[0xff00ffee]

Both. 50 years of people cynically saying "all politicians are crooks". And now we have legitimate sleazeballs running the country and nobody believes it.

On the one hand, Google is huge and needs competition. On the other hand: not this way. Antitrust and monopoly laws exist for a reason, but if you look at telephones in the 80's and microsoft & intel in the 90's, better lawyers get you around that.

We need trustbusters with teeth. Especially for tech. I wish the EFF was 100x larger.

[ticmasta]

how many hands do you have :)

The story could largely be reduced to: Giant Multinational sues Giant Multinational; both gain support of other Giant Multinationals while World's Most Powerful Government sides with plaintiff Giant Multinational.

The EFF needs to 100,000x larger to influence this level of game.

[foobar_]

Throw shoes at Ellison. 10000s of shoes with flyers in them about FSF ;)

This is just another iteration of BSD vs UNIX.

This is so silly. It's like every toy compiler has to pay a license because it looks like "C", even if you make money and other software with it.

As long as they did not "literally" steal the code, I don't see any reason to bother with Oracle's defense.

The same thing happens with MPAA and others, where the actual creators hardly get much but "abstract" corporates get a lot. How long should the copyright law hold? No more than the lifetime of the author. They have made a corporation an abstract person, giving it all sorts of inalienable rights. Lulz ... if that's how you want to go, every time someone in a company commits suicide, the entire corporation needs to be charged with murder and the entire team needs to be thrown in jail and be charged for murder. Every privacy violation would be espionage charges .....

[2J0]

Actually as a corporate person companies are restricted in a very important way: they cannot represent themselves in court, whereas a general partnership can present a partner in court. The fact that directors are employees and only some shareholders may be members actually divided the powers innate to a real person and causes it to be impossible to present a single individual capable of acting in full cognisance and responsible liability for the incorporated company. This saves the law from unimaginable pain.

[foobar_]

> they cannot represent themselves in court

So a corporation can screw many people with legalese, pretending to be everyone's friend and no one gets blamed. It sounds like a convenient loophole to me.

What the fuck is the CEO for then? Its comical because most people treat corporations as the CEO. A vs B is very different from naming names.

[scarface74]

The government caused the phone monopoly and the slap on the risk had nothing to do with Microsoft's missteps when it came to the internet and later mobile. Microsoft still has the same dominance on the desktop that they had during the 90's.

[steego]

The government definitely played a role in AT&T's monopoly, but to say they caused it is playing it very fast and loose.

Even before the government sanctioned their monopoly, AT&T was becoming a monopoly using strategies that the feds were arguing were anti-competitive and in violation of antitrust laws. You could argue the government first acquiesced their monopoly with the Kingsbury Commitment in 1913.

In the '20s and '30s, the government allowed them to resume buying up local carriers and established the FCC to set rates, but there was still tension and antitrust suits up until the '50s.

Like any relation, the government's and Ma Bell's was always "complicated".

they were pursuing a number of antitrust cases against them. Needless to say, AT&T's relationship with the federal government and regulators wasn't static over the next 60-70 years. Sometimes it was at odds, sometimes it was symbiotic.

[criddell]

The action in the 90's wasn't to break up their desktop dominance, it was to prevent them using that power to dominating the internet too.

[scarface74]

That might have been their goal, but do you really think that it had anything to do with the rise of Google, Facebook, Amazon and the resurgence of Apple?

What had more effect on IE being toppled by Chrome, the government or the most popular website advertising it on their front page and bundling it with third party downloads?

[dhimes]

If Microsoft had built adblockers into IE from the beginning there would be no Google. But that was a strategic error, not due to law. And people were definitely on the Google bandwagon in part because of Microsoft. The "do no evil" motto was a direct shot at MS, and everybody felt relief.

[scarface74]

Only the geeks cared about the “do no evil”.

[dhimes]

Fair point.

[2J0]

Local Loop Last Mile CLECs Yup I remember 1994 very well like yesterday in fact.

It was the control over individual customers that mattered not any particular market. The ‘94 act would have been quite prescient to be defending open internet access when first drafted in the early eighties.

[dhimes]

But they were on their way to owning internet communication. They were trying to make it so the only way to communicate was to use office products with Internet Explorer. Fortunately, they didn't get very far.

[akhilcacharya]

One of the most jarring things about the impeachment saga was Trump supporters defending him by saying "all presidents do it". Fundamentally the issue is norms are easy to break if a bunch of people don't know what they are and don't care enough to find out.

[_4byd]

You may be missing the point. When you look past the double standard, the criminality (collusion, corruption, embezzlement, lies, favorable pardons and lack of prosecution) is disproportionately on one side.

And of course there’s the tiny detail that Trump had to conquer the corruption of the Republican Party first to even broach the Democrats. See all the #nevertrump senators that prioritized #resisting Trump in spite of their constituents and his support amongst the party.

[ta999999171]

It's been continuously escalating, like a ratchet strap, and I don't understand how you see this as much different than what previous administrations have done.

They just don't care about hiding shit anymore because nobody understands/does anything significant to revolt.