Google and Evolution of the Internet

[Vagrant0]

 

I am not the only person making the claim that Google squelches their competition, and it's moronic to claim any company would choose to not do so when they're given the opportunity.

 

I know you didn't even bother to look at this when it was posted by RattleandGrind. But feel free to take another. Actually look this time.

 

The first thing listed is not Google. The second thing listed is not Google. The third thing listed is a wikipedia page listing dozens of search engines. The forth listing is Bing, Google's biggest competition. The 5th listing is a page that says specifically "Say goodbye to Google." I'm not sure we're agreeing on the definition of squelch or control here. Even as far as "manipulated" search results go, I decided to manually type in "Google.com", then type in "Search Engines" and got the same exact results as RattleandGrind, Based on this, and a few other test searches I attempted, I'm tempted to believe that any supposed "bubble" doesn't seem to exist any more. But hey, compare with your own results:

1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5

 

Notice how the only place that anything related to Google shows up in the top 5 results is in with Android apps, and still it is 4th on that list despite the fact that most android devices use Google software. Still going to claim that Google is trying to shut out competition or control information? I'd even be tempted to guess that the first search... a topic which has been actively suppressed in the USA would have the same results for someone searching from outside the US. The only "manipulated" results I seemed to get was in relation to the sorts of things which are adjusted based on location... Such as listing insurance providers in the state where I am connecting from higher on the list instead of providers from around the world, but rest assured, I only had to go a few pages to find listings from the next state over, and a dozen more pages to get a provider in the UK... So it's not hiding results, but rather adjusting the ranking of them based on what can be logically assumed by my geographical position and somewhat ambiguous search terms. But hey, feel free to post your own comparison images to show how Google is trying to force to use their services or hide things from you.

 

 

 

No, you aren't the only person who is claiming this, but you are the one who is present. Just because someone else makes a good case for something, or that parts of Europe have sued over this issue does not necessarily mean that everything about it is correct or describing the whole situation. Naturally, these governments have a personal stake in the matter when it comes to the activities within their countries being monitored and recorded by a company in the USA which has to respond to requests from the FBI and CIA. Naturally, when you have a large portion of the market share people will come up with conspiracy theories, or justify their beliefs about this large entity anyway they can. But this is where a healthy dose of skepticism and actually researching things with an open mind can help you see past the propaganda, tin-hat theories, or unfounded fears. The current CEO of the company gives every impression of someone who understands exactly what is at stake, and who can understand what is best for the longevity of the company he founded instead of what earns him the quickest buck.

 

I hate to break it to you, but as of 2013, EVERY e-mail provider in the US and most of the EU is monitoring the content of your e-mails. Those companies who refused to comply with this law and try to maintain encryption on e-mail services were shut down or seized by the government. One instance of this can be read about in detail here as it was connected with the activities of Snowden. Most ISPs currently are also under similar orders to monitor and record your behavior online. Whatever assumptions you might have had about privacy are already non-existent, and were obliterated under the guise of National Security. The only reason why our physical mail hasn't been met with the same treatment is because it is much harder to search packages without leaving behind evidence that they have been searched. But rest assured they still photograph every piece of mail that passes through their system, and have probably been working on technology to scan the contents of that mail as well. Nevermind the ability of the government to make use of drones to physically track and record your behavior. Sometimes, the people in the tin-foil hats are actually onto something. It would be almost concerning if it wasn't for the fact that none of this recording or monitoring has led to any major crackdowns in human trafficking, the drug trade, terrorism (planned or not), or any of the other things that they've used to justify this monitoring... Not even the false alarms that can occur from bored teenagers typing silly things into a web browser or people who are extreme gun/explosive enthusiasts.

[TheMastersSon]

"But hey, feel free to post your own comparison images to show how Google is trying to force to use their services or hide things from you."

 

It's not a claim that Google are hiding things from you, it's their official company policy. Currently 90% of the world has no clue exactly what is being hidden from them, or why. Only Google and other manipulated engines know.

 

"Just because someone else makes a good case for something, or that parts of Europe have sued over this issue does not necessarily mean that everything about it is correct or describing the whole situation."

 

Parts of Europe? Ok at this point I need to back out of my own thread, because to be blunt you appear to be abysmally unread on this subject, or are simply shilling for Google. Or both. Read slowly:

 

http://googleopoly.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Googles-Anti-Competitive-Rap-Sheet-May-2014.pdf

[RattleAndGrind]

Over half a century ago I discovered that in the world of debate, there are the gracious and the childish.

 

The gracious acknowledge the arguments of others, appreciate the efforts of those opposed to their premise and generally accept that someone else was better prepared with more reasonable and rational arguments.

 

What you see above is the other sort.

[TheMastersSon]

RattleAndGrind, what a coincidence, because over a half century ago I discovered people who cannot answer points in debates have no option but to personally attack whoever is making those points. With all of your (and Vagrant0's) typing, neither of you have offered a single third alternative for preventing what happened to cable TV, commercial radio etc from happening (or rather, intentionally being done) to the internet -- despite more than enough evidence that this process was already well underway in our country. There was definitely enough evidence for our FCC to justify Title II protections for internet traffic.

 

As for your other comment, I challenge anyone to read this discussion from start to finish and tell us where most of the lack of graciousness, personal sideswipes and hostility have come from.

[Vagrant0]

There was definitely enough evidence for our FCC to justify Title II protections for internet traffic.

 

They may be justified, in fairness I have not cared to read through all the legalese described in this, but given the state of the world as it currently exists... It won't actually work the way you think it will. The US government itself is far too interested in monitoring internet traffic for its own purposes. There's no reason for the FCC to dictate policies towards encryption when the government is actively shutting down anyone who offers encrypted services. As far as private data goes, that ship sailed LONG, long ago. Anyone who has any idea about the current state of the internet is well aware of this fact, to point that experts have predicted that children born today will not actually have any sense of the concept of privacy by the time they are adults. If a service does not support encoding of passwords or data transmitted (such as most places requiring a password, financial transactions and similar), that information is essentially public domain. This is unfortunately fact, FCC or no. The NSA has higher priority on this issue... which is why it can order your ISP to turn over explicit records of everything you have done online if it has reason to make this request. You may not remember it, but remember that whole deal with Apple refusing to give police backdoor access to iPhones several months ago... The only reason this made any sort of news was because Apple is the only company that operates in the USA who did not immediately cave under the threats of the FBI... And eventually they gave in. More reading on a related matter. More reading. Even more reading. Yet more reading. Still think that you have Privacy online or that the FCC is something to help you in all this?

 

Yet to enforce consumer complaints that ISPs are violating the FCC’s proposed privacy rules, the agency will need expansive access to data traffic, not only of the complaining consumer but of other consumers. Providing technical back-doors for governments, however, is precisely the outcome Apple, WhatsApp, and other participants in the internet ecosystem are spending so much political capital to avoid. If history is any guide, it’s clear that once government agencies gain access to personal information, the likelihood of that data leaking elsewhere — the NSA, but also the IRS, the INS, and other regulators — is nearly 100%.

The same situation applies to any other service.

 

 

As for offering evidence of a third party... You havn't even bothered to look at what evidence I've given you that shows that google is obviously no longer manipulating search results in their own favor. In fact, it would be a fair argument to claim that Google is intentionally manipulating search results so that its own services do not appear high on the list of results. Regardless, you havn't bothered to take notice of any of the search engines I mentioned by name... Some of them operating from their own software and webcrawler bots. You've completely ignored the Chinese web (and companies(despite them actively censoring content, having misleading results and essentially being the actual evil that people claim Google is)) which operates largely without any influence from the West. On every single service that Google operates on, there are competitors both locally and globally, and are services that Google lists within Google search above those services offered by Google. I have provided more than enough evidence here to show that Google is not the only game in town, is not trying to force people to use their services. Any claims to the contrary are simply outdated and disproven within moments of doing your own search in the alleged engine. Their data collection policies are still something I personally disagree with, and there is good reason to be concerned with a US based company recording activities around the world... But much of these activities are still less personal than what your own government is doing or what people are intentionally sharing online (facebook, twitter, instagram, ect). And most of these claims have been addressed over the years... Because they are not a company with practices set in stone (search algorithms changed hundreds of times a year). Competition is only one way to prevent abuse... Modifying practices internally because they prove to be the wrong practices also works. The fact of the matter is that other companies do exist out there, and in most cases they are simply inferior or just horrible companies. Google is not perfect, but in perspective it is a hell of a lot better than some of the alternatives (Microsoft, Apple, Baidu, Yahoo, ect).

 

As to what you have linked as your mountain of evidence against Google, most of these reports you have linked are old news or just completely bogus claims being listed because most people looking at it will just go "wow this is serious" without actually reading further. You might as well have linked me to the pile of pro-Hillary/Trump conspiracy theories, atleast those are an entertaining read with less legalese.

 

For example... from your magic link http://googleopoly.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Googles-Anti-Competitive-Rap-Sheet-May-2014.pdf

 

The top, most recent listing on that page links to http://bit.ly/1kjmTqo which links to http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_SPEECH-14-345_en.htm where no mention of Google is present and the document talks about a patent dispute between Motorola, Samsung, and Apple.

 

Below that... http://wapo.st/1hafIP9 links to https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/apple-google-agree-to-settle-lawsuit-alleging-hiring-salary-conspiracy/2014/04/24/56f1bb32-cbff-11e3-95f7-7ecdde72d2ea_story.html which is a brief article describing the fact that several large tech companies made an agreement to not poach employees from eachother as the practice of this within a microcosm like Silicon Valley is mutually destructive... A matter that is extremely common in business. This is an agreement not just about Google, but rather one that Google made with Apple and a number of smaller companies in the area to agree to not compete for offering salaries... Rather than offering as much money as they wanted and getting the best and the brightest of the workforce. I know you aren't that knowledgeable about business practices... But this sort of agreement is actually very anti-monopoly since those who are part of it aren't trying to siphon the talent out of nearby competitors and force smaller companies into a destructive bidding war for employees. So why is it something they were sued for? Because people want more money and the ability to force their employers to give them a pay increase in order to keep their services. Sometimes there is no perfect solution and it is still better for the company and most of their employees to just settle these claims and carry on.

 

Below that... https://www.scribd.com/doc/215479291/BEUC-s-Google-Complaint which links to a settled complaint where google showed willingness to change the way its search engine works. The particular complaint here is not in relation to anything about Google as a company, but rather how it ranked prices listed from commercial site services suggesting favoritism. It did not even go to court, but Google was more than willing to adjust their search engine to correct for this assumed bias.

 

Going down the list to #49 http://bit.ly/1rKAZG1 which links to http://www.fairsearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Commissioner-of-Competition-v.-Google-Canada-Corp.pdf .While this does indeed link to an actual legal document, the content of this document doesn't actually contain any meaningful information. The only thing it does contain is the formalities related to requesting formation in order to prove a claim (the claim starts at page 24). From page 34...

 

The plantiff, Perfect 10, is a Calafornia corporation... consists mainly of selling, on its website, "adult" images of mostly naked women. It does not have an office or any employees in Canada. It had 13 Canadian customers out of 600 worldwide at the time of this initial litigation.

Now I know that you probably aren't familiar with legal proceedings, but cases like this are the sort of thing where just about anyone can make whatever claims they want in order to file for proof of wrongdoing. In this case, the requests made by this company, both within the US court were thrown out. Based on what I can find from the CCB website, they have also decided not to bother with this claim. No court hearing was held, no information was verified. And there is most definitely not anything as silly as "CCB charges Google with ~90% control" of anything. Again, you failed at your homework. In fact that whole block going from 43 to 49 is this same exact document... Made by a small porn company trying to sue Google because google cached thumbnails of their images, among other claims that didn't show enough merit in any of the courts where it was applied. Claims made by a company who apparently has a history of frivolous lawsuits.

 

In regards to marketshare, this is somewhat more accurate.

https://www.netmarketshare.com/

Chrome at 21% of market

Android Operating system at 66% of market

Google web search 72.48% of desktop market, 89.83% of mobile search market (only thing close to 90% here).

But this last point is mostly because Yahoo dropped the ball when the net bubble crashed and other companies were using mostly inferior code. These metrics are also looking at things from a global perspective instead of one related to traffic just in the USA, where it has the most native competition. In terms of the Greater Picture , they've lost prominence.

 

 

42 links to something creditable https://gigaom.com/2013/12/20/europe-rejects-googles-antitrust-settlement-proposals-yet-again/... But as my images that I linked above show, clearly Google is no longer doing these things. Yay, legal action works. Changes are possible.

 

24-27 are a similar thing... all the same document. The document in question posted in 2012, discussing a 2010 investigation. http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_SPEECH-12-372_en.htm?locale=en describes little in terms of condemning information.

 

In this case, Google Inc. has repeatedly expressed to me its willingness to discuss any concerns that the Commission might have without having to engage in adversarial proceedings.

Most of the findings listed here are again, things which Google has remedied.

 

Do I really need to go on? This master document you have provided is designed to be intentionally deceptive (self-described rapsheet). The contents of the links, if anything, show that Google is more than willing to correct itself and work with competitors. And, once you start digging through the duplicate entries, the mislabeled entries, ect... What you're left with are things which Google has corrected itself or things which no longer apply to any meaningful degree.

 

As for regulation and laws passed to control Google.

 

But it’s also probably a necessary cost of freedom of expression on the Internet. If the government could interfere with Google’s search results, it would also hold the power to meddle with review sites like Yelp—or, in the extreme, the editorial judgment of individual webmasters who curate information and present it to readers in a customized order. The Supreme Court barred this state intrusion into free expression in print form 41 years ago. There’s really no reason the rules should be different just because the marketplace of ideas has relocated to the Internet.

 

 

I know I'm not going to answer your points to your satisfaction... I doubt such a state can be achieved at this point. But I did address them, which is more than you have done.

[TheMastersSon]

Vagrant0, with the amount of effort you've put in this discussion, and imo intentional ignorance, it's hard to believe you're not specifically shilling for Google, and I'm still trying to understand your larger positions. Are you saying Google is trustworthy, because they've 'corrected' their 'mistakes' every time they've been caught behaving badly (but entirely predictably)? Is it your position that Google or any company has a primary responsibility other than to maximize ROI for its shareholders, and will magically decide to not squelch their own competition to the precise degree that they're allowed to by law? Do you believe internet traffic does not require government regulation, or that no regulation is preferable to any regulation?

 

Your netmarketshare numbers reiterate my earlier point. Bing and Yahoo account for the entire gap between Google's 72% stated share and the 90+% market share routinely cited in antitrust lawsuits filed against them, because these other two engines are also manipulated and return simply subsets of the exact same pathetically limited results as Google. Neither Bing nor Yahoo qualify as an alternative to Google for this reason, which leaves the latter with an effective global monopoly on our planet's view of itself.

[JimboUK]

it's hard to believe you're not specifically shilling for Google

 

This is classic conspiracy theorist behaviour, when someone proves you wrong and Vagrant has done that, you accuse the person of being part of that conspiracy. You have no evidence whatsoever that Google manipulate results, in fact it's easy to prove otherwise, ad promoted searches are the only ones boosted up and they are clearly labeled as such. Google offer a ton of services that people use every day and we don't pay a penny for it, they've broken Microsofts pay for everything model, they've broken Apples dominance in the mobile space, YouTube shares its revenue with content creators, something that used to be unheard of, they give away hundreds of millions to various causes, their employees are allowed to spend work hours working for charitable causes, there's a long list of positives, they're no angels but they're far from the fascist business you accuse them of being.

 

There is no need for regulation, the market is the best regulator as proven by Google+.

[TheMastersSon]

"There is no need for regulation, the market is the best regulator as proven by Google+."

 

That must be why our FCC gave Title II protections to internet traffic.

 

Turn on a radio or basic cable TV. There's your future for the internet. It's not my future for it, and fortunately it's also not our government's.

 

Look, instead of arguing over the future, which is utterly pointless since time will tell what happens, let's simply watch and learn. As much grief as it might cause to some, I guarantee you, within three years Google will either be forced (legally) to offer an option for unmanipulated search results (as they did for years), forcibly divested of their search engine or out of business altogether. It's self-evident to any six year-old child that a company with an effective lock on a market, and free reign to artificially maintain that lock, will choose to do so. No other choice is possible, no matter how much lip service the company gives. To expect otherwise from any company is absolute stupidity. They are not in business to give their competitors any advantage.

[RattleAndGrind]

Quoting sources which contradict your theory does not make anyone a liar. Presenting alternative interpretations of what we read does not mean we are "shilling for Google". Not accepting your premise does not mean everyone is "deliberately ignorant". Expressing the opinion that some of your arguments make no sense does not mean that we are "intentionally misinterpreting" your position. Expressing opinions on demonstrated behaviors is not a "personal attack".

 

Several here have provided ample evidence to debunk you claims against Google. You have failed to meet the burden of proof necessary to convince us here that your position is valid.

[TheMastersSon]

You should speak for yourself instead of the entire site, because we're STILL waiting for you or someone to offer a third alternative to regulation or eventual loss of the internet in its current form.

 

From your other posts you sound old enough to remember what FM radio and cable TV were like, before this same decay process. Do you wish the same fate for the internet? Vagrant0's defense of Comcast in the encrypted traffic issue answered this question imo. Some people apparently do.

 

I started this thread hoping to discuss theories for explanations of our current situation, a world where 90% of everything is known on the global internet, only because of the blessings of a single company. I never imagined it would drift into a debate on whether the situation even exists, and I'd be forced to defend the assumption that it does. Especially in a gaming site forum.

 

I can offer another anecdote of how Google in its currently manipulated state severely limits consumer choice. We spent six weeks researching furniture manufacturers online, trying to find one that still make their products in the U.S. We had to find out through a telephone conversation with a dealer about MGBW in North Carolina, who do exactly that for much of their furniture. All Google could manage was to point us to Amazon and their fly by-night fronts for organized counterfeiting and fraud in China. And eBay auctions which function in the exact same capacity.

 

Or here's another fun exercise: anyone reading this is hereby challenged to find a single set of stainless steel measuring cups produced anywhere in America, by using Google. Ready? Go.

 

You may now claim that a nation of 320 million people no longer has a single company that make stainless steel measuring cups in their/our own country.

 

The belief that Google or any other company will or even can act against its own best interests, in my head must rank as some kind of all-time nadir of stupidity in our country. As with all public companies their primary responsibility is to their own shareholders and nobody else. They will limit themselves in accordance with our law, which is why the lesser of two evils (regulation) is necessary.

Edited August 21, 2016 by TheMastersSon