Why should government control the media ? That makes no sense.

Most of the social media giants lose money on their India operations while giving poor Indians an opportunity to have a better platform to express themselves. India has virtually seen a one party rule since independence, that too by a single family who could be more corrupt than all the south american dictators combined. The only way an ordinary tea seller could become a PM while defeating this party was because of power of social media are grassroot movement against corruption.

India has a history of screwing up what works without fully understanding the consequences of their regulations.

That makes it all the more worring. Subverting democracy at the behest of a foreign actor for pay.

Pay per tweet taken to a new level.

The foreign social media sites have political agenda blatantly well “foreign”.

Media houses are strictly regulated and have to abide much stringent criteria for reporting or an oped.

It’s about control it was in the best interest of these tech firms to be “neutral” before they captured the entire public discourse space. That is clearly not the case now, They have infinitely more power than they had before and even more power than the sovereign government in many many countries.

Some governments are trying to protect their (digital) sovereignty through regulation.

One possibility I see is for many shrinks to come together form a co-operative and compete with vc backed alternatives.

This isn’t clear to me at all. I actually associate low-margin business with worse outcomes for traditionally high-touch services.

What is wrong with the article :

- So one small Psychiatrist is losing business to other Psychiatrists.

It is perfectly possible that Ross is an inefficient Psychiatrist here and patients are better served by other Psychiatrists. This is a loss for Ross but barely a "complication". Also it is not clear to me if the market was divided 50-50 between say Google and Bing why would it be any difference. From over 10 years of experience in ad industry I have realized that it is a ruthlessly free market system where the inefficient player will get punished very quickly.

What Google has done here is that opened up a lager pool of customers for the suppliers and that has resulted into fierce competition among suppliers. The customers invariably will benefit here as they have more options.

- The rant about smart campaigns

This is one of the real bad arguments. A couple's councilor is upset that Google is unable to differentiate between a PTSD councilor and couple's Councillor. Will the world be better served if a couple's councilor has to compete with a florist or a nanny ? [That it what yellow pages were].

The article laments that customers have more choice and it is not easy for the suppliers to rely on information asymmetry to make profit. They take some fictional futuristic scenario and compare google against it and blame those problems on Google. But in reality it is a good problem to have.

PS. This is by no means to claim that Google's ad algorithms are perfect, but it is without dispute that they are better than all available alternatives.

Perhaps you're approaching this from a technical standpoint because you're a computer person. He's not supposed to represent the entirety of the problem. He's there to illustrate the problem. Journalists do this to "humanize" the story, to make it more understandable by the audience. This is done all the time. If there's space available, several people are added. Or there may have been several examples in the reporter's original writing, but they were cut for various reasons like lack of space.

As an HN reader, you're probably not the audience.

I share your uncertainty about the relevance of Google’s market share. It was however clear to me that Ross is a psychologist, not a psychiatrist, working as a psychotherapist.

> Ellen Ross ... a psychotherapist ... her practice, True North Psychology ... “I’m a fairly good psychologist,” she says.

The exact service on offer is central to the more relevant issue of competition among suppliers. The psychotherapy market is increasingly competitive. Hopefully she’s an efficient psychotherapist as the flood of money into that space is likely to require some adaptation.

Cheap power and cooling might be a factor, but India is also building huge solar and wind capacities, and not to forget the solar alliance and cross border solar energy exchange/grid.

I might also add incompetent and narcissist.

Fun Fact 4: Everyone, that is everyone which includes Google has due process rights which I feel should be exercised by everyone. Next what ? > "Man charged with murder resists punishment by pleading non guilty in court".

People who put money should decide the area of focus. Not others.

> The project is ineffective and introduces a lot of other environmental problems

This achievement matters and useful in itself. May be they can figure it out how to scale or will find more commercially viable products from this sort of technology.

If students are allowed to declare bankruptcy from student loans than banks can apply a more realistic risk models to such lines of credit. Students will then have to either pay very high rate of interest or will have to go out their way to prove their financial responsibility. Banks will then be able to create sophisticated models to figure out which young people are responsible enough and who are not. This will incentivize responsible behavior from students as well as institutes and not to mention a competition to reduce fees.

Not to mention, this model will also ensure the folks who should not be in college or will not benefit from it will not be able to go to college. I think this is where politicians disagreed and came with the completely wrong policies with perfectly predictable bad outcomes.