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US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

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Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#761

Post by BrenBarn »

animal_spirits wrote: post #716
lolinder wrote: post #695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure where you got that I'm trying to impose anything on anyone—sounds like you latched onto a side note and decided to reply to what you thought the side note was implying instead of the substance of my comment? The argument has nothing to do with values or imposing them on others, it's simply this: These things are not and never were free. Google wants you to think they're free, but either the ads are effec…

True, these services are not and never were free, we pay for them with our data. I would say this is all fairly common knowledge, my parents who are not tech savvy understand this, and I genuinely don't believe people care enough. I know this trade off, my tech savvy friends and acquaintances know this and yet we continue to make this trade off because frankly I don't think many value their personal data at all, and…

The problem is that you don't actually know how valuable it is without knowing how it's being used. If your ad-view statistics are used to charge you personally a higher price for a product than someone else who didn't click on the same ads, is that still okay? If they're used to raise your mortgage interest rate, is that still okay? If they're used to sell scam products to old ladies, is that still okay? If they're used to peddle political misinformation to support the election of a fascist, is that still okay? You don't know what tradeoff you're actually making. Maybe you'd think it was okay, maybe not.

Modern companies have become very, very good at making consumers believe they are getting a good deal by trading an obvious benefit for the possibility of a hidden harm. The type of data tracked by internet companies is only one form of this.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#762

Post by hilbert42 »

BeetleB wrote: post #525
FridayoLeary wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing mediocre about the search engine, gmail, maps, android, chrome etc.. etc. Do they all have room for for improvement? Probably. But they are simply incredibly, breathtakingly good products. Search, maybe has gotten worse in recent years, but it's still amazing. Maps and Satelleite view are astounding, especially when you consider that they are free. >How is this a desirable outcome? The list speaks fo…

> There is nothing mediocre about the search engine, gmail, maps, android, chrome etc.. etc. Search Engine: Google is fantastic with its index. Very poor with the results it returns. Sampling of the problems: - There's a reason people add site:reddit.com - the default results are often very low quality. Sure, Google has the good quality stuff indexed, but over the last 5 years they've been declining like crazy in act…

"If a site works on Chrome and not Firefox, that's not because Firefox is inferior."

Right, we've been through all that stuff with Internet Explorer—sites often preferred it over others even though its HTML extensions weren't standard W3C. Chrome is better but it's still favored for the same reasons.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#763

Post by dreghgh »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #623
makeitdouble wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as good This is a point that will be recurring and merits more thought IMHO. Google services are mostly better because they crushed competition. Cutting their advantage will also mean better alternatives (money will flow to competitors instead of being sucked by Google). As an analogy, it's like athlete doping: they sure were faster than the other athletes, but that's part of the issue.

The fundamental issue is that people don't want to pay money for things. Google tapped into that by creating an ad economy, which since it's inception also comes with a payment optional feature (ad-blocking). People may hate google, but by god do they ever love the internet google created.

I pay for cloud storage, not from Google. I'm happy to pay for this, and I use enough storage there I would be paying Google if I used their storage. Almost every time I go into the Photos all on my phone, there's a dark pattern which tries to get me to turn on backups. If I do this, app my personal photos will be uploaded to Google's servers, possibly forever, possibly to be used in ways I have never consented to. Then the UI will change so that I'm never presented with an explicit choice of turning this off, ever again, and will have to search for how to do it. I don't love the internet Google created.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#764

Post by BrenBarn »

jahsome wrote: post #722
raydiak wrote: post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a straw man, nobody asserted that the consequences should not be considered. Clearly, whichever way we proceed there will be considerable consequences; I doubt there is any dispute about that. Your argument seems to fail to acknowledge the dystopian consequences of NOT doing something. Also, let's dispense with inappropriate jabs such as referring to other perspectives as "fantasy".

I disagree with every single thing you said. I think GP was arguing for exactly what I asserted, and it's a literal fantasy to imagine doing something 20 years ago. I'd like to point out I wasn't being dismissive, at all. Sorry you read into it that way.

> I think GP was arguing for exactly what I asserted

I was not, as I explained in another comment.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#765

Post by luckylion »

BobaFloutist wrote: post #493
luckylion wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One possible answer: pay them for their trouble until you provide value to them, e.g. by paying some fraction of a cent for each (document) request.

Cool, you wanna solve micropayments now or wait until we've got cold fusion rolling first...?

You wouldn't have to make them micropayments, you can pay out once some threshold is reached.

Of course, it would incentivize the sites to make you want to crawl them more, but that might be a good thing. There would be pressure on you to focus on quality over quantity, which would probably be a good thing for your product.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#766

Post by BrenBarn »

hilbert42 wrote: post #757
int_19h wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smaller anything isn't competitive with larger anything, because the larger guys can always price-dump and bundle their way to full market dominance. That's why we need anti-trust in the first place.

"That's why we need anti-trust in the first place." Moreover, it seems to me these laws ought to strengthened to make executives/decision makers even more accountable. The people who made Google a monopoly aren't stupid and knew full well what they were doing. They should not be able to hide behind Google's corporate structure and also should be penalized for their bad behavior.

Yes, this is one of the big changes that need to be made to really reform things. Companies act based on decisions made by individuals. Those individuals should be held accountable if the company's actions are found to be harmful. There should be lots of CEOs and board members of companies in oil, healthcare, housing, retail (as well as tech) who should be facing fines in the hundreds of millions (if not the billions) on their personal assets.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#767

Post by dreghgh »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #554
rs186 wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let them die. The world will be a better place. Some of the services you mentioned are already very irrelevant: * Fitbit -- no explanation necessary * Google translate -- I don't know about if people use their APIs, but for me personally, I have not used translate for a few years. ChatGPT has been my go-to. * Google Pay -- it has a smaller market share than Samsung Pay. Then next tiers of services -- they are doing o…

YouTube, Gmail and Docs are pretty good. All the alternatives to them really suck...

YouTube spent years showing children damaging content through an algo until the parental boycott became so bad that they had to do something, worried that a generation was going to grow up not addicted to their content.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#768

Post by SirHumphrey »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #593
doctorpangloss wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube, Gmail and Docs are pretty good. All the alternatives to them really suck...

YouTube sucks in terms of usability. It only survives, because it is at no cost except for ads viewing and not even that, when using uBlock Origin properly and because of most of the content being there. Other than that is has become so enshittified, it is one of the worst sites I visit. Gmail and Docs are children's toys for people, who don't know much about e-mail and proper documents. Those are the majority of peo…

No, youtube survives because it’s the only platform with a reasonable split between youtube itself and it’s creators. It was obvious long ago that people will go where the content is, usability issues be damned.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#769

Post by creato »

michaelt wrote: post #535
worik wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Too big to fail means too big to exist. Google et. al should never have been allowed to get this large I agree But placing limits on private property accumulation is a controversial idea But it is an idea who's time must come, or we face a dreadful future of robber barrons and peons

> But placing limits on private property accumulation is a controversial idea The US wouldn't need a legal limit on wealth to prevent Google from becoming this large. Every major Google product since gmail in ~2004 was acquired. Google Maps? Acquired from Where 2 Technologies. Google Docs? Acquired from Writely. Android? Acquired as a startup. Google Analytics? You guessed it, acquisition. DoubleClick? Once again, ac…

One of the acquisitions you are talking about was 4 people that started a company and was "acquired" by google less than a year later. The idea that something like this should be blocked by competition regulators is frankly, totally insane.

Aside from that, in 2004, Google was a ~30B company, 1/3rd the size of e.g. UPS. For comparison, Microsoft was ~10x bigger.

The rewriting of history in this thread is just crazy. I don't disagree that google today is huge and some regulation is necessary, but what you are proposing should have been done in 2004 is off the charts ridiculous. Not even totalitarian dictatorships exert that much control over their populations.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#770

Post by coderatlarge »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #367

I'm not sure people understand what the consequences of taking away Google's ad revenue is. If a large enough bank goes under, it takes out not just the bank, but huge sectors of the economy, affecting many more businesses and jobs. That's why the government bailed out the banks when they failed. The same will happen when Google loses its ad revenue. Google is an ad company. By opening up all its trade secret data, i…

i’ve been using google products for over twenty years and they touch almost all aspects of my life and communications. in the past couple of years I’ve been working to de-couple by going to apple and local vs cloud data. it’s an extremely lengthy and error prone process. apple is workable but not great.
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