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Google Decides To Pull Up The Ladder On The Open Internet, Pushes For Unconstitutional Regulatory Proposals

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/10/23/google-decides-to-pull-up-the-ladder-on-the-open-internet-pushes-for-unconstitutional-regulatory-proposals/

It’s pretty much the way of the world: beyond the basic enshittification story that has been so well told over the past year or so about how companies get worse and worse as they get more and more …

50 comments

sunbeam60

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All companies want open standards and regulation of the big players when they’re small. All companies want high barriers to entry and regulation of the small players when they’re big.

All companies want what is best for them. In that matter, they differ very little from people.

beeng

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Corporations are people didn't you know?

sunbeam60

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Not in the country I live, luckily.

drwho

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Don't worry. The US will fix that.

reric88

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America, fk yeah, coming again to save the mother fkn day, yeah

sunbeam60

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Huh?

jherazob

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This is the year of enshittification, isn't it? Damn every company has pushed the pedal to the metal on it

drwho

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The cat's out of the bag. Gotta grab everything before folks try to stop them.

tVxUHF

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It's because interest rates went up and the free VC money tap was turned off so all these companies have to actually turn a profit, so they're squeezing us with every lever they control.

Toribor

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It definitely feels like a transition period for the whole Internet. Tech platforms finally reached their maximum user potential and scale, so now it's time to turn the screws.

They all think we need them, so now we figure out if they're right.

grooving

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They weren't. Source: time traveler from the future

beejjorgensen

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I used to give Google money for services (Drive and YouTube), but I've already stopped doing that because of their evil ways. This just hammers it home that much more.

Edit: The shitty part is what a cool company it used to be. And to watch it destroy itself like this is just sad.

Siddhartha-Aurelius

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This is my biggest complaint. They were the best way to access the sum of all human knowledge. Now I NEVER find things relevant to my search, just things that can be sold to me. Things like the “-“ character no longer work. I still get the excluded term in top results. It garbage now and everyone at google is to blame not just the executives.

beejjorgensen

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I took my money from YouTube and started giving it to Kagi. 🙂👍

DeadGemini

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beejjorgensen

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Might get there. Right now I just have external SSH access (key only) to get to the files. I also need an offsite, so it's all sent to a remote server with rsync and gocryptfs. I only have about 90 GB of stuff on there right now; I don't do any media serving.

DeadGemini

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beejjorgensen

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For sure--I just don't tend to watch anything more than once. :) Most of my federated identity and offsites are at SDF, which is a solid place with a mission I respect and certainly don't mind giving $36/year to. Grayjay for stupid vids (if I could just get it to work with FCast...)

Computerchairgeneral

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Honestly, this is about what I expect from Google nowadays. It's surprising when they manage to live up to the "Don't be Evil" motto they used to have.

Luke_Fartnocker

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There's a reason they got rid of that motto.

dan

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They never got rid of it though. I don't understand why people keep repeating this. See the final paragraph here: https://abc.xyz/investor/google-code-of-conduct/

Adanisi

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They might as well have though 🙃

Quexotic

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don't be evil and if you see something, speak up

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=google+whistleblower+fired

Oh really Google?

Jummit

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It's double speak. The translation is "We are evil and if you say something about what you see, we will silence you.".

Luke_Fartnocker

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Wait, that's the government's stance also.

Jummit

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Are you beginning to see things more clearly now?

beejjorgensen

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Depends on your definition of "evil", I guess.

Quexotic

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Lol, right? Bit of a slippery slope over at the ol search and advertising factory.

Omniraptor

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They removed it from the main body as like, an organizing principle. and left it in only one sentence at the end. https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-dont-be-evil-from-1826153393

dan

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Sure, that's different to totally removing it though.

Luke_Fartnocker

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I heard several news stories stating that they had, but I guess that's my fault for believing the news. I just assumed they would get something right eventually.

arthur

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Expect this and they killing some of their products.

bedrooms

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It's-not-corruption-if-it's-law approach?

Siddhartha-Aurelius

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It’s a form of regulatory capture and is taught is all business schools.

Gsus4

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At this point what they learn in business schools is the full bestiary of legal and illegal tricks and scams you can use to extract money from us cattle and contribute as little as possible to the upkeep :(

jeremy_sylvis

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Regulatory capture seems about on par for Google these days. I suppose I'll be switching back to OnePlus for Android devices; that'll be about it for Google stuff in my home.

teawrecks

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Assume that all devices ship with spyware

jeremy_sylvis

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Suddenly, I miss the old days of Android. I suppose it's back to CyanogenMod or whatever it is these days

Siddhartha-Aurelius

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GrapheneOS

boonhet

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Direct replacement for Cyanogen would be Lineage. There are dozens of decent ROMs to try though.

I still opted for iOS in the end. As much shit as Apple pulls, they did 6 year software updates when only flagship Androids got 3 and they aren't generally trying to dominate the Internet.

Siddhartha-Aurelius

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Nobody outside a select few know the real dirt inside the proprietary code that Apple puts out. Open source is the only truth that you can see for yourself. Apple is the antithesis of open source.

winky88

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Open source is only as useful as the contributors and reviewers. Finding things after the fact helps noone.

People need to stop revering open source as the solution to humanity's problems and treat it as a useful tool, nothing more.

sadreality

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You are correct it is only a tool, sadly it is the only viable tool tho

Siddhartha-Aurelius

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You’re right.

I like to peruse code and have read a lot of it from the sources that make it available. It’s not always the languages I know but even then I can get the idea of what most of it is doing. There are some code bases that are too big for any one person to fully comprehend. That said, I think the only way for one to be confident in open source is to read it yourself which is a problem for most as coding knowledge is not common combine with the size of some.

So it’s always going to be trusting trust for most people. The fact that it is open source and makes available the code for review limits malice to a much greater degree than proprietary ever will.

boonhet

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I know, but as a software engineer, I just hate reading through other people's code and I don't have time for tinkering anymore. Apple's ecosystem is convenient for me and that matters more now. Used to care more of course.

BCsven

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Running it now it is great.

felbane

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Siddhartha-Aurelius

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Yes and no. Buy a used pixel phone and don’t give google a dime on the new pixel that is not fully supported yet.

BCsven

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I dont mind giving a company money for a product, then the transaction ends . What i don"t want is to buy a car then have the car sell my daily location to people.

Adanisi

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Lineage

Nollij

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Everyone seems to be missing an obvious detail- there was a related and even more dangerous piece of legislation reintroduced recently. It's known as the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), and that would have immense impacts on Google's (specifically, YouTube's) operations.

This is an example of them trying to claim the other bill isn't needed, because they can self-regulate. You'll notice how this also purports to protect kids, but in a way that is much easier and cheaper for Google to implement.

vriska1

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Its deeply worrying development seeing Google came out with the narrative saying they are against mandated age verification while secretly saying they do support it atleast that what I get from this article.