“Google: it is time to return to not being evil” • Hacker News Board

Re: “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

#111

Post by freehunter » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 1:21 AM UTC

sandov wrote: post #52

tryingagainbro wrote: post #3

Vivaldi CEO – “Google: it is time to return to not being evil” Me: that train has left the station. When you have monopoly power (70%-98% of market share) the governments should return Google and Whatever Corp to not being evil.

Me: When a company treats its users badly, users can stop using Google and Whatever Corp treats them badly. If users voluntarily subject themselves to mistreating, then I don't see why governments should intervene.

The government intervenes when a company gets so powerful that consumers don't have the ability to choose anymore, or are at risk of not being able to choose anymore.

Re: “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

#112

Post by exikyut » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 1:25 AM UTC

> It is also fair to say that Google is now in a position where regulation is needed. I sincerely hope that they’ll get back to the straight and narrow.

Hah. Even before I read any of this article, just reading the post title as submitted here made me think of something I ponder often:

The Microsoft antitrust regulations happened ultimately because Microsoft read the situation wrong and pushed too hard. It's sad to say that Google have studied what happened very, very well, and they've stepped carefully enough that, well, we now have Chromebooks - the exact direction Microsoft was heading in. And nobody's batting an eyelid.

Yes, Google needs to be reminded what its boundaries are.

I believe this can be done.

My guess is that Google have successfully ridden the general consensus of "it's open source, anyone can fork it" to get away with having Chrome be the world's dominant browser. But Chrome is not Chromium. Yeah, yeah, the binary differences are just a crash-reporter and autoupdater (mostly, IIRC), but still.

So the politicos need to be convinced that we've revisited the same situation. My suggestion is stifles laughter requiring that Chromebooks provide the option to install Firefox. :D

(OT trivia: Chromium's builtin spellchecker is fine with "politicos". That's hilarious. (I know it's on, it doesn't like "autoupdater".))

Re: “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

#113

Post by unityByFreedom » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 1:26 AM UTC

elihu wrote: post #108

It would be great if Google changes their policies and acts responsibly from here on out, but whether they do or not, I think we would all be better off in the long run if there were more competing services. Maybe it's time for a new search engine? (Or a new video sharing site, or a new email service, or a new online ad delivery system, or a new news aggregator, or a new cell phone operating system vendor, or a new I…

> I'm not sure when exactly the PageRank patent expires (people seem to be saying 2017 or 2018), but it will be soon and that should open up some interesting possibilities.

You could use it right now. In fact, many do.

Google doesn't sue companies for using PageRank or much of their published research. Much more interesting things have come out since then like BigTable (led to Hadoop + NoSQL databases) and Word2Vec (better semantic analysis + search). These are in use all over industry.

ITT people who don't understand the contributions Google has made.

If you're wondering why there aren't competitors, you're not looking far enough. Baidu competes with Google in China.

Re: “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

#114

Post by exikyut » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 1:28 AM UTC

WalterSear wrote: post #93

rasz wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adword/Doubleclick clients are their users, not you and me.

I'm not so sure. I've witnessed their adwords team plunder a startup marketing team's budget with false promises and bad advice.

Some extra detail (what's easy to share) could be very interesting.

Re: “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

#115

Post by squeaky-clean » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 1:29 AM UTC

ricardobeat wrote: post #86

mining wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends how you look at it. Dev time is a finite resource, and spending it on supporting a weird combo of user agent and browser seems likely to lead to less user utility.

Weird combo being Firefox with its default user agent..

Well, mobile Firefox which is much less common.

Re: “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

#116

Post by freehunter » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 1:30 AM UTC

alttab wrote: post #109

freehunter wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not forget the time they refused to make a YouTube app for Windows Phone and when Microsoft made one, Google forced them to remove it. And then seemingly in retribution for making the app, Google blocked Windows Phone from being able to access Google Maps even though the browser was technically capable of using it. Google's reasoning was (similarly to another comment here) "it's too hard to check functionality…

They seriously did that as you said? What a bunch of self important twats.

https://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/01/05/calling-shenanigan...

Google's comment was

>The mobile web version of Google Maps is optimized for WebKit browsers such as Chrome and Safari. However, since Internet Explorer is not a WebKit browser, Windows Phone devices are not able to access Google Maps for the mobile web.

The problem is, mobile IE uses the same rendering engine as desktop IE10, which works. Firefox works even though it's not Webkit. And if you visited maps.google.co.uk, everything worked perfectly. And it worked before Google blocked it. Between the time Google blocked WP8 from viewing Google Maps and the time they said "oh hey the browser works now", there were no updates to Windows Phone to change browser functionality.

In short, Google blocked their competitor from accessing their website, got called out, issued a complete lie of a statement, then rolled back the change. Yes, as a Windows Phone user at the time I was not amused, and that was when I stopped using Google services.

Re: “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

#117

Post by FridgeSeal » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 1:34 AM UTC

BartSaM wrote: post #96

klondike_ wrote: post #39

I wish I could use Vivaldi, it seems like a nice browser for power users. Unfortunately it's closed source (besides the Webkit parts). Considering how much sensitive information goes through a browser nowadays, I would never consider something closed source. I'm sure Vivaldi has no intentions of becoming "evil" like Google, but because of its closed source nature it wouldn't be hard to slip a tracker or two in the br…

Closed source sometimes is better than an open source. With open source code, certain agencies can find exploits and use them to track every move you make, months and years before anyone spotted it. With closed source, you have more chance, at least if you believe in humans, that you will stay anonymous. But to be honest, as soon as such company would go public, get major funding from one of the big companies, or get…

> Closed source sometimes is better than an open source. With open source code, certain agencies can find exploits and use them to track every move you make, months and years before anyone spotted it

Haha yeah, as opposed to close source, where no one spots it. Or if they do, you have no idea whether it ever gets fixed or not. Not exactly a better alternative.

Re: “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

#118

Post by akerl_ » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 1:49 AM UTC

freehunter wrote: post #110

akerl_ wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like companies are stuck in a losing game. We constantly push small companies to capture more market share. Any companies that fold during that effort, we bring out the pitchforks because the services they ran get shut off. Any companies that succeed , we bring out the pitchforks because they own too much market power. It seems a bit much that we ask for companies to constantly grow and simultaneously ensure…

It's completely possible for someone to have immense market power and not use it for evil. I mean Apple is the richest company in the world but they choose to compete in very niche markets, and hasn't actually completely dominated a market since the iPod even though they easily could with their massive stockpiles of money. Instead of trying to bend the Internet to the point of breaking, Google could just... not do th…

There are posts on this site at least once a week about something Apple is doing that folks feel to be "evil", just like Google.

Re: “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

#119

Post by studentrob » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 1:53 AM UTC

exikyut wrote: post #112

> It is also fair to say that Google is now in a position where regulation is needed. I sincerely hope that they’ll get back to the straight and narrow. Hah. Even before I read any of this article, just reading the post title as submitted here made me think of something I ponder often: The Microsoft antitrust regulations happened ultimately because Microsoft read the situation wrong and pushed too hard. It's sad to s…

> My suggestion is stifles laughter requiring that Chromebooks provide the option to install Firefox. :D

Google should take that upon themselves.

I was prepared to refute your suggestion until a quick Google search told me Chromebooks have 58% marketshare in K-12.

It's probably much lower across home devices and much lower still across the world, but popular enough that, like Android, it should allow installing competing browsers.

For an antitrust lawsuit to be successful, I imagine their marketshare would need to be much higher.

Re: “Google: it is time to return to not being evil”

#120

Post by zmmmmm » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 1:58 AM UTC

A lot of words, but it seems to boil down to:

    In exchange for being reinstated in Google’s
    ad network, their in-house specialists dictated 
    how we should arrange content on our own website 
    and how we should communicate information to our 
    users.

It's impossible to evaluate this without more details. If their web site actually broke reasonable elements of Google's terms and conditions then it sounds like this is completely expected. The lack of any further detail to the allegations makes me strongly suspect that there's another side to this story. It may still not add up in Google's favour, but without something else I'm left feeling sceptical about this.