This administration has done nothing to end or undermine the antitrust cases against Google. In both cases the judges found Google in violation of antitrust law, but both handed down fairly mild remedies, despite the administration (prosecutor) pushing for much stronger changes. The judges were appointed by Clinton (Leonie Brinkema) and Obama (Amit Mehta).
> In both cases the judges found Google in violation of antitrust law
Exactly. They have been determined to be a monopoly, but have been allowed to continue to be a monopoly because not being a monopoly could damage their business.
Why wouldn't they do anything that they felt like doing if they had been assured immunity to any government intervention. Every company in the country, tech or not, heard this loud and clear. Thanks, Obama. Thanks, Clinton.
Perhaps not US cases, but those aren't the only antitrust cases against Google.
What about Trump's threats after Google was hit with a 2.95 billion Euro fine from the European Commission's antitrust investigation?
From last year: "EU Trade Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič on Monday made an 11th-hour intervention to stop the European Commission from issuing a penalty against American tech giant Google for its search advertising practices, amid continued trade threats from U.S. President Donald Trump." https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-google-antitrust-decision...
Or from https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/10/google-meta-big-tech-6-billi... "In February, Trump signed a memorandum stating the U.S. would consider tariffs to “combat digital service taxes (DSTs), fines, practices, and policies that foreign governments levy on American companies.”"
My point is that your claim 'This administration has done nothing to end or undermine the antitrust cases against Google.' is incorrect if you also include European antitrust cases.
Yes, the last 50 years of post-Borkianism has resulted in an entire judicial system having a very narrow and essentially useless definition of anti-trust, far different from its original goals. That's part of the broader neo-liberal movement which started around the time of Carter, gained strength with Reagan, continued with Clinton's "triangulation" and NAFTA, and is still with us.
Yes, the League of Women Voters warned us about what you term the "two private clubs" back in 1988 when they decided to stop hosting the United States presidential debates saying that following the demands of the two parties would "perpetrate a fraud on the American voter".
Yet you seem to think I'm somehow shocked that same aged corporate Democrats who supported Obama, and who now fight tooth and nail against the democratic socialist arm of their party, are somehow in actually in favor of effective antitrust enforcement?
Your rant makes it seem like you're just easily triggered by the least bit of correction.
> I want to see a third Trump term.
Ahh, you're one of those anti-Constitution people. I remember as a kid people calling out "four more years" in support of a 3rd Reagan term, as their hero worship made them forget the lesson of FDR and the Twenty-second Amendment.
Just like those people who forget the lesson of Guiteau about a consequence of whims and bribes as a way to run a government.
Here's a link in case it's needed (I suspect most people that assume all of their problems are because of the administration don't actually read links but maybe if it's from their court?)
Google and the rest of the billionaire class thank you for ensuring everyone is too divided by red/blue tribalism to ever have enough unity to mount a fight against them. Well done!
The point is that no matter which party rules, they are bribed by big business to represent the interest of big business. Criticism without change does not really work well.
It seems to be very popular on this site to condemn surveillance capitalism and billionaires. But who built and still maintains the basis for their power, misusing it and the billions. So-called smart engineers like many of HN readers. If they rated morale higher than their personal 100Ks we would not need to wait for a government to stop the misery (in vain).
Yes, I have worked for 400,000 employees corp, then for a 70,000. For the last 15 years I have staid under 100. The pay is less, but it's easier to look into the mirror each morning.
Allow me to be anal for a moment, but what is the point of doing “if I remember correctly” for something like this?
You can very easily look up exactly when Lina Khan was appointed and get answer very quickly. Is it not worth the effort checking these things before commenting?
Ok rant over. Sorry to be an asshole. This is not your fault as much a standard which should be changed.
I’m 100% with you on the spirit of this comment. I don’t understand it either. I fear the standard you mentioned has been set at far too low of a level.
The administration is serving private business only. They don't care about the people.
It is not a democracy nor a republic state. It is an oligarchy. Thankfully more and more people realise how corrupt the orange mafia is. Recent polls show that - people learn slowly, but they learn.
It's becoming increasingly likely that satellites will be targeted in even low intensity conflicts. Bear in mind that lasers are getting more powerful so you don't need to vaporize the satellite, just perform a mission kill by torching the FPA behind the lens.
Okay so possibly dumb question, but...what do you do with the gold when you "need" it? How is a bunch of shiny, admittedly "desirable", metal going to fix whatever class of crisis the article is hand waving?
Are we talking physical stuff like Germany deciding third time's a charm and Europe saying "fuck, okay America the gold is already there, do your thing and ship us a few thousand tanks and a few hundred thousand boys from the plains!"
...or are we talking more obscure "fuck, someone did stupid things with excel sheets, we need to make the numbers not say society is over, here everyone...do something with gold!" type situations?
In the former case, this all makes a lot of sense given that the US has both demonstrated a reluctance to assist other countries (sans Israel?) and a lack of capacity to do much if they did care.
I can't help but feel like in a lot of cases you're just going to suddenly crash the gold market and create a bunch of inflation because currency itself is not a "means of production" that you can make things with, it's an old IOU.
You just hold onto it until you want to trade it for something else. Right now there are liquid international gold markets. Like bitcoin, people who are trying to get rich quick by day trading are much of the liquidity.
He's the center of gravity who's enabling the decline at the moment. It's a rare case where doing the thing would probably result in less instability instead of more.
There are a few platforms that facilitate personal transactions using stuff like Venmo and Zelle but I suspect most of the people who are continuously selling lots of coins are probably silk road type vendors so I have to imagine it's just a great way to get your Venmo account on the feds radar.
Using Venmo or Zelle obviates the reason for using Bitcoin to move money from one country to another, which is that you don't want the transfer to be traced, and you may or may not have access to the banking system where you're going (eg the enormous flood of Bitcoin out of China and Hong Kong during the crackdown). Venmo and Zelle are American banks that just add a new type of KYC endpoint. From there, it's easy to see the whole blockchain back to where you acquired it.
Localbitcoins facilitated a cash exchange that was extremely useful for people seeking to move money out of repressive regimes and convert it into local currency they could live on.
To your point, that money didn't have to be acquired on Silk Road or something... I used to get paid for work in BTC, and used it to pay rent for a couple years in Argentina by selling it to a dude I'd meet once a month at a Starbucks.
You don't have to be a silk road vendor. You just have to be selling and buying both, then you can make money on the spread, which can be several percent in P2P markets.
When I lived in Argentina, the maximum amount of USD you could pull from an ATM was $200 per day, dispensed as 600 pesos. That was at a government-enforced 3 to 1 USD to Pesos. The price on the open street market was at least 9 pesos to the dollar.
So, say my rent was 3600 pesos a month. Technically USD$1200 at the official rate, but only USD$400 at the blue rate. It was better for me to take a boat to Uruguay for $100 round trip, plus a hotel room for the night, to get dollars out of a bank there and trade them on the street in Argentina.
Okay, that's the setup of what I was doing. But with Localbitcoins I found this kid who would prefer to hand me a stack of USD$1000 than Argentine Pesos, for BTC traded private wallet to private wallet. He was in his first year of college and he'd just opened a money exchange office in a shopping center.
One day I asked him "where do you get all those dollars, and what are you doing with the Bitcoin?" He told me, most of the service goes the other way. You see, they needed my Bitcoin, because in Argentina, government employees at that time were allowed to take 20% of their income in greenback US dollar cash.... at that amazing government exchange rate of $0.33!!! So naturally they wanted to get it out of the country, not keep it in cash. But Argentina also would not allow you to take more than $500 out of the country. My friendly high school Bitcoin entrepreneur had a solution: Take their dollars and exchange it for Bitcoin, then send the Bitcoin to a friend in the US who would change it back and depost it into a US bank account (for a 5-10% fee). This avoided the export controls and allowed them to offshore their cash without trusting the Argentine banks, which were well known for defaulting on their customers.
The only question for my friend was what to do with all this USD and how to get more Bitcoin with it, which was where expatriates like me fit into the picture.
This is why I believe that the real and only value of BTC is in avoiding currency controls, and it'll continue to have value as long as those controls exist in places, but the closing of the open markets and the end-to-end tracking of ingress and egress points makes it a lot less viable than it was.
Even in stable economies without capital controls you should be able to earn several percent spread, because supply of physical money changers (you) in any particular region is limited, it's risky for you (they may rob you), and you're providing a valuable service (exchanging without any paper trail).
Right, but the risk isn't really worth the reward in an economy that could've slotted this kid into a college job as a loan officer or something. I'm sure having large stacks of Benjamins at his disposal probably had something to do with it for him.
I wrote a paper around 2010 that tried to evaluate the potential value of Bitcoin as purely a method of exchange that bypassed traditional intermediaries, and came up with some ridiculously large figure that everyone dismissed. But one central point of the paper was that it should never be misunderstood as a store of value because its only inherent value was to bypass currency controls.
For the time being, I wish more workflows revolved around RAWs. You can pretty much prove the origins of an image sans cryptography by just possessing the image sensor data that you used to produce the final. It's not foolproof but AI image models can't really generate a convincing bayer raw and it's not something anyone is going to spend significant time training.
Why not just have BBC sign stuff with their own creds then? You can originate the chain of custody anywhere and relying on the camera is kind of silly when the reputation of the original publisher in a more meaningful backstop.
It's useful to have all your tools automatically apply metadata in a standard way instead of having to keep track of it manually. Most cameras already add metadata that says what camera and lens were used, but you lose that as soon as you import it into Photoshop and export as a jpeg.
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