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Tech giants are hijacking the internet
121–130 of 143 posts
Re: Tech giants are hijacking the internet
#122Well DW could do something about it by at least adding the fediverse on their abominable "follow us on X, Y, Z". DW does not even have an RSS feed for chris sake. The press is complicit in the hijacking of the internet. They made a Faustian pact. Now they are crying foul.
I think you are misreading the situation. It’s not enough to have open standards if the big guys just consume that data into their closed platforms. The author argues they are too powerful. We had open standards and big tech embraced and then locked it into their platforms. We need regulations at this point.
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Re: Tech giants are hijacking the internet
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Internet giants don't gatekeep the methods that people use to find and access things. The simplist way is to do a bunch of advertising for your site.
How do you advertise for your site if not through internet giants' advertising platforms? Billboards?
TikTok was able to grow by putting ads on properties like YouTube. Internet giants don't stop you from advertising your own platform.
Re: Tech giants are hijacking the internet
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are definitely people who will and still do pay for these things, Apple News+ or whatever is an example of news...also WSJ, NYT, Economist subscriptions...Instagram verified checkmarks. The question is how do these companies capture both the paying and non paying users...and that is through advertising. If you pay any attention, the amount of ads you watch is your payment to these companies for "free" services.
I am one of those people but this is a far cry from the days where you had to use a newspaper vending machine or walk into a video rental store. Free wasn’t really even an option. Anyway my point is that the problem is not the lack of open standards. The problem is that we discovered how to do “free” and a lot of people prefer this way whether they want to think about it or not.
I'm not really seeing your logic here. Yes, things are "free." What does this have to do with network effect driven monopolies, or open standards as a solution?
Re: Tech giants are hijacking the internet
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you are misreading the situation. It’s not enough to have open standards if the big guys just consume that data into their closed platforms. The author argues they are too powerful. We had open standards and big tech embraced and then locked it into their platforms. We need regulations at this point.
The universe let it all happen. By using cloud services, analytics, and free email services to allow monoliths to be able to run surveillance on basically every original idea launched since the early 2000s, users let and enabled this to happen. Not only did people open their information and identities deeply to companies like google, they also funded them vastly by caving in once free services became paid services. O…
There is just no alternative.
If you want to self host a site your ISP won't let you. If you want to self host email, none of your messages will get through.
15 years ago I could host a site at home. Today, it can't be done.
Want to regulate something... Make ISP's allow for self hosting. My 5 year old android phone has the power to host a small personal site, but my ISP won't let it happen.
Re: Tech giants are hijacking the internet
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think that's what it does. Where did you read that?
that's what it does, it's called attestation. It's being used to be able to tell bots from humans. A human will be required to run a browser with proper attestation that they're a human. It can be used for good (prevent bots from accessing the site) and bad (prevent humans from using anything but chrome).
How does that relate to this statement:
> WEI is a way to cryptographically prove to a remote website that you're really browsing it with an unmodified build of Chrome
What you're saying (and what I read) appears much more general than that. It could be used to block anything but official builds of Chrome, but that doesn't mean that's what it's for.
Re: Tech giants are hijacking the internet
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think that's what it does. Where did you read that?
https://vivaldi.com/blog/googles-new-dangerous-web-environme... says: > It would provide websites with an API telling them whether the browser and the platform it is running on that is currently in use is trusted by an authoritative third party (called an attester). And https://www.xda-developers.com/google-web-environment-integr... says: > The proposal threatens the free and open internet in a number of ways, but on…
I understand what it could be used for - DNS and PKI as centralised structures could also be used to block things. Parler was kicked off all cloud platforms for political reasons.
But that doesn't mean that its sole purpose is to verify that you're using an official Chrome build.
Re: Tech giants are hijacking the internet
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think we can all think of potential futures. I don't see why this one is particularly likely. Google has open sourced the guts of its browser so others can make non-Google controlled browsers, and they fund one of the two only real competitors to their browser.
People can fork Google Chrome, yet none has done this so far. Not counting pretty GUI or some integrated extensions as a fork really. Google Chromium is genius marketing idea, hats off to the people who invented it, they convinced even programmers that there is some mythical "independent" Chromium project and anyone can fork it. Well, theoretically it is possible, but practically - not so much. The strategy is so suc…
Given Edge, Brave, Opera, Silk, Arc, Vivaldi, etc[0], are all built on Chromium, are you sure?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser)#Active
Re: Tech giants are hijacking the internet
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, the problem is no one is willing to pay for any of these services. How many people are paying for their news? For something like YouTube? That stuff costs mega $$$ Back in the day, you were forced to pay for things. You wanted news? You had to put in some coins for a newspaper. Now you sign on and you get news and YouTube seemingly for free… open standards or not, someone has to pay for it one way or another.
Even if this were true, this is a talking point from the beginning of the internet when there were way less people hooked to it, why does it follow that that makes anything okay? If people won’t pay for a service it’s because they really want or need it. You’re simply making the case that these services that no one believes useful enough to pay for are controlling everything because they’re frontends for marketing ag…
I use Google News because it is, imo, the best news aggregator. If it suddenly started to cost me money, I would move to something else. Eventually I would move to OTA TV stations that pay via ad revenue. If OTA TV started charging for viewership instead of ads, I would just stop looking at news. I care, but not enough to spend money. Same with Reddit, tiktok, hn, basically everything besides video games, stack overflow (which is another statement because it might drop in quality so much if it went pay that it might not be useful anymore), and cell services+home internet.
Re: Tech giants are hijacking the internet
#130Well DW could do something about it by at least adding the fediverse on their abominable "follow us on X, Y, Z". DW does not even have an RSS feed for chris sake. The press is complicit in the hijacking of the internet. They made a Faustian pact. Now they are crying foul.
So mainstream press finally starts covering the egregious behavior of big tech companies and the response is to attack them as complicit co-conspirators? Might sound smart but perhaps not the wisest of criticism. Let’s encourage dissent so we can preserve democracies.
I don't think it's unreasonable to point out the hypocrisy and affect on this issue the media has had in the past