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Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

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Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#211

Post by keeganpoppen »

ignoramous wrote: post #137
inopinatus wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary, the end-to-end federated Internet was doing just fine before Google came along, and will do just fine, perhaps better, when it's gone and no longer trying to co-opt every god-damn standards process for their own preferences. No-one has a monopoly on innovation: most inventions are driven by necessity, and large companies stifle genius, they don't foster it. Far from being the greater good, Google is…

> Far from being the greater good, Google is remarkably pig-headed, often downright incompetent outside of selling ads... As is the nature of dualities, the web has benefit immensely from Google's investments even if it would have chartered a different (and in your opinion, a better) course had Google not existed in the first place. Someone pointed out, you couldn't say the same for Amazon. As for incompetence: imho,…

there's no chance that webrtc is a more important innovation than XMLHTTPRequest... the web would be just a bunch of hyperlinked text and images without XHR...

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#212

Post by choppaface »

alsetmusic wrote: post #189
choppaface wrote: post #106

This is a great example of why Google FLoC is not incentive-compatible with consumers nor business owners. Amazon (like Facebook) has a monopoly on ad targeting on their target properties—- properties they own. Google FLoC is Google’s attempt to (further) monopolize their target properties—- the web at large, which Google does NOT own. Google does NOT pay to service the traffic they generate. Google does NOT pay to f…

> (Maybe Google could start by paying Wikipedia for some of the traffic they generate). How is this different from arguing that sites, such as Google or Facebook, should have to pay to link to news articles? I appreciate and support Wikipedia, but I don’t think Google should be expected to help pay for it (though I’d appreciate if they did as a form of public service).

The problem with Wikipedia is that Google copies so much content and moreover Wikipedia is a non-profit trying to cover their huge bandwidth budget. It seems a better alignment of incentives would be for Google to pay into the Wikimedia Endowment as a function of content served inside Google search results.

They gave a paltry $2m to the endowment a couple years ago. ...and how much did they make off serving Wikipedia content?

https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/22/google-org-donates-2-milli...

Google has publicly recognized that they have a problem with trust and incentives. So when they admit that and continue to non-execute on addressing core problems, that's when the monopoly needs to be rebalanced.

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#213

Post by vineyardmike »

ignoramous wrote: post #137
inopinatus wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary, the end-to-end federated Internet was doing just fine before Google came along, and will do just fine, perhaps better, when it's gone and no longer trying to co-opt every god-damn standards process for their own preferences. No-one has a monopoly on innovation: most inventions are driven by necessity, and large companies stifle genius, they don't foster it. Far from being the greater good, Google is…

> Far from being the greater good, Google is remarkably pig-headed, often downright incompetent outside of selling ads... As is the nature of dualities, the web has benefit immensely from Google's investments even if it would have chartered a different (and in your opinion, a better) course had Google not existed in the first place. Someone pointed out, you couldn't say the same for Amazon. As for incompetence: imho,…

> As for incompetence: imho, webrtc, which Google standardized and open sourced, is likely the single most important innovation on the interwebs

Complex browser-based alternative to TCP? Standardized alternative to Socket.io? I can't say its not useful but webrtc is hardly the most important thing...

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#214

Post by vineyardmike »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #207
throwaway3699 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By this point I would (maybe) pay a monthly subscription for a really good websearch like google circa 2005-2010 UI changes and new features aside, the web is just so much more adversarial nowadays. It's no wonder so much rubbish floats to the top of Google because the reality it's drowning out all the other content. If you had the source code for 2005 Google it would be objectively worse today than it was then.

I'm often ridiculed for this idea when I voice it, but on day soon I'd like to make a search engine that is only whitelisted domains, with opinionated / hand curated weightings.

Not crazy. Do it and share it.

Just be prepared: the future of the internet is navigating politics. You better be prepared for people to be upset at query X returns results too right/left/up/down for their political preferences. Then senators start tweeting at you.

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#215

Post by jay_kyburz »

vineyardmike wrote: post #214
jay_kyburz wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm often ridiculed for this idea when I voice it, but on day soon I'd like to make a search engine that is only whitelisted domains, with opinionated / hand curated weightings.

Not crazy. Do it and share it. Just be prepared: the future of the internet is navigating politics. You better be prepared for people to be upset at query X returns results too right/left/up/down for their political preferences. Then senators start tweeting at you.

Actually I just remembered we don't have copyright fair use here in Australia so I can't legally scrape websites. Oh well.

Also, my search engine will be called "Jays Favorite Websites" and the right side of politics can bite me.

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#216

Post by zuppy »

inopinatus wrote: post #200
efdee wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was it though? Search kind of sucked before Google came along. Javascript in the browser was a joke. Google Maps and Mail were revolutionary. I'm not as positive about Google today as I used to be in the past, but I don't feel it's fair to pretend that they didn't help us take giant steps forward.

Many of my primary sources of information have been obliterated by Google; they've also taken giant steps backwards, one case in point being the abridgement of the DejaNews archives, and frankly, no, search did not suck prior to Google: I always had better results writing queries for Altavista, and to this day I continue to use more specific predicates in the same fashion because results are often irrelevant otherwis…

I have a different opinion regarding Altavista search results quality. The results were so bad that most of the times I had to also try Hotbot, Ask Jeeves and various directories (Yahoo, dmoz, etc). They were not good search engines but the web back then was way smaller and there was a high chance that you could have different content on the other engines.

That’s the reason why Google, a very small newcomer, crashed the entire search engine market.

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#217

Post by jay_kyburz »

ActorNightly wrote: post #195
fastball wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeahhhh, but Amazon makes a ton off their own ad business and is trying to turn everyone's personal devices into a mesh network they own. They don't give af about user privacy.

They very much do. When is the last time you heard about any private data leak from Amazon?

That suggests that they are keeping it safe, not that they are not storing or using it.

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#218

Post by pjerem »

mr_toad wrote: post #193
beebeepka wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google was great until 2004 or so. I think uncle Sam made them an offer they could not or simply did not want to refuse. Then this Schmidt guy came and did the actual damage

Google was great until after they won the second browser war and gradually became used to power. They’re a lot like a revolutionary government that gradually becomes corrupt and as bad as the regime they overthrew.

Like mostly everyone, I was amongst those people who heavily recommended Google (really cool) products to friends & family.

Retrospectively, I feel so stupid to have promoted « free products paid by an advertising company » for years.

I know Google duped everyone on this so I don’t feel to be stupid alone. But still, in hindsight, there were no possible future where Google could stay on top without doing dirty things. We didn’t see the targeted ads coming.

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#219

Post by foobiekr »

efdee wrote: post #144
inopinatus wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary, the end-to-end federated Internet was doing just fine before Google came along, and will do just fine, perhaps better, when it's gone and no longer trying to co-opt every god-damn standards process for their own preferences. No-one has a monopoly on innovation: most inventions are driven by necessity, and large companies stifle genius, they don't foster it. Far from being the greater good, Google is…

Was it though? Search kind of sucked before Google came along. Javascript in the browser was a joke. Google Maps and Mail were revolutionary. I'm not as positive about Google today as I used to be in the past, but I don't feel it's fair to pretend that they didn't help us take giant steps forward.

Search sucks now. Searching on google is like talking to someone with no long term memory. It's like nothing prior to the last, maybe, 24 months exists.

Re: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

#220

Post by Ayesh »

Excuse my rant about this free piece of content, but this is one of those sites that render the reading experience horrifying with giant subscribe and menu bars. It feels like reading something on a smartwatch is more easier.
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