[jimmy1]

> they will either do nothing, or take an action that furthers their corporate interests.

> - and look at how the banks are regulated!

And you can view the US Government in a similar fashion, except exchange corporate profits for power. Power is the currency of the US Government, and they will either do nothing, or take an action that furthers their "corporate interest": the increase of power. Regulations serve that role very nicely.

And by the way I see this mistake made all the time, but my spouse is a regulator and here's the dirty secret (well, it's not so secret to astute observers): the bank shills might be going on CNBC or Money Talk radio and go on tropin' about regulations, but they love the regulations. They work with the US Government to create new regulations. Regulations are a wonderful barrier of entry for them. They already have their decades long established regulatory compliance structures in place that would cost billions for the small bank to try and replicate. It helps keep the competition out. It's now a symbiotic relationship. Airwaves are regulated for similar fashion: keep the small broadcasters out, keep the big entrenched players on air and control the message.

If you regulate Google, you will further entrench their position as monopolistic/oligopolistic. You'll create the same situation that you have in banks: only the big have the resources to lobby and comply with complex regulatory overreach.

> finance and banking, cable television, health care, pharmaceuticals, agro-business – are all instances in which the competitive, free market has been interfered with by the paternalistic and regulatory hand of the government. It is not the market that has “failed” in these corners of the economy, but rather it is the presence and pervasiveness of the interventionist state.

> this, too, is typical of market critics such as Professor Stiglitz. They deceptively call “market failures” instances not of competitive free markets but of “crony capitalism” under which special interests have successfully interacted with politicians and bureaucrats to rig the market for their own benefit at the expense of both consumers and potential competitors who are legally prevented or hindered from entering sectors of the economy where they would like to try to gain market share and earn profits by offering better and lower priced goods than their privileged rivals are offering to those consumers.

I feel it is too often we mistake crony capitalism (and address that issue) for "market failures" and then demand that the regulatory hand of the government intervene, which further worsens the situation.

Quotes from https://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/governments-crea...

Making a broader point (not responding to something specifically you said but something I see often come up when discussing regulating Big Tech) -- I am not posting this article to say it is some dogma I 100% agree with, but it does offer a different vision than the leftist dogma that is often offered up by tech liberals as the solution to all their problems.

There are other ways out, and it involves freedom, which is neither easy to achieve nor free. It may hurt to get there, but you cannot complain about the surveillance state and government power and influence on our lives, and then be so willing to hand them more power the moment you feel threatened by the "big evil corp"

Sorry I brain dumped on your innocuous comment about a particular thing, Feel free to tell me "sir this is a Wendys"

[adamsea]

> And you can view the US Government in a similar fashion, except exchange corporate profits for power.

The difference is that however flawed or imperfect it might be our government does have a democratic and representative system intended to give us a degree of control over it, and was designed with a series of checks and balances intended to mitigate the potential for abuse of power.

There are no such equivalent mechanisms in private corporations.

[jimmy1]

> There are no such equivalent mechanisms in private corporations.

To the contrary, you can view the free market as a parallel system of checks and balances where the people have voice and opinion: your wallet. Yes you can actually "vote" with your wallet in a free market.

And unfortunately unlike the free market, where greed of money actually acts as a balancing factor, greed of power is terrible in a democracy, and we have seen the power grabs of our court systems in not only this current regime, but previous ones controlled by democrats as well. Why is the court system so important? Why are senators willing to risk shutting down the government and achieving actually nothing meaningful session after session? Because there is absolute power there. And there is absolute power now in our imperial presidency, started by Bush, continued on by Obama, and now the loaded gun was left for Trump. If we restore power back to congress like the founders intended (and further restore power back to the people by eliminating political gerrymandering) we may return to the situation you describe, but I'll take free markets over the current broken system we have today.

At the end of the day, people have the choice to stop using Google Search, Youtube and use adblock to block Google's Ad networks. Consumers can simply elect to take a different action.