Anti trust prosecutions work only if harm to consumer is proven - harm to other companies doesn't really work for successfully anti trust prosecutions.

There's a reason no US attorneys bring anti trust lawsuits against Google and that's because Google would very likely be able to show their choices benefitted consumers (eg. say saved 10 mins and 50MB data a day across 200 million consumers without charge)

I'm an individual, not a company. I make web pages. Lots of other individuals also make web pages. It's not like only companies make websites and consumers only use websites.

I'm pretty sure the number of individual web devs is vastly lower than the number of consumers.

Maybe, I don't know. My point was that Google fucking with the web doesn't only affect companies. Even if there's vastly more company websites than personal websites, there's a vast number of personal websites too.

What would the process of being convicted of anti-trust laws for a website, when in order to use a competitor, you just have to type 'bing.com' or 'duckduckgo.com' into your address bar?

If using competitor is not viable. Similarly, one could have installed an alternative OS with an alternative browser in 2000, but the jury thought that it's not that simple.

FYI: Although I suppose everyone every once in a while is surprised about the way their posts are moderated on HN and other websites (if they notice, that is) it is annoying when people complain about downvoting. I just automatically downvote that.

Sometimes what you state just isn't popular for the crowd who reads it and/or moderates it. Doesn't mean you are right or wrong. Just take a deep breath and give it a rest.

EDIT: The guidelines say: "Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html hence, nope, I won't change that unless someone who works for HN directs me to.

> I just automatically downvote that.

We can both agree that one of us needs to change.

The guidelines are fine, the part you should change is automatically downvoting anything. Just jumping on a bandwagon makes for pretty boring reading too.

You don't have to be convicted to be violating, because:

1) Not all violators will necessarily be convicted.

2) Even for those eventually convicted, there's always a period when they are violating, but not yet convicted.

Being guilty before proven guilty is a thing in the real world.

As is being guilty and getting away with it. People do that all the time too.

And courthouses and judges don't have some monopoly into assessment of guilt. Just into its official identification and punishment.

(If the legal system had the monopoly, or some moral monopoly, of only it determining guilt, then how would we, as a society, judge the effectiveness or not of the legal system itself?)

> we, as a society

yes, we (the united states where google is head quartered) as a society, have agreed to at least pretend to allow the legal system to define guilt and innocence. But this isn't a philosophical debate. This is a discussion of what can be done to fix the AMP dilemma.