Switching Sides

What goes around comes around. Or maybe we just take turns doing things. Use your own cliché. My point is that just because someone doesn’t like something now doesn’t mean they didn’t like it before. We shouldn’t take anyone too seriously.

I’m elderly enough to remember when people on the left seriously distrusted intelligence agencies and people on the right hated Russia. See what I mean?

Some people switch between hating and loving budget deficits every four or eight years.

Now here’s something you’ve probably never thought about: what exactly is a public utility? Can a private company suddenly morph into a public utility? What if it doesn’t want to?

Before you answer those questions, answer this one: what’s the remedy for a company that dominates or controls a market?

Antitrust, right?

That, in case you missed it, was not the answer that the attorney general of the state of Ohio came up with last week in a lawsuit filed against Google LLC in federal court. After describing Google’s search engine business success, it says “this suit does not argue Google’s dominance of internet search is good or bad when viewed in isolation.”

I’m picturing the Ohio attorney general sitting alone in his pajamas in his basement in isolation but I guess that’s not what he meant.

The suit then says that Google should be classified as a common carrier or public utility that shouldn’t be allowed to “self-preference” on results pages and should be required to provide equal opportunities for non-Google entities.

You know, Google is just like buses or the power company.

I don’t know whether this is a good idea or not (I’ll change my position every year or so), but is a Republican politician supposed to be in favor of government regulation of a successful private business? Sounds suspiciously like the dreaded “SOCIALISM!”

I’m expecting Democrats to angrily respond with a defense of free markets.

Aren’t utilities regulated because they’ve been granted monopolies? Does Google get to be an exclusive government-sanctioned monopoly now in Ohio?

Google might actually like this idea.

Trust antitrust. While we’re talking about internet and antitrust stuff, I have a better idea for combatting ransomware and hacks.

I realize there are multiple solutions for this problem. A certain ex-president last week, for example, suggested that we stop using computers. I’m guessing he didn’t realize that Twitter appears on computers.

MABA – Make America Backwards Again.

We can just type stuff on typewriters and use the Pony Express.

That could work but there’s another approach: You can’t have massive shutdowns of some part of the economy if you don’t have massive companies controlling parts of the economy.

Small cyberattacks are a lot less devastating than big ones.

The Ohio attorney general needs to get working on this.

By the way, whatever happened to backing up computer files? Maybe we just need better clouds.

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