for my day job are Google and the Department of Ed’s IPEDS system, and, well. Here we are.
cain
@Martin:
I agree with all your points. I think nationalize search and the internet in general as utilities is the way to go.
Google isn’t going to let go of that, but you could nationalize Mogeek or some other and avoid the fight trying to nationalize google’s essentially main business.
Bill Arnold
@NotMax:
There is now an AI summary (or summaries) at the top of the search results. If it is ignored, the engine is same as it always was, and for complex queries, the search results are still the best IMO. They don’t show all search results in a particular domain (e.g. balloon-juice) any more, though.
I do use other engines often (duck duck go, bing), because google often complains about my proxies (VPNs, tor, whatever) and makes me solve captchas, also google search records are often requested by governments.
Martin
@Baud: yeah, I agree wrt Vance’s influence. My point more being that the younger generation of GOP that Vance represents isn’t as opposed to antitrust as the older generation that Trump represents. It may not manifest in the next 4 years, but it might after that.
FlyingToaster
@cain: Some links you may or may not want for your Bluesky Account:
Balloon Juice Jackals #Feed
Balloon Juice Jackals List
Mousebumpies’ Balloon Juice Starter Pack
Josh Friedman’s Intro to Bluesky Thread
The #Feed is everyone on the List (I hope) plus it looks for the phrase “balloon-juice” in posts.
Welcome! Enjoy your skyline!
cmorenc
@Bill Arnold:
The prospect of the DEA reducing marijuana from schedule 1 (up there with heroin) to a much lower classification is probably on the indefinite back burner now. Why the Biden Administration didn’t get this done over their 4 years in office is unfathomable – even if the druglords at FDA weren’t ready to reclassify marijuana a health-food, it’s been obvious for decades that the classification with dangerously addictive and easily lethally overdosed opiods is monsterously absurd. Possibly the conventional pharmaceutical industry was successful in lobbying for the foot-dragging on reclassification, because marijuana obviates the need for a wide swath of high-profit prescription drugs by big pharma. Not everything of course, but a huge swath.
Kristine
If you want to narrow searches on google, adding “site:edu” or “site:gov” at the end of the search string (leave a space between) will confine results to those types of sites.
frex: black holes site:edu
Jerry
Next items up on my Google shitlist:
matt
This case was filed as retaliation against Google for not letting Trump and the Republicans serve as America’a assignment editors for their news feed, and for demonetizing fascists on YouTube.
Martin
Since we’re adjacent to the topic, I wanted to write a bit more on my thoughts in this election.
In the polling I’ve been reading the last few years, one thing that has been bothering me is the degree to which Democrats feel that government isn’t serving their needs – even when someone like Biden is in the WH. My thesis, which is influenced by a lot of other people, is that the grand experiment which is the US in big-L liberalism – pairing democracy and capitalism, which was originally intended to take power away from monarchs and give it to capitalists, and marry democracy to it to keep capitalists in check – is failing. Capitalism, particularly in the digital age has simply outrun our democratic institutions who are largely powerless to tip the balance back in favor of citizens. Enterprise has adapted to move quickly and government has not. As such, you get trillion dollar industries pop up before government even seems aware they exist. There is an appeal to move fast and break things – moving fast delivers benefits to citizens sooner, and helps make the country competitive (China’s speed is more compelling than their lower costs), and it’s governments job to protect us from the break things part, but it shows up ages too late. Hell some of these industries collapse with their profits in hand before government even shows up. Penalties are too low to serve as deterrents, executives are rich enough to evade accountability. The US is steadily turning into a grift economy.
It’s not a turn away from democracy so much as a turn away from this implementation of democracy. One that is better designed for the 19th century than the 21st. There is a flawed believe on the right that a slimmer government will move faster, when in almost all cases it will move slower. Sure, there was that time when the healthcare.gov rollout was improved by a smaller team of outsiders, but those are rare. A restructuring of how government works – which in some cases would require changes to the constitution – would work, but these are outside the scope of what the current dynamic will allow. We are trapped in this calcified set of constitutional rules because we have forgotten one of the founders more important messages. They amended the constitution aggressively when they were alive. And after they died, apart from the civil war, we have avoided amending it further and so this system becomes increasingly ineffective relative to its counterpart. As a result, everyone feels abused by landlords, large corporations, constant spam and scams, and so on. It manifests from the public in different ways – inflation, housing costs, lack of access to services, etc. but fundamentally it’s a government that is at best struggling to keep up and at worst completely failing as we saddle lawmakers with spending increasing amounts of their time fundraising rather than legislating, etc. Courts can now be spammed with AI bullshit to slow those processes down more, because we’ve done nothing to help courts be more efficient so they too are glacial. And that’s annoying when the situation is Trumps cases, and catastrophic when the situation is a custody battle or a restraining order. The government is all but powerless to address internet crimes, so online death threats become routine, even against high level elected officials and are shrugged off as routine, in an almost casual way. No, that’s a breakdown of democracy – of the governments ability to protect citizens. If you are shrugging it off, you’ve missed the plot – and EVERYONE shrugs it off.
This is what I think the current moment represents. Democrats are protecting the system that isn’t working, and before Trump Republicans were as well. Yeah, Trump is terrible, but if the current system is becoming intolerable, than you will latch onto anyone who promises to change things. Why are people okay with being unconstitutional? Because aspects of the constitution aren’t working any longer. Democrats can certainly see that. As I said the other day, if people working good faith are unwilling to reform the system, it’ll be turned over to people who work in bad faith to do it.
I think this most aligns with the dynamics we’re seeing. You see this dynamic in industry all the time. That’s what disruption is – it’s a recognition that the incumbent business models no longer fit the moment and new business model is introduced. It doesn’t mean people don’t want to listen to music, it just means that they hate the process of going to the record store and want to just pay $5/mo to listen to whatever they want. Fundamentally they want the same thing as before, but they want it handled better. But they rarely express this directly. Along the way you get piracy and all kinds of breaks to the system to get something closer to the better solution. I think that’s where we are. The two major political parties are the incumbents trying to protect the old way of doing things, and citizens are trying to tell them it’s not working, and nobody is listening.
NotMax
@Rose Judson
My go-to is Startpage (formerly known as Ixquick).
cain
@Martin:
It’s not just that, but social dynamics have changed. Look at AI – deepfakes and the like. Do you think govt policy is going to catch up to figure out how this all works?
Never mind, the people in congress are not able to keep up with the technological advancement and the social change those advances are doing. That’s why it’s been difficult to figure out what are govt are doing to fight misinformation.
To some extent this “the system will heal itself, if we just follow the rules” is one symptom of the disease.
Martin
I think it’s reasonable for citizens to expect that it should. The fact that seems completely unreasonable is the problem, and why there is broad dissatisfaction, IMO.
YY_Sima Qian
@Martin: Network effects of social networks can be pretty powerful. At this point, each aspect of internet/social network in the U.S. has basically been monopolized by the dominant player, & there is little motivation to move outside of the domains of their monopolies. The only new entrants shaking up things have been Chinese players (TikTok, Shein & Temu), hence the major lobbying efforts to get them banned.
In the late ‘10s the internet scene in the PRC was worse, w/ every aspect online life was divided between the duopoly between Alibaba & Tencent, who would quickly buy up an promising startup/unicorn to preserve their duopoly, & maximized their profits at the expense (& outright exploitation) of small business that used their platforms, the gig workers that provided the last mile services, & the consumers. The crack down on internet tech helped to weaken this duopoly, allowing new players such Pinduoduo (which owns Temu), Xiaohongshu, & Bytedance (which owns Douyin & TikTok) to rise as strong competitors to the former duopoly in many spheres of internet/social media/e-commerce. Gig workers now also have better protections, though still have lots of room to improve:
David Collier-Brown
Having google divest youtube would have a huge economic benefit, including for Giggle. Watch them complain about Chrome .. and compromise by breaking off the ‘tube.
BellyCat
@David Collier-Brown: Interesting question. I would suspect Google might agree to Chrome as a “utility” if they could keep the regulatory apparatus’ filthy hands off YouTube. Way more growth potential with the latter and Chrome is not a search engine. It’s simply a browser.
Martin
@BellyCat: Google uses Chrome and Android to steer users to their search. I mean, they were paying Apple $20B a year for that purpose (¼ of their profits) which serves as a comp to Chrome in terms of its value to the business.
Search is half of their revenue. If Chrome or Android is as influential as that $20B implies, then it’s more valuable than YouTube is.
And DOJ isn’t looking for a revenue cut at Google, they’re looking to break the company from leveraging their monopoly, and spinning off Youtube doesn’t achieve that. Only spinning off Chrome/Android does, for the exact same reason DOJ said the payments to Apple are improper.