Comment by strictnein
12 hours ago
The judge was appointed by Clinton, so they've been in their role for decades now. It seems unlikely that someone who has served that long in her position would rule based on making the child in the White House happy.
Clinton was a neoliberal. Not an expert, but I thought for a long time the vision of anti-trust being democracy-preserving (or at least preventing corporations from being able to compete with the government for power) was replaced by a view "consumer harm" was the only concern of anti-trust law. Basically focusing on pricing competition.
Read more about SCOTUS justice Robert Bork who ushered in the modern anti-trust viewpoint.
E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antitrust_Paradox
> Bork argues that the original intent of antitrust laws as well as economic efficiency makes consumer welfare and the protection of competition, rather than competitors, the only goals of antitrust law.
Also worth a shoutout is the fact that Google also got off scott free for their main monopoly case (the "will they have to sell Chrome?" headlines from a while back). I won't pretend to have even a vague idea of why exactly both rulings (sentencings?) came down so leniently, but it does seem even more unlikely that any sort of executive branch interference was at play.
To the contrary, the entire DOJ understands that FAANG and the three-letter-agencies are one revolving door. Any judge that attempts to defang Google's data collection may well run afoul of the American surveillance system, which this administration will fight tooth and nail to defend.
Not very different from how federal protectionism keeps Apple's App Store centralized despite trillions of dollars in ostensible market damage. Anyone trying to loosen America's grip on software distribution is crossing an ugly national security line that we're all too ashamed to admit exists.
100% glad someone states the obvious. Sometimes here people think these tech companies are on truly altruistic missions on making “the world a better place!!1” or truly making an impact by being an IC in their role and having access to perks which, have largely been taken away as the market matures to data collection and surveillance.
If you want to have some fun, go on LinkedIn and see how many former military people, proud of their service, boast how they are at x or y tech company in director esque roles.
Then bookmark them and see the pages disappear in the future. Boy I’m glad it’s legally 100% ok to scrap LinkedIn data because it truly is a revolving door.
Can you give an example of what you’re saying here? Companies spin up and vanish?
agree with you but including netflix is becoming hilarious
Or that N could be Nvidia now.
The acronym gets awkward if we don't, though
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> an ugly national security line that we're all too ashamed to admit exists
We're all ashamed, apparently?? What do they call this, projections of a guilty conscience?
RCS is google's foothold. It forces everyone to share with google and currently, there is no carrier option for RCS. You have to pick google or apple or go without.
Understandable, but how is that fair to other competitors?
The whole system is now easily abused by huge mega-corporations. That goes against capitalism. Why did the USA suddenly abandon capitalism?
Since you are getting no replies but getting downvoted I'm adding source from 2016 corroborating what you mention: https://www.techtransparencyproject.org/articles/googles-rev...
251 individuals in such detected instances just in google. And that report is 10 years old, I'd bet it's 10x that by now.
That makes the argument worse, not better.
Google employees tens of thousands of people. The US intelligence apparatus employees hundreds of thousands of people. In all of that, over eight years, there are 251 people who moved between the two, and because of that absolute rounding error, the entire federal government is beholden to them?
Since you are making the accusation that this is a real conspiracy: statistically, how many people should have rotated between these two giant employers over an 8 year span? The answer isn't zero.
Also, this makes the "data" even more pointless:
"between Google or related firms, and the federal government, national political campaigns and Congress during President Obama’s time in office"
"were appointed to federal advisory boards."
Do you know how many of those boards exist? There are tons of them. I've known a couple of people who have served on them. They're incredibly boring and deal with things like "What accessibility standards should federal government websites support?". Of course you would want people from Google on that type of board.
> 251 individuals in such detected instances just in google. And that report is 10 years old, I'd bet it's 10x that by now.
"Detected instances"
It's so secret that I can name one of them off the top of my head: Matt Cutts. Is he part of this vast conspiracy too?
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The DOJ isn't part of the Judiciary branch, it's part of the Executive.
> FAANG and the three-letter-agencies are one revolving door
Most of the NSA is active duty service members and former military. Did you mean other three letter agencies, excluding the most powerful one dealing with surveillance?
> Any judge that attempts to interfere with Google's data collection may well run afoul of the American surveillance system
The judge in this case put the final nail into Trumps slush fund. But now she's doing his bidding. Is that what you're claiming?
Not everything is a conspiracy. You don't have some special insight into this.
Given the sentence immediately following the revolving door metaphor, I think it was clumsily being used for data, not personnel. Especially because it's true for obvious reasons.
> The judge in this case put the final nail into Trumps slush fund. But now she's doing his bidding. Is that what you're claiming?
No, they're clearly claiming it's a non-partisan thing and the sitting president is irrelevant, as are the specifics of the virtue signalling happening. Yes, even though they qualified themselves with "this administration". Do you think that the Clintons aren't friends with the state department surveillance abomination or the nastiest parts of government writ large? That Bill or Hillary wouldn't fight tooth and nail to protect this terrible thing that's been wrought? Replace the context with some virtue signal about NATO intervention in Serbia 27 years ago, nothing changes. Partisan politics is for yokels.
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> The judge in this case put the final nail into Trumps slush fund.
That's a very different, partisan effort. It's not bipartisan like the Patriot Act was, or domestic surveillance in-general.
> Not everything is a conspiracy. You don't have some special insight into this.
Not everything is as it seems. You can't meaningfully prove that the NSA sat on their hands in the 13 interceding years since Snowden. There's no evidence that US interventionism is on the straight-and-narrow now, you're wishcasting and calling it truth.
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> Apple's App Store centralized despite trillions of dollars in ostensible market damage
Please. The Androidfication of iOS with malware/scamware would cost quadrillions in market damage.
So the market damage would be more than the entire planet's GDP?
Citation needed. The idea that somehow my mum can't even find the space bar on her keyboard and yet is competent enough to go through several warning screens to install a custom .apk is just laughable.
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we got rick grimes over here walking into atlanta
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Two things can be true at once, the entire system is corrupt and the current administration is much more corrupt than any prior administration.
The current administration is in a class of its own regarding corruption -- it is the principle driver of everything they do. The nazi stuff is just bonus for them.
It is in fact true that the Trump administration is corrupt on a significantly different level than any prior administration. It is harmful to paper over this.
At the turn of the century (yikes!) Clinton reconfigured the DNC to serve the corporations rather than labor. I left the party after that but am compelled to vote blue as the least worst option. Partisan politics allows capture of the government by creating a duopoly of power.
Washington warned us of this threat.
You are correct, but it's largely our first-past-the-post voting system that forces only TWO political parties on us. Voting reform is necessary to help make other parties/candidates electable.
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