Sundar Pichai warns of threats to internet freedom
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Re: Sundar Pichai warns of threats to internet freedom
#2From where I sit the #1 risk to the free and open internet these days is Google.
Edit: two reasons:
1) Because adtech is destroying society. Surveillance is never good. Ads as funding smears absolutely everything with perverse incentives that act consistently against both the explicit wishes and implicit best-interests of the viewers, and (it seems moreso every year) society at large.
2) Google is doing everything it can to protect and defend their control over said adtech, using all mechanisms at its disposal including a monopoly on Search, almost a monopoly (and veto power) on what defines HTML (Blink not Chrome), and like 70% of mobile platform.
Re: Sundar Pichai warns of threats to internet freedom
#3Google attacks the "free and open internet" globally far more than a backwater country that restricts its citizens internet usage along with a million other things.
Re: Sundar Pichai warns of threats to internet freedom
#4should have posted it as an amp link
f google
Re: Sundar Pichai warns of threats to internet freedom
#5Pot, meet kettle.
Re: Sundar Pichai warns of threats to internet freedom
#6This article feels like a rosy, uncritical review of Google under Pichai. Even the opening sentence here is full of tone deaf hypocrisy:
> [Sundar Pichai] says many countries are restricting the flow of information, and the model is often taken for granted.
Like when Google, with more influence than most countries, censors content on YouTube or the Google App Store? Google’s manipulation of information amounts to political propaganda to those who aren’t aligned with their prevailing views - naturally many countries will balk at letting that kind of foreign interference/control influence their own societies.
And I can’t help but view Pichai’s perspective on taxes as a form of convenient regulatory capture / barrier to competition:
> I put this to Pichai, who said that Google no longer uses this scheme, is one of the world's biggest taxpayers, and complies with tax laws in every country in which it operates.
The article also talks about the activist streak of Google and its employees but doesn’t challenge it:
> With more than 100,000 staff, many of them hugely opinionated on internal message boards, and activist in nature, this is just impossible to control. There is a tension between Google genuinely embracing cognitive diversity by having people of all persuasions among its global staff, and at the same time really standing up for particular issues as a company.
I don’t think this tension is actually present. Google is a dyed in the wool Bay Area tech company. I don’t think it has employees of “all persuasions” in any great numbers unless they are looking at only the left side of the American political spectrum.
Re: Sundar Pichai warns of threats to internet freedom
#7Google itself is actively restricting the flow of information.
It is really quite sad how Google's formerly excellent search product, has morphed into a tool for censorship, and surveillance capitalism, and in the process, degraded its accuracy significantly.
Re: Sundar Pichai warns of threats to internet freedom
#8This article feels like a rosy, uncritical review of Google under Pichai. Even the opening sentence here is full of tone deaf hypocrisy: > [Sundar Pichai] says many countries are restricting the flow of information, and the model is often taken for granted. Like when Google, with more influence than most countries, censors content on YouTube or the Google App Store? Google’s manipulation of information amounts to pol…
Google doesn't give interviews with executives to outlets that ask critical questions. (Neither does Apple, pretty famously.)
Executive interviews tend to lean more towards press releases than journalism.
Re: Sundar Pichai warns of threats to internet freedom
#9From where I sit the #1 risk to the free and open internet these days is Google. Edit: two reasons: 1) Because adtech is destroying society. Surveillance is never good. Ads as funding smears absolutely everything with perverse incentives that act consistently against both the explicit wishes and implicit best-interests of the viewers, and (it seems moreso every year) society at large. 2) Google is doing everything it…
How so? It seems that a search engine would need the internet to have as much information out there in the open to index and give us the results upon searching..
Because they are so dominate they exercise outsized control, but there are still a few others.
Data behind paywalls/logins is useless to them.
Re: Sundar Pichai warns of threats to internet freedom
#10From where I sit the #1 risk to the free and open internet these days is Google. Edit: two reasons: 1) Because adtech is destroying society. Surveillance is never good. Ads as funding smears absolutely everything with perverse incentives that act consistently against both the explicit wishes and implicit best-interests of the viewers, and (it seems moreso every year) society at large. 2) Google is doing everything it…
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