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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]

#951

Post by surajrmal »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #913
selfhoster wrote: post #867

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You essentially outline why it should be broken up. I disagree: 1) My wife and I have a FREE Gmail account we use for home and other combined interests. 2) We watch all our streaming (movies, docs, etc.) and TV (Tablo TV DVR for free OTA) using FREE Chrome on Linux laptops in our LR, MBR and one for ambiance that runs all day between the kitchen and LR visible across both rooms showing relaxing aquarium and bird vi…

Have you tried Firefox recently? It's been my favorite for a decade or so. Now that chrome has crippled its extension API, it's objectively better. I'm not convinced that any of these would change for the worse. Maybe we will start using more content and services that aren't made by Google. That sounds good to me. Of course, the overall situation will be improved the most by breaking up Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon,…

Firefox won't be around much longer if Google isn't able to pay to be its default search engine.

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

#952

Post by surajrmal »

ReptileMan wrote: post #854
roywashere wrote: post #806

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Chrome would need to be sold off, or Android, or Maps, those can only become even more pressured to be monetized for user data, I’m afraid

Or for someone finally to solve the micropayment problem. I don't mind paying the 53 cents it costs google to provide me their services per month with 30 or 40% margin. But I refuse to subscribe for close to zero value services for 10 or 20 dollar a month.

Do you want the web to work like clash of titans?

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

#953

Post by surajrmal »

MyOutfitIsVague wrote: post #943
rafaelmn wrote: post #901

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my point - Chrome isn't there to play dirty, it's there so competitors can't. But if it had to make money without Google all that BS would get bundled in the browser.

Making moves so that competitors can't play at all is so far beyond playing dirty. It's anti-competitive and illegal.

They can play, but they are competing with a raised bar which benefits consumers. It's not illegal to make things better.

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

#954

Post by surajrmal »

heylook wrote: post #933
rafaelmn wrote: post #901

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my point - Chrome isn't there to play dirty, it's there so competitors can't. But if it had to make money without Google all that BS would get bundled in the browser.

> Chrome isn't there to play dirty, it's there so competitors can't. Like Manifest V3, which explicitly makes it harder to strip out Google's own ad products on websites you visit? > without Google all that BS would get bundled in the browser. Or maybe it wouldn't. There are already lots of other browsers that don't.

Manifest v3 being tied to ads is a fantasy fiction. This is no proof of it and ample evidence it is a good security move which other browsers did first. Is apple doing similar things with Safari for nefarious reasons?

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

#955

Post by ReptileMan »

surajrmal wrote: post #952
ReptileMan wrote: post #854

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or for someone finally to solve the micropayment problem. I don't mind paying the 53 cents it costs google to provide me their services per month with 30 or 40% margin. But I refuse to subscribe for close to zero value services for 10 or 20 dollar a month.

Do you want the web to work like clash of titans?

Well sending bytes and creating them costs money. Someone has to pay them. So it is either ads or payments. The money it costs are close to zero, so we need a way to pay close to zero, that is easy if we don't want ads.

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

#956

Post by fc417fc802 »

zrm wrote: post #887
fc417fc802 wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 m…

> If it's requesting something which is allowed in robots.txt, it's a legitimate request.

An abusive scraper is pushing over your boxes. It is intentionally circumventing rate limits and (more generally) accurate attribution of the traffic source. In this example you have deemed such behavior to be abusive and would like to put a stop to it.

Any given request looks pretty much normal. The vast majority are coming from residential IPs (in this example your site serves mostly residential customers to begin with).

So what if 0.001% of requests hit a disallowed resource and you ban those IPs? That's approximately 0.001% of the traffic that you're currently experiencing. It does not solve your problem at all - the excessive traffic that is disrespecting ratelimits and gumming up your service for other well behaved users.

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

#957

Post by robertlagrant »

dev_l1x_be wrote: post #731
robertlagrant wrote: post #721

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> while selling other businesses a direct line to its customers' wallets What does this mean? > Even if you discount the effectiveness of ads (which seems foolish given how many people have so much staked on them working), the eye-watering prices Google charges for them get directly passed to the consumer in the form of higher prices. But then...why is anyone buying them if they don't work? How do you run this experi…

There are mire dark patterns in this than you can think of. Have you ever wondered what does Amazon do on the top of the search results typing “something ebay” into google?

I can certainly think of some, but that doesn't mean that removing Google would result in lower prices. It could be that replacing automation with manual work could even raise prices.

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

#958

Post by tsimionescu »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #931
tsimionescu wrote: post #783

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Propaganda, which is what advertising is, is generally a way to trick people into doing things that they wouldn't otherwise have done, typically by making them believe things that are not true. In the case of advertising, those untrue things are usually "X is a much bigger problem than I thought" and "Y will solve problem X and make my life a lot easier". That you can convince people of these things doesn't make them…

I think if I ate a lot of eggs, and egg cooker could be very handy. If Google can use targeting advertising to identify customers who eat a lot of eggs, and tell them about the existence of egg cookers, that's a win for everyone except the chickens.

I don't know for sure, but I'd bet egg cookers aren't a useful tool for anyone, compared to the alternatives (boiling the egg without taking up extra room in your kitchen).

But even if you're right about this being useful to some people, advertising is not the right tool for discovering this: advertising will always exaggerate any positive of something and downplay any negative. The goal of advertising, and the incentive, is not to neutrally inform people about products they might use. It's to convince people to buy this product by any means necessary. If it weren't explicitly outlawed, advertisers would probably add "enlarges your penis and cures cancer" to every single product ad.

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

#959

Post by yegg »

mortos wrote: post #939
yegg wrote: post #820

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for providing an example we can look into. If you have other thoughts, please also feel free to share them with me, and I'll take them back to the team. My email is in my profile if that method is preferred. Despite what some people think, we do a lot of the search results ourselves and we're constantly working to improve our search experience. We post quarterly updates to https://duckduckgo.com/updates

I appreciate you having an open ear and reaching out. As I said, it's hard to drum up examples but I do throw in the !g bang a fair bit. With the privacy requirements maybe you can't, but it could be interesting to see if you can find searches where people try a couple times then throw in the !g to try and find examples. I can't be the only one with this workflow. I've just found another, "G Jones collab album" hardl…

Thank you. That’s really helpful and I appreciate it. !g isn’t a great signal actually.

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

#960

Post by d1sxeyes »

surajrmal wrote: post #954
heylook wrote: post #933

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chrome isn't there to play dirty, it's there so competitors can't. Like Manifest V3, which explicitly makes it harder to strip out Google's own ad products on websites you visit? > without Google all that BS would get bundled in the browser. Or maybe it wouldn't. There are already lots of other browsers that don't.

Manifest v3 being tied to ads is a fantasy fiction. This is no proof of it and ample evidence it is a good security move which other browsers did first. Is apple doing similar things with Safari for nefarious reasons?

> This is no proof of it and ample evidence it is a good security move which other browsers did first.

You crush up the bitter pill in a spoonful of jam to make it easier to digest.

> Is apple doing similar things with Safari for nefarious reasons?

Yes? Look at what they tried to get away with with PWAs as an example.

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