[Mirioron]

In the long term the issue with this is that it pushes Google and Facebook into your politics. If you use political measures to screw with them, then they'll start getting involved in the politics more and more to protect themselves. And these two companies could have a lot of influence in ways that are hard to notice.

[slv77]

The pay-per-click model has already forced news organizations towards producing click-bait content. I’m not sure why regulators would want to deepen that influence by making newspapers more dependent on Google and Facebook.

[speedgoose]

It sounds threatening and I hope you don't work for them but anyway, Google and Facebook are already pushing hard into politics.

[Mirioron]

I do not work for them. This is something I noticed over the years: as Google ran into more and more obstacles in the US that are political the more they seem to have started to meddle. Maybe it's because this is easier, but maybe it's to protect themselves.

These companies don't push themselves into politics everywhere (yet), but I'm sure that the more governments squeeze them the more they'll get involved.

[thu2111]

It's based on learning from what happened to Microsoft.

I used to work at Google. It wasn't often discussed, but when lobbying came up (including in formal contexts) the general attitude was "you can try to ignore Washington but Washington won't ignore you". The perception was very much that Microsoft had gone through the anti-trust trial not so much because of what they'd done but because for years under the Clinton administration they didn't grease the right wheels, in fact they barely had any presence in Washington, which left them politically exposed. The combination of no powerful friends, extremely vague laws and extremely empowered and political regulators was seen as a very toxic one. And that's especially remarkable because Google was (at that time) a company whose executives really didn't like Microsoft, they feared them and treated them as the biggest threat to their business. A lot had come out of the Linux/open source world, academia, UNIX vendors etc and they were really the last people who would give Gates a break, but nonetheless their conclusion was that lobbying was basically a requirement of doing business in the USA.

I'm going back here - eventually that changed and they came to fear Facebook more. But for instance the Google Toolbar was basically an anti-Microsoft play, as was Chrome.

[Nasrudith]

I cynically thought that was corruption by design, politicians - trying to get them into a 'contribute to both sides so they shut up' with shakedowns. They were trying to cast Google as sexist well before anything else happened to harm their image.

[vezycash]

It's a fact of life.

Bill Gates kept politicians at arms length.

If Microsoft had given Washington a little attention, the antitrust lawsuit would never ever have happened.

Google has squelched antitrust investigations in US every single time through lobbying.

Even Apple would been in hot regulatory soup if they didn't buddy up to politicians.

[propogandist]

>In the long term the issue with this is that it pushes Google and Facebook into your politics.

Google is already the largest industry lobbyist stateside

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/09/google-is-techs-top-spender-...