Even monopolies are protected by the first amendment, aren’t they? (Since they’re people and all.) The government could theoretically force them to break into smaller companies if they (somehow) decide that Google is the only search engine provider, but it couldn’t force them to change how they conduct their legal business.
Just a note, the term “Fake News” is actually pretty old. See Wiki article, and note the 1894 cartoon using the term.
“‘taking a look’ at regulating Google’s conduct” is a long ways from shutting them down. Agreed?
That didn’t seem to be an obstacle when they wanted to regulate Comcast with net neutrality laws.
You go to Comcast of your own volition, and they provide you a service. If you don’t like their service, go use one of the competitors.
No one said Trump wanted to “shut down” Google. #strawman The thread is about the stated threat of potential regulation.
Do you believe that Trump wants to do nothing to impact or alter Google’s business practice? If you believe he wants to do something, what do you think he wants to do?
I’d be happy to discuss whatever scenario you’re willing to concede that we’re discussing.
No, the government can’t *force *them to change how they operate, but it *can *threaten them with ruinous anti-trust actions and/or AT&T-style break up as leverage to get them to change.
**I’m not saying the administration is going to do that. **(In all likelihood, Kudlow saying they were “taking a look” at regulating Google was just an offhand remark to mollify his boss’s latest tantrum.) But if I were a petty, vindictive, ignorant manchild with no understanding of what conservatism is supposed to be about, that’s how I’d do it.
To be fair, you did suggest that a Democrat potentially shutting down Fox News as being analogous to whatever is going on right now.
I was being facetious, but I’ll own that one.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that they’re in a weird place relative to the existing laws- none seem to really apply.
They are not engaging in any sort of business the FCC could realistically regulate- they’re not in the business of doing any sort of broadcasting or telecommunication/data service providing.
They’re not producing content with their search engine- they’re just ostensibly indexing as much content as they can, and providing users with a convenient and powerful way to search what’s out there. Presumably this is content-agnostic, and even if it’s not, there’s nothing that says that they can’t have an editorial slant on their search results.
And finally, they’re not a monopoly, at least in the anti-trust sense. While they have anywhere between a 93% market share and a 66% market share (according to Microsoft, their largest competitor), they’d also have to be shown to be acting anti-competitively and deliberately trying to shaft their competitors as a business strategy, like say, seriously deprioritizing Apple search results to boost Android. Merely being better/more convenient than the competition doesn’t cut it as far as legal standards go.
So far, there’s nothing that I can see that would lend itself to anything but a VERY long and convoluted court case.
It hadn’t previously occurred to me, but now I want to see if Trump has a page at Conservapedia.
Also, I’d like to see if Conservapedia still exists.
it does, and it does.
“Similar behaviour”? Google is an automated search engine that ranks results by objective assessments of quality, which for political news tends to give highest weight to reputable mainstream media. Facebook is a social platform for random idiots to post and share information that they heard from a friend or just made up, and has lately become an epicenter for distorted and fabricated information originating mostly from conservative and alt-right sources. The penchant of conservatives for reality distortion has apparently reached its hilarious peak when they consider that Facebook is a reliable source of news but Google’s top-ranked news sources are not.
If you can’t distinguish between an occasional mistake and a constant barrage of intentional lies and propaganda then it’s not possible to have a rational conversation about this.
Yes. A threat well demonstrated by the level of knowledge of its audience and who they elect to power. Most of them have still not heard of Michael Cohen or Paul Manafort, and if they have, they think it’s some minor side issue being hyped by the “lamestream media”, the enemy of the people. The same ones helping the Chinese perpetrate the climate change hoax.
While I agree 100% with your post, the devil’s advocate in me can’t help but point out that the bolded parts are presumptions, which wingnut conservatives might seize upon to back Trump’s latest paranoid tantrum.
“Who sez Google is objective?” “Who sez their reputable?” etc.
Probably not, and I don’t know. One comment from an underling about “taking a look” at it doesn’t really give us a lot of detail to work with. FWIW, I’m generally opposed to the government intervening in private industry to try to repair a perceived political imbalance. However, just being honest here, I’m a bit less-inclined to spend much energy opposing Trump on this (whatever ‘this’ consists of) after Democrats pushed to re-instate the “Fairness Doctrine” to attack conservative talk radio.
They’ve collected quite a list of occasional mistakes in the last couple of years. Their mistakes seem to mostly slant things in one particular direction.
That’s true, they’re assumptions, but they’re very plausible assumptions. From what I understand of Google’s many (and mostly proprietary) ranking algorithms, they include many measures of the “reputation” of the site including technical quality, number of cites from other sources and their reputations, and many other measures of traffic and prominence. So the New York Times, for instance, is going to be ranked far higher than some wingnut’s blog. The alternative hypothesis is that Larry Page and Sergey Brin sit around conspiring to screw up their own search business’s integrity in order to make Trump look bad!
I tested this with my own Google search, though it’s likely to be heavily influenced by my search history, yet nevertheless if I type in the word “Trump” I get a mix of prominent media and lots of pro-Trump stuff: the #1 result is his own Twitter feed, and also on the first page, the Trump Organization website and his Wikipedia page. The rest are reputable news organizations: CNN, the Guardian, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair. The second page has more from his Twitter feed, more from the Trump Organization, stuff from Trump Hotels, a pro-Trump political YouTube video, a relatively complimentary Washington Post article about advancing NAFTA with Mexico, and more mainstream media like CNBC and the New Yorker.
It seems pretty obvious to me that pro-Trump material is not being artificially downgraded since there it is, and that what Trumpsters object to about Google is that it gives high rankings to reputable news media, and real news doesn’t sit well with Trumpsters.
Do we have a thread on CNN comparable to the one I linked that itemizes the lies and distortions on Fox News, a thread that (so far) spans 43 pages itemizing the seemingly endless shameless mendacity of Fox “News”? Do you think you could create one like that for CNN? Considering that all you have so far is one highly questionable example of what is, at worst, one honest mistake?
I’m not defending FOX but you got to see what a ridiculous comment this is. The length of a thread here is not an objective measure of anything.
Well, that Brin guy is some kind of furriner, ain’t he?