That means you're a peasant, and don't matter.
Don't worry, they'll work with telecoms and carriers to ensure devices matching your budget are subsidized and made available at every possible opportunity.
I expected mostly snark from my earnest question, And got it.
Ok, concrete scenario. What about homeless people using the computer at the library? Im pretty sure Google wouldn’t intentionally cut marginalized people like this off from the entire internet, would they?
> Im pretty sure Google wouldn’t intentionally cut marginalized people like this off from the entire internet, would they?
Sure they would. Cloudflare has already arbitrarily blocked entire swathes of the internet. Captcha as well. Your average user ends up going to the path of least resistance, and end up with a compliant ISP or carrier that's doing all sorts of censorship and gatekeeping and siloing and funneling.
And if they did get noticed, they'd whip up some sort of program through their cronies like the Obama phone, and get subsidized service to some token groups, heavily favoring political funneling and defaults supporting whatever party won the grift for that particular round of conspicuous do-gooding.
It's bad, man. For technically savvy people, they can get around things, switch up DNS, muck with vpns, etc. Normal folks are kept firmly within the walled gardens.
Then there's the information silos, platforms, and psychological shit they use. People don't have a chance in hell of getting a free and open link to the internet, what they see is tied to their identity, tied to their service provider, tied to their geographic location, and it's all done seamlessly in the background so they never even notice what they're missing, by design.
It wasn't snark. It's the awful, honest truth, and I have things to suggest involving wire brushes for anyone at Google or any other company involved in this shit.
We need a digital bill of rights, outlawing commercial trafficking in user data, mandatory ephemerality, and penalties involving prison time for CEOs and fines that are rapidly and unavoidably fatal even for companies like Alphabet or Amazon if they screw up even a little bit. Otherwise, this whole pretense at a free and open internet is just a convenient talking point and marketing schlock.
Google would throw homeless people in a furnace to generate electricity for their datacentres if they could. No, this is not sarcasm, I fully expect they would if they could.
> Im pretty sure Google wouldn’t intentionally cut marginalized people like this off from the entire internet, would they? Please don’t respond with sarcasm.
Honestly, if you ask such terminally naive questions don't be surprised to get sarcasm in reply. Google does cut off access to chunks of people if it deems it profitable to do so!
> Im pretty sure Google wouldn’t intentionally cut marginalized people like this off from the entire internet, would they?
Why wouldn't they? Google is notorious for making marginalized people's lives harder if it can make them money. Some examples:
- Hosting Palantir's ImmigrationOS, used by ICE to track immigrants
- Actively removing tools marginalized people use to protect themselves against ICE, such as ICE-tracking apps on the play store
- Intentionally aided Israel in committing genocide as part of Project Nimbus
- LGBTQ creator censorship on YouTube
Cutting off a small group of people they've repeatedly shown not to care about in the first place is a small price to pay to further cement their position as gatekeeper of the internet.
>Google wouldn’t intentionally cut marginalized people like this off from the entire internet, would they?
Followed by
>Please don’t respond with sarcasm.
Is my kind of humor. Just because they follow ESG scoring doesn't mean they actually care, if anything it means they very much don't.
They already trying there best to marginalize non chrome, non residential ip, non lodged in user not to mention there decade long silicon valley political purity targeting.
Well, it depends on the application and context. I don't think a homeless person at the library is going to be booking a $1000-a-night room in downtown Los Angeles.
However, services that homeless people will be using should factor in their target audience (such as the homeless not having a phone at all, or maybe not one that's up to date even).
However, like it or not, having a modern up to date device is becoming essential for even rudimentary basic access to society. Whether that's right or wrong it's where we are.
I shuddered when I realized that Google would require (smart)phones for recaptcha.
I say this because I used to have a dumb-phone for an year and more and I only stopped using it when it broke (its battery fried but its replacable but I don't find battery its size). No smart-phone period,(I am a teen so I can afford to do that)
Recently, I wanted to make a google account, guess-what, I literally couldn't make a google account without having an (smart)phone. Google's new feature on making a google account also requires you to qr code your way into, similar to this re-captcha.
I tried to somehow find ways to have a phone number OTP but even when I finally managed to do that after so much PITA, I didn't get the OTP (at all).
I am pretty sure that my phone number works as I got another OTP from google when I had finally given in and used an android device to make an account and even then, there is so much friction.
Even though I have verified my phone number on google, I had to verify the phone number on youtube again to upload a video >15 minutes iirc and yknow I tried to add my number and it didn't send my OTP. So I tried again, and it said that I had tried too much, yes their rate limit of too much is 1
I was sharing all of this with some of my online friends with screenshots. I probably wished to write a blogpost about it that you can't use google without having an (smart)phone.
and now, you are telling me, that Google is gonna force me/us the same but for viewing the open internet, the content and websites that they don't even control. There was one thing about google doing this BS in their own websites because I thought that although really sh.tty, but they don't care about me enough to want me as a user so fine (it wasn't but still)
But this just takes it to an extremely completely next level. I can't stress how bad this all is.
Even after all of the previous things, I still was like, well this problem of google account can still be fixed/isn't thaaat large more than its annoying/frustrating and Google as a company is still mostly fine as compared to other tech giants except from their locking down android thing but this all changed with this move.
With age verification, locking down android, requiring android, recent Utah/UK laws which somehow threaten websites. Internet is turning into Dystopia. We are gonna slowly move towards a allowlist internet where only select few websites are used. For a large swath of the population this is already the case so the voices protesting are quite few but we must do what we can to protest them all from killing the internet. Sorry this got long but I can't stress how bad of a move this is as someone who used to use dumbphone, Google is basically saying that I can't use the internet if I have a dumb-phone.
That means you're a peasant, and don't matter. Don't worry, they'll work with telecoms and carriers to ensure devices matching your budget are subsidized and made available at every possible opportunity.
I expected mostly snark from my earnest question, And got it.
Ok, concrete scenario. What about homeless people using the computer at the library? Im pretty sure Google wouldn’t intentionally cut marginalized people like this off from the entire internet, would they?
Please don’t respond with sarcasm.
> Im pretty sure Google wouldn’t intentionally cut marginalized people like this off from the entire internet, would they?
Sure they would. Cloudflare has already arbitrarily blocked entire swathes of the internet. Captcha as well. Your average user ends up going to the path of least resistance, and end up with a compliant ISP or carrier that's doing all sorts of censorship and gatekeeping and siloing and funneling.
And if they did get noticed, they'd whip up some sort of program through their cronies like the Obama phone, and get subsidized service to some token groups, heavily favoring political funneling and defaults supporting whatever party won the grift for that particular round of conspicuous do-gooding.
It's bad, man. For technically savvy people, they can get around things, switch up DNS, muck with vpns, etc. Normal folks are kept firmly within the walled gardens.
Then there's the information silos, platforms, and psychological shit they use. People don't have a chance in hell of getting a free and open link to the internet, what they see is tied to their identity, tied to their service provider, tied to their geographic location, and it's all done seamlessly in the background so they never even notice what they're missing, by design.
It wasn't snark. It's the awful, honest truth, and I have things to suggest involving wire brushes for anyone at Google or any other company involved in this shit.
We need a digital bill of rights, outlawing commercial trafficking in user data, mandatory ephemerality, and penalties involving prison time for CEOs and fines that are rapidly and unavoidably fatal even for companies like Alphabet or Amazon if they screw up even a little bit. Otherwise, this whole pretense at a free and open internet is just a convenient talking point and marketing schlock.
2 replies →
Google would throw homeless people in a furnace to generate electricity for their datacentres if they could. No, this is not sarcasm, I fully expect they would if they could.
> Im pretty sure Google wouldn’t intentionally cut marginalized people like this off from the entire internet, would they? Please don’t respond with sarcasm.
Honestly, if you ask such terminally naive questions don't be surprised to get sarcasm in reply. Google does cut off access to chunks of people if it deems it profitable to do so!
2 replies →
US govt used to have a program to sponsor mobile phones for homeless. Is that still around or did DOGE kill it?
(edit) It seems to still exist: https://www.fcc.gov/general/lifeline-program-low-income-cons...
> Im pretty sure Google wouldn’t intentionally cut marginalized people like this off from the entire internet, would they?
Why wouldn't they? Google is notorious for making marginalized people's lives harder if it can make them money. Some examples:
- Hosting Palantir's ImmigrationOS, used by ICE to track immigrants
- Actively removing tools marginalized people use to protect themselves against ICE, such as ICE-tracking apps on the play store
- Intentionally aided Israel in committing genocide as part of Project Nimbus
- LGBTQ creator censorship on YouTube
Cutting off a small group of people they've repeatedly shown not to care about in the first place is a small price to pay to further cement their position as gatekeeper of the internet.
4 replies →
>Google wouldn’t intentionally cut marginalized people like this off from the entire internet, would they?
Followed by
>Please don’t respond with sarcasm.
Is my kind of humor. Just because they follow ESG scoring doesn't mean they actually care, if anything it means they very much don't.
They already trying there best to marginalize non chrome, non residential ip, non lodged in user not to mention there decade long silicon valley political purity targeting.
Well, it depends on the application and context. I don't think a homeless person at the library is going to be booking a $1000-a-night room in downtown Los Angeles.
However, services that homeless people will be using should factor in their target audience (such as the homeless not having a phone at all, or maybe not one that's up to date even).
However, like it or not, having a modern up to date device is becoming essential for even rudimentary basic access to society. Whether that's right or wrong it's where we are.
I shuddered when I realized that Google would require (smart)phones for recaptcha.
I say this because I used to have a dumb-phone for an year and more and I only stopped using it when it broke (its battery fried but its replacable but I don't find battery its size). No smart-phone period,(I am a teen so I can afford to do that)
Recently, I wanted to make a google account, guess-what, I literally couldn't make a google account without having an (smart)phone. Google's new feature on making a google account also requires you to qr code your way into, similar to this re-captcha.
I tried to somehow find ways to have a phone number OTP but even when I finally managed to do that after so much PITA, I didn't get the OTP (at all).
I am pretty sure that my phone number works as I got another OTP from google when I had finally given in and used an android device to make an account and even then, there is so much friction.
Even though I have verified my phone number on google, I had to verify the phone number on youtube again to upload a video >15 minutes iirc and yknow I tried to add my number and it didn't send my OTP. So I tried again, and it said that I had tried too much, yes their rate limit of too much is 1
I was sharing all of this with some of my online friends with screenshots. I probably wished to write a blogpost about it that you can't use google without having an (smart)phone.
and now, you are telling me, that Google is gonna force me/us the same but for viewing the open internet, the content and websites that they don't even control. There was one thing about google doing this BS in their own websites because I thought that although really sh.tty, but they don't care about me enough to want me as a user so fine (it wasn't but still)
But this just takes it to an extremely completely next level. I can't stress how bad this all is.
Even after all of the previous things, I still was like, well this problem of google account can still be fixed/isn't thaaat large more than its annoying/frustrating and Google as a company is still mostly fine as compared to other tech giants except from their locking down android thing but this all changed with this move.
With age verification, locking down android, requiring android, recent Utah/UK laws which somehow threaten websites. Internet is turning into Dystopia. We are gonna slowly move towards a allowlist internet where only select few websites are used. For a large swath of the population this is already the case so the voices protesting are quite few but we must do what we can to protest them all from killing the internet. Sorry this got long but I can't stress how bad of a move this is as someone who used to use dumbphone, Google is basically saying that I can't use the internet if I have a dumb-phone.
Then you have already have not been very present in the analytical data that these business decisions are based on.
Go fuck yourself?
I mean, that seems to be the general societal attitude.
And you'll need to buy new ones because many things are app only, or are migrating that way (including being able to travel to certain countries)