271–280 of 888 posts
Anywhere there are eyeballs, there will be ads. And wherever there are ads there are privacy concerns. Netflix waited until they had sufficiently killed off cable TV, then went back to creating the same problem it fixed. No ads in ChatGPT today, but soon as it (or a competitor) gains meaningful marketshare, there will be ads.
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What MSFT learned from that was to open offices in Washington DC, lobby and sell to the federal gov. Hard to find the sense in this action.
Maybe if google sold more products to the feds they wouldn't be so brazen as to kill them off
The only thing the government will be interested in is the spying which they aren't allowed to do, but unaccountable corporations are allowed to do. As people become more aware of this it means google becomes less and less useful.
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Because there were other ways to handle the ad blocker situation. For example, allowing the users to grant access to an extension. The hard protocol ban is heavy handed.
Users don't read dialogs. They just click yes so they can get to their shiny talking purple gorilla. This also doesn't address the threat model: a good extensions that users trust and give these rights to which is bought out and changed to do malicious things.
Not all do, some do. And it only takes a few to spot something fishy and start reporting problems.
> This also doesn't address the threat model
It actually does, because few extensions need broad permissions. The threat is significantly reduced if a change in required permissions goes up a new dialog pops up which encourages the few users that read the thing to ask "Hey, why is this asking for so many more permissions?"
This model works. It works so well that the security model of pretty much every app store is exactly the same. The risks are also identical.
Something I really don't get is the part about Google's monopoly in search text ads. FTA: > Finally, the filing said Google’s dominance over search text ads needed to be addressed by lowering barriers to would-be rivals or licensing its ad feed to others, independently from search results. What Google has is a monopoly on search (which is bad), but I don't think having a monopoly for advertising on your own property…
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Breaking up AT&T was unquestionably the right call. (So to say.) Long distance was expensive for quite a while even after the break-up. If you called up an out-of-state friend or relative to catch up, you expected the call to cost you at least a few bucks. (And you hoped they would be the ones to call you next time.) Even into the 90's, long distance at $0.10/minute was considered cheap. And in most rural areas, ever…
This illustrates why breaking up google is a good idea given their egregious charges (free) for things people used to/still spend money on, such as: - An office software suite - Global maps and GPS, City Guides - Video entertainment - Mobile and Desktop OS - Web Browsers Also, pay no mind to their competitors in all of those markets AND in their core business of search, being feeble multi-trillion and multi-billion g…
I honestly would love it we would ditch surveillance capitalism and went back to a simpler option of paying for products and services. I think that essentially all of the complaints you here about Google (their lack of any responsiveness/customer support, their constant spying on users, the constant "Google graveyard" of discontinued products, their current corporate ossification, etc.) can be directly linked to the fact that users don't pay for their products.
Loving the discourse in the comments here. Speaking as someone who grew up alongside Google in a sense, I fall on the side of the "break it up" camp. It was novel at the time to have a single company so nicely provide us with everything digitally that we could need - G Suite, YouTube, Search, Maps, Advertising, Books, Reader, etc - but in hindsight, we gave too much power to too unaccountable an entity, who in turn u…
The GDP argument is weird. If Google being huge is good for GDP why don't we just let them own the whole country? One US company for everything, maximum GDP afterall!
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This illustrates why breaking up google is a good idea given their egregious charges (free) for things people used to/still spend money on, such as: - An office software suite - Global maps and GPS, City Guides - Video entertainment - Mobile and Desktop OS - Web Browsers Also, pay no mind to their competitors in all of those markets AND in their core business of search, being feeble multi-trillion and multi-billion g…
Those things aren't free, they're supported by ad revenue and the sale of personal or aggregated user information. I'm not saying there isn't a place for that type of software, but imo it's wrong and somewhat dangerous to equate that with things that are actually free. And even so, to the extent that any of Google's software is actually free, it's mostly a loss leader for the sake of vendor lock-in, which is intrinsi…
“But my data” Have your ever sold your data? Would the value you could ever possibly receive for your data ever equate to the value you get from the free services?
Likely No and No.
Is the free ad supported city newspaper free? Yes it is in fact free, just like FM radio is free, and broadcast television is free, and sidewalks next to billboards are free
Someone creating something appealing and giving it away for free in order to make up for it through ads in front of eyeballs does not in any way mean that the free thing isn’t free
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My understanding was that most of the internet infrastructure was laid by Bell before their break-up because they projected video calling being a huge use case in the future.
1982 seem a bit early for the massive fiber rollout. My recollection was that Sprint was the driving factor for laying fiber, since they had the railroad right-of-ways. But that was quite a while back. Maybe there was also another dark-horse company laying fiber along railroads, but not operating as a phone company? Something not quite at the tip of my tongue. Seems like someone could have written a good history book…
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I fully understand that advertising enables many businesses. But there have been businesses based on lead pipes for drinking water plumbing, asbestos for residential insulation, and so on. You could make an argument that these technologies enabled many businesses as well. That doesn’t mean we should allow lead pipes for drinking water or to use asbestos in residential homes.
Online advertising has leveled the playing field, allowing smaller brands to compete with big names. Platforms like Google make it easy to capture attention, which is why even giants like Nike are losing market share to newer players. This shift spans all non-regulated industries. Without online ads, launching a nationwide brand would require enormous budgets, leaving us stuck with the same old monopolies.
to name a few: LISEN, Qifutan, Loncaster, YKYI, Holikme and SXhyf. And who could forget VWMYQ?
DeepMind wouldn’t have happened to the level it did had google been broken up prior.
There was no shortage of other deep-pocketed suitors trying to buy DeepMind too during the Google acquisition back in 2014 - I think DeepMind would have likely found a reasonable home regardless.