Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/09/09/gilded-age-r-us.html
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This has been a long time in coming. When every single state will step up to bat, in a game where the Feds dont even bother to show up, it raises the question, why even have a federal government when its core functions have been taken over by pirates?
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Looking forward to the data on having to go to page 11 in order to get relevant results.
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All hail, future king DuckDuckGo.
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If the Feds don’t even bother to show up, it’s a sign that something is very broken. The Feds should be leading, not ignoring what’s happening. A broken federal government needs to be fixed, not abandoned.
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Alphabet should be broken up, its individual companies spun off into their own standalone entities. Google itself should be further broken up, its advertising arm split from its search engine arm. The google search engine should be required to lease screen space to all advertisers, including Google AdWords.
Of course, similar measures should be taken with several other mega-corps, and not just in the tech industry. (Disney, I’m looking at you.)
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Does this mean we have to start paying to Google something? Asking for a friend…
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just 48 states? Who isn’t on board?
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Hey, let’s not give pirates a bad name, here. 
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California and Alabama.
Edit to add:
The California part is easy to understand. If I read correctly, the AG of CA got a goodly amount of bribe money campaign donations from Google, whose corporate headquarters are located there.
The Alabama abstention seems to be idiopathic.
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The coalition includes 48 states, plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. California and Alabama are the only two states not to join the investigation.
Interesting combination.
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I pay for Gsuite. ProtonMail is not full featured enough yet. (Maybe when they add calendaring at least)
Paid users get no scummy as stuff + a promise to fight legal orders to the fullest extent of the law.
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I think you and I are in agreement here that something is very wrong and needs fixing. 9 times out of 10, thats close enough “for government work”… and I am by no means saying we should abandon the project…
What gives me pause, though, are stories like the one in Romania, where the police chief made an earnest claim of incompetence, as his police force waited 19 hours before investigating an emergency call by a woman who had been kidnapped. Fair enough, lets train the police better, lets fire those keystone cops, lets move on. Right? Except there’s convincing anecdotal evidence that they took so long to investigate becayse they needed to make sure the kidnapper wasnt one of the crooks who own the police in that region. Suddenly criminal incompetence looks a lot nicer than the depths of corruption that seem more likely.
Whether the USian federal government is broken, or if it is functioning perfectly fine for those who own it… the impact on me and you is the same either way. But trying to fix something that is deeply, irreparably corrupt, usually only ends up slapping a thin coat of veneer over something that needs to be completely replaced.
The lingering effects of 2008 sort of speak for themselves. Regulatory capture means the police are the last ones you want getting involved, they can only make it worse.
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Is Google monopolizing Attorneys General too?
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“It is a truism throughout the civilised galaxy, that when the police arrive, your troubles really start.” Robert Scheckley, in “Mindswap”
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