Break up Google
Google vs. the Open Web
141–150 of 207 posts
Re: Google vs. the Open Web
#142Frankly, it's long past time we had "anti-cheat" available for the web. People vastly underestimate how bad "web cheaters" are for society. They drown search engines and social networks with spam that advances interests for a tiny minority. Places like Reddit are flooded with astroturfed misinformation. They are not as obvious as cheaters in a video game, but far more consequential.
There are obviously a lot of details to work out, but pretending that this is just a power grab by Apple, Google et al. instead of an attempt to address an extremely serious problem (that HN indirectly complains about all the time, e.g. "web 2.0 sucks", "why are search results so bad now"), is just naïve.
Re: Google vs. the Open Web
#143I mentioned this in the other WEI thread and I’ll do it here again: Instead of simply flailing our collective arms around complaining about an evil corporation, has anyone written to the respective competition authorities (such as the FTC in the US or CCI in India) about the potential anticompetitive effects of this proposal?
> "Instead of simply flailing our collective arms around complaining about an evil corporation, has anyone written to the respective competition authorities (such as the FTC in the US or CCI in India) about the potential anticompetitive effects of this proposal?"
Yes, I have. A couple times now.
Google has been strongly signaling this since last year. No one wanted to believe it last year though, before the tech bubble burst. Now that people see Google isn't so awesome right now, perhaps more people will write and contact their representatives.
Re: Google vs. the Open Web
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
FTC right now has awful leadership. They only care about blocking mergers and scoring political points.
Isn’t blocking mergers one of the founding goals of the FTC?
Protecting consumers is the goal. If that means blocking mergers to protect consumers, then so be it.
Re: Google vs. the Open Web
#145Makes me sad to think how locked-down modern computing is becoming. Between app stores, DRM, TPM, and proposals like WEI future generations of hackers will have a very different experience of what you can and can't do with a computer than I did.
The comment about it killing scraping makes me sad. Figuring out a website's api and collecting your own dataset using python+scrapy for personal ML projects is a wonderful learning exercise that I recommend to everyone. A world of only approved datasets from Kaggle etc. is not the same.
Re: Google vs. the Open Web
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trying to reach official authorities is a good idea. I will quote and extend part of my call to action I did in an other thread - ban Google all together in your personal life. No chrome and no excuses. Stop the bullshit or leave this profession. Use startpage, duckduck or whatever for searching. - develop with and for firefox and friends only, introduce usability problems for chrome - employ the same tactics as goog…
Going to do this. This is brilliant! -> let your customers know that your service for non-chrome users is cheaper. Money motivates.
This suggestion is particularly brilliant
Re: Google vs. the Open Web
#147Nearly ever single product, service, and idea that Google brought into this world beyond - perhaps - their early days search engine, was created in response to the rise of some problem of Google's own single-handed making.
Inadvertently at first, they were amongst the first to ever even run into some of the complexities of providing internet services at scale after all. But then the rot took hold and Google Chrome was created.
Re: Google vs. the Open Web
#148>but it seems highly unlikely that bots using faked user agents create such a large number of impressions that Google has to use this route against them
Clickfaud makes the frauders money. There is a financial incentive in fooling Google's bot detection. There is a lot of bets using a faked user agent.
>Websites can refuse service unless you install their proprietary data collection agent. Websites can refuse service if you use the wrong browser
Websites can already do this.
Re: Google vs. the Open Web
#149How can a bot create fake impressions? When a bot (or just a simple program) makes a http request he fetches the raw html code only. AFAIK if you don't actually render the html code in a browser or requesting all the contents afterwards again with http requests (like GET ad.jpg, GET logo.png etc.), no google ad server should be hit. Now you could argue that bots could inflate the popularity of a website and therefore the cost to run ads on it. But I guess websites that show ads have most likely google analytics running, one of the only ways Google can actually calculate the popularity (besides Google Search and maybe Chrome history). So it should be no problem for Google to exclude bots from the popularity calculation by analyzing traffic. Maybe I am just missing something, I am also no ad expert at all.
Re: Google vs. the Open Web
#150I'm of the opinion that Google is no longer "Organizing the world's information" but "Stealing the world's information". Their last keynote proved that with all of the AI products. Regardless of this proposal (which is awful) they are a data vampire using all your info for themselves without permission or compensation.
Y'all ought to read Rainbow's End, where a Google-alike is trying to OCR all written information to make it accessible online… while shredding the originals in the process. That book was prescient on so many levels. Same with Accelerando.
> while shredding the originals in the process
In-universe reason for that made no sense whatsoever and was nonsense. It was not even an evil organization (this would make sense) but OCR method as described was absurd and would not work.