The Worst Possible Antitrust Outcome
Mood
heated
Sentiment
negative
Category
other
Key topics
The article argues that the antitrust outcome in the Google case is inadequate, sparking a heated discussion about the effectiveness of antitrust laws and the impact of Google's monopoly on competition and user data.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Very active discussionFirst comment
30m
Peak period
148
Day 1
Avg / period
53.3
Based on 160 loaded comments
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Sep 3, 2025 at 4:29 PM EDT
3 months ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Sep 3, 2025 at 4:59 PM EDT
30m after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
148 comments in Day 1
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Sep 5, 2025 at 11:34 PM EDT
3 months ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
I think once someone gets to a billion dollars net worth, they should get an AmEx black card, and 99% of their assets moved into a sovereign public wealth fund. They can have anything they want, they lose the power of extreme asset allocation, and if they just like competing, they can start over and try to ring the bell again (and can give the second AmEx black card to a person of their choosing).
To who, politicians?
Leaving the large business intact and just changing the leader doesn’t seem like it changes anything.
So yeah, generally I think that would be a good idea.
Of course, control of a very large company is itself the sort of power that wealth caps are supposed to curb, like when people buy newspapers / social media platforms / etc - so you could also just proclaim it a feature instead of a bug, but it still warrants a defense.
That's not what I understand from the GP. What they say is taht if your business is extremely successful, it can keep being extremely successful and you can keep control over it.
You just cannot accumulate more money for yourself. Like if the highest amount of money in a video game was 1 billion. Once you reach it, you don't go back to 0, you just can't go higher.
Makes sense to me.
People put limits on what they should be able to own, but if we extend that idea globally (i.e. don't discriminate based on simply where you were born), then most of us in the first world would also be liable to give up our TVs, cars, latops, houses etc. And then suddenly seizing assets is bad...
The problem is not simple or straightforward. It's mostly people who want more complaining about those who also want more.
Nobody says it's simple or straightforward. I personally just admitted that there is an amount of wealth that is too much.
You sound like you're telling me that because it's a hard problem to solve, I should just shut up.
> You just cannot accumulate more money for yourself.
If that's what it means, I don't think it makes sense, because the point of taking away the money was to reduce the ability of the rich to unduly control and influence others. If they can still do that via their company that they still control, it doesn't much matter whether they have money or not.
Of course it does. It's very different to be the head of a company and to privately have more money than an entire country.
* though I guess newer builds are defaulting to 64-bit signed ints?
In what hypothetical world are these not the exact same thing? Money is a unit of exchange that exists to compel action. That's the point of it, and is just another way of saying "power over others". A world where being rich doesn't grant power over others is one where money isn't money.
Not in a free market. In a free market, people have the option to refuse to accept your money if they don't want to give you what you want to buy from them with it.
This is the contradiction, isn't it? A free market that you or I might define requires safeguards like a social welfare net to make sure individuals are truly free to decline an offer that is harmful to them. Without such a welfare net one is compelled to accept an offer that is harmful (to one's health, morality, etc.) because the alternative is to lose your dignity and all of your belongings, or worse.
But then the owning class has every incentive to reduce or remove the safety net. Not least because they will be paying a lot for it! But even more so because that safety net is what gives people some small amount of power to say no to them.
We've financialized servitude is all.
Capitalism is just the view that one should try to accumulate more capital, by hook or by crook. And there are lots of ways to do that that don't involve any kind of productive work, much less building wealth through cooperation, specialization, and trade. Buying government favors, for example, which is how most big-time "capitalists" in US history did it (for example, the railroad barons who got the government to give them exclusive access to key routes). Today they do it by buying regulations that favor them.
That depends on how the safeguards are implemented. If they are implemented through coercive taxation, you don't have a free market, because people don't have the right to refuse to pay taxes, even if they disagree with how the money will be used.
> Without such a welfare net one is compelled to accept an offer that is harmful (to one's health, morality, etc.) because the alternative is to lose your dignity and all of your belongings, or worse.
Can you give an example?
> the owning class
What you're saying here is something different from what you said above. The problem you're now pointing to is not that rich people have power because they're rich, but that they have power because own too much other than just money. For example, they might own all the housing in the area you want to live in, so you either have to look elsewhere or accept renting on whatever terms they offer.
The solution for that isn't a "social welfare net". It's to restrict how much non-monetary property a rich person can own. And also to make it easier for people who aren't rich to own more things--for example, to own homes.
By the way, your use of the term "owning class" implies that ownership is somehow a bad thing, or that it's naturally restricted to a certain class of people. But that's not how things should be. Ownership gives you control. For example, if you own the home you live in, you're much better protected from various possible bad things forcing you to move, than if you rent. But that also means people need to be willing to accept the responsibilities that come with ownership. It appears that many people in our current society aren't--but they also don't want to accept the tradeoffs of giving up ownership. That's not a stable situation. You can't get something for nothing. And the best "safety net" a person can have is to own as many of the things they depend on as possible.
It's like saying that humans can fly unassisted. Sure, we can jump in the air and for a few milliseconds remain completely in the air. But we can hardly call that process a flight, if it can last for extremely short period of time. Same with free market.
A free market is not unregulated. It's regulated by the voluntary choices of all market participants.
The alternative is to have the market regulated by those who aren't participants--i.e., who have no skin in the game and who suffer no consequences if the regulations are bad. That's basically the situation we have now. Anyone who thinks that's a good thing isn't living on the same planet as I am.
> will be quickly monopolized by a biggest player
The claim that this is a problem of free markets, as opposed to non-free ones, is historically false. Virtually all monopolies, historically, have been due to government intervention in markets to give special privileges to certain players. THe original meaning of the word "monopoly" was permission from the king to be the sole seller of a particular product or service.
Really?
* Search: What special privilege for Google?
* Desktop OS: Microsoft?
* On line retail: Amazon
What am I missing? These firms got no "special privilege " from government, did they?
They did and still do. They spend millions lobbying the government to make it harder for outsiders to break into their industries.
In other words, what's "compelling action" here is the government, and its power to do that is not based on money. But since the government is run by humans, who can be bought, the government's power to compel things ends up being for sale. And even if you magically took away all that money from Google and Amazon and spread it around evenly, that would just mean government favors would get curried in other ways. (Plus the fact that, even if you spread the money around evenly once, it wouldn't stay that way.)
So, what do you think would happen when the biggest market participant makes a choice incompatible with choices of the smaller participants? I can tell you - the biggest player would win. Or it would slowly destroy competitors (slowly mean just a few years), and then start imposing it's rules. Basically any free market would turn to feudalism, which would then turn into a bloody and crude proto-government. Basically the same we have today minus any pro-human and pro-free market policies we have managed to carve for ourselves over centuries. It is impossible that free market would be anything different.
So yeah, because humans are shit at governing, the only viable way (until someone invents something new) is external control.
> Virtually all monopolies, historically, have been due to government intervention in markets to give special privileges to certain players.
Correct. And do you know why that happened? Because there was no control and biggest market players could simply buy the poor politician they wish. And in the free market you describe these two step would be simply combined into one - the biggest market player would also perform as a pseudo politician, ultra monopoly with zero oversight.
No, that's even worse, because, as you admit, humans are shit at governing--and the "external control" is just more humans being shit at governing, but with a much bigger negative impact because the scope of their shitty governing covers many more people.
Advocates of free markets, like me, don't advocate them because we think they solve all problems. We advocate them because, given the fact that humans are shit at governing, free markets are the least worst of the alternatives open to us. Big market players who still have to make money through voluntary transactions do less damage than governments run by humans who are shit at governing. That's the lesson of human history. Unfortunately most of us still haven't learned it, and continue to cling to the foolish belief that somehow calling a bunch of humans a "government" magically makes them no longer shit at governing. It doesn't.
My point was that free market is kinda like unstable isotope, it can't exist for any significant length of time and will decay into a government. As soon as some corporation starts dictating its rules to an unrelated people, we can call it a proto-government. The department responsible for those unrelated people would be a proto-executive branch, the law department would be a proto-legislative branch etc.
And to address your second comment, about competition:
Competition can't work in the free market. The instant external control ceases to exist, the most shrewd and smart players would start employing all kinds of currently illegal shit. They will buy out all media and platform to blast their ads 24/7 and disallow all competition. They will swithch to currently banned practices and materials to save costs and undercut competitors. They will switch to slave work to save costs etc. As soon as one player becomes relatively bigger the rules of free market will allow him to accumulate more and more benefits of the kind I've described. Any competition would be woefully behind, outdated and overpriced relative to the bigger player. And that's assuming elastic market. As soon as market for some goods becomes inelastic, bigger player can do even more damage. For example they can completely buy out some resource or manufacturing capacity of a crucial component or resource and completely deny it to the competitors.
Basically the whole human history and law corpus is a list of examples how free market failed and how humans had to fix it via restrictions.
If this is true, I think we're screwed.
I don't think it's actually true, but it is true that in our current world, the number of people who understand the downsides of government and are willing to truly support a free market is miniscule, not even rounding error in the overall numbers.
> Competition can't work in the free market.
You're forgetting that in a free market, all transactions are voluntary. And in a society where that had been true for a long time, and people upheld that principle and acted accordingly, institutions would evolve that are very different from our current ones. David Friedman's The Machinery of Freedom is a book length attempt to imagine what such a society would be like, in some detail. It would not be at all like what you would get if you took our current society and just eliminated the government. Of course that's a stupid idea, because our society has evolved for a long time under the assumption that it has a government, and its institutions have evolved accordingly.
> The instant external control ceases to exist, the most shrewd and smart players would start employing all kinds of currently illegal shit.
To paraphrase David Friedman in a similar context, unfortunately this sentence remains true if you take out the first seven words.
You're describing what happens now, in our current world, which has "external control" up the wazoo--just external control that does what the most shrewd and smart players want it to do. Google, Amazon, Walmart, etc. have all done "all kinds of currently illegal shit", and paid no real price for it. True, they've also made a lot of shit that should be illegal, technically legal, by buying the laws and regulations that favor them. But they've also broken the law, straight up, numerous times, and the government never makes them pay the proper price. They always get away with what for them amounts to a tiny slap on the wrist.
And the situation now is worse than it would be in a free market, because in a free market, at least no one would believe that there was some magical "external control" that would somehow protect them. They would know that it was up to them to simply refuse transactions whose long term cost outweighed whatever short term gain was being dangled in front of them. In our current world, people still believe, even with all the evidence to the contrary, that the government can somehow protect them from all the "currently illegal shit" that the big players get up to. And that "protection" simply isn't there. Government always ends up being just another tool that the big players use to get what they want at the expense of everybody else--and it's an easier tool to use than trying to do it in a true free market would be.
Again, it might be that humans are simply incapable of doing the things that a free market requires at scale. And if that's true, I think we're screwed. In any case, it's not a problem that is solved by having a government.
Nonsense. It was because the government had control, and could force people to accept that it was giving special privileges to certain players. For example, the railroad barons in the late 19th century US who got the government to give them exclusive access to key routes. The people had no choice about accepting that. In a free market, there would have been competition, and that would have ended up resulting in better service. How do we know that? Because that's what happened until the government stepped in and gave special privileges to certain players.
In other words, your view is exactly backwards to what has actually happened.
A world with laws against monopolies, anti-competitive practices, and media ownership concentration. Not all uses of power are equivalent.
Standard Oil wasn't tamed by taking money from its owner. In fact, even if ownership over the company was dispersed among 10x as many shareholders as before, so long as the company can continue to act as a single entity, the abuse of its monopoly would continue.
First off, my money doesn't grant me power over anybody and it's still money. That leaves only one logically possible version of your statement and the correction looks like this: "A world where being rich doesn't grant power over others is one where big money isn't big money"
In that form, your statement is perfectly logical, if somewhat tautological, but there is another problem with it and it's a real huge one: No textbook has anything like that and no school teaches it either, even the media is vary shy of talking about it.
At a first glance, that's not your problem but it definitely has to be, meaning, you and the people who gold similar views, should become loud public proponents of Speaking Truth to the Powerless (tm).
We can no longer have this cognitive dissonance economics that teaches that money is means of exchange, unit of account, etc, but skips the most important truth: that big money is, first and foremost, a tool of power over small money.
Only after this educational task is complete, your explanation will have the right to exist and be heard.
That's not true. Depends on your wealth bracket of course, but money certainly is the power to compel.
Let's say you have a neighbor whose dog is a nuisance barker. With money you can hire an attorney to go after them. If you don't have money, you have to suffer. There are millions of examples... this is just one not-particularly-good one.
That doesn't mean you can force them to work for you specifically because you have the amount of money you deem sufficient for a specific task.
It feels like a lot of people have forgotten that this is how nature works, not that all of your needs are the responsibility of everyone around you.
There is nothing natural about being compelled to work to live It is an artificial and constructed state.
It’s why there are people who have NEVR had to work to live and never will have to.
> First off, my money doesn't grant me power over anybody and it's still money.
Sure, but it doesn't invalidate the sentence you quoted. At all. You can't "educate" people if you don't understand basic sentences. Let me quote it again, so that maybe you can try to understand it properly:
> A world where being rich doesn't grant power over others is one where money isn't money.
I wasn't talking about hell but about logic, apparently our areas of expertise aren't the same.
> A world where being rich doesn't grant power over others is one where money isn't money.
You cannot claim money in general not to be money if the money for the not-rich still function as money without the rich, in other words, you falsely claim that in order for money to work as a means of exchange, it has to grant the rich power over the not-rich.
Your claim is obviously false, plus there have been closed and open societies, since antiquity to this day, which used money giving no additional powers to the rich - the simplest case - when all the power was concentrated elsewhere.
I didn't invalidate your claim, I demonstrated that it's invalid on its own.
What this means is that they can't imagine a world where having an extreme amount of money does not grant you power over others. As in, if you build a world that has something called "money", but where having more money than a whole country does not give you power over others, then that thing you call "money" is so different from the one we have in our world that it would not count as money in our world at all.
> You cannot claim money in general not to be money if the money for the not-rich still function as money
That is not what they claim, you misunderstand the sentence. It's like if someone said "A implies B" and you answered with "no, because B does not imply A". You would be lacking basic logic skills there.
> you claim that in order for money to work as a means of exchange, it has to grant the rich power over the not-rich.
Nope, not at all. You misunderstand the sentence.
> I didn't invalidate your claim, I demonstrated that it's invalid on its own.
You did nothing of the sort: you just seem to genuinely not understand the sentence you quoted.
And don't get me wrong: it's fine to misunderstand a sentence. What I reacted about was your tone. If you want to talk like this and "educate" people, you better be goddamn right.
That might be the case, there's no point in arguing about details which depend on definitions that aren't necessarily shared. Besides, we're using money in a very vague sense that includes wealth - not a good foundation for detailed analysis.
As I originally wrote, can money-in-general exist without power is a minor nitpick, I can readily accept both answers, more so given that money as it exists today can definitely grant power under certain conditions.
The real problem here is the lack of awareness about it, the lack of anything approaching a clear formulation of it and the absence of that topic from education and public discourse in general.
I would love to see the proponents of "more power to money" approach go public and explain their ideas while emphasizing that foundation.
Of course it does. Call the cleaning service, see if your money can't compel someone to come clean your house while you sit on your ass. Or more indirectly, try to picture the chinese kid making your shoes for a meager wage, and try to explain what, if not your money, is compelling them to do so this menial, repetitive and unfulfilling task for you.
Citation required.
Money is an intermediary form of exchange. It arises organically because if, for example, you are a dairy farmer, there is no practical way for you to a) save enough milk to barter for a house (not only is it perishable but where do you store it all? Especially before refrigeration) and b) find someone with a house they want to trade for that much milk.
Money is just a commodity and in the absence of fiat currency it arises organically. People tend to seek intermediary forms of exchange that are non-perishable, easily divisible, transportable and difficult to forge/counterfeit because it is a necessity of life.
You simply cannot practically barter everything you'd ever want to trade. So instead we humans trade what we produce for something we can stash away and trade later more easily.
Money is not an invention to compel action. It is a natural product of trade that arises because most people, when they're not too busy spouting ideological drivel on Internet forums, have common sense.
Pre-modern societies generally had very little currency and only used it for large transactions. Smaller transactions happened through debt and transfers of debt.
The transaction wouldn't be "I give you a bunch of milk and you give me a house" it would be "You give me the house and I'll give you milk every day for the next 5 years" or something like that.
Or it might be "Bob owes me a calf the next time his cow gives birth. I'll transfer that debt to you and give you eggs for a year and you give me the house."
Vendors who have debt relationships with a very large number of people would often get together with other vendors and swap debts to consolidate them into a more manageable number of debts.
Even if the debt was denominated in units of currency, it was typically settled in goods rather than currency because typical people just didn't have access to much currency.
An article treatment: https://archive.is/20250725000932/https://www.theatlantic.co...
A book treatment (that of course covers many other things): https://archive.org/details/DebtTheFirst5000Years
There were times in history where having a lot of money was correlated to having all those powers. There are places in this world where that’s still the case.
Like yes I think if money didn’t confer incredible power over others and distortionary effects over the shared environment, and allow crazy-wide reach for one’s possibly-nutty beliefs, lots of people wouldn’t have so big a problem with the ultra-rich. Like if the money were just a score on a pinball machine high score table. Cool, you hit a billion, good for you, glad you’re so good at the game, that’s nice. Not a lot of people would mind that so much. But that’s not how money works.
The average person today is much wealthier than many rich people from generations ago, even if they have less social power.
Being disproportionately powerful is tautologically a direct measure of disproportionate influence.
Tin pot dictators of resource-poor nations may not be especially wealthy compared to the very wealthy in the US, but typically have more disproportionate power (within their own country at least).
Seeing the how flaccid "strong" laws have become, I prefer we go back to reducing the voice of money by taxing it away. Maybe our country could then finally have nice things.
if you put more effort into making your point, I'm sure you could get better engagement
People who assign billionaires as being the living manifestation of greed are somehow quick to hand wave away "billionaires will move to protect their wealth".
What might that be? California is still at the forefront of every technological innovation this country is seeing while Texas is at the forefront of theocracy.
California may be seeing a smaller share of the world’s innovation in the past, but that hasn’t moved to Texas, it’s moved to China.
You think people living in NYC, for example, the financial (and one of the major cultural capitals) of the entire world (not to mention all the other benefits of US residency) are going to bother with packing up their lives and moving overseas because the taxes are too high? Not to mention these people will still have obscene wealth in all likelihood.
Some might, but I don't think we should wring our hands over it.
Rather than worrying about "capital flight" let's instead imaging all the good that could come of us having a more more equal wealth and income distribution.
Eventually you'll run out of other people's money to spend, and will be forced to face the reality of your own self-sufficiency.
Europe figured this out long ago and has a very broad tax base (aka higher taxes on the middle class) to fund their social welfare programs but somehow you never see that proposed as a solution by the middle class in the US...
The never come back bit solves the imaginary problem you mention.
Until the early 1980s, the highest tax bracket was taxed at 70%, and before that even more.
The government has billions of dollars. Thankfully government officials are immune to the corrupting influence of billions of dollars.
Under our current system you have to be daft to not invest in buying the government--it's a great return on your investment!
The true billionaire doesn't have anybody else to ask and can finance the campaign to get somebody (not) elected.
> The Gini index, or Gini coefficient, is a statistical measure of wealth distribution developed by the Italian statistician Corrado Gini. The Gini index is used to gauge economic inequality by measuring income distribution, also called wealth distribution.
It's a kinda big red flag if they say that income and wealth are the same thing!
There are a few notable cases of European countries having very high wealth inequality despite lower income inequality (my take which may not be shared by many: having low income inequality makes it hard for people who aren't generationally wealthy to overcome old money). Notably, Sweden has a higher wealth inequality than the United States.
However, I don't think it's true that Europe in general has higher wealth inequality than the United States. Here's the wikipedia list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_we...
Wealthy and old people love when income is used as a stand in for wealth. It deflects political action onto the young and hard/smart working, and helps keep their dynasties and rent seeking assets intact.
This consistently happens in a very specific way. A corporation that dominates a concentrated market becomes excessively large, which makes its early shareholders billionaires.
In other words, if you want to change this, you need to enforce antitrust laws and break up large corporations.
You have a lot of thoughts on something you know very little about.
"Effective Income Tax Rates Have Fallen for The Top One Percent Since World War II" https://taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/effective-income-tax-rate...
What about the federal government gives you the impression that they'd be responsible stewards of the money you want to confiscate and redistribute?
The government does lots of things well. That's why those in power are trying to destroy it right now.
Here's where you go "But it's not perfect, therefore it can't work." or maybe "all taxation is theft".
It's clear you have very little historical or economic knowledge about taxation, and it seems like the sum total of your thoughts on the matter is: taking money from people I don't like makes me feel good.
That link has an agenda. Choosing the height of WWII as the baseline is cherry picking. Effective rates were higher during WWII than they were before or since, but that was eight decades ago, not for very long, and for an obvious reason.
They're also achieving even that much difference by applying speculative math to capital gains, which is meaningless because doing that in real life would result in major behavioral changes.
And it's still not clear how any of that is supposed to solve it. Suppose the founder of MegaCorp has to sell more of their shares to pay the money in tax. They sell them to BlackRock or China or whatever. Is that going to cause MegaCorp's lobbyists to stop trying to capture the government? How? You need there to be more, smaller companies, not change who owns the shares of the predatory megacorps.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S
Basically flat since WWII, despite significant growth in GDP per capita, and before that it was lower.
The high marginal rates in the mid-20th century were fictional because at the time there were so many loopholes that nobody actually paid them. If you think there are a lot of loopholes now, you have no idea. When the marginal rates were lowered, enough of the loopholes were closed at the same time that if you tried to guess when it happened by looking at that graph, you wouldn't be able to tell.
Also, some of the loopholes are still there, but what does that imply for the theory that lower rates are the relevant change? When Richie Rich (or Microsoft) is claiming no taxable income, 60% of nothing is the same as 20% of nothing.
But if that isn't the change, what is? Well, in 1995 the largest company by market cap was GE at ~$92B. In today's dollars that's ~$197B. The largest company today is $4154B. More than 2000% bigger even adjusted for inflation.
And it's the corporations buying the politicians anyway. Who is paying the money, Larry Page or Google? It's Google. If the company is that big, it doesn't matter if it's owned by one person or a million, the CEO has control of enough resources to buy the government, and then does.
Make business small again.
For the rich, yes. Across societies. Despotic regimes have ridiculously high nominal tax rates because they just steal stuff, but that only applies to the poor.
> enforce antitrust laws and break up large corporations
It is a sin to be poor
There being poor, is the sin of the rich
Sure, the easiest way you can do that is to move to Europe and petition its regulators to further tighten the screws. They might actually listen.
Because this can only be solved through legislature, and no matter what black swan event happens, there is no future in which the US legislature will take this problem seriously.
Regardless of what you think of Google or this case specifically, this is an argument for authoritarianism: that it is legitimate for the government to "punish" any company at will, based only on them falling into political disfavor.
> ... the only punishment Google would have to bear from this trial would come after the government won its case, when the judge decided on a punishment (the term of art is "remedy") for Google.
Yes, this is called the rule of law. Punishment comes through the courts, after a guilty verdict. The government has to actually win the argument as to what remedies would be proportionate under the law. In this case the judge didn't buy it. It's fine to disagree with his reasoning (or with the law), but the fantasizing about extrajudicial punishment here is frankly un-American.
Who can know how appropriate or not the remedy was when the evidence is hidden?
For full disclosure: I'm neither a google employee nor a US citizen.
The public record argument is fine; it's just a different argument than the extrajudicial punishment advocated by the original post.
Suppose the government charges you with murder, searches your house, and finds your sex toy collection. At trial they present some elaborate thesis about how you used a sex toy to kill someone, but do not convince the jury, so you're found not guilty. The public has a legitimate interest in judging that the trial was handled with integrity and that the correct verdict was reached. They do not have a legitimate interest in judging you based on whatever private information presented at trial might in some way embarrass you (eg, photos of your sex toy collection). On balance, it could be that the public-record interest does in fact justify making public the evidence of the sex toys, but you have to justify it on those terms. The transparency is not itself intended to be punitive.
There is a definite public interest in understanding how Google conducts itself given the reach and impact it has.
There is no way for the public to have confidence in the trial process if it is conducted in secret, and given the outcome every reason to question the process.
I'm surprised anybody objective would defend this.
No its more like, the process of transparency harms the company enough that they will shift their own mentality to ensure they never have to participate in a transparent process.
The argument that we should cheer on the use of government power to target a specific company, to selectively expose their dirty laundry as punishment for a crime they have not been convicted of, is what I found noxious in the original post.
I do find it a bit curious however, where later in the article theres a discussion about explicit collusion between corporates and the government. I vastly prefer the state and corps to be at odds with each other, than in bed with each other. Do any of the allegations towards the end register on your authoritarianismometer?
Any unjust policy (including just dispensing with trials altogether and allowing the executive to arbitrarily break up companies) will get to the 'desirable' outcome in some cases. That doesn't make it a just policy.
The specific allegation in the post is that the Trump administration will not appeal the verdict because Sundar gave $1M to Trump's inauguration. As far as I know, the government has not yet indicated whether it will appeal, so the claim that "Trump just paid him back, 40,000 times over" is in fact not true. (whether it becomes true at some point in the future, it was a falsehood at the time the author wrote it). It's also quite plausible that a Republican administration wouldn't appeal the verdict just due to being more pro-business in general, even without explicit corruption. But it's precisely because we have such a corrupt executive that it becomes all the more important to stick up for the rule of law. The correct response to authoritarianism is not to advocate for more authoritarianism!
Maybe. But then why was the google case actively sheltered and hidden from the public. The optics were considered in at least one of these cases.
"Google has stolen every fact about our lives, in service to propping up a monopoly that lets it steal our money, too."
I still have all the facts about my life and I don't think any money has been stolen. I get that this is rhetorical, but he's gone over the edge here.
Yikes, you are doing it too. Does accuracy in prose not count anymore?
When you have a strong case you shouldn’t have to bend the facts.
You changed what you wrote to make it accurate now, but refused to admit that and instead just prepended it with "literally"!
Wonderfully ironic given that we are talking about being accurate in your writing!
The second time you were much more accurate. You wouldn’t have even had to restate it differently if the first time had been accurate.
"Oh, a company knows literally everything about me and clandestinely sells that information to the highest bidder in order to target every facet of my existence so that multinational conglomerations can extract every erg of value from every heartbeat of my existence, but that's cool because I also know that information"
Geez.
No, you don't. Google knows more about you than yourself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26639261, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2840916, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1584589
Didn't Apple say that 1) they weren't interested in being in the Search Engine business 2) (in testimony) Google was by far the best search engine that they were going to use anyway ?
Certainly, $20B/Y weighs on the scale, but knowing Apple's negotiation tactics they could also have used their weight to do what they wanted anyhow and get paid handsomely for it (<waggle waggle> "if you don't pay us we might start using other defaults and you'll lose that lucrative iOS market")
My point is, while Google is clearly at fault in this whole situation, it's not quite as moustache-twirling evil as Doctorow paints it.
That Google has paid Apple to be the default search engine was a business deal that has been open knowledge for a decade or more. Other search engines could've paid to be the default. Apple didn't have a search engine when they created the iPhone, and why would they start? Ever? MS didn't do so well. And why would Apple want to make their own search engine? Even if Apple did, the reaction would certainly be that Apple was abusing their position to promote their own search engine and would be committing an anti-trust violation then.
Also I think it's safe to say there is no actual testimony about a quid pro quo arrangement to get Apple to agree to not make a search engine.
I mean Apple Maps happened. Is it the same scale of problem? No, because Street View is harder than search in some sense! In all seriousness it's not the same problem, but it's something.
$20B/year is real money, and I have a very easy time imagining that squashing the idea at all (even if the intent on Google's side is "simply" to maintain dominance, and not squash out competition from Apple specifically)
While the payments were public knowledge and there was speculation about the amount being somewhere between $8B and $12B, the number had never been confirmed until unsealed in the case, was more than the previous speculation, and was something both Google and Apple wanted to keep under wraps: https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/2/24147007/google-paid-apple...
Thus, it's a fact that was established in the verdict. "Slipping" is possibly a stretch, given the deal itself was at least publicly known? - though the fact both parties wanted to avoid discussion of the deal since its inception makes it feel at least somewhat evasive, so I can see what the word choice gestures towards.
> ...in exchange for which, Apple forbore from making a competing search engine.
From https://www.justice.gov/atr/media/1402141/dl?inline=:
> Cutting off all search-related payments from Google to Apple would strongly alter Apple’s incentives. Rem. Tr. 3825:7–3829:2 (Cue (Apple)) (Apple’s SVP of Services “can’t say [he] would disagree” that “it was a disincentive for us to do a search engine based on the payments that we were receiving from Google”)
> forbear: politely or patiently restrain an impulse to do something; refrain
That seems like a reasonable description of what Eddy Cue stated to me. It certainly wasn't part of the wording of the deal, but if I were Eddy, I'd probably refrain from building a search engine in his shoes.
52 more comments available on Hacker News
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.