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by peterwwillis 2835 days ago
What media organization on this planet doesn't make decisions about what users should and shouldn't see? Breitbart does it, The New York Times does it, your local news channels do it.

Google as a news broker is literally just showing you what Google wants to show you. I don't know why you'd think they wouldn't have a bias, or filter their output based on it. All media does.
1 comments
adventured 2835 days ago
None of those is a fraction as powerful as Google, which is an $800 billion goliath with multiple hyper entrenched monopolies. Those monopolies entirely change the equation and expectations.

Search, Android, YouTube. All three of those are either monopolies or close to it. YouTube by itself is worth a solid 20 times what the NY Times is.

Breitbart is maybe worth $100m, a top 100 US Web site with a couple million readers.

The NY Times is a $3.6b business, with maybe 10x the daily readership of Breitbart (and a much more lucrative readership of course).

If those two want to duke it out with each other, fine. Just like with Fox or MSNBC. None of them possess monopoly positions, much less in extraordinarily large, critical information pathways, as with search, YouTube and Android.

If Microsoft had acted in 1999-2000, during its peak Windows monopoly power, to use the desktop + IE in some manner to try to throw the Bush v Gore election in favor of Bush, the Democrats would have more than lost their minds over that. It would have been considered an extraordinary abuse of monopoly power by Microsoft. Google is going to soon find out they've unleashed a political genie that is never going back into the bottle.

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peterwwillis 2835 days ago
Where'd you get that number? Google made 109 billion last year, not 800. Alphabet made 110 billion. Amazon made 177 billion.

In comparison, Facebook made just 40 billion in revenue, but more people get their news from Facebook today than anywhere else. So really it's Facebook that's let the genie out, and they didn't need to be the wealthiest corporation or a monopoly to do it.

These are large corporations made up of lots of people and represent a wide array of shareholders' concerns. But individual billionaires also own media companies, and thus can have greater personal influence on what is expressed through those companies. https://www.forbes.com/sites/katevinton/2016/06/01/these-15-...

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