21–30 of 236 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Competitive markets > Governments > monopolies
Government is the ultimate coercive monopoly; all coercive monopolies derive their power from the arbiters of force — the government.
One way Google maintains their monopoly is that many websites block all bots except for the Google indexing bot. This makes it literally impossible for anyone to make a competing search engine because millions of doors are slammed in their face. There is no practical way to negotiate access at this scale either leaving no options for small startups — e.g.: AI-based search! One possible anti-monopoly measure would be…
Same guys...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Government is the ultimate coercive monopoly; all coercive monopolies derive their power from the arbiters of force — the government.
Governments are at least supposed to be accountable to their constituencies, monopolies are only accountable to their shareholders.
One way Google maintains their monopoly is that many websites block all bots except for the Google indexing bot. This makes it literally impossible for anyone to make a competing search engine because millions of doors are slammed in their face. There is no practical way to negotiate access at this scale either leaving no options for small startups — e.g.: AI-based search! One possible anti-monopoly measure would be…
though chatGPT seem to have had no trouble scraping data from everywhere
These "internal" purposes included growing your social network, monitoring or reverse-engineering the algorithms of competing search engines, and now, it includes training ML.
Which is funny given that when others are doing it to them, they go to great lengths to stop it, and sometimes complain loudly or threaten lawsuits.
I think the main reason the big players don't sue each other is that it's a bit of a Mutual Assured Destruction kind of a deal. Google is doing it to Microsoft, Microsoft is doing it to Google...
[flagged]
[flagged]
Plus they force you tie your outlook account to your Windows install in order to make them stop asking you about it during login.
Google search is useless now. Only now there is no competition so effectively all online search is overall useless.
/Rant
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Governments are at least supposed to be accountable to their constituencies, monopolies are only accountable to their shareholders.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
I am not following these testimonies in anti-trust cases where they have a competitor of Google testify against Google. Isn’t testifying all about presenting evidence? If I am accused of theft in a criminal court and my arch rival is brought for testimony against me, it doesn’t sound like a fair process to me. Of course if it’s a substantiated material it would make sense but otherwise it doesn’t just makes sense at…
I'll just add, Bingbot has the same crawling opportunities as Googlebot. Nobody is stopping Bing from driving traffic to their website. It's also been 20+ years: Windows OS is constantly manipulating defaults and Edge is still not uninstallable.