Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google (cnbc.com) 144
According to The New York Times, the Justice Department is exploring whether to open a case against Google for potential antitrust violations (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source) relating to search and its other businesses, "putting renewed scrutiny on the company amid a growing chorus of criticism about the power of Big Tech." From the report: An investigation into how Google arranges search results could revive a case closed in 2013 by another government agency, the Federal Trade Commission. The five F.T.C. commissioners voted unanimously at the time against bringing charges against the company. Google agreed to make some changes to search practices tied to advertising. But this year, with a new antitrust task force announced in February, the trade commission renewed its interest in Google. In recent weeks, the commission referred complaints about the company to the Justice Department, which also oversees antitrust regulations, according to two people familiar with the actions. The commission has also told companies and others with complaints against Google to take them to the Justice Department.
The task force had been looking into Google's advertising practices and influence in the online advertising industry, according to two of the people. One of the people said the agency was also looking into its search practices. Most of Google's revenue comes from advertisements tied to its search results. If the Justice Department opens a formal investigation, it will be its first major antitrust case against a big tech company during the Trump administration. Google, Facebook and Amazon have come under intense bipartisan criticism, and calls to break up the firms have become a talking point in the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.
The task force had been looking into Google's advertising practices and influence in the online advertising industry, according to two of the people. One of the people said the agency was also looking into its search practices. Most of Google's revenue comes from advertisements tied to its search results. If the Justice Department opens a formal investigation, it will be its first major antitrust case against a big tech company during the Trump administration. Google, Facebook and Amazon have come under intense bipartisan criticism, and calls to break up the firms have become a talking point in the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.
Break it up into small pieces (Score:1)
Facebook next.
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Time to pay up (Score:1, Insightful)
It is a message from Trump to Google, time to contribute to his campaign.
Most of us remembered how the antitrust investigation of Microsoft ended very soon after Bill & Bill had a golf game.
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It is a message from Trump to Google, time to contribute to his campaign.
Trump should just skip this intermediate step and cut to the chase:
Anoint Google with tarrifs!
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General solution: Pro-freedom taxation (Score:1, Troll)
Per my sig, I think the best general solution approach involves increasing our freedom. That could be done with a progressive profits tax related to market share. Basic objective is to make sure there are at least 3 to 5 meaningful choices.
Given the current state of Slashdot, that seems to be sufficient time, but I bid you ADSAuPR, atAJG.
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Really? Are you retarded or something?
Ad hominem
You want to increase competition in the market place and reduce the costs of business via creating increased efficiencies.
False. It is generally not the job of government to try to increase raw efficiency as far as economics go, beyond having sound procurement practices. Capitalism does that by itself. Capitalism, however, has a couple of failures.
First, it can lead to monopolies, which tend to, once established, be hard to replace, thus giving out sized power to extort money. The grandparent post simply said it would be possible to add feedback to bias itself against monopolies. Is there a cost to the feedback?
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Your answer is too simplistic. Sometimes reducing regulations is better. Sometimes not. Sometimes you need the right regulations and the right metrics to measure the results.
This needs to be repeated a thousand times.
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Since I ignore ACs, I can't interpret your [phantomfive's] context. If you are responding to an AC comment that was addressed to me, then my reply is that there is MUCH more to my suggestion than I stated (this time on this Slashdot). If you want to ask for clarification or elaboration, I will at least consider your non-AC request.
It largely comes down to time, which is always limited. For example, ACs almost always waste mine, so I stopped reading ACs' comments. Next example: Slashdot used to be a fertile
Re: General solution: Pro-freedom taxation (Score:2)
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I said nothing about regulation, but if you are asking for my position on that question, then I would say it is not relevant to my comment in this thread, though it is part of my larger philosophy and I think my position is probably similar to yours. In this discussion, my focus is on "tweaking" the system to change the incentives affecting the corporate cancers. Essentially I think the desire to increase profits can be pressured by tax incentives to support more freedom (in the sense of choice, per my sig)
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You don't need to have a Google account to use an Android device. You only need that to connect to Google's play store. There are other community vetted locations where you can get updates, and other app stores you can use to acquire apps for your android device. Google doesn't have my phone number. They beg for it at times on the few devices I use to access my deprecated gmail account.
With all the unrealistic 'abolish Google' proposals one hears on public forums, there is never enough 'taper your conne
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Instead I will look at how well it works with private regulatory agencies like the Underwriter's Laboratory. Where it has worked very successfully for about a century.
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GP commenter made a sophomoric comment regarding freedom and taxation but did so without resorting to profanity. Then you came along.
I think we can see who acts rashly and with the greater lack of maturity, thus who also has some growing up to do.
Re: General solution: Pro-freedom taxation (Score:2)
Your money / possessions will be taken from you by force no matter what unless you are the warlord or one of his henchmen. At least with the current developed world systems you something for your money.
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Re: General solution: Pro-freedom taxation (Score:2)
Your money / possessions will be taken from you by force no matter what unless you are the warlord or one of his henchmen. At least with the current developed world systems you get something for your money. Coherent enough for you?
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Anonymous Coward is asking Anonymous Coward for a cite.
It goes beyond pathetic here on Slashdot sometimes. I have a new idea which I am sure will be knocked around, but it bears considering. The ostensible purpose of allowing A.C. comments on Slashdot is so that 'whistle blowers' can add information. Perhaps only logged-in account holders should be allowed to make a quota-specified number of A.C. comments each day.
There isn't any REAL anonymity on Slashdot, just the ability to spam the community with ano
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* I do it
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be able to develop iOS apps on linux,
That would kill one of the last remaining reasons to use a Mac, aside from 'Weird Uncle Oscar Syndrome' [theonion.com] mac users, who will always be with us. And there aren't enough of that sort of weirdo in the world to support a thing like Macintosh, so it could finally die out.
Investigate Chrome (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Investigate Chrome (Score:5, Interesting)
Interestingly, Google seems intent on giving Chrome users a good reason to switch to Firefox or other alternatives [slashdot.org].
Unlike with desktop operating systems, browsers operate with standards-compliant content, so there's really no such thing as "lock-in", except for the ecosystem of plugins... which Google is planning to neuter.
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as long as you don't do dirty tricks which isn't the case.
https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
Re:Investigate Chrome (Score:4, Informative)
browsers operate with standards-compliant content, so there's really no such thing as "lock-in"
I hate to break it to you but Google has a lot of things they've put into their browser that isn't "standards compliant". If you'd like an example, just head over to any HTML5 validator and run YouTube through it. There's several JS APIs, element attributes, order of tags, shadow DOM, usage of iframes, and so on that Google does that follows zero standards except the one their engineers came up with. It runs because Chrome follows Google's standard because they implemented the client to render their stuff. If you head over to YouTube in Firefox and still see content, that's because their browser handles non-standard content fairly well with the fall-backs they have inside the browser. But yeah, let's not fool ourselves here. "Standards compliant" content only exists for thee and not for me when it comes to Google. They aren't the only one, but boy are they a big one.
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The summary suggests that this is not about Chrome though.
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It's a weird monopoly when the reason it exists is that everyone else decided they couldn't be bothered to put in the work any more and were just going to use Google's code that they gave away for free.
How do you fix it? Force Microsoft to keep developing Edge's HTML engine? Give Mozilla free money to hire more developers? Chromium is already open source, it's not like you can just take it away from Google's control and make it *more* open source.
Re: Investigate Chrome (Score:2)
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Ah yes but it goes against the prescribed Slashdot Narrative that Google is pure, unadulterated evil and everything they do is 100% malicious and devious. The only reasonable course of action is to nuke it from orbit, and any suggestion otherwise is trolling.
Re: Investigate Chrome (Score:2)
You could legally separate the browser business from the advertising business, and from the mobile device business. Let the browser compete on an even field with the others, and let the ad business compete without having the ability to hamstring as blockers in the browser.
That really wasn't a hard remedy to come up with.
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The browser has no revenue stream. How would it be a viable business on its own?
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Investigate Chrome for what? I mean yes the situation isn't ideal but what legal basis is there to intervene? Let's drop the bar lower, what legal basis would there be in Europe to intervene?
Being a monopoly isn't of itself illegal.
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Google has a monopoly on search it leverages to enter other markets. They are absolutely an abusive monopoly.
Cool story, all of which is not at all relevant to Chrome. Being an abusive monopoly is not illegal. Specific abuses of your market position in specific circumstances is.
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Being a monopoly isn't of itself illegal.
This statement isn't of itself meaningful.
Investigate Chrome for what?
Investigate Google for leveraging their position in the web space with Chrome dominant over all other browsers for using it in an anticompetitive fashion, e.g. disrespecting standards which then compromises all other browsers' effectiveness.
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This statement isn't of itself meaningful.
It is on Slashdot, where people think that every natural monopoly must be broken up or investigated or fined solely for existing.
Investigate Google for leveraging their position in the web space with Chrome dominant over all other browsers for using it in an anticompetitive fashion, e.g. disrespecting standards which then compromises all other browsers' effectiveness.
Actually they don't disrespect standards. That's kind of the problem. Chrome is standards compliant. Their big problem with standards is that they have the market power to direct the standards, but on the basis of standards then being openly published they have a great defense against any antitrust allegations brought against them.
This case will go no where. Especially not in the
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Mozilla is worlds stronger than the dark days of IE.
Exaggerate much? (Score:2)
And Firefox is in a much stronger place to challenge them, at least in theory. Most people don't seem to realize that they pull in hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenue. I happen to think that they've been badly misapplying themselves in recent years, copying Chrome and ignoring the needs of power users, and I recommend people use Waterfox [waterfoxproject.org] inste
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In the days of IE5/6, there is no working alternatives (even Safari was barely usable at the time...), now there's Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc... What are you smoking?
It's not nearly as bad (Score:2)
Re: Its About (Score:1)
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ghost of Teddy Roosevelt (Score:5, Interesting)
Did Big Brother Google really think they could get away with buying up dozens of companies, then using their monopoly power to stifle free speech?
The American people spoke, President Trump listened. Get ready for it, googledouches. The ghost of Teddy Roosevelt is dusting off his trust-busting stick.
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Did Big Brother Google really think they could get away with buying up dozens of companies, then using their monopoly power to stifle free speech?
In America? Yes. And they will. The investigation will be opened, and will be looked at according to the American standards of Antitrust. Those standards are far higher than those of the rest of the world and typically require proof of direct impact to consumers as a result. Business > Business relations rarely make it to court, and crap like advertising is even less likely.
Make no mistake, this is going to go nowhere. Google's only foe is outside of America where governments and laws actually have teeth
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If this was really about anti-trust...he'd go after Comcast, he'd go after Disney, he'd go after Time Warner. But no, the only time he mentioned anything about Time Warner was blocking because of CNN....directly threatening action against an organization for what they say in direct violation of free speech.
But you'll just sit there...you'll say t
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It seems wishful thinking to me :P
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I don't even really have to address the stupid in this comment. Just that what I will tell you is that at the very most Donald Trump has five years, and if you think Google can't handle five years of litigation standing on its head, then I guess you don't really have much experience with antitrust action in this country the last 50 years. Google'
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You won. You got everything. It's all yours. The right wing dominates America.
Nah. The left won culturally and the right won economically.
The "culture war" is just a boogie man (Score:1)
And it's working. Abortion is well on it's way to being made illegal again. Companies aren't required to provide reproductive healthcare services in their insurance. And ask the 37% of the prison population that are black men how civil rights movement is going for them.
Government and the economy are what matters. The right wing will let you have victory in the "culture wars" in exchange for all the money an
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Re: The "culture war" is just a boogie man (Score:2)
Actually, brohamatic, in Soviet America the ratio of pie to population grows smaller every year. Offshoring is great for well-connected capitalists, super shitty for everyone else.
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You're right, Pelosi is not a centrist (Score:2, Insightful)
When it doesn't matter she's a bit left. She'll ban assault r
Ok, if Liz will kill the education system (Score:2)
America had a pretty strong left in the 20s, 30s up through the 70s before the ruling class figured out how to push the buttons of guys like you. There was a time when healthcare being a right wasn't a radical idea, and you know what, Thanks to Bernie [thehill.com] we've gotten back to that.
Your a troll lashing out in anger so you might be too far gone for me to save, but go watch some Bernie rally's
When will the bloody EU ... (Score:2)
stop harassing American companies! I mean if they can't build tech companies of their own all they can do is endlessly investigate and litigate.
Obviously (Score:2)
When a company formerly providing a ubiquitous service at least reasonably objectively begins to demonstrate behaviour and motives that are grossly political, it is fairly predictable that when the target of their shenanigans is the party in power, the tools of government will be applied against them.
This is why most companies wisely avoid political stances. Of course if one is arrogant enough, self righteous enough, or oblivious enough (in a Pauline Kael sense) or all 3...well, you have a Google.
Uh, no. (Score:1)
I dont believe they will. Money talks, after all. Even to the justice department. I hope they do, but will not be surprised if we never hear of this again.
Didn't stay at Trump Tower often enough (Score:2)
A few alterations of Google's travel plans should make the whole thing go away.