United States of America v. Google, LLC

[TwiceHorn 31495]

So the DOJ dropped its antitrust complaint on Google today. https://apnews.com/article/google-justice-department-antitrust-0510e8f9047956254455ec5d4db06044

This apparently is a very serious deal on the part of the government.  Akin to the MS case 20 years ago, and IBM 20 years before that.

I'm a little surprised that it's happening under Trump/Barr.  The antitrust head is Makan Delrahim, who is a "Chicago school" type antitrust lawyer, which means fairly unlikely to bring a major enforcement case.  That may indicate that they really have Google by the short and curlies.

This is something Elizabeth Warren pledged to do, to put this in some kind of perspective.

Eleven state attorneys general have joined, including Paxton.  Somewhat odd.

DOJ release with complaint. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-monopolist-google-violating-antitrust-laws

Edited October 21, 2020 by TwiceHorn

[workswithseed 2112]

This is what's being accused of Google.

 

"Entering into exclusivity agreements that forbid preinstallation of any competing search service.

Entering into tying and other arrangements that force preinstallation of its search applications in prime locations on mobile devices and make them undeletable, regardless of consumer preference.

Entering into long-term agreements with Apple that require Google to be the default – and de facto exclusive – general search engine on Apple’s popular Safari browser and other Apple search tools.

Generally using monopoly profits to buy preferential treatment for its search engine on devices, web browsers, and other search access points, creating a continuous and self-reinforcing cycle of monopolization.

These and other anticompetitive practices harm competition and consumers, reducing the ability of innovative new companies to develop, compete, and discipline Google’s behavior. "

[52-80 19162]

Do you want Bing as your search engine?  Because this is how you get Bing as your search engine

[immamac 42864]

Google should drop it. If their SE was so good people would continue to use it. This is about the shady exclusivity practices they put into place that make it need difficult or impossible for a duck duck go to exist not for a bing to exist. 

Microsoft has its own distribution of Bing that has kept them alive that ships with every windows device, which unsurprisingly is a metric fuckton. 

[MNLonghornFUKM 8817]

Do you want Bing as your search engine?  Because this is how you get Bing as your search engine

I still use Alta vista

[Buzzrock 14922]

The amounts of money are staggering. Google could be paying Apple between 15 and 20 percent of its annual *profits*.

That said, it takes about five seconds to change your default Safari search engine to one of the top four.

[CooterBrown 18014]

I still use Alta vista

Webcrawler FTW.

[XYZ 2154]

Nothing to see here. Google will settle for an amount that is pocket change to them, and nobody will go to prison.

[immamac 42864]

21 minutes ago, XYZ said:

Nothing to see here. Google will settle for an amount that is pocket change to them, and nobody will go to prison.

thanks, I was worried that this was legitimate.

[hornian 5219]

41 minutes ago, XYZ said:

Nothing to see here. Google will settle for an amount that is pocket change to them, and nobody will go to prison.

I’m on the opposite side of this one. It goes all the way to SCOTUS and takes years to wind its way there. 

[TwiceHorn 31495]

This is a civil case.  No one is going to jail on this case, no matter what happens.

The interesting part, if the government wins, is what "break up" remedies might be proposed or adopted by the court.

Antitrust law has kind of a shaky foundation.  Is it supposed to protect competitors?  Consumers?  The abstract notion of competition?  Any antitrust case is liable to fundamentally change the way the antitrust law is applied/interpreted.

This is especially true when the business at issue may not be governed by conventional economic analysis.  

This one is going to lack some of the fireworks of the Microsoft case because there's no Bill Gates and the consensus is that Google learned its lesson from MS and rigorously avoided making internal statements about "murdering" or "choking" the competition, so there will be a lot less inflammatory evidence of anticompetitive intentions.

 

[Samson's Wig 3192]

Even though I was also birthed from the "Chicago school" of antitrust law, I'd still love to see antitrust law actually applied again in this country when it's applicable.  However, I suspect this case is merely a means to a separate end.  If backdooring an antitrust case is the only way to break up privacy monsters like Google, Amazon, and Facebook, I'm all for the feds going to pound town. 

/Aside/ Hell, Southwestern Bell (AT&T, Inc.)  is exponentially larger now than Bell was in 1984, and they're doing a fine job, along with Disney, of buying up every piece of content IP in existence along with significant control of the distribution models.  These two should likely be nailed to the wall as well.

[crash_davis 23113]

Apple seems to be able to do whatever the fuck they want with iOS. So the lesson is that Google should be following Apple's lead by making Android commercial software (instead of "freeware" so to speak) and charging OEMs for Android, something like $0.01 per device.. That way, Google can do whatever the fuck they want with Android. 

 

[Captainant 27680]

It's funny that DOJ is going after Google on antitrust issues while completely ignoring the telcom industry's cartel-like practices to deny cheap internet to America, which is significantly more deleterious than which search engine comes pre-installed in your browser

[Bigpoppapump 532]

WWJeevesD?

[kevwun 15797]

1 minute ago, Captainant said:

It's funny that DOJ is going after Google on antitrust issues while completely ignoring the telcom industry's cartel-like practices to deny cheap internet to America, which is significantly more deleterious than which search engine comes pre-installed in your browser

Google forgot to send in their campaign donations this year.

[NeverMarryAStripper 21907]

They don't need to make donations.  Every candidate has some kind of streaming device so Google has the dirt on them all.

[TwiceHorn 31495]

1 hour ago, Samson's Wig said:

Even though I was also birthed from the "Chicago school" of antitrust law, I'd still love to see antitrust law actually applied again in this country when it's applicable.  However, I suspect this case is merely a means to a separate end.  If backdooring an antitrust case is the only way to break up privacy monsters like Google, Amazon, and Facebook, I'm all for the feds going to pound town. 

/Aside/ Hell, Southwestern Bell (AT&T, Inc.)  is exponentially larger now than Bell was in 1984, and they're doing a fine job, along with Disney, of buying up every piece of content IP in existence along with significant control of the distribution models.  These two should likely be nailed to the wall as well.

Yeah, when Warren first brought this up, she kind of conflated the accumulation of staggering amounts of privacy data with market control and anti-competitive practices.  But it seems like a decent case can be made that a lot of the things they do are subtly monopolistic.

Worth noting that this is a Section 2 case, where the offense is "being" or "maintaining" a monopoly, rather than Section 1, which attacks specific monopolistic practices.  I guess that means the specific practices don't have to violate Section 1, but in aggregate and with Google's market power, it violates Section 2.

Totally agreed that if the net result is a breakup of entities holding privacy data, or some concessions by Google relating to privacy information, that is a good result.

[Longhorn94 2452]

3 hours ago, hornian said:

I’m on the opposite side of this one. It goes all the way to SCOTUS and takes years to wind its way there. 

dear baby jesus i hope so.

[Hate 20112]

Do you want Bing as your search engine?  Because this is how you get Bing as your search engine

DuckDuckGo.com FTW.

[Brisketexan 105154]

5 hours ago, MNLonghornFUKM said:

I still use Alta vista

I was an Infoseek loyalist WAY longer than I should have been.....

[Bevo 13579]

I loved Alta Vista. Unlike Bing, it gave good search results.

[J.R. Juniors Junior Jr. 1084]

This lawsuit is baseless.  Bing is the superior search engine for porn.

[RollLeft 5045]

Bing sucks.  I was a Comet man until i switched to Huli.

[Mikey4 2476]

The Yahoo directory has a much better organization and over 1,000 indexed sites.

[South Austin 52519]

I miss card catalogs.

[Viper 12109]

interesting analysis here from an ex-googler

 DuckDuckGo CEO here:

 

I'm not even sure these two disagree with each other. Kovacevich is looking at it from a legal perspective and doesn't think it has much to go on. Weinberg is just saying, punishing google will be great for his company and people in general.

 

Scott Shackford goes over it here, though not from a legal perspective 

https://reason.com/2020/10/20/justice-department-files-federal-antitrust-lawsuit-against-google/

interesting bit at the end here:

Quote

 

But, as The New York Times notes, other attorneys general in other states may file lawsuits of their own. Some big states like Texas and Florida have signed onto the Justice Department lawsuit, but others, like California and New York, have not.

This shouldn't be taken to mean that leaders of these states aren't making plans of their own. As Andrea O'Sullivan recently observed, there's a push among Democrats to broaden antitrust law so that it can be used to enforce sociopolitical economic goals, not just to protect consumers from monopolies. It may well be that other states didn't sign on here precisely because the Justice Department isn't trying to dismantle Google.

 

 

[thunderlounge 7866]

On 10/21/2020 at 10:21 AM, Bigpoppapump said:

WWJeevesD?

 

Dunno. Ask him.

 

 

[TwiceHorn 31495]

On 10/22/2020 at 8:21 AM, Viper said:

This shouldn't be taken to mean that leaders of these states aren't making plans of their own. As Andrea O'Sullivan recently observed, there's a push among Democrats to broaden antitrust law so that it can be used to enforce sociopolitical economic goals, not just to protect consumers from monopolies. It may well be that other states didn't sign on here precisely because the Justice Department isn't trying to dismantle Google.

 

That's interesting.  Historically, while every state has their own version of the various antitrust acts, state enforcement actions have mostly been ineffective.

States have proven to be a good venue for private antitrust actions, where one competitor sues another.  That's usually only good for damages and a narrow injunction.

[High Plains Drifter 11050]

 

We got this new IT head a few years ago. For the purposes of this post, I'll call him Phil. He instituted an all google all the time approach.

I use firefox as my browser and duckduckgo as my search engine. An assistant IT guy was doing something to my laptop that assistant IT guys do, saw firefox on my desktop, and told me that Phil doesn't want any browsers other than google on company machines. I told the assitant "Tell Phil to go fuck himself."

Here i am two years later still gainfully employed, surfing surly on firefox at work.  (Actually at home right now, but officially working). 

 

[kevwun 15797]

Some companies are like that. I think it's real dumb because all Google is is a giant data mining operation.

[RPM 26322]

On 10/22/2020 at 6:08 AM, South Austin said:

I miss card catalogs.

Dewey decimal system FTW

[crash_davis 23113]

This seems pretty important.

https://gizmodo.com/google-results-about-you-remove-personal-info-search-1849591913

Starting today, people in the U.S. will be able to use Google’s new “Results About You” feature, which aims to provide a simpler way for people to get their sensitive personal information out of the company’s search results. Next year, Results About You will become proactive and allow users to opt in to alerts when new personal information related to them appears in search results, enabling users to request removal more quickly.

Google announced that it would officially launch Results About You, first unveiled at I/O back in May, at its Search On 22 event on Wednesday. With Results About You, users can request the removal of personally identifiable information with just a few clicks. This information includes physical addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses. The feature is also a hub for all of Google’s content removal policies, such as those for Social Security numbers and bank account numbers, and will direct users to the forms to request take down of that info.

 

Results About You isn’t a feature hidden away in Google’s maze of a website. It’s available in the Google app. All you have to do is tap on your profile picture and choose Results About You from the drop-down menu. If you’re a Safari user like me, you can also access Results About You on individual search results.

 

 

[Brisketexan 105154]

4 minutes ago, crash_davis said:

This seems pretty important.

https://gizmodo.com/google-results-about-you-remove-personal-info-search-1849591913

Starting today, people in the U.S. will be able to use Google’s new “Results About You” feature, which aims to provide a simpler way for people to get their sensitive personal information out of the company’s search results. Next year, Results About You will become proactive and allow users to opt in to alerts when new personal information related to them appears in search results, enabling users to request removal more quickly.

Google announced that it would officially launch Results About You, first unveiled at I/O back in May, at its Search On 22 event on Wednesday. With Results About You, users can request the removal of personally identifiable information with just a few clicks. This information includes physical addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses. The feature is also a hub for all of Google’s content removal policies, such as those for Social Security numbers and bank account numbers, and will direct users to the forms to request take down of that info.

 

Results About You isn’t a feature hidden away in Google’s maze of a website. It’s available in the Google app. All you have to do is tap on your profile picture and choose Results About You from the drop-down menu. If you’re a Safari user like me, you can also access Results About You on individual search results.

 

 

Does it allow you to ask to remove photos of you completely naked, covered in Manwich sauce, wearing an embarrassingly small galvanized bucket as a hat?

Asking for a friend.

[StruggleBus 3922]

And mugshots. Also asking for a friend. 

Edited September 30, 2022 by StruggleBus