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Web by Google (TM)

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61–70 of 496 posts

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#61
post #8

I think we’re in a real low point right now. Gmail, AMP, Chrome, Android. So many peoples internet experience is from one place. With Amazon dominating retail, and Facebook under its various brands dominating social media, there isn’t much scope for other players. I don’t see another option than breaking theses companies up at this point.

FAG are America's new Hollywood.

Hollywood was an important leg to establish worldwide cultural hegemony for the US during the 20th century.

With the internet taking over to shaping culture, the US had to adapt. And it did, and again controls most of the important channels that influence culture worldwide.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#62

Didn't we do this to ourselves, though? The tech community did decide that vendor lock-in is okay, walled gardens are okay and also that a browser monopoly is okay. My impression is that this is what's different this time: it was chosen by developers themselves

Didn't we do this to ourselves, though?

Does it matter?

We still give cancer treatment to smokers. We still give dialysis to alcoholics. We still pull the plastic out of our own oceans.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#63
post #37

I posted a while ago about how chilling it was to me how dysfunctional Google Search (and really, every search engine) is these days. It is still your best-bet "front door to the web," and it's been fundamentally broken by the pivot towards ML-based natural language search (e.g., dropping of whole search terms to fit the model of what it "thinks" you're searching for), its bias towards recency and "brands," and its i…

The recency bias and a bias towards 'N things to X in YYYY' lists kills me. It's so bad.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#64
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that kinda like saying that the electric companies do the same thing, though?

True, that’s why in some markets the electric companies have been split into transmission companies and delivery companies. You buy power from the delivery company and the transmission companies are paid to maintain power lines.

That's effectively how it already is though: there's one market for connectivity, and a separate market for cloud computing. If you don't want to build on Amazon's cloud, you can build on Azure, GCP, or one of the smaller competitors.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#65
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that kinda like saying that the electric companies do the same thing, though?

Electric companies can switch off your electricity, and not much else. Amazon can read your secrets.

I know that in practice nobody at AWS reads customer secrets and if someone does, it will be logged somewhere but I always find it funny that you can encrypt things in AWS with secrets fully managed by AWS. It's just a checkbox to check the box for encryption in technical requirements but it doesn't really matter if you really care about privacy when the keys are stored in a very safe box accessible by AWS and the USA state (patriot act).

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#66
post #8

I think we’re in a real low point right now. Gmail, AMP, Chrome, Android. So many peoples internet experience is from one place. With Amazon dominating retail, and Facebook under its various brands dominating social media, there isn’t much scope for other players. I don’t see another option than breaking theses companies up at this point.

FAG are America's new Hollywood. Hollywood was an important leg to establish worldwide cultural hegemony for the US during the 20th century. With the internet taking over to shaping culture, the US had to adapt. And it did, and again controls most of the important channels that influence culture worldwide.

[deleted]

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#67
post #8

I think we’re in a real low point right now. Gmail, AMP, Chrome, Android. So many peoples internet experience is from one place. With Amazon dominating retail, and Facebook under its various brands dominating social media, there isn’t much scope for other players. I don’t see another option than breaking theses companies up at this point.

FAG are America's new Hollywood. Hollywood was an important leg to establish worldwide cultural hegemony for the US during the 20th century. With the internet taking over to shaping culture, the US had to adapt. And it did, and again controls most of the important channels that influence culture worldwide.

Poor choice of acronym. Please change it, there’s a reason no-one else has used it.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#68
post #5

> Google’s capture of the Web is a fait accompli. Only legislation will keep the World Wide Web from finally becoming Web by Google (TM). I really hope it's not the case, because then Google will cancel it. /s Search is probably something where there could be creative use of the p2p decentralized technologies. If when performing a search I could ask my contacts to look in their history if they have something matching…

>Search is probably something where there could be creative use of the p2p decentralized technologies. Has this been attempted before? does it have a name?

YaCy calls it “P2P Mode”: https://yacy.net/

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#69
I hate Safari, but Apple here have really good opportunity to step up. With opening Safari for PC and Android and at the same time improving Safari along, they could cut quite a share from Chrome and stop this nonsence.

But they seemed to dithched focus on web platform as it is still such mess for both users and developers, so meh.

Chrome for me is done, using it only for PWA.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#70

I would be very interested in seeing HN commenters' theories on the following scenarios: A) what happens if Google decides to stop funneling money to Mozilla? What becomes of Firefox? B) at what point do you think the $350+ million/year cash flow to Firefox will get cut off? C) do you think Mozilla has a reasonable chance of success of replacing that amount of money with a deal with Microsoft/bing?

I’m optimistic and think they’ll get some other funding, when the money starts to dry up.

  There are some companies that probably have a strong interest in google not controlling the web entirely.  Though it will be hard to replace that revenue entirely.
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