Hal Varian: preference

Transcript context

…But why is it you always win the arms race? That, to me, is what’s surprising. There’s never been a three-month period where you’ve lost the arms race. And it’s not just Google. George Mason has a Microsoft-based system. It’s not quite as good as Google, arguably, but it works fine for spam. I waste 30 seconds a week fighting spam. Yeah, I have my private account, and I have my Google account. My Google account — basically there’s no spam on it. My private account — my email address is here and there, and so I do tend to get more spam. And they’re all those mailing lists that somehow you got on and now find they’re not that useful. That shows up in my private inbox too. I don’t know a good answer to your question. I think, as long as it’s under control from the users’ point of view, then we don’t see a big uprising. By the way, we do see, of course, a lot of resistance to robocalls, which are much more annoying than spam in my experience. And likely there’ll be some regulations trying to control this. Well, there’s been regulation, but it hasn’t worked, right?…

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