5/9/2023 0 Comments Falling blocks tv tropes![]() I absolutely hate people who look at a successful product, grow to depend on it, and think its success should be a valid reason to impose regulations, or that it should enter public ownership. This does not describe a 'typical' relationship of equals under contact law. ![]() Is such regulation needed here? I don't know - but although TV Tropes is hardly a paragon of virtue, looking at it comparatively to the Internet at large, even dismissing the explicitly erotic, they are hardly anyone's definition of obscene, and yet a complaint to Google could result in a unilateral suspension of services on which they had come to depend, without warning or an attempt to correct the issue from both sides.Īnd let us be clear here - this was an exchange of goods and services - Google provided the ads, TV Tropes provided the space - and yet the suspension *was* initiated unilaterally and without warning or even complaint to the offending partner. In this case, yes, Google's domination of the market allows them to deliver ad rates well above that of any competitor and still gain a profit, and that in turn means that Google's definition of family friendly can have a chilling effect regardless of whether that definition is reflective of society. When a single entity dominates the market, that transparency and capacity to contract as equals disappears - of *course* success is a valid reason to regulate. A 'market', of any type, depends on a high degree of transparency and the ability to exchange one provider of a good or service for another It may not be *fair* that a sufficient level of success creates the very domination of a market that distorts these, but I am only aware of Rand acolytes willing to staunchly deny this as a matter of course - even most libertarians I know will grant that. ![]() That doesn't sit well with a large portion of slashdotters either so there's really no remaining alternative. But they do have one competitor, though it's about a quarter the size of Google: Microsoft. French courts have ruled that they are (I'd paste a link but Chrome has had problems pasting into slashdot these days - use Google :) to find a court ruling from France on July 2). That suggests a question - does Google have an advertising monopoly? It's a tough question. It's merely that relatively innocent actions, when backed up by an effective monopoly, have profound effects. And to be clear, I don't think Sergei Brin is sitting atop a dark tower laughing maniacally and screaming "by the power of this monopoly SOON ALL WILL BE UNDER MY CONTROL". I don't think this incident is a huge deal, though I do find it frustrating that TV Tropes will be a little harder to use the next time I decide to lose myself in its pages for a while. This particular case smells like a light form of censorship, which is particularly unpopular on slashdot. That tends to be controversial - sure, we're mostly okay if they refuse to do business with explicitly pro-slavery organizations, but as you back off into grey areas more and more people's hackles start to rise. It's not for free - they have to include Google content and follow rules about how it displays, and now the terms seem to be changing out from under them to also have to hide their own content behind an annoying, user-unfriendly click-through.īasically the problem is that Google is wielding an advertising monopoly to dictate the business terms of its suppliers (supplying eyeballs and data). It will become both "too big to fail" and "big enough to fuck everything up". Since the Justice Department has been asleep at the wheel for the past several decades, Google will not be broken up as it should be. There probably was a point somewhere between Google being a search engine and Google being an advertising agency and Google being an ISP, and Google having trucks with cameras and wi-fi sniffers driving down every street in the world, where it crossed the line. A further problem is that there will seldom be a point at which you can say, "There! Now it has become a danger." ![]() It's one reason (among many) that the free market will always end up being "un-free". And unfortunately, there is no mechanism of the "free market" which deals with this. It's one reason why there's such a danger in any single company getting as big, and as ubiquitous as Google has become. The technical term for this kind of thing is "Chilling Effect". But the content itself hasn't actually changed!
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |