Facebook and Google agreed to "cooperate and assist one another" if they ever faced an investigation into their pact to work together in online advertising, according to an unredacted version of a lawsuit filed by 10 states against Google last week. [...]
A Google presentation said if the company couldn't "avoid competing with" Facebook, it would collaborate to "build a moat." [...]
For years, criticism of Google's online advertising empire has focused on how the company leveraged its powerful consumer-facing platforms, such as Google Search and YouTube, to take over another lucrative but less visible business: the software that acts as a middleman for buying and selling ads across the web.
The Facebook allegations add a new wrinkle -- that Google cut a deal with a competing middleman, one that the states describe as Google's "largest potential competitive threat."
They also represent a potent legal risk. Under U.S. law, agreements to fix prices can be easier to prove than the states' other accusations -- namely that Google is maintaining an illegal monopoly.
In addition to the suit filed in Texas, Google was hit last week in a separate antitrust lawsuit joined by 38 attorneys general, which alleged that it maintained monopoly power over the internet-search market through anticompetitive contracts and conduct.
Google, Facebook Agreed to Team Up Against Possible Antitrust Action
I feel like there's a term for this.
Tags: big brother, conspiracies, corporations, doomed, spam, www
7 Responses:
A meta cartel. Pretty sure this has escaped from some dystopian scifi written by someone who would like to be William Gibson but isn't as nearly good. Or is it that we're just living in a dystopian poorly-plotted sub-Gibson scifi? Yeah, it's that, isn't it.
Zack Snyder's movies still suck, including and especially his DC Comics flicks. But the choice to cast Jesse Eisenberg as a Zuckerberg-esque take on Lex Luthor seems sensible in hindsight. Here we have Zuck creating his own Legion of Doom.
I expect Uber to jump in any day now. They publicly say they want their drivers to get the vaccines, but... their being classified as "gig workers" makes that all-but-impossible. And it's not as if Uber, Lyft, and the rest spent most of the year spending $200m on the most expensive ballot measure in US history just to guarantee their drivers remain gig wo-- oh, right.
But... Sucker Punch, man.
Yes...? What about it? It's also shitty-looking flick I've no interest in ever seeing.
Nor do I plan on seeing his upcoming adaptation of The Fountainhead (because of course a guy who thinks Superman should kill and missed the point of Watchmen is a guy who loves an Ayn Rand story in which the "hero" rapes a woman and she's grateful for it).
Sucker Punch is an original concept, not franchise work or adaptations.
As such, it's a very interesting take on where Zack is coming from - and worth seeing for that.
DC movies would suck as much without Zack's involvement. Batman and Superman are flawed singletons that prevent many stories; the Marvel family dynamics (Guardians, FF, Avengers, even Spider-Man) are absent.
I'll keep this brief sice I know Jamie hates threads going off-topic:
Sucker Punch (like Avatar) is only "original" in the sense that it's not a pre-existing IP. I have no interest in seeing the tired "yeah, she's pretty, but she kicks ass!" trope that wiser-folks-than-I have already torn apart.
And your argument that "DC movies would suck without Zack" falls apart with Watchmen. Snyder had active influence over the scripts, so the blame is indeed his. Great writers have done great work with these characters; Zack Snyder isn't one of them.
But if you enjoy Snyder's work, more power to ya for finding something to enjoy in these trying times. Cheers.