> One of the facts established in the verdict was that Google had been slipping Apple more than $20b/year in exchange for which, Apple forbore from making a competing search engine.
Didn't Apple say that 1) they weren't interested in being in the Search Engine business 2) (in testimony) Google was by far the best search engine that they were going to use anyway ?
Certainly, $20B/Y weighs on the scale, but knowing Apple's negotiation tactics they could also have used their weight to do what they wanted anyhow and get paid handsomely for it (<waggle waggle> "if you don't pay us we might start using other defaults and you'll lose that lucrative iOS market")
My point is, while Google is clearly at fault in this whole situation, it's not quite as moustache-twirling evil as Doctorow paints it.
graeme · 28m ago
The idea is that without $20 billion or an incentive to send people to google Apple might have become interested in chipping away at the search business. Sori already handles a lot of search.
Google didn't want Apple thinking about that. They wanted Apple to have an incentive to send traffic to google.
isleyaardvark · 30m ago
His quote is stunningly disingenuous, I'm surprised to hear that coming from Doctorow.
That Google has paid Apple to be the default search engine was a business deal that has been open knowledge for a decade or more. Other search engines could've paid to be the default. Apple didn't have a search engine when they created the iPhone, and why would they start? Ever? MS didn't do so well. And why would Apple want to make their own search engine? Even if Apple did, the reaction would certainly be that Apple was abusing their position to promote their own search engine and would be committing an anti-trust violation then.
Also I think it's safe to say there is no actual testimony about a quid pro quo arrangement to get Apple to agree to not make a search engine.
frogperson · 3h ago
Americans have allowed the rich to become too wealthy. The kind of power that comes with billions of dollars just doesnt work with justice or democracy.
jmward01 · 3h ago
I have nothing against rich. I have everything against a single person having a megaphone for themselves and a gag for everyone else and still calling it a democracy. We need strong laws that reduce the voice of money and increase the voice of individuals. Having said that, the practical implication is that money needs to loose power and there are very few ways to truly do that other than just take it away. So, I agree that our only known practical path to a healthier democracy is to make it harder to be pathologically rich.
idle_zealot · 2h ago
I'm not sure I understand what distinction you're drawing between ideological opposition to rich people existing and opposition to disproportionately powerful people existing.
In what hypothetical world are these not the exact same thing? Money is a unit of exchange that exists to compel action. That's the point of it, and is just another way of saying "power over others". A world where being rich doesn't grant power over others is one where money isn't money.
zdragnar · 2h ago
Being rich is a measure of wealth. In a world in which there is no resource scarcity and everyone has access to lots of resources, everyone is rich but not necessarily more rich or powerful than anyone else.
The average person today is much wealthier than many rich people from generations ago, even if they have less social power.
Being disproportionately powerful is tautologically a direct measure of disproportionate influence.
Tin pot dictators of resource-poor nations may not be especially wealthy compared to the very wealthy in the US, but typically have more disproportionate power (within their own country at least).
tripletpeaks · 32m ago
If I read their post correctly, they’re saying they wouldn’t mind rich people if money didn’t… do the stuff that money does. But it does, so they do.
Like yes I think if money didn’t confer incredible power over others and distortionary effects over the shared environment, and allow crazy-wide reach for one’s possibly-nutty beliefs, lots of people wouldn’t have so big a problem with the ultra-rich. Like if the money were just a score on a pinball machine high score table. Cool, you hit a billion, good for you, glad you’re so good at the game, that’s nice. Not a lot of people would mind that so much. But that’s not how money works.
pdonis · 1h ago
> Money is a unit of exchange that exists to compel action
Not in a free market. In a free market, people have the option to refuse to accept your money if they don't want to give you what you want to buy from them with it.
Yizahi · 1h ago
It is theoretically and practically impossible that free market could exist. Every unregulated market will be quickly monopolized by a biggest player and it will stop being free by definition.
It's like saying that humans can fly unassisted. Sure, we can jump in the air and for a few milliseconds remain completely in the air. But we can hardly call that process a flight, if it can last for extremely short period of time. Same with free market.
teachrdan · 1h ago
> people have the option to refuse to accept your money...
This is the contradiction, isn't it? A free market that you or I might define requires safeguards like a social welfare net to make sure individuals are truly free to decline an offer that is harmful to them. Without such a welfare net one is compelled to accept an offer that is harmful (to one's health, morality, etc.) because the alternative is to lose your dignity and all of your belongings, or worse.
But then the owning class has every incentive to reduce or remove the safety net. Not least because they will be paying a lot for it! But even more so because that safety net is what gives people some small amount of power to say no to them.
nielsbot · 1h ago
People like to talk about politically tyranny, but forgot about the tyranny of capitalism.
We've financialized servitude is all.
bigbadfeline · 1h ago
> A world where being rich doesn't grant power over others is one where money isn't money.
First off, my money doesn't grant me power over anybody and it's still money. That leaves only one logically possible version of your statement and the correction looks like this: "A world where being rich doesn't grant power over others is one where big money isn't big money"
In that form, your statement is perfectly logical, if somewhat tautological, but there is another problem with it and it's a real huge one: No textbook has anything like that and no school teaches it either, even the media is vary shy of talking about it.
At a first glance, that's not your problem but it definitely has to be, meaning, you and the people who gold similar views, should become loud public proponents of Speaking Truth to the Powerless (tm).
We can no longer have this cognitive dissonance economics that teaches that money is means of exchange, unit of account, etc, but skips the most important truth: that big money is, first and foremost, a tool of power over small money.
Only after this educational task is complete, your explanation will have the right to exist and be heard.
nielsbot · 1h ago
> First off, my money doesn't grant me power over anybody and it's still money
That's not true. Depends on your wealth bracket of course, but money certainly is the power to compel.
Let's say you have a neighbor whose dog is a nuisance barker. With money you can hire an attorney to go after them. If you don't have money, you have to suffer. There are millions of examples... this is just one not-particularly-good one.
idopmstuff · 1h ago
I don't think you even have to go to the extreme of compelling someone to do something through the legal system. I can use money to get someone to clean my house or walk my dog - they don't have to do it, but the fact that I have money does give me the power to get them to do what I want.
palata · 1h ago
What the hell are you talking about?
> First off, my money doesn't grant me power over anybody and it's still money.
Sure, but it doesn't invalidate the sentence you quoted. At all. You can't "educate" people if you don't understand basic sentences. Let me quote it again, so that maybe you can try to understand it properly:
> A world where being rich doesn't grant power over others is one where money isn't money.
bigbadfeline · 57m ago
> What the hell are you talking about?
I wasn't talking about hell but about logic, apparently our areas of expertise aren't the same.
> A world where being rich doesn't grant power over others is one where money isn't money.
You cannot claim money in general not to be money if the money for the not-rich still function as money without the rich, in other words, you falsely claim that in order for money to work as a means of exchange, it has to grant the rich power over the not-rich.
Your claim is obviously false, plus there have been closed and open societies, since antiquity to this day, which used money giving no additional powers to the rich - the simplest case - when all the power was concentrated elsewhere.
I didn't invalidate your claim, I demonstrated that it's invalid on its own.
palata · 52m ago
> A world where being rich doesn't grant power over others is one where money isn't money.
What this means is that they can't imagine a world where having an extreme amount of money does not grant you power over others. As in, if you build a world that has something called "money", but where having more money than a whole country does not give you power over others, then that thing you call "money" is so different from the one we have in our world that it would not count as money in our world at all.
> You cannot claim money in general not to be money if the money for the not-rich still function as money
That is not what they claim, you misunderstand the sentence. It's like if someone said "A implies B" and you answered with "no, because B does not imply A". You would be lacking basic logic skills there.
> you claim that in order for money to work as a means of exchange, it has to grant the rich power over the not-rich.
Nope, not at all. You misunderstand the sentence.
> I didn't invalidate your claim, I demonstrated that it's invalid on its own.
You did nothing of the sort: you just seem to genuinely not understand the sentence you quoted.
And don't get me wrong: it's fine to misunderstand a sentence. What I reacted about was your tone. If you want to talk like this and "educate" people, you better be goddamn right.
like_any_other · 1h ago
> In what hypothetical world are these not the exact same thing?
A world with laws against monopolies, anti-competitive practices, and media ownership concentration. Not all uses of power are equivalent.
Standard Oil wasn't tamed by taking money from its owner. In fact, even if ownership over the company was dispersed among 10x as many shareholders as before, so long as the company can continue to act as a single entity, the abuse of its monopoly would continue.
JKCalhoun · 1h ago
> We need strong laws that reduce the voice of money and increase the voice of individuals.
Seeing the how flaccid "strong" laws have become, I prefer we go back to reducing the voice of money by taxing it away. Maybe our country could then finally have nice things.
nielsbot · 1h ago
Agreed. (I'm all in on confiscatory taxation.) No one person should be allowed to accumulate so much power and wealth.
culopatin · 1h ago
What do you do when all the money goes away to countries that don’t tax them that hard?
spongebobstoes · 1h ago
why do you think that will happen? how could that scenario be prevented, while still taxing money?
if you put more effort into making your point, I'm sure you could get better engagement
Workaccount2 · 49m ago
Look at what Texas has been doing to California.
People who assign billionaires as being the living manifestation of greed are somehow quick to hand wave away "billionaires will move to protect their wealth".
p_j_w · 3m ago
> Look at what Texas has been doing to California.
What might that be? California is still at the forefront of every technological innovation this country is seeing while Texas is at the forefront of theocracy.
California may be seeing a smaller share of the world’s innovation in the past, but that hasn’t moved to Texas, it’s moved to China.
thoroughburro · 23m ago
We should be so lucky. They are leeches.
alexashka · 31m ago
Anyone that wants to take their money and leave and never come back ought to be encouraged to do so as soon as possible.
The never come back bit solves the imaginary problem you mention.
nielsbot · 1h ago
I say "see ya!" and wave goodbye.
You think people living in NYC, for example, the financial (and one of the major cultural capitals) of the entire world (not to mention all the other benefits of US residency) are going to bother with packing up their lives and moving overseas because the taxes are too high? Not to mention these people will still have obscene wealth in all likelihood.
Some might, but I don't think we should wring our hands over it.
Rather than worrying about "capital flight" let's instead imaging all the good that could come of us having a more more equal wealth and income distribution.
hollerith · 1h ago
Maybe the reason it is the financial capital of the entire world is that historically the tax regime let people keep most of the money they earned.
p_j_w · 2m ago
Have you any evidence for this proposition?
TimorousBestie · 54m ago
Income tax rates and corporate tax rates were higher during the post-war era than they are now.
actionfromafar · 58m ago
It used to be that the US had unique ways of dealing with that, by virtue of its sheer size and dominance. But nowadays the ballon is leaking power from both ends, soft and hard.
orwin · 3h ago
Yes, ideologically, i had no issue with people being rich, it's people having undue power over other people that i found morally wrong. I was a libertatian almost in the american meaning of the word, a liberal libertarian. Then, i tried to put my ideas real conditions, and came to the realisation that as long as money could buy you power, you can never be free. I don't realistically see how we can limit money influence on power, when you can offshore your company in two days, so in a practical manner, the only way to limit how rich one can get, until we figure out the rest.
saulpw · 2h ago
There's rich, and then there's 10x rich, and 100x rich, and 1000x rich, and 10000x rich, and now even 100000x rich. Millionaires are fine, billionaires are bad, and hectobillionaires are supremely terrible.
I think once someone gets to a billion dollars net worth, they should get an AmEx black card, and 99% of their assets moved into a sovereign public wealth fund. They can have anything they want, they lose the power of extreme asset allocation, and if they just like competing, they can start over and try to ring the bell again (and can give the second AmEx black card to a person of their choosing).
lotsofpulp · 1h ago
So if your business is extremely successful, your reward is losing control if it?
To who, politicians?
Leaving the large business intact and just changing the leader doesn’t seem like it changes anything.
palata · 1h ago
> your reward is losing control if it?
That's not what I understand from the GP. What they say is taht if your business is extremely successful, it can keep being extremely successful and you can keep control over it.
You just cannot accumulate more money for yourself. Like if the highest amount of money in a video game was 1 billion. Once you reach it, you don't go back to 0, you just can't go higher.
Makes sense to me.
philsnow · 49m ago
I'm reminded of Nethack, which keeps track of your score as a 32-bit* signed int, and so some people have perfected making sure that they have MAX_INT when they win.. and then it becomes a game of trying to do as much as you can in the game without going over MAX_INT.
* though I guess newer builds are defaulting to 64-bit signed ints?
Workaccount2 · 47m ago
I face palm through the back of my skull when people think billionaires have billions of dollars. Virtually none of them do.
nielsbot · 1h ago
Taxation = losing control of your business? Sounds a little hyperbolic. But explain more what you mean?
blargey · 35m ago
They're pointing to the fact that most of a given billion+aire's net worth is ownership of a highly valued company (stock). Their billions are literally just the market-assigned value of the control itself, so it falls upon people suggesting a wealth cap to come up with an arrangement that can divest them of that value without divesting them of the ownership/control rights that said value is being derived from.
Of course, control of a very large company is itself the sort of power that wealth caps are supposed to curb, like when people buy newspapers / social media platforms / etc - so you could also just proclaim it a feature instead of a bug, but it still warrants a defense.
mxkopy · 1h ago
You should be forced to invest into all aspects of the social fabric that makes your success possible. Your reward is being able to be a successful philanthropist
Workaccount2 · 46m ago
Your 401k is their social fabric contribution.
JKCalhoun · 1h ago
Society?
tart-lemonade · 2h ago
It also doesn't work when the media is either striving to uphold the status quo that got us here or actively going out of its way to try and make things worse.
cut3 · 2h ago
you mean the megaphones owned by the rich?
bilbo0s · 1h ago
Isn't "the media" really just, the rich?
From WSJ and The Economist, to CNN, BBC and FOX, right on through to Youtube podcasts.
AnthonyMouse · 2h ago
> Americans have allowed the rich to become too wealthy.
This consistently happens in a very specific way. A corporation that dominates a concentrated market becomes excessively large, which makes its early shareholders billionaires.
In other words, if you want to change this, you need to enforce antitrust laws and break up large corporations.
nielsbot · 1h ago
As well as tax like we used to in the 50s. (Ok, we can argue about the specifics, but you get the idea)
actionfromafar · 56m ago
Yeah, the regressives (can't call them conservatives anymore with a straight face) never want to go back to that part of the 50s, for some odd reason.
thegreatpeter · 3h ago
Plenty of billionaires all over Europe. Relative to salaries the spread is quite worse. Democracy there is perfect
bbreier · 2h ago
As far as I am aware, wealth inequality is significantly better in Europe than it is in the United States (https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/wealth-in... as an example) and I still wouldn't characterize democracy in Europe as "perfect" even if we narrowly define the rubrick to be only concerned with money tipping the scales of power
aetherson · 1h ago
That site is weird. As far as I can tell, it's measuring income inequality, not wealth inequality, and it doesn't... appear to know the difference? Quoting it:
> The Gini index, or Gini coefficient, is a statistical measure of wealth distribution developed by the Italian statistician Corrado Gini. The Gini index is used to gauge economic inequality by measuring income distribution, also called wealth distribution.
It's a kinda big red flag if they say that income and wealth are the same thing!
There are a few notable cases of European countries having very high wealth inequality despite lower income inequality (my take which may not be shared by many: having low income inequality makes it hard for people who aren't generationally wealthy to overcome old money). Notably, Sweden has a higher wealth inequality than the United States.
> It's a kinda big red flag if they say that income and wealth are the same thing!
Wealthy and old people love when income is used as a stand in for wealth. It deflects political action onto the young and hard/smart working, and helps keep their dynasties and rent seeking assets intact.
NoMoreNicksLeft · 3h ago
> The kind of power that comes with billions of dollars just doesnt work with justice or democracy.
The government has billions of dollars. Thankfully government officials are immune to the corrupting influence of billions of dollars.
nielsbot · 1h ago
The bad part is that congress is bought so cheaply. Not with billions.
Under our current system you have to be daft to not invest in buying the government--it's a great return on your investment!
johannes1234321 · 2h ago
Budget (in theory) is controlled by Congress, this is a bunch of people with their agendas who aim for being reelected.
The true billionaire doesn't have anybody else to ask and can finance the campaign to get somebody (not) elected.
BizarroLand · 1h ago
If you ever need to see what a false equivalence is, look at this comment
Workaccount2 · 40m ago
The worst thing about Google is that they discovered the ad-model and created an entire generation that is entitled to free tools and services on the internet. People who think Gmail, drive, sheets, translate, Gemini, YouTube, search, android, etc., etc. are all inherently free services that Google is greedily slapping ads on.
Google is a monster because people so heavily favor the ad-model over paying for things.
Kagi wonderful, but paying for search? Lol that shit is free!
tomComb · 17m ago
I think the ad model as the document model of the internet consumer was discovered long before Google, but otherwise agree with you.
guyzero · 1h ago
I generally like Doctorow's writing and agree with a lot of what he says here, but:
"Google has stolen every fact about our lives, in service to propping up a monopoly that lets it steal our money, too."
I still have all the facts about my life and I don't think any money has been stolen. I get that this is rhetorical, but he's gone over the edge here.
gleenn · 1h ago
I think your phrase choice is also quite funny. Obviously a fact isn't physically stolen, it has been surveilled and sold to the highest bidder. Every fair chance a competitor had to offer you something better was taken from you, it just wasn't done in front of your face. And that data is becoming more and more valuable as we speak as all this AI data race heats up.
tomComb · 14m ago
> and sold to the highest bidder.
Yikes, you are doing it too. Does accuracy in prose not count anymore?
When you have a strong case you shouldn’t have to bend the facts.
dumbledoren · 1h ago
Google became a monopoly in search, advertising and various other things. It uses all of those to extract money from everyone, especially the advertisers with absolutely no accountability. All the large and small businesses have to jack up prices to make up for the money that Google extracts from them through those monopolies, and then reflect that expense on the consumer. Just go to reddits like r/ppc or r/googleads. Google became a company that single handedly amplifies inflation during its endless extraction of profit.
BizarroLand · 1h ago
That's among the worst takes I've ever seen.
"Oh, a company knows literally everything about me and clandestinely sells that information to the highest bidder in order to target every facet of my existence so that multinational conglomerations can extract every erg of value from every heartbeat of my existence, but that's cool because I also know that information"
Geez.
incompatible · 42m ago
It's basically a language quibble, that copying data is never "stealing", also in the copyright-violation context. I suppose they'd be happy with a rewording.
conartist6 · 13m ago
I read the decision and I thought it did require a choice screen. He says it doesn't. Did I miss something here or did Doctorow?
drivebyhooting · 3h ago
Can I opt out from having my data shared with other companies? Or will some kind of privacy framework like ATT be applied to it?
inetknght · 3h ago
Would you be shocked to learn that neither will happen?
wmf · 3h ago
I think it's aggregate data so it's not really yours.
socalgal2 · 51m ago
Google doesn't share your data with other companies.
vkou · 1h ago
> Can I opt out from having my data shared with other companies?
Sure, the easiest way you can do that is to move to Europe and petition its regulators to further tighten the screws. They might actually listen.
drivebyhooting · 1h ago
How is moving to Europe the easiest solution? What about my family and life?
vkou · 13m ago
> How is moving to Europe the easiest solution?
Because this can only be solved through legislature, and no matter what black swan event happens, there is no future in which the US legislature will take this problem seriously.
davmre · 2h ago
> The government doesn't have to win an antitrust trial in order to create competition. As the saying goes, "the process is the punishment."
Regardless of what you think of Google or this case specifically, this is an argument for authoritarianism: that it is legitimate for the government to "punish" any company at will, based only on them falling into political disfavor.
> ... the only punishment Google would have to bear from this trial would come after the government won its case, when the judge decided on a punishment (the term of art is "remedy") for Google.
Yes, this is called the rule of law. Punishment comes through the courts, after a guilty verdict. The government has to actually win the argument as to what remedies would be proportionate under the law. In this case the judge didn't buy it. It's fine to disagree with his reasoning (or with the law), but the fantasizing about extrajudicial punishment here is frankly un-American.
ratherbefuddled · 1h ago
There's very little reason that Google should have been protected from the evidence of its wrongdoing being made public. That's not extrajudicial punishment, that is public record. Justice should be seen to be done as well as done.
Who can know how appropriate or not the remedy was when the evidence is hidden?
For full disclosure: I'm neither a google employee nor a US citizen.
davmre · 1h ago
Sure, there's a strong public interest in having proceedings on record. US civil cases are supposed to have a presumption of openness, which the judge weighs against other interests, like protecting trade secrets, confidential business information, privacy of third parties, etc.
The public record argument is fine; it's just a different argument than the extrajudicial punishment advocated by the original post.
NotPractical · 48m ago
I think the extrajudicial punishment he's advocating for is the wrath of the court of public opinion though? Unless I'm misreading.
davmre · 19m ago
The public interest is in judging the trial process, not in judging the defendant.
Suppose the government charges you with murder, searches your house, and finds your sex toy collection. At trial they present some elaborate thesis about how you used a sex toy to kill someone, but do not convince the jury, so you're found not guilty. The public has a legitimate interest in judging that the trial was handled with integrity and that the correct verdict was reached. They do not have a legitimate interest in judging you based on whatever private information presented at trial might in some way embarrass you (eg, photos of your sex toy collection). On balance, it could be that the public-record interest does in fact justify making public the evidence of the sex toys, but you have to justify it on those terms. The transparency is not itself intended to be punitive.
protocolture · 1h ago
>This is an argument for authoritarianism, that the government should be able to "punish" any company at will based only on them falling into political disfavor.
No its more like, the process of transparency harms the company enough that they will shift their own mentality to ensure they never have to participate in a transparent process.
davmre · 1h ago
If there's a general standard of transparency applied to all companies, fine. There are costs to increasing transparency, but certainly you could argue for that policy.
The argument that we should cheer on the use of government power to target a specific company, to selectively expose their dirty laundry as punishment for a crime they have not been convicted of, is what I found noxious in the original post.
protocolture · 1h ago
The direct reference was Bill Gates being forced to testify about internet explorer. Its hard to argue with that particular case. There are very few people who argue that the results of that intervention were unwarranted.
I do find it a bit curious however, where later in the article theres a discussion about explicit collusion between corporates and the government. I vastly prefer the state and corps to be at odds with each other, than in bed with each other. Do any of the allegations towards the end register on your authoritarianismometer?
davmre · 47m ago
Regardless of the effects, I don't think the case against MS was brought with the intent to "punish" MS through the trial process. The government brought the case because it thought it could win, it did win, and a judicial remedy was imposed. Trials are inherently unpleasant, but a just system tries to minimize this, not exploit it.
Any unjust policy (including just dispensing with trials altogether and allowing the executive to arbitrarily break up companies) will get to the 'desirable' outcome in some cases. That doesn't make it a just policy.
The specific allegation in the post is that the Trump administration will not appeal the verdict because Sundar gave $1M to Trump's inauguration. As far as I know, the government has not yet indicated whether it will appeal, so the claim that "Trump just paid him back, 40,000 times over" is in fact not true. (whether it becomes true at some point in the future, it was a falsehood at the time the author wrote it). It's also quite plausible that a Republican administration wouldn't appeal the verdict just due to being more pro-business in general, even without explicit corruption. But it's precisely because we have such a corrupt executive that it becomes all the more important to stick up for the rule of law. The correct response to authoritarianism is not to advocate for more authoritarianism!
protocolture · 12m ago
>Regardless of the effects, I don't think the case against MS was brought with the intent to "punish" MS through the trial process. The government brought the case because it thought it could win, it did win, and a judicial remedy was imposed. Trials are inherently unpleasant, but a just system tries to minimize this, not exploit it.
Maybe. But then why was the google case actively sheltered and hidden from the public. The optics were considered in at least one of these cases.
saurik · 58m ago
I agree that the remedy sucks, but I am just not following the logic about private data? I'm totally willing to believe Cory is correct here, but I just need some more do the dots connected :/. I think the premise is that, if we want to have a competitor to Google Search--which I do not think was even the correct goal here, but seems to be what people were trying to optimize for :/--you would need to do something effectively impossible: you need to catch up to Google's search index operation, as, as a user, if I'm going to use a search engine, I'm going to use the one with the most data in it, lest I am just wasting my time. (I appreciate that for a minority of users they might have other things they are optimizing for, but that's always going to be a minority of users, and isn't going to really change Google's ridiculous market power.)
And so, if you have that goal--and I will again stress that I don't even think that is the correct primary goal to have at this point, due to Google having effectively taken control of the only browser that matters and being in control of the only video site that matters--breaking apart Google into a bunch of tiny companies along the obvious lines (Android, YouTube, Maps, Gmail, or even Chrome) wouldn't fix the situation, as that isn't going to suddenly allow anyone to create a viable competitor to Google search, as Google Search would still exist, it would still always continue to have more data indexed off the web than anyone else... forever.
You thereby have two options: you can try to destroy Google Search and make it so that no one has a search engine as good as Google--at least for a while--or you can figure out how to break up Google Search itself. The former is maybe a good outcome, but it is not only unrealistic, it isn't necessarily helpful in any external sense, which is where I get really confused about Cory's point here: the thing Google is searching over isn't my private data... it's my public data. Yes: they know a lot about my private data, and it could be cool to have that deleted, but that's kind of besides the point, as it has very little to do with Google Search; people aren't searching for my private data, and Google Search is going to find losing all of my private data as, at best, a minor inconvenience.
What you need to do, thereby, is figure out how to break up the Google Search product into parts, to separate the wholesale part of the business from the retail part of the business, whether by making it into two separate companies or putting restrictions on the combined whole to offer both services separately... and, it sounds like that is what they are going to try? Now, I don't know if this is going to work--as it might be extremely painful or confusing to actually build a useful search engine accessing Google's catalog--but it certainly isn't as if I have a better idea for how to create a competitor to Google Search.
(Again, though: I'm not sold on the idea that the actual problem with Google is that we don't have a competitor to Google Search. Hell: as of recently, my usage of Google Search has plummeted, as I've replaced most of the things I used to use Google for with various uses of large language models... and, yet, I still find Google to be too powerful in a way that distorts markets and should require some kind of antitrust intervention. :/ Maybe, then, the premise is that Cory feels that we should have tried to fix some other problem? But, he's saying that this result is itself a privacy breach... while simultaneously saying Google is going to skirt the benefit by redacting data so hard that they end up in court? I don't get it.)
> Judge Mehta was similarly cautious when forcing the company to share data. The company will need to share parts of its search index, the corpus of web pages and information that feeds its results page. But Google does not need to share other data associated with those results, including information about the quality of web pages, he added.
> Google must syndicate its search results to its competitors, Judge Mehta said, adding that the company could do so using the terms it already provides to commercial partners using the company’s results.
Didn't Apple say that 1) they weren't interested in being in the Search Engine business 2) (in testimony) Google was by far the best search engine that they were going to use anyway ?
Certainly, $20B/Y weighs on the scale, but knowing Apple's negotiation tactics they could also have used their weight to do what they wanted anyhow and get paid handsomely for it (<waggle waggle> "if you don't pay us we might start using other defaults and you'll lose that lucrative iOS market")
My point is, while Google is clearly at fault in this whole situation, it's not quite as moustache-twirling evil as Doctorow paints it.
Google didn't want Apple thinking about that. They wanted Apple to have an incentive to send traffic to google.
That Google has paid Apple to be the default search engine was a business deal that has been open knowledge for a decade or more. Other search engines could've paid to be the default. Apple didn't have a search engine when they created the iPhone, and why would they start? Ever? MS didn't do so well. And why would Apple want to make their own search engine? Even if Apple did, the reaction would certainly be that Apple was abusing their position to promote their own search engine and would be committing an anti-trust violation then.
Also I think it's safe to say there is no actual testimony about a quid pro quo arrangement to get Apple to agree to not make a search engine.
In what hypothetical world are these not the exact same thing? Money is a unit of exchange that exists to compel action. That's the point of it, and is just another way of saying "power over others". A world where being rich doesn't grant power over others is one where money isn't money.
The average person today is much wealthier than many rich people from generations ago, even if they have less social power.
Being disproportionately powerful is tautologically a direct measure of disproportionate influence.
Tin pot dictators of resource-poor nations may not be especially wealthy compared to the very wealthy in the US, but typically have more disproportionate power (within their own country at least).
Like yes I think if money didn’t confer incredible power over others and distortionary effects over the shared environment, and allow crazy-wide reach for one’s possibly-nutty beliefs, lots of people wouldn’t have so big a problem with the ultra-rich. Like if the money were just a score on a pinball machine high score table. Cool, you hit a billion, good for you, glad you’re so good at the game, that’s nice. Not a lot of people would mind that so much. But that’s not how money works.
Not in a free market. In a free market, people have the option to refuse to accept your money if they don't want to give you what you want to buy from them with it.
It's like saying that humans can fly unassisted. Sure, we can jump in the air and for a few milliseconds remain completely in the air. But we can hardly call that process a flight, if it can last for extremely short period of time. Same with free market.
This is the contradiction, isn't it? A free market that you or I might define requires safeguards like a social welfare net to make sure individuals are truly free to decline an offer that is harmful to them. Without such a welfare net one is compelled to accept an offer that is harmful (to one's health, morality, etc.) because the alternative is to lose your dignity and all of your belongings, or worse.
But then the owning class has every incentive to reduce or remove the safety net. Not least because they will be paying a lot for it! But even more so because that safety net is what gives people some small amount of power to say no to them.
We've financialized servitude is all.
First off, my money doesn't grant me power over anybody and it's still money. That leaves only one logically possible version of your statement and the correction looks like this: "A world where being rich doesn't grant power over others is one where big money isn't big money"
In that form, your statement is perfectly logical, if somewhat tautological, but there is another problem with it and it's a real huge one: No textbook has anything like that and no school teaches it either, even the media is vary shy of talking about it.
At a first glance, that's not your problem but it definitely has to be, meaning, you and the people who gold similar views, should become loud public proponents of Speaking Truth to the Powerless (tm).
We can no longer have this cognitive dissonance economics that teaches that money is means of exchange, unit of account, etc, but skips the most important truth: that big money is, first and foremost, a tool of power over small money.
Only after this educational task is complete, your explanation will have the right to exist and be heard.
That's not true. Depends on your wealth bracket of course, but money certainly is the power to compel.
Let's say you have a neighbor whose dog is a nuisance barker. With money you can hire an attorney to go after them. If you don't have money, you have to suffer. There are millions of examples... this is just one not-particularly-good one.
> First off, my money doesn't grant me power over anybody and it's still money.
Sure, but it doesn't invalidate the sentence you quoted. At all. You can't "educate" people if you don't understand basic sentences. Let me quote it again, so that maybe you can try to understand it properly:
> A world where being rich doesn't grant power over others is one where money isn't money.
I wasn't talking about hell but about logic, apparently our areas of expertise aren't the same.
> A world where being rich doesn't grant power over others is one where money isn't money.
You cannot claim money in general not to be money if the money for the not-rich still function as money without the rich, in other words, you falsely claim that in order for money to work as a means of exchange, it has to grant the rich power over the not-rich.
Your claim is obviously false, plus there have been closed and open societies, since antiquity to this day, which used money giving no additional powers to the rich - the simplest case - when all the power was concentrated elsewhere.
I didn't invalidate your claim, I demonstrated that it's invalid on its own.
What this means is that they can't imagine a world where having an extreme amount of money does not grant you power over others. As in, if you build a world that has something called "money", but where having more money than a whole country does not give you power over others, then that thing you call "money" is so different from the one we have in our world that it would not count as money in our world at all.
> You cannot claim money in general not to be money if the money for the not-rich still function as money
That is not what they claim, you misunderstand the sentence. It's like if someone said "A implies B" and you answered with "no, because B does not imply A". You would be lacking basic logic skills there.
> you claim that in order for money to work as a means of exchange, it has to grant the rich power over the not-rich.
Nope, not at all. You misunderstand the sentence.
> I didn't invalidate your claim, I demonstrated that it's invalid on its own.
You did nothing of the sort: you just seem to genuinely not understand the sentence you quoted.
And don't get me wrong: it's fine to misunderstand a sentence. What I reacted about was your tone. If you want to talk like this and "educate" people, you better be goddamn right.
A world with laws against monopolies, anti-competitive practices, and media ownership concentration. Not all uses of power are equivalent.
Standard Oil wasn't tamed by taking money from its owner. In fact, even if ownership over the company was dispersed among 10x as many shareholders as before, so long as the company can continue to act as a single entity, the abuse of its monopoly would continue.
Seeing the how flaccid "strong" laws have become, I prefer we go back to reducing the voice of money by taxing it away. Maybe our country could then finally have nice things.
if you put more effort into making your point, I'm sure you could get better engagement
People who assign billionaires as being the living manifestation of greed are somehow quick to hand wave away "billionaires will move to protect their wealth".
What might that be? California is still at the forefront of every technological innovation this country is seeing while Texas is at the forefront of theocracy.
California may be seeing a smaller share of the world’s innovation in the past, but that hasn’t moved to Texas, it’s moved to China.
The never come back bit solves the imaginary problem you mention.
You think people living in NYC, for example, the financial (and one of the major cultural capitals) of the entire world (not to mention all the other benefits of US residency) are going to bother with packing up their lives and moving overseas because the taxes are too high? Not to mention these people will still have obscene wealth in all likelihood.
Some might, but I don't think we should wring our hands over it.
Rather than worrying about "capital flight" let's instead imaging all the good that could come of us having a more more equal wealth and income distribution.
I think once someone gets to a billion dollars net worth, they should get an AmEx black card, and 99% of their assets moved into a sovereign public wealth fund. They can have anything they want, they lose the power of extreme asset allocation, and if they just like competing, they can start over and try to ring the bell again (and can give the second AmEx black card to a person of their choosing).
To who, politicians?
Leaving the large business intact and just changing the leader doesn’t seem like it changes anything.
That's not what I understand from the GP. What they say is taht if your business is extremely successful, it can keep being extremely successful and you can keep control over it.
You just cannot accumulate more money for yourself. Like if the highest amount of money in a video game was 1 billion. Once you reach it, you don't go back to 0, you just can't go higher.
Makes sense to me.
* though I guess newer builds are defaulting to 64-bit signed ints?
Of course, control of a very large company is itself the sort of power that wealth caps are supposed to curb, like when people buy newspapers / social media platforms / etc - so you could also just proclaim it a feature instead of a bug, but it still warrants a defense.
From WSJ and The Economist, to CNN, BBC and FOX, right on through to Youtube podcasts.
This consistently happens in a very specific way. A corporation that dominates a concentrated market becomes excessively large, which makes its early shareholders billionaires.
In other words, if you want to change this, you need to enforce antitrust laws and break up large corporations.
> The Gini index, or Gini coefficient, is a statistical measure of wealth distribution developed by the Italian statistician Corrado Gini. The Gini index is used to gauge economic inequality by measuring income distribution, also called wealth distribution.
It's a kinda big red flag if they say that income and wealth are the same thing!
There are a few notable cases of European countries having very high wealth inequality despite lower income inequality (my take which may not be shared by many: having low income inequality makes it hard for people who aren't generationally wealthy to overcome old money). Notably, Sweden has a higher wealth inequality than the United States.
However, I don't think it's true that Europe in general has higher wealth inequality than the United States. Here's the wikipedia list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_we...
Wealthy and old people love when income is used as a stand in for wealth. It deflects political action onto the young and hard/smart working, and helps keep their dynasties and rent seeking assets intact.
The government has billions of dollars. Thankfully government officials are immune to the corrupting influence of billions of dollars.
Under our current system you have to be daft to not invest in buying the government--it's a great return on your investment!
The true billionaire doesn't have anybody else to ask and can finance the campaign to get somebody (not) elected.
Google is a monster because people so heavily favor the ad-model over paying for things.
Kagi wonderful, but paying for search? Lol that shit is free!
"Google has stolen every fact about our lives, in service to propping up a monopoly that lets it steal our money, too."
I still have all the facts about my life and I don't think any money has been stolen. I get that this is rhetorical, but he's gone over the edge here.
Yikes, you are doing it too. Does accuracy in prose not count anymore?
When you have a strong case you shouldn’t have to bend the facts.
"Oh, a company knows literally everything about me and clandestinely sells that information to the highest bidder in order to target every facet of my existence so that multinational conglomerations can extract every erg of value from every heartbeat of my existence, but that's cool because I also know that information"
Geez.
Sure, the easiest way you can do that is to move to Europe and petition its regulators to further tighten the screws. They might actually listen.
Because this can only be solved through legislature, and no matter what black swan event happens, there is no future in which the US legislature will take this problem seriously.
Regardless of what you think of Google or this case specifically, this is an argument for authoritarianism: that it is legitimate for the government to "punish" any company at will, based only on them falling into political disfavor.
> ... the only punishment Google would have to bear from this trial would come after the government won its case, when the judge decided on a punishment (the term of art is "remedy") for Google.
Yes, this is called the rule of law. Punishment comes through the courts, after a guilty verdict. The government has to actually win the argument as to what remedies would be proportionate under the law. In this case the judge didn't buy it. It's fine to disagree with his reasoning (or with the law), but the fantasizing about extrajudicial punishment here is frankly un-American.
Who can know how appropriate or not the remedy was when the evidence is hidden?
For full disclosure: I'm neither a google employee nor a US citizen.
The public record argument is fine; it's just a different argument than the extrajudicial punishment advocated by the original post.
Suppose the government charges you with murder, searches your house, and finds your sex toy collection. At trial they present some elaborate thesis about how you used a sex toy to kill someone, but do not convince the jury, so you're found not guilty. The public has a legitimate interest in judging that the trial was handled with integrity and that the correct verdict was reached. They do not have a legitimate interest in judging you based on whatever private information presented at trial might in some way embarrass you (eg, photos of your sex toy collection). On balance, it could be that the public-record interest does in fact justify making public the evidence of the sex toys, but you have to justify it on those terms. The transparency is not itself intended to be punitive.
No its more like, the process of transparency harms the company enough that they will shift their own mentality to ensure they never have to participate in a transparent process.
The argument that we should cheer on the use of government power to target a specific company, to selectively expose their dirty laundry as punishment for a crime they have not been convicted of, is what I found noxious in the original post.
I do find it a bit curious however, where later in the article theres a discussion about explicit collusion between corporates and the government. I vastly prefer the state and corps to be at odds with each other, than in bed with each other. Do any of the allegations towards the end register on your authoritarianismometer?
Any unjust policy (including just dispensing with trials altogether and allowing the executive to arbitrarily break up companies) will get to the 'desirable' outcome in some cases. That doesn't make it a just policy.
The specific allegation in the post is that the Trump administration will not appeal the verdict because Sundar gave $1M to Trump's inauguration. As far as I know, the government has not yet indicated whether it will appeal, so the claim that "Trump just paid him back, 40,000 times over" is in fact not true. (whether it becomes true at some point in the future, it was a falsehood at the time the author wrote it). It's also quite plausible that a Republican administration wouldn't appeal the verdict just due to being more pro-business in general, even without explicit corruption. But it's precisely because we have such a corrupt executive that it becomes all the more important to stick up for the rule of law. The correct response to authoritarianism is not to advocate for more authoritarianism!
Maybe. But then why was the google case actively sheltered and hidden from the public. The optics were considered in at least one of these cases.
And so, if you have that goal--and I will again stress that I don't even think that is the correct primary goal to have at this point, due to Google having effectively taken control of the only browser that matters and being in control of the only video site that matters--breaking apart Google into a bunch of tiny companies along the obvious lines (Android, YouTube, Maps, Gmail, or even Chrome) wouldn't fix the situation, as that isn't going to suddenly allow anyone to create a viable competitor to Google search, as Google Search would still exist, it would still always continue to have more data indexed off the web than anyone else... forever.
You thereby have two options: you can try to destroy Google Search and make it so that no one has a search engine as good as Google--at least for a while--or you can figure out how to break up Google Search itself. The former is maybe a good outcome, but it is not only unrealistic, it isn't necessarily helpful in any external sense, which is where I get really confused about Cory's point here: the thing Google is searching over isn't my private data... it's my public data. Yes: they know a lot about my private data, and it could be cool to have that deleted, but that's kind of besides the point, as it has very little to do with Google Search; people aren't searching for my private data, and Google Search is going to find losing all of my private data as, at best, a minor inconvenience.
What you need to do, thereby, is figure out how to break up the Google Search product into parts, to separate the wholesale part of the business from the retail part of the business, whether by making it into two separate companies or putting restrictions on the combined whole to offer both services separately... and, it sounds like that is what they are going to try? Now, I don't know if this is going to work--as it might be extremely painful or confusing to actually build a useful search engine accessing Google's catalog--but it certainly isn't as if I have a better idea for how to create a competitor to Google Search.
(Again, though: I'm not sold on the idea that the actual problem with Google is that we don't have a competitor to Google Search. Hell: as of recently, my usage of Google Search has plummeted, as I've replaced most of the things I used to use Google for with various uses of large language models... and, yet, I still find Google to be too powerful in a way that distorts markets and should require some kind of antitrust intervention. :/ Maybe, then, the premise is that Cory feels that we should have tried to fix some other problem? But, he's saying that this result is itself a privacy breach... while simultaneously saying Google is going to skirt the benefit by redacting data so hard that they end up in court? I don't get it.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/technology/google-search-...
> Judge Mehta was similarly cautious when forcing the company to share data. The company will need to share parts of its search index, the corpus of web pages and information that feeds its results page. But Google does not need to share other data associated with those results, including information about the quality of web pages, he added.
> Google must syndicate its search results to its competitors, Judge Mehta said, adding that the company could do so using the terms it already provides to commercial partners using the company’s results.