The FTC wants to sue Google, and now it may have found the charges that stick

http://qz.com/23718/the-ftc-really-wants-to-sue-google-and-now-it-may-have-found-the-charges-that-stick/

by donohoe • 14 years ago

14 25 14 years ago

dalke2• 14 years ago

donohoe: You say that you are "Product Engineering Director for Quartz" and comment that you "do post stuff from qz.com on rare occasions cos I naturally come across it as part of my work".

10 of your last 13 posts, all within a month, are to your company. I think you need to change your about text and remove the words "rare occasions".

tatsuke95• 14 years ago

I get a lot of links to Quartz from another (financial) website I frequent.

I've never been able to get a page to load in Chrome, so I've never read a single article from the site.

donohoe2• 14 years ago

Really - what version? Screenshot? (email in profile)

donohoe2• 14 years ago

Yes! I do say that!

The three main sites I visit are NYTimes, Hacker News and Quartz.

This is a breakdown of my postings in the last 244 days.

  Quartz  - 16
  NYTimes - 20
  Misc    - 24

As I tried to say in terms of Quartz I have it open all the time at work. To me its stands to reason that if I'm seeing it all the time and I see something I like then I will post it more often.

It was the same at the NYTimes - however I haven't worked there in almost 2 years yet I still post significant amounts from them. Again, its about what I think people will like within the community that I've read.

I've been on HN for over 3 years and I'll bet the majority of my posts come from NYTimes where I worked for a large part of that time. Again - it was always open in my browser so hard not to be hyper-aware of what was being posted and catch interesting stuff.

I'm just doing my best to be as upfront as possible. Plenty of others don't necessarily do that:

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=nickbilton

Sometimes I post two links in a day, sometimes it will be one link in a week or two. Again, its as I see things I like and want to share.

Updated my profile to say: "I do post stuff from qz.com on occasions that I post cos I naturally come across it as part of my work" and linked to your Comment since it provides more detail.

Not sure this is the answer you wanted but I certainly hope that helps clarify things a bit.

dalke2• 14 years ago

Your numbers show that you are no longer posting rarely, and that you've changed your posting frequency during the last month. I've stopped following "The Atlantic" links because of their spam-like actions, described in http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2012/06/13/reddit-... . I believe the guidelines listed therein are reasonable. That you responded to my comment is actually a good thing. There was, e.g., a frequent poster to Outside Online pages who never responded to comments on their thread.

alanctgardner22• 14 years ago

I'm not sure about the source, but this seems far more malicious on the part of the FTC than I'm comfortable with. Shouldn't they be impartially judging this sort of thing on a case-by-case basis? Instead they've decoded that Google, as an entity, is broadly criminal, and the crime itself is just their vehicle for delivering whatever punishment they deem appropriate.

Samuel_Michon• 14 years ago

Then, should Al Capone not have been indicted for income tax evasion? They really wanted him for peddling booze during the Prohibition.

alanctgardner22• 14 years ago

The problem is that indicting an individual stops them, more or less. Whatever judgement they get regarding FRAND patents won't have anything to do with search. If all they had done was collect Capone's taxes without throwing him in prison, it would've been pretty useless.

I also have issues with things like tax evasion being used as a proxy to prosecute other crimes, but that's more of a romantic notion about how law should work. I realize it can't be that way.

Noxchi• 14 years ago

Why the fuck is the FTC trying to troll Google? Because it prioritizes (and thinks better of) it's services than other sites? That's what ANY business is supposed to do!

fear912• 14 years ago

The problem is when for majority of people Google = The Internet.

If you are not showing high in Google and you don't want to pay, you are fucked. You don't exist for the 85% of population.

fourspace• 14 years ago

Clearly, Google needs to be punished for such abuses of the power, power that is granted to them by consumers voluntarily choosing to use their free product.

madrona• 14 years ago

Rankings are inherently mutually exclusive. Not everybody can be a winner.

Tell me how Bing is better at solving this problem.

marshallp• 14 years ago

It's almost certainly google's enemies having finally got through to the FTC. Google's made a lot of enemies, the telcos, microsoft, apple, big oil, big media. The population should wake up realize there's only a few good guys out there, google and maybe amazon, everyone else is evil and an effort needs to be made to stop the evil guys from destroying the good guys.

tedivm3• 14 years ago

They're trying to "troll" them for abusing their search monopoly to promote their services- but unfortunately they can't prove it at the moment.

They went after Microsoft for similar reasons- they were using their operating system (Windows) to push other products (like Internet Explorer), which limited competition and hurt consumers. Now Google is integrating Google Plus into their search, and ignoring sources like Facebook and Twitter for that same positioning. It's pretty clear cut to me why they're doing that.

The other issue here is that the author of this article is the one making this connection, and adding his own thoughts about it. No one from the FTC is saying they're trying this second path because the first one didn't work- in fact, if you follow the links from this linkbait blog post, you'll see that he's filling in a hell of a lot of blanks himself. The FTC is still pursuing the original issue, they're just also going after this second complaint at the request of Microsoft and Apple (amongst others), who think paying 4 billion dollars to add wifi to their phones is a bit ridiculous.

esolyt2• 14 years ago

Google is not allowed to search tweets and Facebook posts. Twitter and Microsoft do not allow Google to do that and they both made an exclusive deal with Bing.

youngtaff2• 14 years ago

2.25% is slightly less that Samsung wants for it's FRAND patents and is a whole lot less than the 6% Apple wanted for it's patents.

Apple and MS seemed to want the mobile radio patent owners to give away their technologies for free but are unwilling to license their own patents on reasonable terms

tzs• 14 years ago

What Apple patents has Apple promised to license to all comers under FRAND terms in exchange for getting those patents into required parts of international standards?

felipeko• 14 years ago

What Motorola's patent they promised to give for cheap? FRAND does not mean cheap. It never meant. Microsoft and Apple are trying to change the term now, because they want to tax Android products, and cheapening SEP is the easiest way to do that, because that would disarm all others OEMs, and they would be able to tax them with "utility" patents.

youngtaff2• 14 years ago

Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory - if everyone else is willing to pay 2.25% then that seems pretty fair...

The FTC wants to sue Google, and now it may have found the charges that stick

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