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by bsder 197 days ago
No, you need to bust up Google as the monopolist it is.

YouTube should get split out and then broken up. Google Search should get split out and broken up. etc.

This is not a problem you solve with code. This is a problem you solve with law.
2 comments
emsign 197 days ago
Yes. It's a political problem and a very old one. That's why we also already have solutions for it, antitrust laws and other regulations to ensure competition and fairness in the market, to keep it free. Governments just have to keep funding and enabling these institutions.
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Terr_ 197 days ago
There are very few things I'd consider a silver bullet for a lot of problems, but antitrust enforcement to break up near-monopolies is one of them.
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AnthonyMouse 197 days ago
> This is not a problem you solve with code. This is a problem you solve with law.

When the DMCA was a bill, people were saying that the anti-circumvention provision was going to be used to monopolize playback devices. They were ignored, it was passed, and now it's being used to monopolize not just playback devices but also phones.

Here's the test for "can you rely on the government here": Have they repealed it yet? The answer is still no, so how can you expect them to do something about it when they're still actively making it worse?

Now try to imagine the world where the Free Software Foundation never existed, Berkeley never released the source code to BSD and Netscape was bought by Oracle instead of being forked into Firefox. As if the code doesn't matter.

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