🐱 Trump administration 'taking a look' at regulating Google

http://thehill.com/policy/technolog...nistration-taking-a-look-at-regulating-google


White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow on Tuesday said that the administration is “taking a look” at potentially regulating Google, following President Trump’s tweets criticizing the search giant.

Trump tweeted on Tuesday morning that Google search results for “Trump News” showed results for “only the viewing/reporting of Fake New Media," he wrote, referencing prominent news outlet CNN.



“Republican/Conservative & Fair Media is shut out,” Trump’s tweet read.
Kudlow's comments were in response to being pressed by reporters on if, in light of the president's comments, the administration is considering imposing regulations on Google.

In his tweets, Trump went on to accuse Google and other tech companies of being biased against conservatives, an increasingly common attack from Republicans.

“Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good. They are controlling what we can & cannot see. This is a very serious situation-will be addressed!” Trump tweeted.

Google shot back at the president's claims, refuting charges that it is biased against conservatives or any other political groups.

"When users type queries into the Google Search bar, our goal is to make sure they receive the most relevant answers in a matter of seconds," a Google spokesperson said in a statement.

"Search is not used to set a political agenda and we don't bias our results toward any political ideology," the statement continues. "Every year, we issue hundreds of improvements to our algorithms to ensure they surface high-quality content in response to users' queries. We continually work to improve Google Search and we never rank search results to manipulate political sentiment."

Trump joins high-profile Republicans like House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) in accusing technology companies of treating conservatives on their platforms unfairly.

With support from McCarthy, the House Energy and Commerce Committee is set to hold a hearing on the matter on Sept. 5, which Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is set to testify.

Dorsey will also testify during the Senate Intelligence Committee’s hearing that day on how foreign governments have run misinformation campaigns on American tech platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google Plus.

 

[Your Weird Fetish]

And none of them are in common use (well, duckduckgo actually gets a ton of traffic, but its a curated list.)

How do you define common use?

Could be, I didn't pay much attention to that shit back then I'm afraid. But the main instigators for dumping it were in the 1980s.

Commander Keen is correct, that was a major driving force for talks to bring it back as I recall.

 

[wellthathappened]

I listen to Rush about every day, because he is entertaining.

The notion that he somehow is personally responsible for the Fairness Doctrine being abolished was some hilarious shit on the show today. It isn't true, but it was entertaining and amusing.

 

[whatever I feel like]

How do you define common use?

Thats the job of a court, but I don't know a single person who uses them and I doubt that many people can say that they do.

 

[Mrs Paul]

Getting back to the whole Google thing.
My own personal impression is that Trump really isn't enjoying the presidency nearly as much as he thought he would. I think he believed it would be just like running his business, where he was the boss, and what he said goes. And now he's finding out it's not like that at all.

And naturally, the more he complains, the worse it's gonna get. Quite frankly, I wouldn't be surprised to see the guy have a heart attack or stroke in the near future. (Consider his shitty diet and does he even exercise?)

 

[Ineedahero]

Google is different. It's substantially algorithm driven. Because of that, it would be a huge news story if they started fucking with the algorithm. Like if a google engineer saw some hard-coded constant somewhere that's suspicious, I don't think they could keep it secret. I think that's shocking enough that a programmer would leak it eventually. I think it's just a numbers game.

You are way too optimistic about the intelligence of the public. Just like the nsa shit, Google 'fixing' autocomplete or image search or etc has been in the news plenty of times, and people don't care because it's too big or too confusing or just plain inconvenient to think about.

 

[Your Weird Fetish]

Thats the job of a court, but I don't know a single person who uses them and I doubt that many people can say that they do.

Surely there's no better legal justification for nationalizing a company.

 

[Alec Benson Leary]

The fix is totally in over at silicon valley. Trump has to cut them off at the knees because they are absolutely trying to sabotage his reelection and his party.

That may sound ideal on paper but I don't trust Trump to do so fairly. If he loses the next election, no matter how fair the circumstances are I don't believe he will have the integrity to accept it. Look at how many times he moved the goalposts over Obama's damn birth certificate alone, the man does not accept loss whether he deserves it or not. I don't believe any political leader should be trusted to be that impartial and honest.

Why does he have to? It didn't work in 2016. Why is it going to work this time? Why take that step of establishing the precedent of presidents unilaterally fucking with media that is hostile to them?

Exactly.

You don't put this kind of power into the government's hands because even if they do what you want today, tomorrow they'll use it to do something you don't like and they'll declare you an enemy if you complain. Look at all the lefty Obama/Hillary diehards who think the world is ending every time Trump makes an executive order. These are people who had no complaints about Obama spending 8 years paving the way for anti-illegal policy, unending war, restriction of civil freedoms. The rug was pulled out from under them because they just assumed that power would always be used in a way they approved of and that magically no one else's input would ever influence it.

It doesn't matter how much you like today's leadership. You don't give them more power because you should always be afraid of tomorrow's leadership, including when it's the same people. No exceptions.

 

[whatever I feel like]

Surely there's no better legal justification for nationalizing a company.

That isn't what we are talking about. Though there are obviously cases where such things have been necessary in the past.

 

[Basketball Jones]

N0 offense, but do you have a cite for that? From some place that's NOT from Breitbart, or the Daily Caller or even a leftist site, but some mainstream one? Color me skeptical.

I didn’t remember Google specifically coming out and saying this, so I looked it up and found this from 2016.

 

[Mrs Paul]

I didn’t remember Google specifically coming out and saying this, so I looked it up and found this from 2016.

Actually a good example of what people are talking about as far as Google algorithms vs. Google itself.

 

[Corbin Dallas Multipass]

And none of them are in common use (well, duckduckgo actually gets a ton of traffic, but its a curated list.)

Are you suggesting the government needs to force us to use other search engines? Is google somehow stopping those other search engines? Simply existing and being better/more well known is not a monopoly. Just because I didn't know anyone with a sega mega drive doesn't mean the government needed to regulate nintendo somehow.

 

[whatever I feel like]

I am suggesting that as a monopoly Google is subject to additional regulation and that, since it has engaged in things such as product tying and deceptive advertising, it should be subject to government monitoring and potential regulation.

 

[I-chi]

Trump is a fucking tard and has absolutely no place touching the internet, nor does the government.

Just because some of you idiots are keen to lick his boots and excuse him out of amicability and say "muh Obama" like it justifies being exactly as ideologically complacent as the left was during his eight years doesn't make it somehow magically correct now.

He is treading dangerous water and needs to be told to fuck off.

 

[Your Weird Fetish]

Trump is a fucking tard and has absolutely no place touching the internet, nor does the government.

Just because some of you idiots are keen to lick his boots and excuse him out of amicability and say "muh Obama" like it justifies being exactly as ideologically complacent as the left was during his eight years doesn't make it somehow magically correct now.

He is treading dangerous water and needs to be told to fuck off.

This but also back at the people that thought this shit was great until Trump brought it up.

 

[Bork Laser]

It doesn't matter how much you like today's leadership. You don't give them more power because you should always be afraid of tomorrow's leadership, including when it's the same people. No exceptions.

Yeah and this is something alot of Trump Supporters don't see. Like the Obama camp, they think Trump will be in forever or that a republican will always control the office. Obviously that's not true. The weapon you use today can be used against you tomorrow. I wanna say most people here on the farms are mostly around their 20s, maybe early 30s. You've lived through 4 presidents. Lets say you live to 100.

That means during our lifetime, we will elect 12-13 Presidents(more if some don't serve a full 8 terms, which is actually very rare). Put that into perspective. You trust one person to enact this and use it fairly but will you trust 7 more unknown people to also have this power in the future?

 

[QI 541]

You don't put this kind of power into the government's hands because even if they do what you want today, tomorrow they'll use it to do something you don't like and they'll declare you an enemy if you complain. Look at all the lefty Obama/Hillary diehards who think the world is ending every time Trump makes an executive order. These are people who had no complaints about Obama spending 8 years paving the way for anti-illegal policy, unending war, restriction of civil freedoms. The rug was pulled out from under them because they just assumed that power would always be used in a way they approved of and that magically no one else's input would ever influence it.

It doesn't matter how much you like today's leadership. You don't give them more power because you should always be afraid of tomorrow's leadership, including when it's the same people. No exceptions.

We already decided a long time ago that businesses need to be regulated for the good of society, that a pure free market simply doesn't work. Those are already the rules that were set in place and pretending they don't exist is only going to handicap you.

Are you suggesting the government needs to force us to use other search engines? Is google somehow stopping those other search engines? Simply existing and being better/more well known is not a monopoly. Just because I didn't know anyone with a sega mega drive doesn't mean the government needed to regulate nintendo somehow.

Lol no, they're not a monopoly on search engines, they're a monopoly on digital advertising. Every e-business and probably every business in the future will require being listed on the first page of Google. Their motto used to be "don't be evil" because they realized they can rule the world if they started manipulating their search results.

 

[Corbin Dallas Multipass]

Many people voluntarily use google, so it's advantageous to be listed highly on google. I agree with this statement.

Because it's advantageous to be highly listed on google, they're a monopoly. This statement is not logically correct.

It's good for a business to have the biggest ad on the most popular nascar driver's car. That doesn't make Dale Earnhart a monopoly. (Apologies for the incorrect spelling, and probably completely wrong person, I really don't follow nascar).

You're right about it being silly to pretend we don't regulate the market already. Completely free market anarchy doesn't work very well for most people.

 

[Krokodil Overdose]

Many people voluntarily use google, so it's advantageous to be listed highly on google. I agree with this statement.

Because it's advantageous to be highly listed on google, they're a monopoly. This statement is not logically correct.

This statement can be correct (if technically a non-sequitur) because there's no "therefor." "Google is a monopoly, therefor it's highly advantageous to be highly listed on them," is true but relies on "Google is a monopoly" to be true. While I don't think the statement is technically true, I'm on the fence about how untrue it is.

I don't think that it's up for debate that Google is part of a duopoly when it comes to smartphones- they control a bit more than half the market, with Apple taking up the other half. Considering the integration of their search engine, and the phone itself being essentially a big data-mining mechanism, combined with the fact that they're also in a duopoly (with Facebook this time) on online advertising, makes a new competitor breaking into the market effectively impossible. Google's corpus is too large, they're too big, they're too fine-tuned. You'd have to actually re-invent part of the internet in order to be competitive, and while that's not impossible, it is implausible.

It's good for a business to have the biggest ad on the most popular nascar driver's car. That doesn't make Dale Earnhart a monopoly. (Apologies for the incorrect spelling, and probably completely wrong person, I really don't follow nascar).

But NASCAR has no local equivalent of Metcalfe's law, quite the reverse in fact: it's structured as a competition ("making a left turn" jokes aside,) and there's no market for competitions with only one competitor outside of Venezuelan elections. Google (like it's kissing cousin Facebook) has no such restriction: the value of the network is a function of how many nodes it connects. If economies of scale dictate that the most efficient number of actors in the market is one (everyone connected to everyone else, on a single network) then that's a textbook natural monopoly and should be regulated as such, just like water and power.

You're right about it being silly to pretend we don't regulate the market already. Completely free market anarchy doesn't work very well for most people.

Right. This is where I really scratch my head about "the government shouldn't have this power!" posts. Regulating natural monopolies is something we've been doing for quite some time now, and it's one of the least-worst areas of government intervention, both because it's simple and because the alternative is known to be quite bad.

 

[Marvin]

This statement can be correct (if technically a non-sequitur) because there's no "therefor." "Google is a monopoly, therefor it's highly advantageous to be highly listed on them," is true but relies on "Google is a monopoly" to be true. While I don't think the statement is technically true, I'm on the fence about how untrue it is.

I don't think that it's up for debate that Google is part of a duopoly when it comes to smartphones- they control a bit more than half the market, with Apple taking up the other half. Considering the integration of their search engine, and the phone itself being essentially a big data-mining mechanism, combined with the fact that they're also in a duopoly (with Facebook this time) on online advertising, makes a new competitor breaking into the market effectively impossible. Google's corpus is too large, they're too big, they're too fine-tuned. You'd have to actually re-invent part of the internet in order to be competitive, and while that's not impossible, it is implausible.

I don't think google (the search engine) is even reasonably a monopoly. There's solid competition in that field.

In regards to app stores, yeah, that's a choke point and google wields an uncomfortable amount of power there.

With advertising, google does have a bunch of power (I'm not exactly sure how much though), but an interesting competition to google's advertising platform are just alternatives to traditional advertising in general. I'm talking about things like patreon, combined with aggressive ad blocking.

Ad blocking is interesting to me because it's kind of an obscure technical thing that many ordinary people have managed to adopt. Like, technically speaking, you can install apps on your android phone without going through the app store, but it's still a pain in the ass. 99.9% of phone users probably wouldn't bother.

But I think a huge chunk of internet users have managed to install an adblocking plugin in their browser.

I'm also a big fan of Brave, which attempts to combine a great ad blocker (and blocks various tracking software in general) with micropayments. You gas it up with $30/month or whatever you want, and it'll dole out micropayments to the various websites you visit. (You can exclude some websites if you want.)

But NASCAR has no local equivalent of Metcalfe's law, quite the reverse in fact: it's structured as a competition ("making a left turn" jokes aside,) and there's no market for competitions with only one competitor outside of Venezuelan elections. Google (like it's kissing cousin Facebook) has no such restriction: the value of the network is a function of how many nodes it connects. If economies of scale dictate that the most efficient number of actors in the market is one (everyone connected to everyone else, on a single network) then that's a textbook natural monopoly and should be regulated as such, just like water and power.

Metcalfe's law is really overused as an argument. It has a huge flaw in that it assumes a static target. There are almost no static targets on the internet.

 

[Alec Benson Leary]

One idea I've heard bandied about is that of more heavily taxing a business depending on how much of the market share they command. Google has 80% of all search traffic so you'd bilk them twice as hard as their competitor who only has a tenth of that, or some such. The concept being that it would encourage businesses to be careful about trying to conquer too much territory.

The obvious pratfall there being that you are essentially punishing a business or entrepreneur for success. I haven't done any hard research but I wonder what you guys think of it as a solution.

I'm also a big fan of Brave, which attempts to combine a great ad blocker (and blocks various tracking software in general) with micropayments. You gas it up with $30/month or whatever you want, and it'll dole out micropayments to the various websites you visit. (You can exclude some websites if you want.)

I absolutely love the idea behind Brave. The only reason I'm not using it now is because it seems pretty barebones function-wise. I'm spoiled by vivaldi.