[Jpost] Until Tuesday’s suit, Big Tech was beyond the rules
The tech world is not the same planet that it was before Tuesday.
On Tuesday, the US Department of Justice filed a lawsuit, which in its broadest implications could lead to the breakup of Google and eventually other tech giants like Facebook.
No lawsuit since the 1998 case against Microsoft has carried similarly fateful consequences.
While Google, Facebook, Amazon and others are credited with providing a wide range of important services to billions of human beings across the planet, recent years have seen a dark side to some of their dominance.
If at one point, Google shared the search engine business with a variety of other competitors, the US lawsuit said that currently Google controls nearly 90% of all general search engine queries in the United States and almost 95% of searches on mobile.
It is hard to imagine the breakup of a company whose name has become a verb (go Google that for me) and is so dominant that children of a certain age do not even realize that there is a difference between the Internet and Google.
The potential sledgehammer to Google, with more major antitrade lawsuits against tech giants on the way, comes after major evolution in recent years.
VDH on TownHall
The coronavirus, widespread quarantines, an unprecedented self-induced recession, and unchecked rioting, looting, and protesting -- all in a presidential election year -- are radically disrupting American habits and behavior.
Rents, home prices, and office occupancy rates in major cities, especially on the two coasts, are dropping fast. Techies and young professionals have discovered that they can work from home without paying sky-high housing costs in order to be close to the office.
Those more fortunate wonder why they should get bogged down with commutes and urban traffic -- or navigate city sidewalks amid homelessness, crime, racial tensions, and urban unrest -- when they can make as much money while staying distant in quieter landscapes.
...Gun sales are at record highs. When some cities take steps to defund police and some soften bail laws, citizens quietly go to the local gun store and stock up on ammunition. Many of the people who have never before owned firearms are no longer clamoring for gun control. A "man's home" is now becoming his armed castle.
As a general rule, any business or activity that does not bother, judge, or lecture Americans and instead allows them to work or relax in peace is preferred. That may explain why Zoom and Skype use is soaring while TV ratings for the woke NBA and NFL are down.
...For the first time in their careers, many teachers and professors are careful not to go off-topic and rant to their high school and college students. Their video streams are not only seen by captive classroom audiences but occasionally peeked in on by the parents and taxpayers who pay their salaries.
This is the first autumn in memory that a huge percentage of college students are staying home. And no one is sure of the ensuing consequences.
Will students revolt over borrowing money simply to watch lectures on their basement computers? Will they be less likely to vote in November when they are isolated at home, rather than congregating on campus near polling places and subject to constant peer pressures to vote -- and to do so in predictable ways?
With college revenues dropping, will ambitious promises to hire more diversity administrators, build more self-segregated racial theme houses, and increase campus social services be seen as just more costly overhead that shorts classroom teaching?
During the pandemic, government has become more intrusive and yet seemingly more impotent and incompetent. Pick a month and some government official issues yet more contradictory orders on mask wearing, social distancing, and lockdowns -- all to be soon reversed.
Taxes stayed high and yet urban services got worse. Increasingly, American city dwellers don't always count on the power going on when they flip the switch, or the bus or train always showing up, or the police always answering 911 calls.
...The cultural currents are often contradictory. They defy easy political analysis and seem at times counterintuitive.
But there is one historical constant.
When institutions and politicians cannot accommodate radically changed circumstances, people will no longer value institutions and politicians. In their place, citizens will seek to ensure their own livelihoods, leisure, and safety in ways that are more reliable and affordable -- with their circumstances in their own hands rather than in those of distant others.
And their adjustments won't always be calm or polite.
[Townhall - It's Kurt] Okay, why is the President walking into yet another liberal kill zone? I get that he's fearless, but we seem to be kicking it on all cylinders now and why create a chance to disrupt our glide path to victory?
Also, here's a bit of on-line conferencing etiquette in case you are confused. Keep it in your pants.
And speaking of remarkable meat, I talk about my latest steak adventure.
This Debate Is An Ambush
Kristen Welker is a Democrat operative who has completely changed the focus of the debate, unilaterally shifting the topics from "Foreign Policy" to "All the Things Grandpa Badfinger's Handlers Want to Talk About." I don't think the President should do the debate, but what do I know? Betting against Trump's cunning is a losing proposition, as President Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit can testify to between gulps of Chardonnay.
Welker proposes to waste our time and set up dingers for Hoover's Pa on subjects like the climate hoax and race in America, as if Trump hasn't decried white supremacy a hundred times already. Now, Trump can totally turn the tables and use a climate hoax question to point out how Kamala's Quarry wants to render a million Pennsylvanian's unemployed, but Kristen Crowley will leap in to block for her quarterback. The idea that she will let Trump win is a (Hunter's crack)pipe dream.
Trump will look "mean," which I like and you like, but a lot of sissies Nadler themselves about. You know the media will declare Biden the winner even if his desiccated carcass collapses in a cloud of dust.
Maybe Trump doesn't skip the debate. Maybe he demands ahead of time that Welker commit to ask about Biden's manifest corruption - and to follow up - if she wants Trump to appear. That gets the issue out there, gets people conscious of how the media is protecting the corrupt, crusty crustacean, and if she doesn't agree, Trump has taken Biden out of the picture this week for nothing - the dude seems to have called a perma-lid.
We all know Trump is not afraid, but this is an ambush and you don't avoid ambushes because you're scared. You avoid them because they are bad.
Avoid this one.
Don't Display Your Junk On Zoom
Twitter exploded in twittering about Jeffrey Toobin's tubin' the other day, and this just reinforces my well-established position that our alleged establishment betters are a bunch of clowns.
What is the decision-making process that began with "I will sit down to do this Zoom call" and ended with his pants around his loafers? Something happened in-between those points in time that I can't wrap my head around. What the hell was he thinking?
Well, he wasn't, because so often our garbage Establishment's members don't need to think. They get a pass on behavior that destroys us mortals.
Now, Toobin got caught, and his misfortune is that he is to be sacrificed because this can't be, if you pardon the expression, covered up. The Establishment will occasionally cast aside members if they are of no use any longer, or if the crime is horrendous enough. It's unclear if Toobin - who looks like a guy who would make Ogre start bellowing "NERD!" - was ever really useful for anything. Bad lawyers on TV are pretty common, and he only distinguished himself by the transcendent badness of his bad takes. His previous crime was allegedly trying to get some chick to abort her kid, which is actually a plus for liberals.
This incident also reaffirms my Iron Law of Liberal Nudity: When a liberal gets naked outside of cable TV, it's never one of the hot ones.
Just remember this one thing. The people lecturing you about how you are stupid, and immoral, and unworthy, and how you are their inferiors, are either people who think it's a fantastic idea to whip it out on a Zoom call, or who listened intently to and believed a guy who thinks it's a fantastic idea to whip it out on a Zoom call.
Our betters are much, much worse.
Posted by: Mullah Richard ||
10/22/2020 00:00 ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
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Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
