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FTC's Internal Memo On Google Teaches Companies a Terrible Lesson
schwit1 writes FTC staffers spent enormous time pouring through Google's business practices and documents as well as interviewing executives and rivals. They came to the conclusion that Google was acting in anti-competitive ways, such as restricting advertisers from working with rival search engines. But commissioners balked at the prospect of a lengthy and protracted legal fight. For a big company, that process may have been enlightening. Agency staffers might find evidence of anti-competitive behavior. But that doesn't mean the firm will face the music in the end. Previous attempts to go after big companies — such as the Justice Department's long-running antitrust case against Microsoft in the 1990s — loomed large in regulators' minds at the time of the Google probe, according to a former official who worked at the agency then. "Even if we were in the right and could win," said the former official, "it could take a lot of resources away from other enforcement."
You mean all those corporate tax cuts which were handed to them which was supposed to trickle down to the rest of us?
Sorry, but bitching about the tax increases on corporations which would be required to enforce the law against those same damned corporations is absurd.
It's the years of giving corporations tax breaks and loop holes which is why there isn't sufficient tax base for this stuff.
How much money does Google and other large corporations effectively launder through international loopholes?
And how much money are the wealthy politicians hiding, and how much tax breaks have been given to the wealthy -- again, under the lie that it would trickle down to the rest of us.
Thirty years of tax policy has only served to make the corporations and the wealthy have even more money, while the rest of us starve ... and now we bitch that those tax cuts have made it impossible to apply the fucking law.
Just bloody awesome.
Welcome to the fucking oligarchy, kiddies. It's all downhill from here.
Eat the damned rich, and stop pretending that lining their pockets helps the rest of society.
Unfortunately it's greedy rich assholes, under the payroll of greedy rich corporations, who pass the laws -- laws designed to line the pockets of greedy rich assholes.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
That's not a "market assumption", it's plain old reality: resources are finite, so you need priorities. If a cop pulls someone over for speeding, then sees an armed robbery in progress, or a paramedic is treating someone's sprained ankle then a bystander has a heart attack, do you want them to stick to what they were doing and reject the notion of priorities as being a "market assumption"? I'd rather they focus their efforts on the higher priority, because that gives the best outcomes.
In this case, the FTC had more pressing enforcement jobs, like telemarketing scams, the fight with cellphone companies over ripoff premium services ... they felt putting their resources there made more sense than fighting Google over the order of search results, and I'm not at all sure they were wrong about that.
By coincidence, I was discussing law enforcement priorities at work on Friday (we teach computer forensics for law enforcement, among other things); unlike the world of CSI, real law enforcement doesn't go spending days testing out an obscure theory, or digging into every possible detail of each case: they do enough work on a case to pass it to the next stage, then get on with the next case. No "market" - there just aren't an unlimited number of hours in each forensic caseworker's day.