Comment by jchw
1 day ago
Exactly my thoughts. I am unfathomably angry and I want to contribute to any effort to dismantle Google as a company.
1 day ago
Exactly my thoughts. I am unfathomably angry and I want to contribute to any effort to dismantle Google as a company.
Yeah, same. It is hard; we start to need a collective boycott.
We can all do our part, by using their products as little as possible, contribute to open alternatives (OpenStreetMap, Fediverse, Linux, Nextcloud...) and by stimulating our (non-techie!) friends and family.
But it is a lot of work :(
It should not be a "vote with your wallet" situation. It should be governments shattering that organization into appropriately sized companies.
I wouldn't hold your breath. The government is reliant on them for surveillance, censorship, and propaganda. It is a synergistic relationship, not adversarial.
We cannot vote with our wallets because there’s no real competition. That’s the problem with the big tech companies and other monopolistic companies in other areas.
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It should have been the government providing an identity verification API, like they already do in the physical world with physical IDs. Governments dropped the ball, and so now Apple and Google get to be infrastructure.
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These days every time a government as much as thinks of imponging on a supranational corporation's right to do whatever the hell it pleases you'll hear no end of cries ranging from "overregulation" to "tyranny".
For an example, see EU's GDPR, DMA etc.
It's less work than 10 years ago. So many much more mature alternatives.
The technical challenge is actually the smaller one. The real one is to get people to care. Don't be tricked by the HN/techie bubble. Most people don't understand the problem, or don't see it as a problem because nothing smacked them in the face yet. Any attempts to explain it makes you sound like a lunatic to some, or just a bit of a worrier to others.
Whether it's targeted ads, or training AI on their data, or verifying their age and implicitly identity, or "fraud defense", most people happily take it in exchange for a convenient freebie which is why things keep escalating.
It's understandable, people are assaulted with all kinds of abuses from every direction. There are more immediate threats that they can grasp more easily so this stuff has to wait its turn.
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They're trying to block your ability to boycott. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-BDS_laws
Those are specifically targeted to boycotts of Israel, which ties it to anti-racial discrimination law.
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> Yeah, same. It is hard; we start to need a collective boycott.
Feelgood slactivism. They don't care about your boycott. They finance their own alternatives because they know what makes you shut up.
IMO the biggest issue is that some non-tech people will occasionally be straight up hostile and will whine about not having "features", but then again it only takes a small amount of people taking action inflict real change. Also medium term we need to start making phones (smart OR dumb) that are FOSS as possible. > Linux Open/FreeBSD too, we need to have more redundancy.
But remember: once again, don't simply get angry at Google the institution. Get angry at Page and Brin personally. They have the power to prevent this, a power they were careful to preserve when they gave Google its IPO. They are fully responsible for Google's choices here. But, partly because they aren't constantly jumping up and down drawing attention to themselves on social media, they've tended to escape the same personal scrutiny given to eg. Elon Musk. That needs to end.
On that topic, I would highly recommend you to switch to Kagi!
Search is still their workhorse for ad revenue. Less search, less users, in addition to users now just asking chatgpt and co, will hurt them well
Wouldn’t installing an adblocker basically hurt them as much / more as I still cost them compute but don't get them that sweet ad money?
You think systems that have adblockers installed will keep being able to pass WEI / Google Cloud Fraud Defence checks?
This is an attestation scheme. Attestation is about controlling what software you are and aren't allowed to run. If a future version of this allows desktop browsers rather than just phones, it will almost certainly try to do similar forms of attestation, and prevent you from controlling your own software stack.
The problem is this type of controlling move, that will be used to benefit their company, is one among many things a company like Google can do that is unethical. They won’t stop. They are too powerful and can get away with it repeatedly. Even if this one thing is stopped, there will always be another dark pattern or another privacy violation or another anti-competitive thing.
We really need brand new legislation that makes it much easier to break up companies that are too big, and also to tax mega corporations at a much higher rate than all other companies. Then we can have fair competition and the power of choice. But the existing laws end up with no real consequence for these companies, and even if there’s some slap on the wrist, it takes years in court. New laws must make it very fast and low cost for society to take action.
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