311–320 of 888 posts
I wish that instead of wasting time on antitrust cases, that the government would just directly fund competition by incentivizing it. I.e, the first company to reach x% browser market share will receive $x million (billion?) in prize money or, the first company to build an LLM-based search engine with x% market share will receive $n million Or structure as a direct investment or heavy tax breaks. Always better to inc…
An open source, public benefit search engine would be a really valuable thing to have, which no private company does or ever will find it viable to provide. And I don't even want it to be the only search engine. Commercial search engines will probably still have the edge in various ways, for various use cases. But why not have a public option as one point in the landscape?
If someone is going to "organise the world's information" I'd prefer it to be a democratically controlled government, not an unaccountable for-profit corporation. I know that's an ideological position that many here won't share.
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google.com is a search engine, regardless of what drives Google's revenue. Weird to say it's not.
But Google the company is an advertising company, regardless of what they use to spread those adverts. Weird to say it's not.
> I get why 90% of people use google. I'm no google fan, but it still baffles me how bad the alternatives still are.
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Why wouldn't people pay for something highly useful? It seems the opposite, that people would pay for things that are highly useful. People don't pay for things that are marginally useful.
> Why wouldn't people pay for something highly useful? Typically because they can easily get it for free. Perfect case study is WinRar. How many people actually bought a license for software they used daily?
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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.
Bad things happened because tool, tool bad , very good argument. Put yourself in the mind of someone making a THING, how do you plan to reach your possible customers for THING? THING is the best in class, better than the competition but how would you make the world aware of THING existing?
trade shows, trade magazines, word of mouth, window-dressing in the THING-quarter, ...
why are personalized ads on a website indispensable?
Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon -- the US could easily break all of these up. There's a huge risk to stagnation and over-optimization once these companies get as big as they do.
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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.
As someone who spent time researching the Ma Bells breakup and being knee deep in the local telecom deregulation, I see a lot of the same proposals when discussing the breaking up of Google and Facebook. This is the short story of what happened in the local telecom deregulation, which I'm pretty sure will happen if you were to break up Google. Consider this took place over the course of 20+ years, but I see the same…
Perhaps Ma Bell taught us lessons to avoid this time around.
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Bad things happened because tool, tool bad , very good argument. Put yourself in the mind of someone making a THING, how do you plan to reach your possible customers for THING? THING is the best in class, better than the competition but how would you make the world aware of THING existing?
how did this happen before advertising? trade shows, trade magazines, word of mouth, window-dressing in the THING-quarter, ... why are personalized ads on a website indispensable?
There is no before advertising
Pretty sure we have ads from Mesopotamia
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Yes I can see the dystopian consequences of google’s search monopoly profits, which they have used to do such horrible things as: - Providing a free alternative to Microsoft’s monopolized office suite and desktop OS - Provide a free alternative to Apple’s mobile OS, spurring a revolution in access to the internet for the world’s poor - Provide free global maps with streetview sights - Provide a free to access video p…
Very few of that is free. openstreetmap - that's free. Google maps is an advertising and data mining platform.