16 Replies to “Social Disease: Antitrust”

  1. “It will take time, but eventually they will settle, and there will be a negotiated Consent Decree.”

    And how, pray, will that change anything important? Baby Googles will be easier for the CCP to manipulate or buy out, not more difficult.

    The bad guys figured out long ago that the revolutionaries don’t have to control the factories, just the minds of the men who own them.

    Deal with the problem and only the problem. Recognize that the top brass at Google are in league with enemies of the United States, giving them aid and comfort on a daily basis, and deal with them as normal countries deal with traitors.

    You will immediately see far more civility in corporate America’s relations with President Trump and greater willingness to help him make America great again.

    1. “the top brass at Google are in league with enemies of the United States, giving them aid and comfort on a daily basis”
      With China’s billion plus potential consumers for google’s goods and services, it’s mainly a money thing that motivates google and causes them to constantly kiss red Chinese ass and don’t forget:
      what’s good for Google is good for Red China.

  2. The “manipulation” aspect will (I hope…) be big on this one. Google is the recognised world-leading search engine, but there have been numerous Google searches put-up on social media where the sought information was either buried under five pages of what Google wanted you to see, or not there at all – while other search engines took the viewer straight to what they wanted. Easy to show a monetary component to that, especially for a google-search on a product or service – which is the heart-and-soul of anti-trust, free service or no.

    Hopefully Amazon is next – Denninger documents several predatory business practices, such as negative ratings on products, ratings which were obviously put-up by ghost-writers hired by competitors to bad-mouth the product or its supplier. As Denninger points-out, this would be trivially easy to stop – only somebody who’d bought that product on Amazon would be allowed to publish a review on it. But that hasn’t been done – and too many times, Amazon has black-jacked one of their independent suppliers with negative reviews while taking-up the product themselves, resulting in the independent losing his business while all the money goes to Amazon.

    One of the monsters in the room for the last couple of decades is that if you’re rich, you don’t go to jail. Hopefully that’s about to change under Trump, but if Hitlery had won the election, mega-crooks would’ve ended-up fully-pardoned and working as her special advisors – for nominal contributions to the Clinton Foundation, of course…

    1. Amazon has another issue, arbitrary silencing of those who dare protest or complain. We had done several detailed reviews on Amazon of products we bought, both good and bad that got lots of helpful ticks from other people. We were suddenly being inundated with requests to review products. We declined. Then we found numerous other reviews supposedly written by us that we had never posted for stuff we had never purchased. We contacted Amazon to alert them to the fraud. They responded by removing all the content we had provided and they told us we were now banned from posting reviews for accepting money for reviewing products we hadn’t bought. We told them someone else was doing it to us and we were the ones who had alerted them but there was no recourse, no appeal no nothing. We sent several messages and never got any answer back. We were just banned for life.

    2. “One of the monsters in the room for the last couple of decades is that if you’re rich, you don’t go to jail.”

      That’s utter nonsense. Martha Stewart went to jail, and pretending that Trump would change that is the height of hilarity.

      1. Martha Stewart went to Camp Cupcake. It was something short of punishment…

      2. UnMe, you calling a post “utter nonsense” proves it’s the truth, so thanks.

  3. Google gave GORE a huge stash of Stock for his help in getting Anti-Trust protection……Gore made his first big money from Google…. Time to end Anti-Trust protection in every Sport (NFL) & business..
    It is Mob Connected protection….

    Social Engineering is rampart on the Net …..Ebay does not search or show Vaping products… Master Charge will not process a charge without a $7… fee…….Discourage…Discourage…..

  4. Joe Biden was for it before he was against it:

    https://twitter.com/AZachParkinson/status/1266187699603623938

    “Unreal. It’s like the Biden campaign doesn’t even track what their candidate says.
    Here’s Biden in December, telling the New York Times editorial board that “Section 230 should be revoked immediately” for tech companies
    “It should be revoked. It should be revoked.””

  5. I think TLR is reaching here. This sounds more like a “nice company you’ve got here; shame if anything should happen to it” DOJ investigation. First of all, Google doesn’t have anything close to a monopoly on search. Second, arguing they have a monopoly on Internet ad revenue – an easier claim – has a built-in trap: Facebook and Twitter also sell ad space, and if you argue that Google has an effective monopoly on Internet ad revenue then you can’t immediately turn around and argue Facebook or Twiiter have a monopoly on “Internet communication”.

    As the guys over at Gab keep pointing out, Trump could defang Twitter and Facebook in a heartbeat simply by moving his communications to Gab. All of his followers would then go to Gab, and a non-trivial number of his detractors would as well just so they could keep track of his utterances. This isn’t about solving Big Social Media’s bullying behaviour, it’s about getting revenge on them using the power of Big Daddy Government. That’s what we used to criticize Obama for.

    1. That’s what we thought they were criticizing Obama for. Turns out they really just wanted the gun pointed at educated and/or brown people.

  6. A little OT but there was a patent fight over the Lang patents on search methodology that Google infringed on. Case went to court about 8 years ago and Vringo – the company who held the Lang patents – was successful in suing Google for a good sum – which demonstrated Googles guilt.

    But lucky for Google – the very final appeal overturned the verdict – a 3 judge circuit court ruling – 2-1, which was an utter joke.

    One of the reasons they overturned it was because they said the patents were “obvious” and as such did not warrant protection.

    My thought at the time was if Lang was not protected why should Google be.

    I would hope that there are some bright silicon valley types that could flip this back on google and steal their tech for search ?

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