The power of Google
A video has emerged that tells us what we already knew—that the heads of Google follow the ethos of the left:
Someone leaked to Breitbart an hour-long video of an “all hands” Google meeting that was held just after the 2016 election. The video features Google’s co-founder, Sergei Brin, its CEO, Sundar Pichai, and numerous other high-ranking “Googlers” speaking in turn about the election’s tragic outcome. It is stunning.
All of the speakers express grief over Donald Trump’s election. All of the speakers assume that every Google employee is a Democrat and is stunned and horrified that Hillary Clinton–the worst and most corrupt presidential candidate in modern history–lost. There is much discussion about what Google can do to reverse the benighted world-wide tide exemplified by Brexit and Trump’s election.
Well, there was at least one Google employee who didn’t get with the program: the leaker. But you can bet that person was a huge exception.
Private monopolies can do whatever they want. I mean, sure it’s illegal to use a dominant market position as leverage to advance another business product — Microsoft was sued for using its dominance in operating systems to try to give its Netscape browser an advantage over competitors — but our well-paid-off “conservative” shills will tell us it’s no problem for an outright monopoly to scheme to use its power to squelch some businesses and competitors and an entire political movement.
The question has never been what political persuasion the Google majority hold, or their willingness to use their clout to act on it. The question is whether Google is a monopoly and whether antitrust legislation can be used to change that. The question is discussed here, here, and here, just to cite a few of the many articles on the subject.
But it’s not just about conventional antitrust laws. It’s about whether Google (and Facebook, and Twitter) can be considered ordinary companies, or whether they are neutral platforms for speech:
So far, in the courts, Google has successfully argued that its decisions about what to rank, the ordering of its rankings, what ads to run, what videos to allow on YouTube and who will see them are all analogous to a newspaper editor’s decisions about what op-eds to run. And since a newspaper editor’s decisions are protected speech under the first amendment, so, Google argues, are its search engine decisions.
That Google compares itself in these cases to a newspaper editor might come as a surprise, given that Google, Facebook, Twitter and others often make the contrary claim to users and governments that they are neutral platforms, mere conduits for information.
Mark Zuckerberg made that claim explicitly when Facebook was under fire from critics who were accusing the platform of suppressing conservative content in its “Trending Topics” news feed. Google still makes that claim on its support page under “search using autocomplete”, disclaiming: “Search predictions aren’t the answers to your search. They’re also not statements by other people or Google about your search terms.”
But disingenuity aside, are these companies’ practices of privileging certain information really analogous to what newspaper editors do, and therefore similarly protected by the first amendment? The answer is no.
Making decisions about what and how information is conveyed does not automatically make one an editor entitled to first amendment protection. That is what the supreme court decided, for example, in Rumsfeld v Forum of Academic and Institutional Rights (Fair), when a group of law schools argued that it could bar military recruiters from recruitment fairs for its students…
…the court [in Packingham v North Carolina] called cyberspace and social media “the modern public square”. If the court means what it says and sticks with the modern-square analogy, then it’s these companies that become vulnerable to first amendment challenges by users.
There are also other analogies to draw with what Google is doing (eg providing users information) that would not entitle it first amendment protection.
Much more at the link.
We also have the release of a movie entitled “The Creepy Line.” It’s about Google:
I found that trailer on YouTube, by the way—which is owned by Google.
The case of James Damore, represented by the superb attorney Harmeet Dhillon (who often appears on Tucker’s show), may well prove to a watershed in the public perception of Google.
I just did an item on the same google meeting video. Kismet.
@neo:The question is whether Google is a monopoly and whether antitrust legislation can be used to change that.
I don’t think we have to go that far. It’s whether Google is still justified in being treated as a common carrier under the FCC, and under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and getting the legal privileges that go with that, while at the same time interfering with content–when their status under these rules is predicated on their assurances that they did not interfere with content and hence should not be responsible for that content.
This article from Quillette illustrates one of the major developing dangers of having monopoly social media companies: they are being used for multiple cases of harassment and destruction.
https://quillette.com/2018/09/09/when-censorship-is-crowdsourced/
“Last month, Facebook, Apple and Google deleted gigabytes of video, audio and text content from Alex Jones’ Infowars web site — part of a larger speech-pruning process that is applied every day to numerous (less prominent) wing nuts who, like Jones, blur the line between conspiracism and hate-mongering. Twitter, on the other hand, allowed Jones’ Infowars and personal accounts to remain active — but then abruptly changed course in early September. Why? Who knows. All of these online services make users sign on to terms of-service agreements that prohibit abusive speech and the advocacy of violence. But the lines are blurry, and there’s lots of wiggle room. And even if there weren’t, it wouldn’t matter anyway since these are private companies that can pretty much ban anyone they want, so long as they’re willing to accept the blowback from remaining users. These companies aren’t making legal decisions when they block or don’t block one of their users. They’re effectively taking political positions on what is and isn’t beyond the bounds of mainstream discourse.
And since social media is the way we all communicate with one another every day, their power over information flows has become enormous. Taken together, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Reddit’s Alexis Ohanian and Google’s founding duo of Larry Page and Sergey Brin have far more impact on what we see and hear than any government.
…Compared to the situation a decade ago, the source of censorship in our lives has been massively decentralized.
In many creative spheres, in fact, censorship hasn’t just been decentralized. It’s been crowdsourced. Which is to say: The very writers, publishers, poets, musicians, comedians, media producers and artists who once worried about being muzzled by the government are now self-organizing on social media (Twitter, especially) to censor each other. In its mechanics, this phenomenon is so completely alien to top-down Big Brother-style censorship that it often doesn’t feel like censorship at all, but more like a self-directed Inquisition or Chinese communist “struggle session.” However, the overall effect of preventing the propagation of stigmatized ideas is achieved all the same.”
No one expects the……
(Google, Facebook, Twitter inquisitors)
It’s been pointed out by others that what’s bizarre is that they’ve manufactured such a monoculture in a company with thousands of employees. What’s even more peculiar is that they’ve gone out of their way to insert themselves into social and political disputes extraneous to their business interests. Did it ever occur to Bell Telephone to do that?
Apropos of nothing other than I found it on the internet today,
here is what sounds like an excellent depiction of the methods used by trolls on this and other blogs.
Despite the author’s leftist bias against all conservatives (not just creationists), he certainly describes a lot of the tendentious rants of his own cohort.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop
“The Gish Gallop (also known as proof by verbosity[1]) is the fallacious debate tactic of drowning your opponent in a flood of individually-weak arguments in order to prevent rebuttal of the whole argument collection without great effort. The Gish Gallop is a belt-fed version of the on the spot fallacy, as it’s unreasonable for anyone to have a well-composed answer immediately available to every argument present in the Gallop. The Gish Gallop is named after creationist Duane Gish, who often abused it.
Although it takes a trivial amount of effort on the Galloper’s part to make each individual point before skipping on to the next (especially if they cite from a pre-concocted list of Gallop arguments), a refutation of the same Gallop may likely take much longer and require significantly more effort (per the basic principle that it’s always easier to make a mess than to clean it back up again).
The tedium inherent in untangling a Gish Gallop typically allows for very little “creative license” or vivid rhetoric (in deliberate contrast to the exciting point-dashing central to the Galloping), which in turn risks boring the audience or readers, further loosening the refuter’s grip on the crowd.
This is especially true in that the Galloper need only win a single one out of all his component arguments in order to be able to cast doubt on the entire refutation attempt. For this reason, the refuter must achieve a 100% success ratio (with all the yawn-inducing elaboration that goes with such precision). “
Microsoft’s web browser was Internet Explorer and Netscape was its competitor. Several commenters over at Ace have pointed out the error but the post has not been changed.
I winder what percentage of Google employees are US citizens ?
How many H1B visa holders ?
Maybe that is just in companies, like Disney and the Edison company, that use them as low level programmers?
I used to use Netscape Navigator but the world wide web consortium revised the HTML specification in 1996 if recall correctly. Netscape did not revise their browser to comply with the new HTML specification but Microsoft did, so in 1998 I started using internet explorer. That was how Microsoft disadvantaged Netscape. They updated their browser to be compliant with the new HTML specification.
When the issue of breaking up the info-tech oligopolies has come up before, my simple-minded reaction has been that a legal case can be made, but to what end?
How exactly can Google be broken up so that the new parts don’t act just like the old parts? I’m not a lawyer, and never wanted to be one, but this is a knotty legal problem. Sorting it out is way beyond my expertise.
As far as I can tell, the companies need to be broken up, AND the relevant laws and regulations regarding “common carriers” need to be applied. Maybe someone’s already written about this. Any good references?
Someone else made the point recently, that it used to legal for a restauranteur to deny service to black people. He or she was running a private business after all. So through the Civil Rights Act and the courts we expanded the notion of “equal protection” I suppose. We’re well down the road of private businesses not being able to do what they want, aside from overt crimes.
The better avenue IMHO is anti-trust. I read the WSJ, Greg Ip article (the Neo link) again. It’s a solid article, though I disagree with the conclusion. The article states that Standard Oil produced a great product at a really cheap price, but also invented the technology of “thermal cracking” and then hid it under the guise of employee safety. When SO was split up, one of the spin-offs developed the technology to the great benefit of consumers. Lesson: what consumers are missing under a monopoly often goes unseen.
While the whole topic is a large one, here is Wikipedia on the Sherman Antirust Act.
“The Sherman Act broadly prohibits (1) anticompetitive agreements and (2) unilateral conduct that monopolizes or attempts to monopolize the relevant market.”
“The purpose of the Sherman Act is … to preserve a competitive marketplace to protect consumers from abuses.”
Now Greg Ip (and he claims the DOJ) interprets “protecting the consumer” as giving them more stuff at lower prices. To me, that seems much narrower than “protecting consumers from abuses.” The stuff is now not gasoline or widgets but speech, especially political speech.
I suppose the consumer protection doctrines are well established, but on the other hand, when Google actively suppresses Yelp results or other competitor’s search results, and we know they have; then they run afoul of the direct language in the Sherman Act.
It is no accident that Eric Schmidt as CEO of Novell was very active in Wash. DC and was one of the chief promoters of attacking Microsoft via anti-trust law. And Microsoft stupidly avoided engaging in politics. It is also known that Schmidt and upper Google/Alphabet management have made many hundreds of visits to the Obama Whitehouse.
Cornflour
I don’t think there are any solutions that aren’t significantly ugly, but in the case of Microsoft a judge picks a “special master” expert (or it could be a group) and installs them as a top management overseer. I’d like to see that overview of references too.
Even if it all turns out to be legal and defensible, it is important to keep illustrating that this is happening. the bias is real. It is not the fevered claims of paranoids.
From all the signs I am seeing emerge–especially more and more over these last several weeks–It appears to me that all of these gigantic, Leftist-dominated/run** communication platforms that have grown to control the lion’s share of today’s personal level research and communication around the world–Google, Youtube, Facebook, etc.–have launched a coordinated campaign to shut down the ability of anyone who does not share their leftist ideology to use their platforms to express and to communicate i.e. spread their conservative viewpoints and ideas to others.
As I posted the other day, I also suspect that they have also been tampering with search results to eliminate conservative content.
This deliberate campaign of suppression of conservative thought having the immediate goals of stopping the apparently growing hemorrhage of Democrat voters/supporters that the #Walkaway movement has stimulated, as well as discouraging and diminishing the vote for conservative/Republican candidates in the upcoming midterms.
The most recent case in point, yesterday’s reported new incident of Facebook banning of Brian Straka, the founder of what appears to be a wildly proliferating “#Walkaway” movement; a movement of former Democrats who have walked away in disgust from the increasingly far left Democrat party, it’s increasing violence and hatred, it’s actual history, it’s ideology and positions, and it’s candidates.
The #Walkaway movement appeared to be roaring along, and gaining great momentum, as those who made the decision to #Walkaway used videos to share their very varied, genuine, and personal “walkaway moments,” their reasons for doing so, via Facebook and Youtube.
Leftists first tried to shut this very damaging #Walkaway movement down by claiming that those who posted their #Walkaway stories were either “Russian bots,” or were paid actors reading from scripts. But, those claims got no traction.
So, some other method had to be tried to stop “#Walkaway,” and throttled back it has been by these crippling bans on Straka’s ability to use Facebook to get out the word about an upcoming couple day, October 26-28 march on Washington and rally–planned to be held before the midterms–that Straka was just starting to publicize.
Facebook’s reported justification for a 30 day ban on Straka? Facebook had recently permanently banned Infowars and it’s founder. It’s reported that Straka mentioned that he was to appear on the Infowors show, so Facebook imposed their 30 day ban on Straka.
These companies have just gotten too much control over the flow and content of information and, thus, their ability, through their control, to shape pubic knowledge, perceptions, and actions–like voting.
They simply have too much power and absolutely no accountability, as illustrated by their lame excuses of technical glitches, or simple confusion in the application of their supposed “community standards”–vague, never really defined, could mean anything standards that they themselves just made up out of whole cloth–as being responsible for bans on users and what they want to say, bans that miraculously only seem to be punitively applied against those on the Conservative side of the political spectrum.
Laws must be passed to force these gigantic, way too powerful companies—really “public utilities”—to be “transparent” and even-handed in their policies and the application of their procedures, and to ban them from restricting each individual’s Freedom of Speech that is guaranteed by the First Amendment.
** (see the secretly recorded video, released yesterday, of Google’s top level Management weeping and wailing about Trump’s victory and it’s possible effects at Google’s first ever, 2016 “all hands” meeting.)
Ah, that should be “shape public knowledge,” not “shape pubic knowledge,” although they probably would like to control that, if they could.
Snow on Pine:
“it’s increasing violence and hatred, it’s actual history, it’s ideology and positions, and it’s candidates.” … “and it’s possible effects at Google’s first ever”
it’s or its?
We’ve all done it. Abuse it over and over, but it never complains. Masochism, courage, or patience? Let it be its own judge. I recuse myself.
My partial solution here is to make them pay for the goods that they are selling, namely your and my information. When you buy produce, meat, cleaning products, or whatever else you get at the local supermarket, they buy from a wholesaler and then turn around and sell to you at retail. There is absolutely no reason why Google, Facebook, or whomever shouldn’t pay you every time they sell your information to an advertiser. Standard retail mark up is 4x, so if they, for example, are selling names to Toyota at 4 cents a name, you should get a penny. The more detailed information about you that they sell, the bigger the cut should be. What’s more, they should be forced to inform you of the name of who’s buying and give you the right of refusal. I don’t know if this would help, but it would put a crimp in their income and might make them a little more aware of the world outside their bubble.
“what’s bizarre is that they’ve manufactured such a monoculture in a company with thousands of employees.”
What percent are H 1B visa holders?
There are other issues at work. One is the Qchan matter and 4 chan and 8chan.
I don’t know much about this but some say it is a significant factor, especially in the Alex Jones ban.
Assistant Village Idiot on September 13, 2018 at 4:44 pm at 4:44 pm said:
Even if it all turns out to be legal and defensible, it is important to keep illustrating that this is happening. the bias is real. It is not the fevered claims of paranoids.
* * *
You aren’t paranoid if they really are out to get you.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/09/on-puerto-rico-trump-is-right.php
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/09/the-kavanaugh-smear-why-now.php
https://hotair.com/archives/2018/09/13/saletan-lefts-response-weekly-standard-fact-check-proves-need-conservative-fact-checkers/
“t’s not often that I recommend a piece published at Slate, but this piece by William Saletan is the exception. As you may be aware, left-wing site Think Progress published a piece this week titled, “Brett Kavanaugh said he would kill Roe v. Wade last week and almost no one noticed.” The Weekly Standard wrote a fact-check of that piece saying the headline was false. Usually, no one at Think Progress would care about that, but in this case, they did care because the Weekly Standard is one of a handful of organizations which Facebook has partnered with for fact-checking. That meant that whenever the TP story was shared on Facebook (where they get a sizeable chuck of their traffic), there was also a note indicating it had been rated false by the Standard.
To say that the left reacted with outrage would be to undersell it. Here’s Saletan’s summary of the uniform reaction denouncing Facebook for partnering with the right:”
…
The many revelations concerning Google are indeed grim, but the adage about hard cases making bad law is particularly applicable where the murky, emotional, and industry-changing world of antitrust is concerned. The antitrust statutes themselves are so absurdly vague and the caselaw so confused, that former ABA antitrust section head Edwin Rockefeller has likened the field to a “religion.”
These problems are particularly acute where Section 2 monopolization claims are advanced. The industry structures and actions of the defendants in the Standard Oil and Microsoft cases, for example, were very complex and it is far from certain that either prosecution was warranted (e.g., refined oil prices fell substantially during the Standard Oil era). These and other Section 2 cases, however, have had profound effects — almost uniformly negative — upon how firms do business throughout the economy.
Economists are not all-knowing gods, and neither are antitrust lawyers or financial columnists (Tom Hazlett and Holman Jenkins are worth reading on these issues, though). Google, Facebook and its brethren are up to much political mischief, but they have also added trillions of dollars to the economy. As I recall, various early 1900 antitrust suits drove the railroad industry into virtual bankruptcy, and ultimately into the hands of the Interstate Commerce Commission. Making similar mistakes in Silicon Valley would be a horrendous mistake.
I agree with Frederick that the question of whether Google is a “publisher” is key.
I also wonder Google and its comrades have violated Section 1 of the Sherman Act, which prohibits agreements in restraint of trade. Google and other Silicon Valley firms may have conspired, for example, through interlocking directorates to blacklist conservative engineers, such as James Damore. In U.S. v. eBay, a federal court found that Meg Whitman had entered into an illegal “handshake” agreement with Intuit president Scott Cook for “skilled employees.”
Facebook should be nationalized, or highly regulated with a newly formed Digital Utilities Commission.
All speech that would be allowed as legal, not inciting direct violence, should be allowed. There needs to be clear, public criteria about what speech is not allowed, and only that speech will be suppressed by the US-FB platform.
Google needs to be broken up into at least 4: 1) Search; 2) YouTube (& video / music search); 3) Android & OS; 4) email + maps + other stuff.
Breaking Search up into regional search doesn’t make sense, but breaking it out of Alphabet (the newish Google legal holding company) and keeping it separate does make sense.
The Digital Utilities Commission needs to regulate what info on users is shared between companies.
Before this, there should be increasing taxes on on-line ads for those monopolists with 50% or more market share.
I think Richard Fernandez described the situation succinctly yesterday in his Belmont Club post at PJ media in the context of Kuhn’s description of the varying ways an established paradigm responds to the emergence of a dissenting paradigm. “Which way the crisis will develop is suggested by the institutional strength of the progressive paradigm. It will try to stay unchanged and is so powerful that suppression and coexistence are likely to be more likely than the acceptance of error as a response to dissidence. Suppression is already in evidence.”
1. Make Google move to Omaha.
2. What’s up with adults wearing hats with propellers?
It’s extremely difficult to change that, since modern left behaves as a intolerant cult. That causes that they will take control and invade every company.
This social dynamic has been incredible well explained by Nassim Taleb (the author from The Black Swan).
The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority
https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15
“Qualify for first amendment protections” is an odd framing.
I mean, all you have to do to qualify is engage in speech. Once that’s established, the burden of proof is on the government. They have to prove that their law or action is constitutional, and often that mean they must go thru “strict scrutiny”, the highest level of judicial review.
Google doesn’t have to prove that they are entitled to constitutional protection. That’s assumed, once speech is demonstrated.
The author of the article moves the goalposts. Now Google must demonstrate that they are like the NYTimes. Well, that’s not the standard. Worse still, even if they are assumed to be neutral platform like a public square, which they are not, this doesn’t mean they do not enjoy 1A protection.
The cited precedent, Rumsfeld v Forum of Academic and Institutional Rights, involves government funding…or whether 1A protests expressive platforms from losing government funding is they refuse to allow certain viewpoints to use their platform (in this case, military recruiters on campus).
Scotus said the 1A doesn’t apply. But that’s a very long way from the 1A not allowing for viewpoint discrimination.
“2. What’s up with adults wearing hats with propellers?”
I thought the same thing Cornhead. It’s a cult, they are cultists. I work at a big, successful tech company, have for a very long time. There are people here who are true believers in the company and its products and services, in a Catholics vs Baptists, mine is better than yours sort of way. They stay with the company until they no longer believe. For me this is a job that finances my life. I watch the cultists come and go. Fortunately I’m never made to swear my fealty, by wearing a silly hat or any other gaudy way.
Conspiracies in restraint of trade – whether it be in the labor market or in the goods market – needs to be dealt with harshly by state and federal prosecutors. That should mean prosecuting companies and persons. The actions against Infowars were co-ordinated, and that should trigger prosecution.
I doubt Google qualifies as a monopoly as an economist would understand the term (though Youtube might). There are readily available alternatives.
What’s puzzling is why Zuckerberg, Brin, et al painted this target on their back. It’s another episode of gleichschaltung.
The other puzzling business is why companies like MasterCard and PayPal have elected to take orders from the $PLC. Morris Dees is a scam artist and anyone who’s done minimal research into his organization has not excuse not to know it.
@Manju:Google doesn’t have to prove that they are entitled to constitutional protection. That’s assumed, once speech is demonstrated.
Google is NOT entitled to common carrier status under the FCC or the protections of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Those legal privileges were granted and can be rescinded, if they no longer behave in the way that they claimed they did when they sought those privileges.
Frederick, I would assume that common carrier status refers to Google’s actual internet infrastructure business, like Google Fiber.
Either way, the Trump admin’s repeal of net neutrality would make the point moot, no?
@Manju:like Google Fiber.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is not about Google Fiber, unless there is a Google Time Machine I haven’t heard about.
Frederick,
Looking into it a little further, I see that protection under the Act is not dependent on being a neutral party:
https://www.bna.com/insight-communications-decency-n73014482221/
Indeed, it appears the Act is designed to protect non-neutral platforms, like alleged International Socialists Facebook, even thought they claim to be neutral…like Finland during the Cold War or something. But I digress…
To make matter worse, the Trump admin has moved to eradicate Net-Neutrality. So even ISP’s can pick and choose who gets the top spot without worrying about the Government coming in to tell them to stop.
So I don’t see how Google gets wacked under your proposal.