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Congressman Warns FTC: Leave Google Alone
concealment writes with this selection from Ars Technica: "A Democratic congressman who played a leading role in the fight against the Stop Online Piracy Act earlier this year has taken up a new cause: shielding Google from antitrust scrutiny. In a strongly worded letter to Federal Trade Commission chairman Jon Leibowitz, Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO) praised Google's contribution to the nation's economy. He warned Leibowitz that if the FTC does choose to initiate an antitrust case against Google, Congress might react by curtailing its regulatory authority."
It's probably completely unrelated to the fact that Google has a huge presence in Boulder, CO now.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
... that actually gets it. He was one of the 5 or so congresscritters that "stood in the way" of SOPA during the House Judiciary Committee hearings. He even understands the seedy underbelly of the net without going apeshit with wild claims. Someone this "net literate" in Congress is a rare thing indeed. There are a few with Rs next to their names that also get it, but they are rare as hen's teeth also.
>Google is a monopoly
The market is that way because every other competitor's product sucks more. Yahoo somehow keeps finding ways to suck more as time goes on, even though it seems like it can't possibly suck more. Google Maps is unparalleled, for example. Nobody else has the equivalent of Google Earth. There is Google search and then there is "everyone else" - mirroring "IBM and the seven dwarfs." They may as well be Cuil. And after, what, a decade of Hotmail being a laughingstock, I'm not motivated to use And unlike other companies that "maintain monopolies," Google doesn't go out of its way to "cut off the oxygen" of its competitors or partners - they don't have to.
I don't like big corporations and Google's size makes me uneasy. But I have problems finding serious fault with how they got to where they are today.
And when the FTC actually ever takes Microsoft seriously, then maybe I'll give them the benefit of the doubt going after Google. But they didn't and won't so I won't.
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BMO
We're facing some of the core issues that were warned about so long ago.
Do Not Track is proving to be a key issue, with a stand off building between advertisers/marketers/corporations, and various 'providers', and users. DNT has the potential for wrecking the models of many content providers, crushing the online ad business, and doing so by ensuring users can be 'left alone' despite the powerful drive to reach them no matter their preference. This is not much different from the Do-Not-Call fights not long ago with the telemarketers. Will the FTC and other agencies get into this fight as they did with Do Not Call, on the side of consumers, or wil the cave to the Internet and try to avoid it? Watching Microsoft try to implement DNT and being told outright that some advertisers will just ignore it sounds like the boilerroom types threatening to ignore Do Not Call, and indeed some did. Only fines worked, and then not perfectly. Will we get DNT?
Google is of course doing whatever is legally permitted, and more where there isn't much legislation to call upon. We will have to decide how we want to be tracked online, and then petition our representatives to force that, and then deal with the global Internet and all the non-US entities that may have different ideas. I don't blame Google for this, but until we legislate it, they will do whatever makes money.
And if we succeed in limiting Google and others, we should expect that the days of 'free' on the Internet , as in 'free services', are numbered. GMail is only free to you because ad revenue supports it. When you start denying the ads, you will need to pay for what was supported by them. It's just that simple. Will we? And then, google gets out of the 'beta' model and gets into the paid-for model, where customer service is necessary, and people will complain when Gmail goes haywire.
There is an outfit that is doing the paid-for model already, and seems moderately adequate. Yahoo! mail is available with POP/IMAP access for a fee, and they seem to be doing it well enough for a small fraction to pay. If I were the Yahoo! CEO, I would be lobbying behind the scenes for DNT, as it would force others (Google mostly) to find some way to fund their operations without stealing the info users would rather they not, and might force them into a new revenue model. One Yahoo! could possibly compete with.
Between the Partiot Act, TSA, SOPA, DMCA, copyright law abuses, and domestic surveillance, our government is edging closer to a full-fledged confrontation with the electorate. We will have to fight for our freedoms again in my lifetime. Privacy will not be the issue. Due process will become the issue. Watching me, intercepting my communications, and compelling my cooperation without discernable benefit are the coming issues. Already here, just not yet painful enough for us to complain. TSA Kabuki Security Theatre is one of these, NSA snooping another, and government management of healthcare another. When the governemnt decides to offer you different healthcare options based on your apparent lifestyle, based on your online data, we'll realize that none of this was good for us. And government-provided anything will always suffer from financial constraints. That will lead to making decisions based on budgets. Don't think it won't. Already, with private health insurance, you make these decisions.
We have a big fight ahead of us.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
If corporations were not people, the actual people who break the law for profit and the people who supervise and direct them would be the ones with legal responsibility for their crimes and abuses. We can't have that, that would be class warfare. How dare you rise against your betters and their incorporated proxies.
I don't think the people who blindly defend Google have an understanding of what Google is doing with its search results. Let me give you my experience as a site owner.
I run a popular sports website. On April 24 2012, I saw a 30% decrease in traffic. I figured that maybe interest in my sport had cooled off because the season was winding down, or that it was a temporary situation. But the traffic didn't get any better. But then I noticed when searching Google that my site wasn't coming up as often as it used to. In fact, when searching for topics that were only covered on my site, my site wasn't being returned in Google. If I went to Bing, they came up right at the top, but Google searchers were left thinking that no such information existed on the internet.
I learned that on April 24, Google put in an algorithm that penalized websites for "webspam". What is webspam? They identified it very vaguely, but the examples they gave were egregious - people who put thousands of unrelated words on a page, or people who were running massive link exchanges designed to boost other websites' popularity in Google's results. But my site did none of that - yet Google cut it from appearing in the search results by about 70%.
Do you know what recourse I had as a site owner? Zero. Google doesn't have a customer service department. They have an online forum staffed by volunteers who are, quite honestly, arrogant and abusive. Occasionally an actual Google employee drops in, but they won't answer questions because they don't want people to be able to figure out their algorithms.
My story has a happy ending because last week, my penalty was lifted. No explanation, no communication, it was just something I noticed. Many others have not recovered, and there is always the threat of having the penalty applied again. To be clear, this penalty is applied by an algorithm, not by a human. There is no human ability to override it. That's just wrong, and scary too.
Some have speculated that Google's algorithm penalized sites in order to force them to purchase advertising on Google. Imagine that you're making $500 a day from your #1 Google spot. No need to advertise. But if Google demotes you, then maybe you'd spend $250 per day to get back to the #1 spot? It's speculation, but well-reasoned - before I learned that I was demoted by a penalty, I increased my advertising with Google to try and get traffic back. Google's advertising profits went up after they put this penalty in place.
Another reason that Google gives for penalizing sites is if they have "too much advertising". So they want sites to remove advertising. That itself is an antitrust problem - because less advertising on sites means more demand for Google advertising.
Google also penalizes websites that run affiliate programs that Google doesn't find "add much value". Let's say that you have a site that reviews books, and in your review you provide an Amazon link so that if someone buys the book, you get a commission. Google doesn't like that. They want to send the user to Amazon instead. They want to cut out the middleman.
Google may also be (or may soon be) penalizing or rewarding sites that don't mark up their data in a way that Google can interpret with an algorithm. But since Google has expressed an interest in cutting out the middleman - websites - when it comes to returning information, this could be an attempt to force sites to train their own replacement. They're already doing this - they pull data from Wikipedia (which Wikipedia editors have manually scraped from other websites) and display it right on Google's page. No need to leave Google for your information.
By applying penalties, Google has become like a credit bureau. Last I checked, credit bureaus were regulated in the USA because they have the power to do significant damage to people via things like errors and omissions. Credit bureaus have to give you a chance to correct your credit rating, to fix errors, and they have to give you a general idea as to what