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0 pointsAnthonyMouse2y ago0 comments

The problem with all of this is that it's a performance.

Google does something actually anti-competitive, but it's subtle and requires a thorough understanding of industry dynamics to fully understand. But one of their employees said something that sounds bad, so guess what the headline is.

Whether the quote was taken out of context or not isn't even the interesting question, because it's independent of whether they're actually doing something wrong.

The quote could be completely in context and the employee was a fool who didn't know what they were talking about, or it could be completely out of context even though they actually did the bad thing.

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Aunche2y ago

What exactly is so hard to understand? It's a well known fact that they pay to be the default search engine. Either that's against the rules or it is not. It sounds like the DOJ doesn't want to be blamed for any potential negative consequences for establishing clear rules, so instead they'll bully Google into settling so that they can get an easy win.

AnthonyMouseOP2y ago

The Department of Justice isn't a rulemaking entity, it's the federal prosecutor's office. The antitrust laws we have are quite old and passed during the era of robber barons in order to do something about them, with extremely broad language that by its terms would prohibit not only anything you might like them to but a lot of things you might not.

The result is that the courts get to make something up about when they apply, and have made a bit of a mess of it.

Sure, it says, "Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal." But that doesn't mean Sprint can't merge with T-Mobile. Or maybe it does. Anybody have a coin to flip?

What the DoJ can do is dump a bunch of allegations into an indictment and hope some of them sound plausible enough to induce a settlement. Which will ideally actually promote competition and not be some political quid pro quo.

dragonwriter2y ago

> The Department of Justice isn’t a rulemaking entity

Yes, it is. [0]

> it’s the federal prosecutor’s office.

That is among its functions, yes.

> The antitrust laws we have are quite old and passed during the era of robber barons in order to do something about them, with extremely broad language that by its terms would prohibit not only anything you might like them to but a lot of things you might not.

Among the antitrust laws we have are:

* the Antitrust Criminal Penalty Reform and Enhancement Permanent Extension Act (2020); whose main effect was, as the names suggests, to make permanent the provisions of the Antitrust Criminal Penalty Reform and Enhancement Act (2004).

* the Criminal Antitrust Anti-Retaliation Act (2020)

* the antitrust provisions of the Competitive Health Insurance Reform Act of 2020 (oddly enough, 2021)

Some of our antitrust laws were written in the so-called “age of robber barons”, but antitrust law (even purely statute law) hasn’t been static since.

[0] for illustration, https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-advances-p... ; you probably mean, though, that its not the rulemaking entity with regard to competition, since that’s mostly the FTC.

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AlbertCory2y ago

There are entire books and law review articles written about antitrust law since the Sherman Act. Maybe you've read some of them?

Being "quite old and passed during the era of robber barons" is not quite the killing argument you think it is. The 13th Amendment is even older. So is Marbury vs. Madison.

bell-cot2y ago

> Either that's against the rules or it is not.

If the rules were actually that simple, the world would need far fewer lawyers.

But - whether you say "rules that simple can't work when the world is vastly more complex", or "rules-writing lawyers aren't stupid enough to write their own kind out of their jobs" - the rules are definitely not that simple.

flagrant_taco2y ago

Simple rules aren't very feasible though, laws need to be well defined and the sheer scale of societies today makes that anything but simple.

I'd argue that's the main reason for not making a law though, if it's too complicated for the average person to read and understand where the line is drawn then we shouldn't draw it.

unyttigfjelltol2y ago

As has been said so many times on HN, individual users of Google resources are not the customer, they are the product. Browser defaults are an annoying way that Google exerts pressure on everyone to be their product, but I'm more annoyed by their stupid Captcha API integrated into many pages Google has no business monitoring.

I feel harmed every day being coerced to be an unwilling and unhappy product of Google's adtech leviathan. I don't know what that means for this particular case, but hopefully Google gets the message and builds a better off-ramp.

nonrandomstring2y ago

> I feel harmed every day being coerced to be an unwilling and unhappy

You are harmed. The question now is how to obtain remedy for that objective harm and injunction against further actual harms.

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