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Sundar Pichai warns of threats to internet freedom

bbc.com

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Re: Sundar Pichai warns of threats to internet freedom

#211

Post by passivate »

acomjean wrote: post #9
Sophistifunk wrote: post #2

From 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.

Yes, while the web may seem "open" due to its fragmented nature of hosting, Google wants all content to reside in their own walled garden so it can quickly kill competition. AMP was a major play towards that. Also, all (?) their money makers are closed source and proprietary - which is just fine by me, but Google should own up to what they really are instead of projecting a fake "open" image of themselves.

Re: Sundar Pichai warns of threats to internet freedom

#212

Post by sjg007 »

sn41 wrote: post #185
moshiv wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pichai is there to keep the factory lights on and the assembly line running. Nobody is expecting anything more from him.

You're wrong there I think. I personally was surprised by Chrome and the way it took off - initially when it started it looked like a me too product, it seemed pointless to repeat the good work at Firefox. And Android was also a good bet, though in my humble view, not as good a one as Chrome. Sundar got some big calls right.

Chromebooks too.

Re: Sundar Pichai warns of threats to internet freedom

#213

Post by sjg007 »

WA wrote: post #139
cromwellian wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there is no open internet, there is nothing to index or organize. If anything Apple has does more harm than anyone to the Web by pushing the idea of native apps for everything served from a closed proprietary App Store that you can’t even side load around.

You can index and organize billions of AMP pages. You can index and organize the content of an intranet of every large organization.

I've worked at several large companies and all are very bad at documenting anything.

Re: Sundar Pichai warns of threats to internet freedom

#214

Post by sempron64 »

pessimizer wrote: post #191
arcturus17 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Utopian thinking almost never comes to fruition because by definition it discounts a lot of negatives. It rarely comes from a place of first-principles reasoning about human behavior. And above all, human beings cannot see into the future so any vision is always incomplete and flawed. Nevertheless, as much as there are heaps of shit on the internet - digital surveillance, bottomless wells of inane addiction, hateful…

The only real benefit I see is 1) Wikipedia, Sci-Hub, Archive/LibGen, and 2) the increase in general literacy that came from people commenting/posting. I think 2) gets underestimated a lot - 10 years ago you could recognize a lot of stupid comments by the fact that they capitalized every word or the grammar and spelling were horrific. Those people didn't stop posting, they learned how to express themselves well throu…

There are SO many more valuable things on the internet than academic sites with genuinely useful material, even if you're not considering commercial transactions "useful". Forums, blogs, public libraries, newspapers, even if you don't consider the titans which we use so much we take them for granted (Google (Scholar, Books, Maps), Youtube, Amazon, Ebay, etc. etc.)

Just because there are parts of the internet like social media of questionable net positive impact, the sum total utility of the web for humanity has been an overwhelming positive. It's hard to see good things when you're thinking about bad ones. Take a step back.

Re: Sundar Pichai warns of threats to internet freedom

#216

Post by Spooky23 »

WA wrote: post #139
cromwellian wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there is no open internet, there is nothing to index or organize. If anything Apple has does more harm than anyone to the Web by pushing the idea of native apps for everything served from a closed proprietary App Store that you can’t even side load around.

You can index and organize billions of AMP pages. You can index and organize the content of an intranet of every large organization.

> You can index and organize the content of an intranet of every large organization.

Good luck. The magic of the internet is that everything is public and interlinked.

Usually within a company the incentives are such that information is more tightly controlled. A software engineer doesn't see purchase orders and an HR specialist doesn't see software assignments. Usually a directory is more useful than a search within a company. Obviously there are exceptions.

Re: Sundar Pichai warns of threats to internet freedom

#218

Post by cromwellian »

adolph wrote: post #147
cromwellian wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nationalism is followed by fascism quite easily, it o accident that many consider excessive nationalism to just be a kind of secular religion, with an easily route to toxicity, dogma, and racism. Look no further than the fact that nationalist movements have right wing ethno-state ambitions attached to them everywhere, usually with a return to “Greater X” where X is an older empire they use to have, usually when their…

Are the Olympics part of a fascist propaganda machine? > Nationalism is followed by fascism quite easily It seems just as easily followed by other forms of totalitarianism as exemplified by the USSR, China, Yugoslavia, Cuba, Venezuela.

[flagged]

Re: Sundar Pichai warns of threats to internet freedom

#219

Post by casefields »

mclightning wrote: post #177
benreesman wrote: post #133

I’ve never met a person inspired by what we thought the Internet would be in the 90s who isn’t sad that it went the way it did. I suspect the more idealistic of the cryptocurrency people will also feel nostalgic when Goldman and JP Morgan run blockchain in a few years. It’s extremely tempting, especially to technical people, to believe that some piece of technology will create net freedom and equality. The reality is…

>> "The reality is more mundane: technology is just a fancy word for tool, and the only thing the guillotine ever freed anyone from was tomorrow." Did you just come up with that? :O

It's true. If an existential threat is elected/takes office the guillotine can free us all from the tyranny of tomorrow.

>Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.

Freedom fighter vs terrorist is merely a question of narrative.

Re: Sundar Pichai warns of threats to internet freedom

#220

Post by cromwellian »

imwillofficial wrote: post #196
cromwellian wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google doesn’t sell data, and Google’s primary purpose is Search and organizing information, ads is just the way it’s funded. If the primary purpose was ada, then it would stop all of the wasteful spending on engineering projects with no relation to, and no hope of, making ad money.

You’re right on the not selling data directly. I should have been more precise. Google is in the business of collecting data and selling advertising using that data. For the purpose of making money. Search hasn’t been part of their purpose in decades. Let me ask you this, has search gotten better or worse in the last 5 - 10 years? Has their data collection gotten more invasive or less over the last 5 - 10 years? I th…

Search hasn't gotten worse. If you have objective measures as opposed to subject personal anecdotes, present them.
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