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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.
It's called politicizing law and order, not much different than the president demanding Justice to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Clinton to act as a distraction about Russia and little Trump Jr. being brain dead stupid. This is the kind of shit that happens in banana republics and places like Russia and China.
No have no doubt the whole investigation is politically based as I doubt the state of Missouri has any serious privacy protections and this whole thing is to distract from Trumps own problems and to try to punish Google for their political activism. Only problem is that when you politicize law enforcement it ends up going the other way too and law and order goes out the windows and police start being used for political retaliation. For example the NY attorney general then launches a massive investigation of Trump Corp and when Trump loses in 2020 a special prosecutor gets appointed to investigate everything he's ever done (him and his kids would probably end up in jail for life with all the shady bullshit they've done) and the big blue state AG's (NY and Cali) open investigations of all the major GOP doners. Is that where we want to go, every politician gets a special prosecutor after leaving office and any company that advocates for anything gets law enforcement thrown against them?
It's not right to politicize law enforcement, it's a dangerous and IMO illegal use of law enforcement assets and ANYONE that does it should be arrested and charged with abuse of authority. Trump and this Missouri AG are on a very dangerous path here and there should be severe repercussions for doing what they are doing. The fact that they are both so fucking short-sided to see where this slope leads once they aren't in power should stop them but if it doesn't the rest of us should. No one on either side of the aisle should be defending this perversion of the justice system. The president should not have the authority to order an investigation of anything/anyone by the justice department.
Child molesting is a left-wing thing. Joe Biden, Harvey Weinstein, George Takei, and Kevin Spacey are all on the same side. Not to mention John Podesta and all the others we haven't even caught yet.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I didn't look closely, but my understanding was that Damore was quite liberal, just apparently not the kosher type liberal.
Actually he wasn't. You can see that from the interviews he did afterwards. He was just a conservative / sexist pretending to be reasonable for the particular debate. The argument was that his document included an ostensible aim of improving diversity and a number of caveat's which made it a reasonable contribution to the debate. If you read between the lines when he withdrew his employment case against Google without any apparent compensation he had likely been behaving badly in other ways at work and they had plenty of other evidence of sexism against him.
This was the biggest problem. He had a number of reasonable points, but the people who just read the emotional level of his document rather than the science picked up that he was a sexist so thought he should be fired. Then they turn out to be right. People who read the same document on a scientific level without actually checking for things that were missing thought that it was reasonable and maybe he was just making a point in a bad way. They turn out to be wrong. The reasonable arguments, for example that diversity training doesn't work (research has been shown it to have a negative effect) and that restructuring work might make more sense (if you need emotional intelligence to be a programming manager maybe it's good to design the entry work to fit that more) got lost in the whole mess and may even have been discredited.