It's 100% Google saves my data. And gives me an option to delete that data. It uses that data, and while I have some degree of control over it, i don't have full control over it. As a user it's preposterous that any kind of data generated by me is anonymized (or not) and effectively sold to a third party. First party usage is kind of understandable. What YC and the govt is asking is that Google should be forced to do…
> Presumably, if that data is so useful, why dont all of these companies lining up to pay the users? Because users are lining up to give away their data.
Not to these companies who want it. To Google yes. Not exactly because they have to, but also because they built things people want.
I'm less worried about GMail. It's much easier to start a GMail competitor today (in relative, not absolute, terms) than a Chrome or Android competitor, because of network effects. For example, Fastmail is tiny (comparatively speaking), and will probably stay tiny forever, but their service works fine, and there's no major obstacles (comparatively speaking) to replacing GMail with Fastmail for any of us personally.
Is it really? I think any potential competitors face many of the same pitfalls as, say, Chrome competitors do. Maybe even worse. Google slams its weight around when web standards are being designed so as to unilaterally benefit Chrome, but (at least in theory) it's a fundamentally cooperative process where everyone at least gets some sort of input to direct where each standard goes. In GMail's case, they can just arb…
Not easy in any absolute sense, but very much easier in a relative sense. You're right that Google still have indirect levers to pull, to mess with independent email providers, but the distance is more and the scale is less. In comparison, Google is literally an absolute gatekeeper on Android (insofar as Google Play is the only app store that the mass market cares about, the mass market would never accept an AOSP repackage without Google Play Services, etc.), and Chrome has become the reference implementation for web standards (insofar as some increasingly large proportion of developers develop against and only ever test in Chrome).
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…
Of all the things you listed, I swear, only used maps in the last decade. All other I avoid them because I find them terribly bad. And I only use maps because is the one I remember the URL fast.
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…
Here is anticompetitive, I use Firefox on Ubuntu Linux and went to Apple maps site, here is what it says: https://maps.apple.com/unsupported "Your current browser isn't supported" I thought OK, how many people use Firefox on Linux. So I went to their site in this browser, Chrome (most popular browser in the world on the most popular Linux Desktop OS, Ubuntu)...same error. Every site I visit in Chrome (and Edge when I…
Here is anticompetitive, I use Firefox on Ubuntu Linux and went to Apple maps site, here is what it says: https://maps.apple.com/unsupported "Your current browser isn't supported" I thought OK, how many people use Firefox on Linux. So I went to their site in this browser, Chrome (most popular browser in the world on the most popular Linux Desktop OS, Ubuntu)...same error. Every site I visit in Chrome (and Edge when I…
This seems like two different issues. One is, suppose there are a thousand search engine bots. Then what you want is some standard facility to say "please give me a list of every resources on this site that has changed since " so they can each get a diff from the last time they crawled your site. Uploading each resource on the site to each of a thousand bots once is going to be irrelevant to a site serving millions o…
> then you set traps like disallowing something in robots.txt and then ban anything that tries to access it That doesn't work at all when the scraper rapidly rotates IPs from different ASNs because you can't differentiate the legitimate from the abusive traffic on a per-request basis. All you can be certain of is that a significant portion of your traffic is abusive. That results in aggressive filtering schemes which…
> That doesn't work at all when the scraper rapidly rotates IPs from different ASNs because you can't differentiate the legitimate from the abusive traffic on a per-request basis.
Well sure you can. If it's requesting something which is allowed in robots.txt, it's a legitimate request. It's only if it's requesting something that isn't that you have to start trying to decide whether to filter it or not.
What does it matter if they use multiple IP addresses to request only things you would have allowed them to request from a single one?
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…
> Chrome
Breaking Google's stranglehold on how people access the Internet sounds pretty good.
Firefox would need to find a better deal than being slowly choked out by Google in exchange for the "it's not antitrust if we pay these guys while we do it" money.
Maybe they can finally double down on ad-freedom as their PR rather than keeping it at arm's length and letting Brave take the credit.
> A world without Google would not be a world with less disposable income for regular people, but it might be a world with less disposable junk. If the argument is "more ads = more junk" then the argument is essentially "my values are more important than other peoples values". I'm also anti-consumerism, but if someone sees an ad and finds a product intriguing enough to purchase, they believe that thing might have val…
Yes? Economics is the distribution of finite goods amongst infinite desires. It’s the objective way to optimize an economy given some normative set up.
It can't be that objective if there are multiple schools of thought. Getting two economists to agree on why what happened yesterday happened is hard enough, let alone getting them to agree on what we should do today to have a specific outcome tomorrow.