[cageface]

That's the thing that makes me uneasy about this. I'm ok with some regulation of Google and perhaps even some kind of breakup. What I don't want to see is regulators picking winners and losers. I'm concerned about Google's control over the web but at least their interested are aligned with the survival of the web and not completely locked down & proprietary platforms like iOS.

[arrosenberg]

If regulators don't get involved, they are still picking winners and losers.

[cageface]

Can't follow the logic there. If I don't jump in the middle of a horse race am I still picking a winner?

[zaarn]

The market Google and Friends are in is not a horse race.

It's more like you know that someone is manipulating the bets on the horse race, possibly even forcing results by paying off the competitors. If you do nothing, you are picking winners (the betting house) and loosers (the betters), if you do something you reverse that.

[abstractbarista]

I saw a sign at a recent protest that read "Silence is Consent". Prior to this, I've been blasted all my life with "Silence is Not Consent".

So which is it? Can you help me out here?

As for myself, I'm certain that silence is not consent. It's a freely-made choice not to take part in something.

Thus, doing nothing is not equivalent to picking winners. Picking winners is when you ... wait for it ... pick winners.

[zaarn]

In my above example, by doing nothing you pick winners.

Not in all situations, doing nothing is doing nothing. Take the famous trolley problem. By doing nothing you pick 5 people to die, if you do something you pick 1 person to die. One of those will come true, either inaction or action will determine which. But that also means your inaction is an action of yours to force an outcome. This doesn't necessarily mean it's the outcome you want or the outcome that is preferred. Inaction can be the worst type of action to take in some scenarios, but it is the action of non-intervention that creates an outcome regardless. Inaction doesn't mean you consent to the outcome either.

[cutemonster]

Sometimes, doing nothing is even illegal, eg not helping someone who is in danger when one can do so at no risk, or sometimes, not reporting an ongoing crime (I think they can be illegal, here where I am)

[pdpi]

Both forms of “Silence is (not) consent” are true, they just refer to different things. If you are in a position of authority, silence is effectively consenting to the status quo remaining unaltered.

If you are not in a position of authority, whoever is in that position can’t take your silence as consent of their choices.

[cutemonster]

Nice explanation; I never thought about this in such a logical way (although intuitively I'd known the answer)

[tlavoie]

I think in your example, whichever use of silence is addressed to a specific audience.

For the former, the idea (I think) is that if you don't consent to something, speak up to make a difference.

In the latter, it's more that one should not assume consent on the part of another, presumably in the context of a sexual partner.

[cutemonster]

It can be both, depending on the situation.

[arrosenberg]

That's the wrong analogy. Regulators aren't random spectators sitting in the stands, they are the referees. The better analogy would be if you were assigned to monitor the race for violations, and you discovered the winning horse had broken a rule. As the referee, your decision whether or not to enforce the rules has a direct impact on the results. Just so, if regulators choose not to act, they are picking the incumbents as the winners, whether or not that is ideal, best, legal or good.

[cageface]

In this race every horse is breaking every rule they can get away with and exploiting every advantage. If you suddenly want to jump in and start enforcing rules, which I think probably should happen, you need to be very careful that you don't wind up making things worse by legitimizing the abuses of only one horse. If you can't do that then you're better off just letting them fight it out.

[arrosenberg]

We've already arrived at that station. The rules are already enforced such as to legitimize the abuses of a small number of horses in each vertical. If we let them fight it out, they will only further entrench and consolidate, which is the worst thing that can happen. We don't need to act like battered housewives afraid that it could always get worse - the laws are already on the books to fix the issue, we just need to insist on their vigorous enforcement.

[thu2111]

But anti-trust law is vague, and violations are often in the eye of the beholder. A sports game is also the wrong analogy because sports games have very clearly defined rules, specifically to avoid referees picking winners.

Governments are nowhere near that level of rigour or coherency, especially if you look at EU anti-trust. The USA at least requires the government to demonstrate some actual harm to consumers in court. EU anti-trust requires a single bureaucrat to decide that competitors were harmed, and they can then levy any fine they like which goes straight into the EU Commission's coffers. It can only be appealed in some sort of court after the fine is paid, and the court is packed with judges who want to see the EU expand (via spending), so that's cold comfort.

That approach is incoherent: the whole point of capitalist competition is that the better firm in some sense harms the weaker firm by taking away its customers. And giving the referee the power to transfer money from the competitors to their own pockets at will, without needing to convince anyone else at all, is clearly an enormous conflict of interest.

Many arguments about anti-trust do implicitly assume the US model, which at least has some tenuous connection to harm to the general public. That isn't really true internationally, yet ramped up anti-trust in the USA would absolutely be taken as a green light by other parts of the world to whack US firms with enormous fines for conduct that isn't actually bad in any way.

[arrosenberg]

> But anti-trust law is vague, and violations are often in the eye of the beholder. A sports game is also the wrong analogy because sports games have very clearly defined rules, specifically to avoid referees picking winners.

Have you ever watched sports? The referee always has an impact whether they blow the whistle or not. Every rule requires some level of interpretation or fitting to a given situation. Some sports (mainly soccer) don't have rules, they explicitly have "laws of the game" because it's understood that they are to be interpreted.

> That approach is incoherent: the whole point of capitalist competition is that the better firm in some sense harms the weaker firm by taking away its customers. And giving the referee the power to transfer money from the competitors to their own pockets at will, without needing to convince anyone else at all, is clearly an enormous conflict of interest.

...you know regulators don't get to keep any money right? Their job is to set market rules, enforce them, and break up any competitor who gains too much market power. Where exactly is the conflict of interest? Historically, most shareholders wind up making more money off the future value of the broken-up interests than they did with the original conglomerate.

It seems like you are arguing from an EU standpoint, and I don't know anything about their antitrust history, so I'm not going to try and defend or interpret what Europe does.

[thu2111]

you know regulators don't get to keep any money right?

This is exactly my point. They don't ... in America. In the EU anti-trust fines are both created by and collected by the Commission, specifically, a high ranking Commissioner. Those people are selected not for any particular expertise in their subject area but rather nominated by countries and selected for political reasons. The money goes straight into the general budget of the Commissioner's employer, and then handed out in "solidarity" payments, subsidies, bureaucrat salaries and other priorities of the Commission.

[pyuser583]

Bureaucrats have their own set of incentives. They can increase their position within the bureaucracy, and increase the bureaucracy’s influence.

One of the reasons Americans are so “anti-bureaucracy” is because of precious bureaucratic oversteps.

It’s pretty well established the EUs administrators strongly value the influence I’d their own agencies (with some exceptions).

A good US example is the military. Army, Navy, Marines, etc. are in constant competition. Do any of the generals or admirals get to take home their funding?

[chiefalchemist]

I believe the idea is, Google _is_ winning currently. Choosing not to get involved is a choice in favor of that winner.

It's an interesting point. To me it has merit.

[leptons]

Google AMP is bad. Google Pagespeed Insights is bad and misleading. Google has its own agenda for the web, and it doesn't really align with anything but the survival of Google.

[cageface]

I think that goes too far. Google does have an agenda for the web but at least it includes the web. Apple would like nothing better for the entire internet to be locked down and controlled inside its app store. We're better off with Android and Chrome than we would be without them.

[marcthe12]

I hope some pseudo open source components come under non profit with reduced Google control. So other big player have bigger say in stuff Chromium and Android.

[mcny]

> breakup

If you look at the breakup of Ma Bell, I think you’ll doubt the government’s ability to break up a company properly.

[cageface]

I doubt their ability to regulate properly too. But it does seem like the big tech companies have failed to self-regulate.

[andromeduck]

How can they self regulate when government keeps screwing with the incentives?

Did busting kingpins solve the drug problem?

[mcny]

Worse, the corporations have to meddle with their own regulation because they know other corporations will. My understanding is AT&T basically wrote its own consent decree.

Who in their right mind decided that the solution to a national monopoly is a handful of regional monopolies...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Bell_Operating_Compan...

> In the early 1970s, American antitrust regulators became suspicious that Bell was abusing its monopoly power, and in 1974 the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice brought a lawsuit against Bell claiming violations of the Sherman Act. In 1982, feeling that it could not win, Bell agreed to a Justice Department-mandated consent decree that settled the lawsuit and ordered it to break itself up into seven "Regional Bell Operating Companies" (known as "The Baby Bells"), which it did in 1984, ending the original company's existence. These "Baby Bells" are now independent companies, and several of them are very large corporations in their own right, such as AT&T, Verizon Communications, and CenturyLink.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System

[wyattpeak]

> What I don't want to see is regulators picking winners and losers

I'm not thrilled by the idea either, but I'd prefer it to another round of IE6. When it comes to dealing with monopolies I think you're solidly in the realm of looking for the least bad choice.

[cageface]

I don't think IE6 really compares to Chrome. IE6 froze the web in time and made impossible for standards to evolve. Chrome may be in danger of becoming synonymous with the web but it's hardly standing still. In fact the most common complaint is that it's adding features too quickly and trying to do too much.

[wyattpeak]

IE6 was the most innovative browser of all until it won the race. I don't think we're at the stage yet where we can say if Chrome can be compared or not.

[nwienert]

The features they are adding are often unnecessary and designed to help them further lock down the web, prevent ad blocking, etc.

I’m surprised no ones even noticed that Portals are basically AMP Supercharged to where you’d never leave Google. Truly dystopian future they’re trying to slowly cement.

[saithound]

> The features they are adding are often unnecessary and designed to help them further lock down the web

Reminds me of the Browser Wars of yesteryear, when Microsoft and Netscape invented their own unnecessary, easily abused, proprietary HTML tags, such as blink and marquee.

[1] https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/blink-marquis-tag/

[ethbr0]

It's easy to look backwards, with the benefit of more robust and fast (relatively!) standards bodies, and shake a finger.

But my memory at the time is that there were essentially no effective, consensus-based evolutions of web standards, because everything was so new.

Even the idea of running executable code in a browser at all was "That's weird. Is this a thing we want to do?" and resulted in 10+ variations (of which javascript ultimately triumphed).

It was certainly a worse time for the consumer, and web developer, as essentially everything was broken on every platform but your target w/ your target plugin installs.

[cageface]

A lot of people noticed and I thought the gave a reasonable counter argument as to why this was not the case.

[koalaman]

examples?