This is Google

The release also had my favorite piece of “I said the loud part quiet and the quiet part loud”:

When pressed for evidence of anti-conservative bias, his lawyer pointed to pro-nazi-punching memes shared on internal forums.

Dox people via discovery. A whole bunch of Googlers are gonna get targeted now because of the evidence presented in the lawsuit.

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Holy shit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imWn0IMV-JM

They have both won and lost this case many times before :slight_smile:

Of course, depending on what happens with the Google/Oracle case, it could have far reaching implications for the entire tech industry.

It’s bad enough that they decided that APIs were copyrightable, but it’s even worse that copying them isn’t fair use either. If that were the case in the early 1980’s, for example, the PC sitting on your desk right now would have the letters “IBM” on it and probably cost 5x more than what you paid for it.

This case seems like one I should know/care more about. But I kinda view it like, well, I see them winning and losing it every few years, every time I see it it seems like the source article or whatever seems really invested in one party or the other winning. I’ve never really looked into it enough to formulate a strong opinion.

I guess whichever side leads to my computer not being 5x the price.

There was a shooting this morning at YouTube HQ.

At some point in the United States’ past, we decided that having one steel producer and one oil company was bad for business. Today we have (effectively) one search engine, one video host (it’s also the search engine), two phone manufacturers (one is also the search engine), one social network, etc.

What would breaking up the big boys do? Should they be broken up?

Yes

If, back in the day, that one steel producer and that one oil company had the same kind of lobbying power as Google, Facebook, etc have today, they never would have been broken up either.

It’s all about campaign finance and influence.

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Nationalize it.

15 character limit circumvented??

I’m more surprised he showed up without someone criticizing Bernie or the Chapo turds first. It’s out of order, like answering a phone before it rings.

There is a big problem comparing the modern tech companies with old monopolies. In the modern world, a lot of these services are free to the users (not mobile phones though) and users chose and continue to choose to use them. As soon as something is free, or has a zero cost of distribution, it can’t be compared to old world industries. Putting zero into an equation does weird shit.

It’s fine breaking up a steel or oil supplier, as they produce commodities, literally interchangeable goods. Not so much services that rely on network effects. Facebook only works because it connects everyone. Google only works because it indexes everything. YouTube keeps growing because everything is there and linked to everything else.

If these were broken up, would you also force users to pick one service? Force them to check in with two social networks every day? Force them to go to one place for some videos and somewhere else for the other half of videos they want to watch?

And then if one service was just better, despite the network effects, would you force them to be not as good, to level the playing field? Not release new features until their competitors had their own parallel features ready?

Once you start doing that, you’re just turning the services into interchangeable commodities (like news websites), or the standards just become infrastructure. All you’d do is create a space for a single company to make layer on top of the services to access them all at once… just moving the “monopoly” up one level.

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I’m assuming that Churba, the racist, imperialism apologist white person from a settler colony, is referring to me with their comment, just in case anyone else is confused as to what they were referring to.

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It’s pretty simple to circumvent. My above comment actually looks like this:

< s p a n>Yes

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Huh, I thought that didn’t work last time I tried. Take that Scott, now I’m going to add 15 CHARACTERS just for fun.