Google sued under Anti-Trust Laws

And so it begins…

Attorney General Barr has directed the Justice Dept. to prefer charges against Google under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. Sherman is a law that was ratified over 100 years ago, to prevent the gigantic monopolies of the Gilded Age from taking over huge swaths of American industry and exercising undue influence over the American political system. The most famous of Sherman prosecutions, was the breakup of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. Rockefeller was the richest man who ever walked the Earth; because he was ruthless in business, but he was not above the Law.

Just my opinion, but social media has been begging for this. There was a huge outcry when both Twitter and Facebook blocked users who were attempting to publish links to a New York Post story regarding a national candidate last week. Google has allegedly been redirecting searches for political purpose, and has allegedly monopolized the Internet Search Industry with exclusionary trade policies.

This could get very big. Check your position, the fallout will be far reaching.

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Or, as likely, under Clayton.

Either way, it’s been a long time coming, and only took so long because of all the money, graft, corruption, etc. sloshing around D.C. If it was human waste, it would smell a lot like San Francisco or L.A. or New York City.

Oddly…both GOOG and GOOGL finished up over 1% today, although they were both down 1% in after-hours trading. I couldn’t easily figure out what time lawsuit was actually filed today?

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Ars Technica has an analysis of the case.

Personally I suspect that this will very much go the way that the EU inquiries have gone - Goog pays a fine, grudgingly complies with the sanctions, and nothing really changes. As a parallel, look at Wall Street - shaft the market to the tune of billions, maybe pay fines a decade later to the tunes of millions while admitting no wrongdoing, just a cost of business.

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The only consideration I’d say might make this different this time could depend on outcome of election. A serious red wave might also result in a serious backlash/spanking to Big Tech from a united repugghhlican gubmint. As alluded to above, the obvious, overt disparity in treatment from B/T between conservative and liberal posts, accounts, etc. might have earned them a serious come-uppance.

But to your point, maybe not. They have a lot of money. And know literally everything about you, and everyone in Congress.

#TermLimits!!

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The main purpose of antitrust law is to promote fair economic competition that benefits consumers. Keeping rich people from having political influence has nothing to do with it.

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Tangential: if the electorate is too indifferent to vote out incumbents, they’re too indifferent not to vote for candidates groomed by party machines.

Have to disagree on fundamental and historic grounds. JP Morgan, Vanderbilt, and Carnegie put McKinley in the White House, and the reformer Teddy Roosevelt in the Executive Offices of the VP, to take him off the national stage. When McKinley was assassinated, TR was promoted and all Hell broke loose for the big monopolies.

Standard Oil was broken up, and A.L.A.M. was ruled against in their attempt to stop Henry Ford from building cars. But more importantly, the supremacy of the Federal Government was established over these uber big and powerful companies.

To see big global companies try to directly sway elections again is disturbing. The Senate is questioning Google, Facebook, and Twitter soon about suppressing Free Speech and swaying political discussion. Trump and Republicans are threatening to remove Section 230 exclusions from social media, which would make them responsible and susceptible to civil lawsuits for their content.

Why Congress passed antitrust laws isn’t as important as what they passed.

You can’t just step into court and win by saying, “I fear the political influence of your wealth.”

You have to prove consumer harm or unfair competition.

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I feel that Amazon is going to be targeted soon, Im thinking the equivalent of Bill Gates’ Microsoft in the mid to late 1990s.

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What is it, specifically, about big global companies that disturbs you, and why? Is it their global scope? Their wealth? Their commercial motives? The fact that they, like the owners and employees who comprise them, seek to influence elections? And does your opinion change depending on whether the company is controlled mainly by American voters or foreigners? Should the First Amendment only protect the speech rights of U.S. citizens?

Congress might winge and moan about how Google, Facebook, and Twitter (“GFT”) manage their websites, but the First Amendment restricts the government from suppressing speech – not private persons. The webpages of private companies are fundamentally different from a town square or other public property.

Reasonable minds might differ over whether GFT should be liable for libel for publishing other people’s lies. If so, we need to impose the same standard to Trump’s retweets.

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This is exactly the focus of the prosecution. Apparently the Federal Govt. believes that Twitter, Facebook, and Google control the platform of public discourse, essentially Speech. In providing the public platform, these global providers are modifying or curtailing the speech of certain participants in favor over others.

On another note, in Citizens United, the SCOTUS ruled that Money = Speech. It opened the floodgates for big companies and PACs to sway public opinion with massive paid advertising. It did not, however; provide for the silencing of opposing voices.

Facebook and Twitter are actively silencing opposing voices. Google is accused of tailoring their search algorithms to favor certain political or economic viewpoints, and deny competitors access from users employing their search engines. I wonder what lawsuits are being crafted for Facebook and Twitter, the two most egregious offenders.

Facebook uses arbitrary “Fact Checkers”, to silence opposition. Twitter uses “Cancel Culture”, they just suspend anyone that they don’t agree with, then cite some nebulous interpretation of their TOS. Facebook and Twitter have become what George Orwell warned us about in “1984”, they are rewriting reality simply by controlling access to the public forum.

Or look at the Microsoft case. They still make their browser the default browser in Windows. Windows is still the biggest slice of the desktop OS pie, by far.

Or the breakup of “Ma Bell.” We had what, 10 years maybe of separate companies, then they started merging again and we’re back with one company, AT&T.

Until wage-earners stop voting like they’re actual capitalists (not “fans of capitalism”), this is what we will live with.

Whether Facebook and Twitter are “public forums” or not is probably the heart of the case. If I allow the Mickey Mouse campaign to put a sign in my yard, must I allow the Donald Duck campaign to put their sign up too? Or am I “big brother,” controlling access to the public forum?

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FTFY.

So back when we had ‘local’ and ‘long distance’ phone companies, guess where some ~half of ‘local’ phone companies’ revenue came from? If you guessed ‘access fees paid by the long distance companies’ you’d be correct. And since the local carriers had the captive subscriber base, post- 96 Telecom Act they invariably started to acquire the long distance carriers.

Southwestern Bell outright acquired AT&T and promptly wore its skin donned its mantle since I guess AT&T was less-despised than SBC. Or their brand was national as opposed to the regional limitation of the SBC brand. So in the long run, the SBC shard of AT&T from when they divested local operations then subsumed the LD shard.

I fear the economy as we know would be badly disrupted for many years if that happened, such is our dependence on everyone nearly maxing out their credit on nonessential purchases.

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Meh…I don’t argue with your point that people will act indifferently/complacently when they can get away with it, but at least if politicians can’t spend 50 years living off of other’s people’s taxes while making themselves and their cronies rich, that’s a benefit in and of itself. Making aspiring officeholders actually have to go out and earn a living first, or expect to have to do so after holding elected office, will naturally benefit a democratic society, and closely comports with the original intent of our founders and their belief in the yeoman farmer. They would find the de facto establishment of an embedded, long term, political class in our country antithetical to some of the principles we were founded on.

If people still can only vote for party apparatchiks, at least under a term-limited paradigm the apparatchiks could not accumulate any more political influence and power that a term or two would allow, and the next apparatchik would have to start all over. And, occasionally, you’d get a decent candidate or two in there as well. But a lot of the perverse incentives would be reduced, undermined, or eliminated, IMO.

Only in a court of law when applied to a specific case or controversy. But with regard to society and from a political science perspective, laws (and regulations and etc.) are nothing more or less than expressions of a society’s values and principles and desired policies…they don’t exist just to give law book publishers something do or law students something to read and quibble over. Why the law says this and not that is very important in this overarching context. The whole point of antitrust law is to keep companies, and therefore the individuals that run or own them, from getting too powerful, whether it be through being rich or influential or market-dominant or whatever. Any numb-nutted numb-nut understands that money == influence == power == more money (not necessarily in that order!)…I know this because I just asked myself and that was how I responded.

That’s not quite true…some business behaviors such as price-fixing, geographic market division, and group boycott are deemed to be illegal per se, regardless of the market reasonableness or overall benefit to consumers of such actions.

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Tomato tomato. Potato potato. A per se rule creates an irrebuttable presumption that consumer harm or unfair competition occurred. Proving the bad conduct occurred (e.g., price-fixing) is deemed to prove the harm. I think we’re describing the same thing in different ways.

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I wasn’t making an argument against term limits, simply pointing out that any improvement they offer to society is apt to be incremental at best.

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You forgot one spelling of it…Potatoe… lol.

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That has nothing to do with antitrust. It’s their platform and they can do what they want with it. Users can choose another platform if they wish. There’s plenty of others to choose from that won’t moderate as much (e.g. Reddit). It’s important to separate the issues to have meaningful discussion and understanding.

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Probably we are. But I extend your logic to proving a company is too big, i.e. a monopoly is the same as proving it is too powerful (or getting there), and therefore too easily able to unduly influence things like elections. And because, if left unchecked, they then can do it, they will do it, in the furtherance of their own ends and agenda…usually more money, influence, and power. And that’s in and of itself harmful to a democracy.

As @Russell_Crow pointed out (or alluded too) above, it is not any given company saying clearly and out loud “we support such and such” candidate that is the issue, it is that of too large and too powerful and too influential of a company doing so in unseemly and underhanded ways. If you are a private company that controls virtually all the flow of news and information, and can even prevent other people or other organizations from meaningfully voicing their opinions, then you are too big/powerful/influential, etc.


BTW, a lot of this discussion has not much to do with the actual lawsuit, which is Google-specific, and really only alleges they are using their market dominance to stifle competition in Search tech sector and Search advertising (but convo is interesting and important, nonetheless):

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