Should be interesting to compare to the internally squashed FTC report here: <a href="http://graphics.wsj.com/google-ftc-report/" rel="nofollow">http://graphics.wsj.com/google-ftc-report/</a>
What's the goal or endgame for these antitrust cases...<p>If antitrust is entirely delegated to courts, it's hard to see how it ever becomes more than a "compliance" issue. Fines and/or mandatory adjustments to current MOs. That's hardly trustbusting.<p>The big pieces aren't a secret. Market share, the big competitive dynamics, income streams and overall structure of the search-ads "industry" and its adjacent, also Google dominated markets like android, youtube and chrome.<p>How is a judge supposed to decide what to do about all this... Seems like the wrong tool for the job.
I'm torn between whether I should distrust this site because it's pretending to be associated with Bloomberg ... or if I should distrust this website because it may actually be associated with Bloomberg.
For the sake of discussion let's just say Google is broken up. Let's also say that it's broken up such that Google Search, Google Ads, and YouTube are separate entities (among others).<p>In this new broken up set of companies, what's stopping them from remerging like Bell? Also, what's stopping them from giving each other favorable partnerships?<p>Personally I find this entire exercise a waste of time - rather than break up Google we should just acknowledge that certain industries have certain types of attributes that result in necessarily "anti-competitive" behavior. In Google's case, since it's an internet company I would say the more users it has the harder it is to beat - with that being said they should just create some sort of progressive taxation as a function of users.<p>Your users in the USA equal 90%+ of the country, you are subject to rules A. Your users in the USA equal to <10%? You are subject to rules B and are subsidized directly by those whose users equal 90%+. If all companies are less than 50% than we use rules c, for example.<p>The same logic could be used for manufacturing, utilities, internet providers, and more.
Does this mean the content of Google searches now will be sent directly to the U.S. gov't and state gov'ts? It seems like the kind of privacy intrusion that would concern everyday people.
If Google is prohibited from paying for default search engine status, because it is judged a monopoly, will that condemn us all to default Yahoo or Bing, like Firefox tried a few years ago? Google should at least be able to match the top bid of its competitors, so that device manufaturers / browser developers can make a pro-user choice (i.e. Google) without losing revenue.
LOL 30 days. Even a Googler who wanted that data would be waiting a minimum of half a year before anyone from the logs access rotation even glanced at their ticket.<p>Plus, one wonders if Google even holds the data the US government is requesting.<p>Plusplus, I hate it when "granular" is used as if it has a direction, which it does not. Are the feds asking for fine-grained data, or coarse-grained data?