Please wait...
Sometimes its hard to avoid them 100%.
You deserve the bad karma you get for participating in youtube and other mainstream tech sites.
So it appears that the government has requested that Alphabet pay them a very large sum of money.
That's not how they phrased it, of course. What they actually said is "Alphabet needs to divest itself of the Chrome browser and possibly Android as well."
In other words, once enough dark money changes hands, they'll end up with a toothless consent decree. That's how it always goes.
Disclaimers up front:
- I agree there are issues with Google.
- I do not have solutions to propose. But, i do not propose a meaningless hand slap.
- The following is totally based on selfish involvement in their services and their effects on me, personally.
Going the route of BU divestiture
- Chrome ( and by its nature ChromeOS ) gets sent away. Browsers are a loss. The parent company feeds development. ChromeOS is based on the same project so it would exit as well, and yes, there are commercial sales of it for Enterprise. Is that actually enough to keep it afloat? Or do we end up with Microsoft dominating the browser market again who can fund with their back end profits? And does ChromeOS become fee only? And moving either to closed source, a loss for us all.
- Android. Similar here, is there anyone paying for this now? i honestly don't know if a company has to pay a fee to include it in their products. If no, then this cant survive on its own and it goes pay only, raising costs for everyone both in trying to get apps, and just the base OS on a device. Much like Apple, no store = no ios. And going closed source is a loss here too.
- Gsuite. ( including gmail ) Ok, much like Chrome, this has a enterprise level too, but is it enough to keep it going? Do the free tiers vanish? ( not that this matters to me personally, but it would impact a lot of people )
- Voice ( i know, part of Gsuite enterprise too ). Same story here. Is enterprise licensing enough to keep it funded, or do people like me now have to pay ( like before they bought it )
- Data centers. sure, this will survive since we now live in cloud-land, but it also would now charge back to the 'children projects' that got cut loose making their lives harder.. ( and no, i dont use google data center services, but with their TPUs being available there, its been tempting )
- YT - i hear its not making money now. Does that mean they start sucking more $ from ad placement? Do they start charging for publishing? Or make it a pay service? Yes, there are alternatives here in this space, but its disruptive to the industry and many will see the opportunity to make more cash of the incoming serfs until we are in the same boat we are now.
- Their search engine.. yes, we can choose others, but will it become even more AD packed to pay the bills?
And countless smaller projects we never even notice. Poof? Or Now commercial? Does the pricing cut out us little folk if they go commercial only? Or do they just vanish due to not being sustainable on their own?
Fundamentally many tech companies do this, fund minor projects with core profits. Some just because they want to and are pet projects, others to help bring in business back to the core. But either way, as standalone products they are non-products.
And and has been said before. Google does contribute a lot back to the OSS world ( not all of it is obvious, they don't often wave a flag "look at me", they just do it ). If they are struggling for cash due to losing all of these things that brings in business, ( or insane level fines and restrictions ) that stops. And yes that effects me too.
Mini rant-> it often is the case that while the feds 'break up or beat up the bad guy' and get applause in the end we end up worse off. ( and while many dont agree, i still say the Bell breakup did this to us. and we are still suffering ). Yes, actions need to take place when companies get out of line, but perhaps more intelligent and less market-disruptive solutions need to be considered, not just hack and slash or fine them out of existence. These actions are supposed to help us, not hurt us...
( and ignore typos, wrist brace today, and its early. and Friday :) )
So it appears that the government has requested that Alphabet pay them a very large sum of money.
That's not how they phrased it, of course. What they actually said is "Alphabet needs to divest itself of the Chrome browser and possibly Android as well."
In other words, once enough dark money changes hands, they'll end up with a toothless consent decree. That's how it always goes.
Keep firmly in mind that antitrust laws are different around the world. In
the United States they are written to protect the consumer. In most of Europe
they are written in part to protect the competition. How one divests a multinational
corporation depends largely upon where the effect takes place.
Bell System needed to be broken up, but as I've posted here before, they did it wrong. Local vs. long distance was incredibly short sighted, even to observers of that era. Divesting between physical plant and wireline services would have created a clean demarcation that would still be useful today. A divestiture of Alphabet (Google), while unlikely to happen at all in an era where large corporations have developed the skill of properly bribing and controlling the government, must be considered at least as carefully.
The manner in which web browsers are abused for anti-consumer behavior has not fundamentally changed in the last twenty years. Default settings, tight integrations, and other such behaviors are used to steer the user towards web properties that are also owned by the browser publisher.
It is impossible, for example, to fully decouple Chrome (or even the generic distribution of Chromium) from Google services. It is even more difficult to fully decouple Edge from Microsoft services. On my work computer I use a browser fork called "ungoogled chromium" whose maintainers apply an *extra* set of patches over and above the open source release to remove all remaining call-home behavior.
Now it can, and should, be argued that from a pure business perspective, a web browser provided at no cost to the user community is provided as a loss leader to encourage the consumption of other products and services. In most cases this is considered a good business practice, and should not be prohibited or discouraged. Where, then, is the line that Google and others have crossed, between the provision of a simple loss leader, and bona fide anticompetitive behavior?
One may argue that the Chrome browser and the Android operating system would not exist without the good will of existing open source projects upon which they were built. The work of the KDE project, and later Apple, produced what would become the WebKit engine. To the best of my knowledge, however, Alphabet has not violated the license agreements of any included code, and the continued publication of derivative code that can still be compiled into a working browser seems to indicate that Alphabet has been a reasonable citizen of the open source community.
I believe there is a different litmus test which must be performed regularly upon any entity which seems to be abusing something that looks like monopoly power. From a purely denotative perspective, Alphabet does not exert monopoly power because the customer can supposedly choose to do business with someone else at any time. This is the same argument made by Microsoft during their antitrust case, as well as IBM before them. Computer technology, however, has a way of escaping such a clean decision making process.
Today's robber barons cannot make the same arguments as the oil and railroad tycoons of the early 20th century. Consumption of popular computer technology is subject to a network effect. Each user of a modern technology product or service increases the value of all other units sold or consumed. Eventually a tipping point is reached where all competitors are not merely smaller, but effectively unusable.
Consider the ubiquity of YouTube, another Alphabet service. Video publishers dare not skip YouTube when choosing where to publish their videos, lest they miss out on the majority of their potential audience. This ubiquity is further integrated into the Google login and account system, which is further integrated into the Chrome browser, along with their search engine, email system, and other first-party products. To a lesser extent, GMail also enjoys this network effect. One must argue that a monopoly-like anticompetitive position has been achieved not when it is *impossible* for consumers to escape the gravity field of the monopolist, but merely when it is *impractical* to do so without incurring damage to one's business and personal activities.
By that measure, Alphabet has crossed the line and must be considered guilty of anticompetitive behavior. Ideally it would self correct and divest key technology components into spinoff companies or into trustworthy open source organizations. Government intervention ought to be a last resort, but should be used if necessary.
Bell System needed to be broken up, but as I've posted here before, they did it wrong. Local vs. long distance was incredibly short sighted, even to observers of that era. Divesting between physical plant and wireline services would have created a clean demarcation that would still be useful today. A divestiture of Alphabet (Google), while unlikely to happen at all in an era where large corporations have developed the skill of properly bribing and controlling the government, must be considered at least as carefully.
The manner in which web browsers are abused for anti-consumer behavior has not fundamentally changed in the last twenty years. Default settings, tight integrations, and other such behaviors are used to steer the user towards web properties that are also owned by the browser publisher.
It is impossible, for example, to fully decouple Chrome (or even the generic distribution of Chromium) from Google services. It is even more difficult to fully decouple Edge from Microsoft services. On my work computer I use a browser fork called "ungoogled chromium" whose maintainers apply an *extra* set of patches over and above the open source release to remove all remaining call-home behavior.
Now it can, and should, be argued that from a pure business perspective, a web browser provided at no cost to the user community is provided as a loss leader to encourage the consumption of other products and services. In most cases this is considered a good business practice, and should not be prohibited or discouraged. Where, then, is the line that Google and others have crossed, between the provision of a simple loss leader, and bona fide anticompetitive behavior?
One may argue that the Chrome browser and the Android operating system would not exist without the good will of existing open source projects upon which they were built. The work of the KDE project, and later Apple, produced what would become the WebKit engine. To the best of my knowledge, however, Alphabet has not violated the license agreements of any included code, and the continued publication of derivative code that can still be compiled into a working browser seems to indicate that Alphabet has been a reasonable citizen of the open source community.
I believe there is a different litmus test which must be performed regularly upon any entity which seems to be abusing something that looks like monopoly power. From a purely denotative perspective, Alphabet does not exert monopoly power because the customer can supposedly choose to do business with someone else at any time. This is the same argument made by Microsoft during their antitrust case, as well as IBM before them. Computer technology, however, has a way of escaping such a clean decision making process.
Today's robber barons cannot make the same arguments as the oil and railroad tycoons of the early 20th century. Consumption of popular computer technology is subject to a network effect. Each user of a modern technology product or service increases the value of all other units sold or consumed. Eventually a tipping point is reached where all competitors are not merely smaller, but effectively unusable.
Consider the ubiquity of YouTube, another Alphabet service. Video publishers dare not skip YouTube when choosing where to publish their videos, lest they miss out on the majority of their potential audience. This ubiquity is further integrated into the Google login and account system, which is further integrated into the Chrome browser, along with their search engine, email system, and other first-party products. To a lesser extent, GMail also enjoys this network effect. One must argue that a monopoly-like anticompetitive position has been achieved not when it is *impossible* for consumers to escape the gravity field of the monopolist, but merely when it is *impractical* to do so without incurring damage to one's business and personal activities.
By that measure, Alphabet has crossed the line and must be considered guilty of anticompetitive behavior. Ideally it would self correct and divest key technology components into spinoff companies or into trustworthy open source organizations. Government intervention ought to be a last resort, but should be used if necessary.
Too many people today want that to be the first and only resort.
Government intervention ought to be a last resort,
Fuck the browser bullshit, rip out their advertising.
Fuck the browser bullshit, rip out their advertising.
Well, the big essay above was from a rarely seen character called "Reasonable IG". The normal IG says, let's find a way to make the San Andreas fault open up completely so California falls into the ocean and takes all of Silicon Valley with it.
So, as you may have guessed right now, I run a lot of hobby Internet services
for the sheer fun of it.
Something that has always bothered me a little is that I run some top tier services that none of my friends have ever cared for. I am talking about the sort of stuff everybody has some use for but they always pick the service from one of the big players. For example, friends could host their downloads with my services but they'd rather use Google Drive. You surely get the idea.
It turns out I recently rolled a Youtube frontend for watching Youtube videos without advertisements and stuff and setit as private. I shared the link with my buddies thinking nobody was gonna use it. Well, it turns out I had to assign it more CPU and more RAM because they are all using it like crazy.
I am kind of proud I managed to make this little dent. Youtube is always demonetizing videos, so I think it is a good thing we demonetize youtube.
Something that has always bothered me a little is that I run some top tier services that none of my friends have ever cared for. I am talking about the sort of stuff everybody has some use for but they always pick the service from one of the big players. For example, friends could host their downloads with my services but they'd rather use Google Drive. You surely get the idea.
It turns out I recently rolled a Youtube frontend for watching Youtube videos without advertisements and stuff and setit as private. I shared the link with my buddies thinking nobody was gonna use it. Well, it turns out I had to assign it more CPU and more RAM because they are all using it like crazy.
I am kind of proud I managed to make this little dent. Youtube is always demonetizing videos, so I think it is a good thing we demonetize youtube.
Are these the same friends who you turned on to search.citadel.org? As a famous anti-Google frog once said: feels good, man.
2024-12-05 23:27 from IGnatius T Foobar
Subject: Re: Demonetizing Google
Are these the same friends who you turned on to
search.citadel.org? As a famous anti-Google frog once said:
feels good, man.
Some are :)
Actully I am advertising search.citadel.org around Internet friends, and my pseudo-youtube service among real life friends. There is some overlap but not that much.