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Comment by pembrook

2 years ago

I don’t have a problem with advertising generally, as long as I know upfront that’s what funds a tool I’m using, and isn’t disguised like a non-ad (eg. Unlike what Google does, which is outright deception). Advertising and spam are two separate things in my book.

However, my real problem is with what I call “The Google Strategy.” Basically, they take publicly funded infrastructure like HTTP and SMTP, capture the network by dumping “free” products on the market (with basically no advertising), kill off competitors, then monetize their market capture by removing the "free" part, packing these products with ads, making them worse and worse over time in the process. And everyone is trapped, since they captured the network of this public infrastructure. This is the story of Google Search, Gmail, YouTube, etc.

It’s anti-competitive, anti-markets, and quite frankly should have been regulated away as a strategy a long time ago.

Google basically ran Microsoft's classic anti-competitive B2B strategy to capture the consumer internet, and got away with it!

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pembrook

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jhonkola  2 years ago

This process has a descriptive name, enshittification (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification), and it seems to apply to most internet services.

  • pembrook  2 years ago

    That might be the trendy term for it now, but the strategy is as old as time.

    In old school economic terms its called "dumping." When international trade started becoming a major thing, aspiring monopolists would flood foreign markets with goods sold below-cost to push out local competitors, then ratchet up prices and reduce quality once they'd captured the market (basically the Google strategy).

    Just like crypto people had to learn that financial regulation was in place for a reason, internet people have had to learn that industrial age anti-trust rules were also put in place for a reason. Now we just need to enforce them.