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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| Conservatives Must Regulate Google And All of Silicon Valley Into Submission |
| 2017-08-14 |
| h/t Instapundit Google's fascist witch-burning of an honest engineer for refusing to bow down at the altar of politically correct lies was the final straw, an unequivocal warning to conservatives that there's a new set of rules, and that we need to play by them. First they came for the tech geeks; we’re next. That means Republicans at both the federal and the state level need to rein in the skinny-jeaned fascist social justice warriors who control Silicon Valley ‐ and, to a growing extent, our society ‐ through the kind of crushing regulation of these private business that we conservatives used to oppose. They're going to hate the new rules. Now, the old rule for us conservatives was that businesses could do pretty much whatever they pleased, with minimal regulation, if they focused on maximizing profit and thereby rained benefits down upon society in the form of wealth and job creation. It was a good system, but, like all systems, to get benefits you have to meet certain obligations. For businesses, one obligation was to generally stay out of the cultural and political octagon. But the Woke Weenies of Silicon Valley, flush with cash, power, and unearned smugness, decided that they just couldn’t keep on the sidelines and make their money. No, they had to make change, as in, changing us. They violated the most important of the old rules ‐ they chose a side. In the past, when a company or even an industry crossed the line, it rarely made much difference. So some insurance company was outspokenly progressive? So what? The one exception was the mainstream media/Hollywood complex ‐ its actions were extremely annoying (and destructive), but it had the First Amendment to protect it and we conservatives had alternate channels to get our ideas across. Not so with the Googles, the Facebooks, and the Twitters. Their antics are not necessarily protected by the First Amendment, their internet monopolies choke out alternative channels, and, unlike the line-crossers of the past, they possess enormous amounts of personal information that can be used to manipulate, intimidate, and punish political opponents ‐ you know, us. Worse, their leaders are evangelists of cultural Marxism, so these companies don’t even have the fig leaf of objectivity that the mainstream media has (or had) to constrain them. Yet they still expect the same laissez-faire treatment as any other business even as they try to gut us politically. They discriminate against conservatives, they actively assist leftist partisans like Felonia von Pantsuit, and they aggressively silence conservative voices within their apps. They imagine that they can adopt new rules for themselves while keeping in place the old rules that prevent us from defending ourselves because of "free enterprise" or something. |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |
| #22 More satellite coms are not really going to be a solution. The amount of orbits are fixed. Perhaps Musk can get into them for a while, but they will quickly be cross loaded with other sats resulting in the Kessler Syndrome throughout the useful orbits. Either someone has to put up a robot maid satellite to clean up the mess, which could clean up regular working satellites; so, not going to happen. Or we will just lose the ability to use certain orbits because of space trash. Tragedy of the Commons anyone? |
| Posted by: rammer 2017-08-14 23:15 |
| #21 Antenna will be a flat phased array to multiple sats. Your antenna has a built in wifi-router that connects your actual devices... |
| Posted by: 3dc 2017-08-14 22:49 |
| #20 Network access and the network will change radically when Musk and SpaceX launch their 12000 sat network. (starting maybe end of 2019) On the regime sides... the great firewall of China falls... DNS (if properly configured) will be hitting a random walk of Musk sats and not google's 8.8.8.8 or comcast's # or ATT's. (^8 And that's just the start. |
| Posted by: 3dc 2017-08-14 22:47 |
| #19 Anti-trust action is way to slow to have any effect. We tried that on Microsoft's windows os, and they responded by investing in the nearly bankrupt Apple os to show there was no monopoly in operating systems. And now that company, Apple, has a higher market cap than Microsoft. These companies are smarter and quicker than government. If you want to break tech companies, then you need a new approach that can hit them faster than they can react. I would suggest cutting out all the tax exemptions that they use. The IRS knows all of them. Tell Congress and cancel them. This change will add competition to their business model. Most of these exemptions were put in the tax code to exclude new entrants into their business. Additionally, we could penalize companies who fail to protect their customer's data. This would fall more heavily on those companies with more customers. Moreover, we could create product liability for software vendors to support their software products just like we reacquire for car manufactures. If my Dodge's airbag is a hazard ten years after I bought it, then Dodge is responsible to fix it at no cost or pay for the ensuing injuries, then why shouldn't Microsoft's dodgy OS be liable for zero day bugs that compromise my computer? There are tons of things that could be done here. We need to decide which are the right things to do. |
| Posted by: rammer 2017-08-14 21:56 |
| #18 Linux makes a perfectly good web viewer. Use DDG and maybe the Brave browser (though I use Firefox with AdBlocker). Install Linux on your Chromebook. |
| Posted by: KBK 2017-08-14 21:45 |
| #17 Phil, I suggest a less polished version of linux, maybe one of the ones without systemd, like slackware. I don't like any of the totalitarian societies we've handed over our manufacturing to, whether they're google, apple, or China. Google and Apple have basically made a deal with the socialists abroad and here, that the crocodile would eat them last, and they've made mountains of hundreds of billions in cash from it. Every bit of time we've let these left-libertarians define liberty as "We get to do what we what, while the rest of you get nickel and dimed to death in the name of imaginary externalities" we wake up less free, and broke on top of things. We've reached the point where Silicon Valley can have their power, or the rest of us maybe can get to be free, but both of those conditions can't coexist now. |
| Posted by: Thing From Snowy Mountain 2017-08-14 21:43 |
| #16 On the internet, the incremental cost of a transaction approaches zero. Which means even pockets as deep as Microsoft's have trouble competing against market leaders. I am a long time Chrome and Chromebook user, and the only alternative is to go back to Windows, which I won't do. There isn't anything else. A Standard Oil/Bell style break up is needed. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2017-08-14 18:58 |
| #15 More than I'd like to think, Pappy. |
| Posted by: Mullah Richard 2017-08-14 14:31 |
| #14 The question is how much of the 'street work' was done under a government contract. I know they've have Google maps for Israel (used it several times) - so, would USG pay for something like that? |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2017-08-14 14:31 |
| #13 The question is how much of the 'street work' was done under a government contract. |
| Posted by: Pappy 2017-08-14 14:07 |
| #12 Just apply existing laws on monopolies. Acquiring a vertical monopoly structure seems to be a big Google feature and entry point for action. The other entry would be to hold the company accountable for privacy information, invalidating those boilerplate user agreements. Classifying such info as inalienable property of the individual. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2017-08-14 14:06 |
| #11 'Streetside' in Bing maps is sort of getting there, Glenmore. They have a ways to go for coverage, though. Open Bing maps and select the 'Streetside' view. If the road(s) have a blue highlight, they've done the camera work. Metro areas seem to be covered. Backwoods and rural, not so much. |
| Posted by: Mullah Richard 2017-08-14 13:09 |
| #10 I figured it must be Schlichter. He's not very bright, is he? |
| Posted by: KBK 2017-08-14 13:09 |
| #9 These who don't play by our rules are not entitled to protection of our rules. |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2017-08-14 12:49 |
| #8 What we need to do is Alinsky's "make em play by their own rules". Invasions of privacy and pernicious data collection should be crushed. |
| Posted by: Frank G on the Road 2017-08-14 12:43 |
| #7 So, thought experiment, what makes markets non-competitive? Government 'support', for one? |
| Posted by: Pappy 2017-08-14 12:29 |
| #6 Hey, let's use the power of government to punish companies we don't like. Doesn't sound very conservative to me. Seems like the problem is really the opposite - our markets are insufficiently competitive. Otherwise, alienating half your customer base would be a non-starter. So, thought experiment, what makes markets non-competitive? |
| Posted by: Iblis 2017-08-14 11:51 |
| #5 That means Republicans at both the federal and the state level need to rein in the skinny-jeaned fascist social justice warriors who control Silicon Valley The mechanism is self-correcting. Don't make rules because you can, that's how the Dems got us here. |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2017-08-14 11:48 |
| #4 The one Google product I have not found an alternative for is their street level view in Google Maps. |
| Posted by: Glenmore 2017-08-14 11:31 |
| #3 We'll see how it works. |
| Posted by: Abu Uluque 2017-08-14 11:03 |
| #2 Resetting my cookie with Opera. |
| Posted by: Abu Uluque 2017-08-14 11:02 |
| #1 If you don't like 'em, don't use 'em. There are alternatives. Right now I'm taking a test drive with the Opera browser. |
| Posted by: Abu Uluque 2017-08-14 11:01 |