Google and others working to soften new US antitrust bills?

[ichthyous]

I am seeing signs that January will continue the decimation of my traffic started in early December. My ranking is now at a low I haven't seen in years and continues to drop slowly and steadily. I have lost 56% of my top 3 ranking terms and 26% of 4-10 ranking terms in USA since one year ago. This is mostly due to Google strongly favoring info sites and also large corporate sites...most of the ranking has been taken by how-to articles or the same large sites with big ad budgets.

This is compounded by a massive loss of image traffic, down more than 50% from early 2021, because media sites are now ranking across the board for images. Add on top of that the multiplication of ads and so many other items added to each page and there is little motivation to work on improving my ranking at all.

Some food for thought...all during 2021 it's been mostly USA traffic that has been throttled to death and whittled away. Could it be that Google feels that there are no significant barriers to its abuses and manipulation in the USA market so it's free to do whatever it wants, while it treads more lightly in the EU/UK/AU and other markets where real action might be taken or is already being considered? Australia forced Google to start paying newspapers and media sites for content. There are currently zero barriers to Google's abuses in the USA market. Read this article today which illustrates how Google and the other tech giants use big money to influence our elected representatives: [politico.com...]

[edited by: not2easy at 5:30 pm (utc) on Jan 4, 2022]
[edit reason] split thread cleanup [/edit]

[Markedd]

@ichthyous It's funny to see how these Amazon sellers are defending Amazon. Wasn't it the big e-commerce giant that killed lots of businesses in its expansion and even stole devices from their sellers, banning them afterwards from the platform. But I get it, this is 'lawyering' 101. Show the Congress that the small guys/gals are actually profiting from the big tech (I think I saw an episode on Better Call Saul that showed something like that).

[NickMNS]

Wasn't it the big e-commerce giant that killed lots of businesses in its expansion and even stole devices from their sellers, banning them afterwards from the platform.

It is survivorship bias at play. The businesses that were killed by Amazon are by definition no longer around an thus not able to voice the harm that they have endured.

Moreover, those that survive certainly benefit from Amazon, because without Amazon their competition would still exist. However, the joke is on them because without the other market participants the survivors loose bargaining power with Amazon, and thus the rake or rent (economic rent) can be increased to the point where Amazon gains all the benefit from the survivor's work and the survivor can't pull out because that will lead to the survivor's certain death.

Ironically, the tech giants also like to claim that regulation stifles innovations, but they're less concerned about the impact of rent seeking on innovation.

See:
[en.wikipedia.org...]

Also in the above link see the heading about Tullock Paradox, and the rent seeker's low cost of bribing governments.

[edited by: not2easy at 5:34 pm (utc) on Jan 4, 2022]
[edit reason] snipped broken link from split/splice [/edit]