That is the least the judge should do.

Google’s possible monopoly over ad tech, which is beyond the purview of this case, but is being decided in another case, is destroying democracy.

Google gets the majority of online ad revenue in the U.S. It manages that through anticompetitive practices — it controls the plumbing of online advertising technology — that are starving news outlets of the revenue they need to survive.

Big tech companies have lobbied Congress fiercely to prevent the U.S. from following other Western democracies in passing legislation to protect the press from predatory tech interests.

We saw the rotten fruits of Google’s work in this election, when swarms of uninformed voters elected an autocrat whose only “achievement” was a tax cut for economic elites.

As newspapers in this country have declined, Fox News and big tech (i.e. social media misinformation) have risen. That is like trading a forest for a nuclear waste dump.

And, welcome to DU, Ndp5

led by modern day kings who rule with impunity. They all need to be broken up, with standards made open, to allow for more competition, especially with AI on the horizon. The top 7 companies (the so-called Magnificent 7) are all big tech monopolies that account for a third of the market cap of the S&P 500 and half of the Nasdaq.

and I hope it happens. These behemoths should have never been allowed to develop nor should the degree of control they have nor the massive private wealth they've accumulated.

“The government putting its thumb on the scale in these ways would harm consumers, developers and American technological leadership at precisely the moment it is most needed.”

Well isn't that rich because it was US taxpayer that funded them. Now it's all proprietary which also should not be allowed. It should be a public asset.

By the mid 1990s, the intelligence community was seeding funding to the most promising supercomputing efforts across academia, guiding the creation of efforts to make massive amounts of information useful for both the private sector as well as the intelligence community.

They funded these computer scientists through an unclassified, highly compartmentalized program that was managed for the CIA and the NSA by large military and intelligence contractors. It was called the Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) project.

In 1995, one of the first and most promising MDDS grants went to a computer-science research team at Stanford University with a decade-long history of working with NSF and DARPA grants. The primary objective of this grant was “query optimization of very complex queries that are described using the ‘query flocks’ approach.” A second grant—the DARPA-NSF grant most closely associated with Google’s origin—was part of a coordinated effort to build a massive digital library using the internet as its backbone. Both grants funded research by two graduate students who were making rapid advances in web-page ranking, as well as tracking (and making sense of) user queries: future Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

The research by Brin and Page under these grants became the heart of Google: people using search functions to find precisely what they wanted inside a very large data set. The intelligence community, however, saw a slightly different benefit in their research: Could the network be organized so efficiently that individual users could be uniquely identified and tracked?

https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-cia-and-nsa-research-grants-for-mass-surveillance