Somewhat related, last month there was an 'antitrust and competition conference' at chicago booth school of business, and their videos came up last weekend.
FB's free basics implementation in Brazil is free for facebook-owned properties (e.g. whatsapp), but not for general website usage. Claire Wardle argues this creates a problem where free basic internet users are less motivated to fact-check things ( https://youtu.be/Wu9q5fb6MO0?t=1231 , specifically https://youtu.be/Wu9q5fb6MO0?t=1340).
Barry Lynn of Open Markets had an interesting quote I'm still trying to think about - https://youtu.be/Wu9q5fb6MO0?t=2523 - "The issue is not that the price is free, the issue is the price is imposed outside the market. The issue that price is a function not of competition, but a tool of power. Without a public price, you don't have a public. Without a public, you can't protect democracy."
Facebook Free basics also suffers the Tom's Shoes problem [1] - basically by giving away the free service in a developing country, it kills the local economy for the same service and sets it back, not forwards. By saturating the ISP market, Facebook is hindering ISP development in Brazil.
This would be less of a problem if Facebook offered net neutral internet service but they're not - FB is only offering free access to theirs and a handful of partners websites. It's charity message of bringing "free internet to people who don't have it" is a red herring to the problems it presents.
Facebook. Google will point to facebook's news feeds and internal mechanism as evidence that Google is not alone in terms of news and information linking. Similarly, there are many legitimate competitors in search. DuckDuckgo is a minor player, but microsoft's Bing isn't.
I think that Google is far too big, but I just don't see an antitrust case in the areas of news or search. Oldschool advertising would seem an option but that is a decreasing area, not the place to make real change going forwards imho. I'd like them to break up youtube, but there too Facebook's video sharing is a valid competitor.
> DuckDuckgo is a minor player, but microsoft's Bing isn't.
DuckduckGo, Qwant, and Bing are all the same player.
DDG and Qwant just pull Bing results.
Bing is the only real competitor to Google.
>or search.
Erm. I think it's absolutely there on search. The existence of competitors doesn't negate monopoly status.
And the accusation can be legitimately claimed, that they use their monopoly status in one market (search) as leverage to give other services in different markets a leg up over the competition.
MS can't leverage Bing for the same - no matter how integrated Bing might be into other products.
If Google tells people to use AMP or be de-ranked, that's monopoly power. Flat out.
It there a source for this? People keep saying that DDG is just Bing, but I can't find any indication of that actually being true. Sure, they may be using Bing results, but they're seem to be mixed with result from other sources.
The only post I ever found on the subject is Gabriel Weinberg saying that DDG is not just Bing.
If there aren’t laws damning this style of business there should be. The amount of power focused in such a few people can only have catastrophic effects on society.
>DuckDuckgo is a minor player, but microsoft's Bing isn't.
Bing has 5% market share of search.
You also don’t see Microsoft leveraging the 5% market share to create competing businesses and then self bidding on search engine keywords to bid up the costs to existing customers.
The problem is google has a dominate market share and unfairly leverage its dominate market position to the determinate of other businesses and consumers. Say I’m an airline and use google ad words and pay $2 pay per click for the term “x”, google knows I can afford to pay more, so they create a spin off company and they bid up “x” to force me to pay google more for the same AdWord or lose out to Google’s new flight aggregate business. Either way this drives up costs to consumers and is unfair to a competitive business landscape.
I think it's important to remember that when we talk about competition, it doesn't mean pick between two companies, one if which is much stronger. Strong competition would mean dozens to hundreds of sustainable entrants. The competition in this (and many other) markets is anemic.
A Google whistleblower today released internal documents and helped Project Veritas obtain camera footage:
> Google Exec Says Don’t Break Us Up: “smaller companies don’t have the resources” to “prevent next Trump situation”
If a single company believes they have the informational monopoly needed to control national politics, isn't that an admission of anti-trust liability?
This is nothing new, given the statements made in the Google 'all-hands' immediately after the election, for which complete footage was leaked as well. Some leadership was less explicitly partisan, but one or two were more openly so, to the point that they were amenable to being more proactive in future elections.
The problem is not so much that a corporation has political opinions (or rather that the executives have political opinions and don't keep work and politics separate.) None of that is particularly unusual.
The problem in this case is this particular company believes they have enough power to decide the outcome of elections. Or more accurately, the problem is that they might be right.
As they should be. Google, Twitter, and Facebook were in unique positions to see how heavily Russia worked to influence our elections. They should've been screaming from the rooftops about that.
CEO's tend err on the side of hubris, and it'd seem they all have strong political views. I think power maybe does that. So in a more informal 'TGIF' setting, I'm not surprised to see some of it come out, however uncomfortable (whether or not I disagree with the position is different, but I definitely disagree with political dialogue at the office by CEO's).
But today's revelation indicate more broadly material policy, i.e. 'not just off the cuff CEO's remarks'. Also, there's some information regarding the efforts of AI to 'rebalance' information, it's downright scary.
I don't believe that their activity is remotely 'neutral' and given some of the statements it seems they are blissfully ignorant of how people could possibly disagree with them. It's definitely a bubble.
Today's revelations have crossed the rubicon for me, I'm putting Google effectively in the 'bad company' camp.
I used to trust Google's goodwill and talent more than government, but now I don't.
I want Google to be broken up, and for there to be some kind of transparency and oversight into their algorithms.
It was obvious as daylight that Google supported Clinton through various algorithm tweaks in the search engine, not just against conservatives, but also against other Democratic candidates in the primary.
There was even a paper released after the election showing that Google favored Clinton over Trump in about +20% of the searches.
But nobody ever believes this stuff, because:
1) The vast majority don't pay attention/or are too biased for a certain political candidate to care/believe it
2) "The Algorithm™ can only ever be objective and true" (i.e. Google would never tweak the algorithm for its own interests; ignore the antitrust cases saying the opposite)
3) Google can do no evil. Google can only ever be the good guy in the story
Project veritas has repeatedly shown itself to be untrustworthy, but if the commentary they have appeared to capture in this case is accurate, it is a disgraceful embarrassment for google if not actually illegal. I am betting she'll be fired over this.
> Project veritas has repeatedly shown itself to be untrustworthy, but if the commentary they have appeared to capture in this case is accurate, it is a disgraceful embarrassment for google if not actually illegal
Uh, what commentary, specifically? Everything seems to be hanging on the single phrase "preventing the next Trump situation", which of course we don't have the rest of the conversation to know what that's referring to.
Could just be the whole fake news/algorithmic gaming situation in the election talked about conversationally by someone who obviously didn't vote for Trump? Seems like much less of a stretch than secret plans to interfere in elections, especially considering all the other "evidence".
Everything else seems like it's talked about here all the time. Bias in ML, prioritization of news sources, re-clustering youtube recommendations, etc. There's literally nothing here they haven't outright said that they're doing, and sometimes even published papers on.
"This machine designed solely to lie and mislead in order to drum up and target hatred and rash action cannot be trusted, on account of its history of doing nothing except lying and misleading. However, if this machine designed solely to lie and mislead others is telling the truth this time, that makes me very upset!"
As a general rule, give them a few days after the initial sensational posting to see if they post the full interviews in context. They like to stagger releases of footage.
Wiki states (about the ACORN incident, which I guess is what you mean)
The videos were heavily edited. The sequence of some conversations was changed. Some workers seemed concerned for Giles, one advising her to get legal help. In two cities, ACORN workers called the police. But the most damning words match the transcripts and the audio, and do not seem out of context
This seems to be about a (possibly over)aggressive sting operation. The current Veritas stuff isn't a sting, it's all leaks from insiders who are clearly very concerned about what's happening. I don't see how Veritas/O'Keefe could edit these things deceptively, as they'd only be provided with what the leaker wanted them to see anyway. Moreover the leakers are probably all Google shareholders or at least have no incentive to damage their own employer beyond taking the moral high ground.
So - this seems unlikely to be an issue here. Especially as, just like before, the words being spoken are damning and very clear. It's hard to imagine what sort of context might mitigate them beyond something like "this particular executive isn't actually very important" ... but that context would have no real impact if it wasn't backed by actions, like firing.
To put it bluntly, Veritas has a covert video of a Google exec who might or might not be senior, but who seems to at least be well informed. She says:
"We're also training our algorithms, if 2016 happened again, would we have, would the outcome be different?"
"People who voted for the current president do not agree with our definition of fairness"
"Certainly on top of my old organisation, Trust and Safety, top of mind, they've been working on it since 2016, to make sure we're ready for 2020"
They also have a screenshot of a document saying, "If a representation is factually accurate, can it still be algorithmic unfairness? Yes." and then goes on to say that an image query for CEOs shouldn't show primarily men because even though that's accurate, it might "reinforce harmful stereotypes".
Stuff coming out of these leaks isn't really news though, in the sense that it aligns perfectly with all the other leaks that have been happening and also some of their research publications. So there's little reason to doubt anything here - it's all entirely consistent.
It's incredibly sad how an organisation that was once so committed to simply giving people the most relevant and accurate answers has gone full blown Machiavelli; they've been utterly corrupted by internal social justice activists who share none of those original values. I worked there for many years and it's a crying shame what has happened there since 2016. It looks from the outside like they've collectively lost their minds. And taking a corporate position of systematically manipulating their own userbase at scale, in order to control elections, is not only stunningly dystopian but also stunningly bad strategy.
We should really trust the openly left-leaning search monopoly on it's self certified neutrality - that's just common sense. If we start doubting the neutrality of our monopolies, how will they even gaslight us into submission?
> What matters is that the American people had better believe, almost to an individual, that the process was fair and there was no cheating. That falls not just on voting matters directly but on the attempts by the media, whether old or new, to skew results, to steer people and to play psychological games with them whether through some "AI" or via in-person interference.
> You have weeks, maybe a couple of months, before the window slams shut on this opportunity. Beyond that point all you're doing is packing powder into a tinderbox with a lit fuse.
> [Jen Gennai's admission] is flat-out, without question, the most-dangerous admission I've ever seen and a very high-risk predicate for outright dirty civil war within the next 18 months. It only takes 0.1% of the American Population to decide they'd had enough of this crap and are willing to spend their life. If that happens you suddenly have three hundred thousand people committed to destruction who are utterly convinced that they are staring down tyranny and are willing to do whatever they can to stop it. They will be uncoordinated, you have no way to know who they are before they act, and once they do you can only sentence someone to death for a murder once; the facts, whether you like it or not, is that all the rest are "free, and always will be."
It seems incredibly risky for the bottom line and unwise to make such politically risky moves against half the US people. The action seem to assume that the reigning silicon valley ideologies are 1) right and 2) will win.
By assuming corporate and regional dominance will last through violating some peoples trust in favor of placating others desire for power, it is just a matter of time before you open up a weakness that someone elsewhere can exploit. Or as they said in Detroit: "People will still need cars". To which you can answer "Yes, but that doesn't matter if you loose your competitive edge"
“Corporations” are useful abstractions, but leaky. Google
exists as a collection of people, most of whom are shielded from the profit motive. It’s also not terribly controversial to note that, on average, Google
employees don’t like that other half of the US people.
The upshot: it’s not very hard for a corporation to end up doing things that are right or good for the members, but bad for the corporation’s survival.
James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas should never ever be trusted. They’ve been caught so many times now lying and spreading fake news that I have no doubt that you are intentionally spreading lies.
> If a single company believes they have the informational monopoly needed to control national politics,
There are other ways to interpret this statement. You have, without context, chosen to interpret it in the least charitable way possible.
For example, supposing that:
1. You believe that there was illegal foreign meddling with Facebook during the next election. [1]
2. Instead of one Facebook, there were many competing social networks.
3. They would adopt, with highly varying degrees of effort and success, institute compliance and controls to deal with #1.
One may reasonably and intelligently postulate that in such a parallel universe, #1 would be a bigger problem then it will be in our next election. (Because, thanks to economies of scale, and only having to implement it once, Facebook might do a better, more consistent job of being compliant, then 15 tiny social networks would.)
[1] I am of the opinion that that it is irrelevant, and that the whole bloody purpose of campaigning is to 'meddle' with public opinion, but that doesn't seem to be a popular position here. For some insane reason, we're convinced that foreign enemies of the American people should not campaign in our elections, but domestic ones should. Somehow, through some tortured interpretation of the First Amendment, one is protected speech, and the other isn't.
Every time there's a discussion about tech antitrust (google, fb, amazon, ms) people point to each of these as being their competitors, therefore, there is no monopoly or antitrust issue.
Perhaps we need to rethink antitrust in the context of the internet however. These laws were written in the late 1800, and early 1900s, long before Google existed. I think there should be some evaluation on needing a new framework of what is antitrust for tech companies.
The laws are fine, what we need is to not tailor laws according to selfish political whims or to the whims of publishers and all other inferior competition.
It’s not just their enemies. We would have been happy to continue being a customer of Google if they hadn’t massively jacked up prices with little notice when they recognized their monopoly advantage in maps. So now we’re happy to be on board the anti-trust train.
Yeah what is it with people throwing "monopoly" at everything? Just because they're an industry leader doesn't mean they're anything close to a monopoly.
I do not think this will go well for Google. They are not dealing with one or two companies going after them - we're talking about dozens companies building out cases over years that show potential anti-competitive behavior. Google will have to address each of these individually, and as long as one sticks, I think the dominoes start to fall. Think about all of the industries Google has entered over the years - travel, retail, real estate, news - these are all industries that have players with deep pockets, and mountains of data. It's totally worth the cost of going all-in if it means either they get a settlement, or Google has to make fundamental changes to their products, and/or ad network.
I have a lot of mixed feelings on what this could mean for the other tech companies.
But I hope something is done about Google. While they have done some good, they have too much power over the internet. Looking at AMP as a prime example of something that seems universally hated, but basically forced on users and publishers or risk your placement in Google.
Readit News
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wu9q5fb6MO0 is one of the panel videos with some interesting arguments:
FB's free basics implementation in Brazil is free for facebook-owned properties (e.g. whatsapp), but not for general website usage. Claire Wardle argues this creates a problem where free basic internet users are less motivated to fact-check things ( https://youtu.be/Wu9q5fb6MO0?t=1231 , specifically https://youtu.be/Wu9q5fb6MO0?t=1340).
Barry Lynn of Open Markets had an interesting quote I'm still trying to think about - https://youtu.be/Wu9q5fb6MO0?t=2523 - "The issue is not that the price is free, the issue is the price is imposed outside the market. The issue that price is a function not of competition, but a tool of power. Without a public price, you don't have a public. Without a public, you can't protect democracy."
This would be less of a problem if Facebook offered net neutral internet service but they're not - FB is only offering free access to theirs and a handful of partners websites. It's charity message of bringing "free internet to people who don't have it" is a red herring to the problems it presents.
[1] https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/one-one-business...
I think that Google is far too big, but I just don't see an antitrust case in the areas of news or search. Oldschool advertising would seem an option but that is a decreasing area, not the place to make real change going forwards imho. I'd like them to break up youtube, but there too Facebook's video sharing is a valid competitor.
DuckduckGo, Qwant, and Bing are all the same player.
DDG and Qwant just pull Bing results.
Bing is the only real competitor to Google.
>or search.
Erm. I think it's absolutely there on search. The existence of competitors doesn't negate monopoly status.
And the accusation can be legitimately claimed, that they use their monopoly status in one market (search) as leverage to give other services in different markets a leg up over the competition.
MS can't leverage Bing for the same - no matter how integrated Bing might be into other products.
If Google tells people to use AMP or be de-ranked, that's monopoly power. Flat out.
It there a source for this? People keep saying that DDG is just Bing, but I can't find any indication of that actually being true. Sure, they may be using Bing results, but they're seem to be mixed with result from other sources.
The only post I ever found on the subject is Gabriel Weinberg saying that DDG is not just Bing.
Bing has 5% market share of search.
You also don’t see Microsoft leveraging the 5% market share to create competing businesses and then self bidding on search engine keywords to bid up the costs to existing customers.
The problem is google has a dominate market share and unfairly leverage its dominate market position to the determinate of other businesses and consumers. Say I’m an airline and use google ad words and pay $2 pay per click for the term “x”, google knows I can afford to pay more, so they create a spin off company and they bid up “x” to force me to pay google more for the same AdWord or lose out to Google’s new flight aggregate business. Either way this drives up costs to consumers and is unfair to a competitive business landscape.
Absolutely not, there is such a thing as minimum efficient scale. Some markets might only have room for 2 or 3 companies to operate efficiently.
> Google Exec Says Don’t Break Us Up: “smaller companies don’t have the resources” to “prevent next Trump situation”
If a single company believes they have the informational monopoly needed to control national politics, isn't that an admission of anti-trust liability?
https://www.projectveritas.com/2019/06/24/insider-blows-whis...
The problem in this case is this particular company believes they have enough power to decide the outcome of elections. Or more accurately, the problem is that they might be right.
Instead it looks like they ignored it at best.
CEO's tend err on the side of hubris, and it'd seem they all have strong political views. I think power maybe does that. So in a more informal 'TGIF' setting, I'm not surprised to see some of it come out, however uncomfortable (whether or not I disagree with the position is different, but I definitely disagree with political dialogue at the office by CEO's).
But today's revelation indicate more broadly material policy, i.e. 'not just off the cuff CEO's remarks'. Also, there's some information regarding the efforts of AI to 'rebalance' information, it's downright scary.
I don't believe that their activity is remotely 'neutral' and given some of the statements it seems they are blissfully ignorant of how people could possibly disagree with them. It's definitely a bubble.
Today's revelations have crossed the rubicon for me, I'm putting Google effectively in the 'bad company' camp.
I used to trust Google's goodwill and talent more than government, but now I don't.
I want Google to be broken up, and for there to be some kind of transparency and oversight into their algorithms.
There was even a paper released after the election showing that Google favored Clinton over Trump in about +20% of the searches.
But nobody ever believes this stuff, because:
1) The vast majority don't pay attention/or are too biased for a certain political candidate to care/believe it
2) "The Algorithm™ can only ever be objective and true" (i.e. Google would never tweak the algorithm for its own interests; ignore the antitrust cases saying the opposite)
3) Google can do no evil. Google can only ever be the good guy in the story
Uh, what commentary, specifically? Everything seems to be hanging on the single phrase "preventing the next Trump situation", which of course we don't have the rest of the conversation to know what that's referring to.
Could just be the whole fake news/algorithmic gaming situation in the election talked about conversationally by someone who obviously didn't vote for Trump? Seems like much less of a stretch than secret plans to interfere in elections, especially considering all the other "evidence".
Everything else seems like it's talked about here all the time. Bias in ML, prioritization of news sources, re-clustering youtube recommendations, etc. There's literally nothing here they haven't outright said that they're doing, and sometimes even published papers on.
Dead Comment
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_O'Keefe
The videos were heavily edited. The sequence of some conversations was changed. Some workers seemed concerned for Giles, one advising her to get legal help. In two cities, ACORN workers called the police. But the most damning words match the transcripts and the audio, and do not seem out of context
This seems to be about a (possibly over)aggressive sting operation. The current Veritas stuff isn't a sting, it's all leaks from insiders who are clearly very concerned about what's happening. I don't see how Veritas/O'Keefe could edit these things deceptively, as they'd only be provided with what the leaker wanted them to see anyway. Moreover the leakers are probably all Google shareholders or at least have no incentive to damage their own employer beyond taking the moral high ground.
So - this seems unlikely to be an issue here. Especially as, just like before, the words being spoken are damning and very clear. It's hard to imagine what sort of context might mitigate them beyond something like "this particular executive isn't actually very important" ... but that context would have no real impact if it wasn't backed by actions, like firing.
To put it bluntly, Veritas has a covert video of a Google exec who might or might not be senior, but who seems to at least be well informed. She says:
"We're also training our algorithms, if 2016 happened again, would we have, would the outcome be different?"
"People who voted for the current president do not agree with our definition of fairness"
"Certainly on top of my old organisation, Trust and Safety, top of mind, they've been working on it since 2016, to make sure we're ready for 2020"
They also have a screenshot of a document saying, "If a representation is factually accurate, can it still be algorithmic unfairness? Yes." and then goes on to say that an image query for CEOs shouldn't show primarily men because even though that's accurate, it might "reinforce harmful stereotypes".
Stuff coming out of these leaks isn't really news though, in the sense that it aligns perfectly with all the other leaks that have been happening and also some of their research publications. So there's little reason to doubt anything here - it's all entirely consistent.
It's incredibly sad how an organisation that was once so committed to simply giving people the most relevant and accurate answers has gone full blown Machiavelli; they've been utterly corrupted by internal social justice activists who share none of those original values. I worked there for many years and it's a crying shame what has happened there since 2016. It looks from the outside like they've collectively lost their minds. And taking a corporate position of systematically manipulating their own userbase at scale, in order to control elections, is not only stunningly dystopian but also stunningly bad strategy.
I don't trust them very much as an entity, I think they are kind of seedy and 'slant' their findings, no doubt.
But there is materiality in their revelations.
It's a 'noisy channel' so to speak, but there's 'materiality' in the noise.
Dead Comment
> What matters is that the American people had better believe, almost to an individual, that the process was fair and there was no cheating. That falls not just on voting matters directly but on the attempts by the media, whether old or new, to skew results, to steer people and to play psychological games with them whether through some "AI" or via in-person interference.
> You have weeks, maybe a couple of months, before the window slams shut on this opportunity. Beyond that point all you're doing is packing powder into a tinderbox with a lit fuse.
> [Jen Gennai's admission] is flat-out, without question, the most-dangerous admission I've ever seen and a very high-risk predicate for outright dirty civil war within the next 18 months. It only takes 0.1% of the American Population to decide they'd had enough of this crap and are willing to spend their life. If that happens you suddenly have three hundred thousand people committed to destruction who are utterly convinced that they are staring down tyranny and are willing to do whatever they can to stop it. They will be uncoordinated, you have no way to know who they are before they act, and once they do you can only sentence someone to death for a murder once; the facts, whether you like it or not, is that all the rest are "free, and always will be."
By assuming corporate and regional dominance will last through violating some peoples trust in favor of placating others desire for power, it is just a matter of time before you open up a weakness that someone elsewhere can exploit. Or as they said in Detroit: "People will still need cars". To which you can answer "Yes, but that doesn't matter if you loose your competitive edge"
The upshot: it’s not very hard for a corporation to end up doing things that are right or good for the members, but bad for the corporation’s survival.
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
There are other ways to interpret this statement. You have, without context, chosen to interpret it in the least charitable way possible.
For example, supposing that:
1. You believe that there was illegal foreign meddling with Facebook during the next election. [1]
2. Instead of one Facebook, there were many competing social networks.
3. They would adopt, with highly varying degrees of effort and success, institute compliance and controls to deal with #1.
One may reasonably and intelligently postulate that in such a parallel universe, #1 would be a bigger problem then it will be in our next election. (Because, thanks to economies of scale, and only having to implement it once, Facebook might do a better, more consistent job of being compliant, then 15 tiny social networks would.)
[1] I am of the opinion that that it is irrelevant, and that the whole bloody purpose of campaigning is to 'meddle' with public opinion, but that doesn't seem to be a popular position here. For some insane reason, we're convinced that foreign enemies of the American people should not campaign in our elections, but domestic ones should. Somehow, through some tortured interpretation of the First Amendment, one is protected speech, and the other isn't.
Perhaps we need to rethink antitrust in the context of the internet however. These laws were written in the late 1800, and early 1900s, long before Google existed. I think there should be some evaluation on needing a new framework of what is antitrust for tech companies.
Say what it is, you built your platform using google, and they changed prices.
Deleted Comment
But I hope something is done about Google. While they have done some good, they have too much power over the internet. Looking at AMP as a prime example of something that seems universally hated, but basically forced on users and publishers or risk your placement in Google.
And even then some AMP defenders show up in the comments. It makes the mobile web suck less in a way marketroids can understand.