[benedictevans]

Thanks for the comment. My piece contains half a dozen specific examples of exactly the thing that you claim it misses, and most of the second-half explains why the things you think are okay are in fact complicated and subject to lawsuits.

[sradman]

We seem to have an unlimited supply of outrage and facile solutions; your careful analysis is always appreciated.

The zero marginal cost of digital goods and services makes it hard to judge fairness. It is difficult to make a cost based estimate of a platform tax; why a percentage and why 30%? Many use absolute profit as a simple heuristic to assess malfeasance.

[webmaven]

> Thanks for the comment. My piece contains half a dozen specific examples of exactly the thing that you claim it misses,

Maybe I need to reread your piece again, but it seemed like you were focusing on the grey areas to the exclusion of clearly bad behavior. And missed mentioning some rather egregious (and illustrative) past examples, like "Windows isn't done until Lotus won't run".

Concentrating on the grey areas to make the point that it isn't all black and white is all very well, but the piece comes off as saying it is all just shades of grey and that nothing is ever clearly wrong except in retrospect after the wonks set policy.

You're also, I believe, making factual seeming statements about hyperbolic hypotheticals, like Yelp only wanting Google to show links to their site and never show any reviews or summaries inline with search results. Has anyone at Yelp actually said that?

Finally, you sort of missed a trick: Voice assistants and conversational interfaces provide far less 'room' for choices even compared to the constrained screen space of a smartphone.

If we ask for Chinese restaurants nearby, we just want an answer. We might want a qualifier appended if different data sources disagree, eg. "The Golden Garden Bistro is half a mile away on foot, and is rated 4.2 stars on Yelp, but only 2.5 stars by Google. They are pretty busy right now, and reservations are recommended. Do you want more information about this restaurant?".

Almost no-one is ever going to prefer "There are 15 results within one mile from here that are open right now, how do you want them sorted?", or "Two nearby places have current promotions you might be interested in.", or "Do you want them sorted by distance, sorted by price according to Yelp, sorted by overall popularity or how busy they currently are according to foot traffic data from Google, sorted by number of reviews from Yelp or Google, or sorted by average Yelp or Google review?".

Basically, having defaults will suck for competition, but anything that requires the user to make choices will also suck, like making the user be specific in their query, or having the assistant asking follow-up questions before giving answers. Making choices available but only if the user asks for them sucks differently as there is almost no 'surface area' for affordances.

So whatever policy decisions are made in these current cases after a couple of years of litigation, they may have to be revisited immediately, and the problem is going to get much harder because for many commercially valuable purposes people don't want a list of ten results, they just want an answer, and that makes the search engine a kingmaker.