291–300 of 361 posts
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> breaking up of monopolies What’s the monopoly here? There are tons of successful ad companies.
Please name one credible Google Ads competitor.
Before anyone makes the argument that the EU should have no jurisdiction over an American entity, please remember that Google sells its services in Europe. It's well within the jurisdiction of the EU to regulate how anyone does business here. Google Ireland alone had a 50B euro turnover. The breaking up of monopolies used to be in the toolbox of American antitrust policies, back when America enforced antitrust legisl…
There are real questions about how much authority the EU has over an American entity. Can the EU only regulate activities in the EU or does it have global jurisdiction? On one hand, if Google simply restructured, spun off or sold its EU ad business the competitive landscape wouldn't change that much. I'm not sure whether a new European competitor could ever become a peer to Google if it could only compete in the EU m…
Of course, if Google only makes the change in the EU, it doesn't much change the landscape outside of the EU. Although there's a chance for better competition in the EU to give another player a foothold, which then helps them gain usage elsewhere (perhaps from global customers who like the results in Europe and try it globally)
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1. Neeva sounds like a hairspray brand. Not a search engine. 2. It's literally just a claim. I have no way of verifying the claim. Them asking me to pay for it makes it more sus. 3. I use searx already. Which I can confirm isn’t “spying” on me because it has nothing to tie me to my IRL identity. 4. It was a Bing reseller. I don’t care for Bing resellers.
The point is that it had no "surveillance capitalism". It failed because no one cares about that enough - proving that people prefer free with data mining/ads over subscriptions for many internet products.
You say that like there aren’t numerous other competitors in the space: DuckDuckGo, Kagi, Brave, searx, qwant, startpage, etc, etc.
These services provide both paid and ad based models.
Neeva failed because of its own issues. I am in their target market and I had never even heard of them until they shut down.
Starting any business is extremely challenging, one failing doesn’t imply there was no market.
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Nobody suggested killing Android (and they couldn't do it in the first place even if they wanted to). It's about adds. I hope this is a step towards seeing adds for what most of them are: lies, propaganda, manipulation, and a pointless arms race that distracts efforts from improving products. In general, I expect this to go nowhere, of course. However, the fact that the EU can dare suggest such things fills me with h…
The ad business supports android development.
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Nationalization is corporate civil asset forfeiture.
This is just a lazy attempt to tie one thing to another, unpopular thing. What is the comparison here aside from "I don't like both"? In what sense is nationalization "corporate civil asset forfeiture"? Not all nationalization is uncompensated, even in the real world. Further, you can imagine very fair ways, long term, to nationalize companies by e.g. requiring them to pay a wealth tax in the form of equity.
> civil asset forfeiture: enables a government to seize property and other assets belonging to persons suspected of committing a crime
The suggestion being that being wildly successful should be a crime.
Google operates an exchange for a digital asset, is a major vendor/trader of said asset on that exchange and operates an algorithmic trading platform to enable people to buy and sell on that exchange. On top of that the algorithmic trades are a "black box" with no audit trail, and no public insight into how it operates. If that sounds familiar, think illegal crypto exchanges... Obviously "ads" are not "securities", b…
This is where I stand, I operate some ad accounts but the amount of control and insight taken away with each update is really noticeable. Really interesting is that I actually get zero input on how much I pay on each day. You give a budget for the day but I don’t have a lot of control over it unless I micromanage the thing. It’s crazy and I hope the EU will go hard on Google. Edit So more about payments. It used to b…
Then the URL[2] 404'd and the API disappeared. I couldn't find any references to a "BillingCap". I wondered why[3].
Now it makes sense: they got rid of budgets as you explained above. Everything's seems to be obfuscated behind a quite opaque Proposals/Deals[4] data structure now.
[1]: https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-billing
[2]: https://developers.google.com/ad-manager/api/reference/v2019...
[3]: https://twitter.com/kdeldycke/status/1625409998225285121
[4]: https://developers.google.com/authorized-buyers/apis/guides/...
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I'm not pro Google, and I'm finally un-googling my life. But I don't think it is great to compare food to ads, one is required to live.
Un-googling, I found out, is easier than un-Microsofting or un-Facebooking. MS because of Office and FB because of WhatsApp. Writing this from a yet to be un-googled Pixel phone...
Apple Maps sucks, there's nothing near as good as YouTube, and I don't want to move hundreds of email accounts off of gmail.
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The point is that it had no "surveillance capitalism". It failed because no one cares about that enough - proving that people prefer free with data mining/ads over subscriptions for many internet products.
>It failed because no one cares about that enough You say that like there aren’t numerous other competitors in the space: DuckDuckGo, Kagi, Brave, searx, qwant, startpage, etc, etc. These services provide both paid and ad based models. Neeva failed because of its own issues. I am in their target market and I had never even heard of them until they shut down. Starting any business is extremely challenging, one failing…
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Neither is Google. If Google said they're going to disappear in 30 days, the world will move on and every single one of their services will be replaced.
If a power company suddenly shuts down and after the logistics nightmare that follows, they get replaced, they are still infrastructure. If just a few products that google make go offline for only a few hours, the economic damage that causes is in the hundreds of millions at least. Just because googles services could feasibly be replaced, it does not mean they are not infrastructure.
Yet, it's ok for Europe to ignore their own monopolies.
This is just moving the goal post. A monopoly is a monopoly.
What about ASML? They're a monopoly for EUV machines, which power our modern tech economy. That should be "infrastructure" enough right? Why isn't Europe looking at them?
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>99% of the people don't care. People do care. They just don't have much, if any, choice.
They do. Neeva, founded by a former Google exec, built a search engine that had no ads and no tracking. No surveillance capital. They just shut down because no one wanted to pay for it - hence the idea that 99% don't care about surveillance capital enough. Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65671468