Guggle has little place in my life.
Android phone that has been heavily
fiddled with,no pay store,no jeemail,etc.
This is hard to maintain ,as so many services are interlinked and
useing heavy duty add blockers ,etc
breaks a lot of sites.
Living in a low population rural
area,mobile intetnet is the by far
best choice for me.
And so I am in the process of choosing a new phone that will be
my main device,it will be very tame
and to my liking,and my current phone will get a talk and text sim
with no data and be reset to factory level awfulness and used for those occasions where its just
much easier to let the algorithyms
play with each other and hold my nose untill its switched off.
I will delay getting an actual guggle account as long as possible.
So here I am a hardcore lemyalone
Ill mind my own buisiness type,doing all the workarounds ,and
just finding that non viable and costing me what has become basic access to goods and services.
Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a public utility
271–280 of 748 posts
Re: Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a public utility
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except it's actually not that easy. Most of the web uses google analytics, so its unavoidable when you visit a website. Most of the web's emails are routed through google; I remember reading a post about a guy who set up his own SMTP server and everything, but then realised that everyone he was contacting was using gmail anyway (can't find the post). Every time you see an add that's served by google, that means that…
"Most of the web uses google analytics, so its unavoidable when you visit a website." I actually mentioned that. Just shim GA connections; this happens with most ad-blocking software, and I believe happens in Firefox's "strict" mode by default. It's really trivial. "Most of the web's emails are routed through google; I remember reading a post about a guy who set up his own SMTP server and everything, but then realise…
>""Also, what alternative is there for YouTube? there isn't a realistic competitor."
Bittorrent."
I should avoid Google's monopoly by becoming a criminal?
Re: Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a public utility
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a service with which essentially every person living in present-day America needs to interact on a day-to-day basis. And yes, they need to. I think it is hugely disingenuous to pretend otherwise. We can talk all day about how DuckDuckGo and ProtonMail exist. But for a huge, huge majority of people, Google simply is the internet.
Hard disagree. Gmail maybe. Providing email as a utility service is a strained argument but could be made as there is a parallel to actual mail service. Literally everything else Google does has a mainstream alternative that is a click away.
> everything else Google does has a mainstream alternative that is a click away.
Except no one clicks away (most people).
Re: Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a public utility
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
At least with government we have the powers of oversight and political organizing. It seems like a better bet then a corporation who's accountable to a bottom line, or owners.
I trust "political organizing" (codeword for astroturfing and cathedral control) less than I trust Google's profit interests.
I would rather be governed by a public actor with constraints than the arbitrary interference of a private actor.
This is the core republican (as in the political philosophy: Discourses on Livy, Philip Pettit, etc.) insight. If you want a stable society, you cannot leave space for arbitrary private individuals to become domineering forces on the rest of society. It's literally textbook how civilizations will fall, yet as a species we seem incapable of avoiding our own mistakes.
Re: Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a public utility
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're making a category error in your analogy. DuckDuckGo is much more like Google than "dig a well" is like municipal water.
I disagree, wells are equal to or better than municipal water, and can often be cheaper while being higher quality. the inverse can be true. the analogy holds imo.
I'm sure there are different geographical and utility costs, but every well I've ever priced was between 25-100 years to break-even
.
Re: Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a public utility
#276Well, a public utility also doesn't have the right to do this: "You did something wrong, we won't tell you what it was, there's no chance of appeal, and you are now banned from receiving water service again, ever, for the rest of your life, no matter where you move. And don't try moving in with someone else who's still receiving service, because they'll get banned too."
You are aware that public utilities CHARGE FOR THEIR SERVICE A LOT? Ask Texans and Californians about their power bills in the last months. The level of entitlement of people like you using a free service and expecting to impose the rules as they see fit and getting all angry at the company giving them an absolutely world class amazing service for free because they don't want to piss off the advertisers that pay for the whole deal is very hard to understand.
Re: Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a public utility
#277A big problem with software and people who write software (often) is that software doesn't like all the ways that human beings misbehave, change their minds, don't have immutable states, and don't fit into the categories you build for them. So any system that has a duty to serve everyone eventually ends up with an operational component that has almost as much human interaction and problem solving required as the soft…
There are plenty of rational reasons for not wanting a smart meter. Don't let the irrational people detract from the fact that there are many real problems with smart meters. Especially lots of privacy issues. In the UK, I report my own meter readings and the electrical company probably only really ever goes out once every few years when tenancies change. So I actually don't see what money it saves them asides from t…
Sure, but those not-irrational reasons are locale-specific. I've never heard of someone self-reporting the meter reading here in the US. The meter still keeps a local log of how much energy was used, so worrying about being framed for using too much energy still feels a bit irrational to me.
OTOH, smart meters allow the utility to charge TOU rates, which helps even out the load on the grid. It benefits the utility, of course, but also customers. For example, it is minimally inconvenient to set my car to charge or my dish washer to run at night instead of day, but I might not bother to do so unless the utility charges me below average rates to do so. I calculate that I am earning several hundred dollars per hour for the time spent taking advantage of TOU rates.
As for selling the data... the solution to that is banning such sales, not banning smart meters.
Re: Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a public utility
#278Well, a public utility also doesn't have the right to do this: "You did something wrong, we won't tell you what it was, there's no chance of appeal, and you are now banned from receiving water service again, ever, for the rest of your life, no matter where you move. And don't try moving in with someone else who's still receiving service, because they'll get banned too."
You are aware that public utilities CHARGE FOR THEIR SERVICE A LOT? Ask Texans and Californians about their power bills in the last months. The level of entitlement of people like you using a free service and expecting to impose the rules as they see fit and getting all angry at the company giving them an absolutely world class amazing service for free because they don't want to piss off the advertisers that pay for…
I don't see what any of that has to do with it being impossible to appeal or contact someone about the ban, though.
Re: Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a public utility
#279Well, a public utility also doesn't have the right to do this: "You did something wrong, we won't tell you what it was, there's no chance of appeal, and you are now banned from receiving water service again, ever, for the rest of your life, no matter where you move. And don't try moving in with someone else who's still receiving service, because they'll get banned too."
"but we still fully intend to profit off your data."
Re: Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a public utility
#280this stupidness always ends up lost in people's lack of understanding about what Google is, how the internet works, what SEO is etc. Waste of time and Google's right, not grounded in any kind of legality.