Comment by meowface

Comment by meowface 4 days ago

>Google is a convicted criminal that suppressed competition and is now awaiting sentencing

>Google's illegal monopoly

>Google's criminality is the one mitigating favor

As someone who switched from Firefox to Chrome a while ago, these remarks made me curious enough to research the case.

The judge ruled based on "billions of dollars Google spends every year to install its search engine as the default option on new cellphones and tech gadgets".

The crime of the century laid bare before our eyes. A search engine company caught red-handed paying companies to set its search engine as the default search engine as everyone everywhere knew and saw for decades. Utterly reprehensible.

safety1st 4 days ago

Okay. If you think they should be above the law, that's who you are. Those are your values. Thanks for letting us know.

I'm of the humble view that it's at least as important to enforce the law when it comes to the most powerful corporations in the world, as it is to enforce it on the average person.

But maybe you see things differently.

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meowface 4 days ago

Sure, the law should be enforced against them. The law's the law. I wasn't trying to imply they should not face the full penalties the law requires, here. Obviously they should. No one is above the law.
The tone of your post just carried an impression of criminality in the sense of wanton fraud or murder rather than an organization using its money to put itself in a position to make more money via consensual contracts with technology product providers and running afoul of "wait, you can't be too good at running a business" regulations.

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- immibis 4 days ago
  
  Aren't you implying that actual fraud, as well as things like copyright infringement, would be anything more than an organization using its money to put itself in a position to make more money via consensual contracts and running afoul of "wait, you can't be too good at running a business" regulations?
  
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  meowface 2 days ago
  
  Fraud usually implies deceiving someone or something.
  
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  immibis 2 days ago
  
  Which is just a company being better at business than you. Selling promises and breaking them is a very good business model, in a free market without government intervention, since it makes a lot of profit. If you were good at business, you wouldn't give money to those companies. Hence, them being better at business than you.
  
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- pyrale 3 days ago
  
  > The tone of your post just carried an impression of criminality in the sense of wanton fraud
  Oh, they also did that [1]. If a bank did this kind of stuff, perpetrators would see jail.
  [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue
  
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  meowface 2 days ago
  
  Well, since this discussion is about the law as well:
  >In September 2022, a ruling in the case dismissed claims there was collusion between Google and Facebook regarding the matters covered in the agreement.
  
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  pyrale 2 days ago
  
  The scope of the part of this ruling alluded to by this wikipedia quote is extremely limited. All it says is that facebook didn't explicitly promise to not develop header bidding in the future, so the agreement is not a collusion between fb and google.
  In essence, all that it says is that this lawsuit is limited to Google's fraud and monopoly behaviour, and does not extend to Facebook.
  In many other matters, the judge allowed the litigation to go forward. Just check out the document below [1] and ctrl-f "the complaint plausibly alleges".
  [1]: https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-yor...
  
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paulryanrogers 4 days ago

IMO buying defaults isn't as bad as Google's rigging the ad market. At least others have outbid them for search defaults in the past and in other markets.

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meowface 4 days ago

That one is definitely a lot worse and a danger of a monopoly/extremely powerful market player. I would argue that a monopoly is not inherently "bad"* but has much more ability to do bad things if it chooses to, with not much potential recourse from others.
https://economictimes.com/news/international/world-news/ad-v...
*Strictly in an ethics and fairness sense. It might (or might not) be worse for consumers. Just worse in a kind of boring rather than nefarious or deeply harmful way.

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