Mad At Google? Are You Mad Enough To Stop Using It? Can You Even Stop Using It? | Hacker News Reader

Mad At Google? Are You Mad Enough To Stop Using It? Can You Even Stop Using It?

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71 pointsmattculbreth45 comments

This is all so absurd. Why is anyone mad at Google over this Verizon thing?

Is Verizon so evil that just talking to them about the future of networks is enough for Google to be evil by association? (Actually, don't answer that.)

The argument in this article is that Google touches every part of the internet, and you can't live without their services even if you wanted to, because they're so widespread. I can accept that, but wouldn't that also mean that Google has an interest in a free and neutral internet, because their services are so widespread?

The very core of Google's business is derived from indexing all of the content on the internet. Their stated goal is to "index all the world's data". How exactly would cutting back-room deals for special traffic shaping with Verizon help Google?

Verizon, however, has a serious interest in preventing competition. They mostly sell network access at a premium price, which they can only do because they've gone to great lengths to limit the choices available to consumers.

Verizon seeks to limit access to consumers, while Google seeks to broker access between the user and whatever data they're searching for.

The more Verizon can stifle the competition and trap users, the more secure their business is. Google, however, is made more secure by every piece of user-contributed content that gets created. When Google indexes a new website, Google is increasing in value. When a user uploads to Youtube, Google is increasing in value. When someone makes a phone call with Google Voice, Google is increasing in value.

I can imagine Google providing internet access, but could you imagine Verizon providing Google-like data indexing services for public use? Remember that Google killed the phone book. We take it for granted now, but that's hugely significant. Verizon should be terrified of them providing cheap wireless communication, but Google need not be terrified of Verizon competing in the data indexing space.

Verizon needs to be a successful network access provider, and Google wants to be the hub for all data on the network. It makes perfect sense that they should be in talks.

Moreover, I've yet to understand most of the arguments against their policy proposal, beyond disappointment that they excluded wireless internet from regulation. (Which I think is a good thing for now).

I'm with you on this so far as the agreements seem rather reasonable, and I kind of assumed that agreeing not to include wireless in the deal for the moment was a compromise with Verizon so they'd agree to the regulations in the first place.

net neutrality is required if we want a free market where someone with a great idea can compete with Giant Corporation X. A lack of rules which allows Giant Corporation X to create artificial barriers to entry, which is exactly what a lack of neutrality will allow, will lead to a market that is not based primarily on merit.

I didn't speak against net neutrality. I spoke against regulations on wireless internet to enforce it at the current time. (For what its worth, I would be against any proposal that insisted that net neutrality regulations could never be implemented).

Tabling the issue for wireless networks for now might be the wrong position. (I don't think it is, but I could be wrong). But it is hardly the same as implementing policies that would forever block neutral wireless networks-- most of the critics I've read over the past few days have characterized the Google/Verizon deal as a total loss of neutrality on wireless networks, forever. It specifically outlines an annual review of the current policy.

That's hardly language of a "surrender monkey" (as Wired so inarticulately put it).

Most of us find it hard to believe that once such large corporations are able to create a tiered network there is little chance that it will ever change given their enormous financial stake in it.

> The argument in this article is that Google touches every part of the internet, and you can't live without their services even if you wanted to, because they're so widespread. I can accept that, but wouldn't that also mean that Google has an interest in a free and neutral internet, because their services are so widespread?

Google has a financial interest in its services being available as widely and quickly as possible.

Google has a different kind of interest in other folks services being available and the specific interest depends on who and what services we're talking about.

Google's stated goals have little to do with their real goals of making money. Personally after the AdMob deal I started to look at Google much differently.

Can you elaborate? What happened with AdMob?

You are using two different logics for Google and Verizon.

The main point is that Google is by far the #1 search engine, and online advertiser. Once you have the whole market (or most of it) for yourself, you can't go any further. At that point the second best thing you can do is raise the bar for any future competitors.

So as you say Google touches every part of the Internet. But they also have a _lot_ of money. If we end up in a world without net neutrality and ISPs and content providers start to make their own deals, then Google can spend its money to ensure that its services won't get slowed down. However any Google competitor will then have to pay a lot more to compete with Google.

In other words Google can make a deal with Verizon because Google and Verizon don't really compete. And while paying Verizon to ensure good speeds is a disadvantage for Google, it is a lot worse for Google's competitors.

You can get your data exported from most Google services. There are instructions here: http://www.dataliberation.org/

The problem is importing this data into some other service.

They don't seem to include a way to export Google Talk conversations.

Chats do show up in the gmail web interface. So (and I'm not saying this is elegant) you could open each chat and Forward it to a real email address, then save it from there.

Neither does Jabber.org, or YMessenger, or MSN.

You want logs of those chats, use a better client. Or setup your own XMMP server, with which you can talk to GTalk users btw ;)

Interesting that he mentioned Android, search, and GMail as services that it'd be hard to stop using. They all have easy substitutes that are arguably just as good, or at least close (iPhone, Bing, Yahoo Mail/Hotmail).

The one place where it's really difficult to stop using Google is AdWords. If you want to buy search ads, Google has a near monopoly, and others can't compete right now. That's where the real "can you even stop using it?" is.

> iPhone, Bing, Yahoo Mail/Hotmail

Are we really going to position Apple and Microsoft as the heroes to Google's villain?

(That sounds like a bit of a troll, but I don't mean it that way; I just mean that, if you care enough about such matters of principle to boycott Google, surely you can find something in the current or past behaviour of either to turn you off it, too.)

Its about pressure. If Google is stupid enough to make people even contemplate about alternatives, then they would be going on a slippery slope as it is not too difficult to switch, to vote with your legs as it were. Sure Microsoft may be bad, but you have Yahoo search. If you do not like them because of something they do, you can switch from them too, isn't that what free market is all about, alternatives, competition on every variable.

But the previous poster is spot on. There are just as good alternatives to all the services they provide, except perhaps for google maps but that is once in a while use, but they have a monopoly on advertising on the internet and no other alternative even compares.

I am not sure I'd stop using Android if Google became too evil. I don't particularly depend on the proprietary Google apps for anything, and it's easy enough to fork, remove references to Google, and recompile. (And yes, I do run the AOSP version of Android on my phone, so I would lose nothing by doing this.)

If Google hate becomes something worth caring about, I'm sure CyanogenMod will have a non-Google Android build in about a day. That's what makes Android great; it's just software, not an ideology.

No, No and No.

80% of my business is from Google, and 80% of my business runs on Google.

I can give up the U.S. dollar, airlines, and banking. But not Google.

You can give up banking?

    su echo x.x.x.x google.com >> /etc/hosts

where x.x.x.x is the IP address of the non-Google search engine you wish to use. ie. ping http://www.gigablast.com/

I can only speak of myself, but I don't feel that stop using Google's products would be that hard. I have already two other e-mail accounts which I use in different context, and I actually use different clients for each (pine and mutt via ssh, and gmail's web-interface for gmail). Bing maps is already better in some places than Google's, so I use them both. I'm not liking Google's new image search at all, and I'm beginning to think if I should begin to use Bing's, as it has provided more accurate results (in the cases I have tried it), and has better UI (imho). The list goes on...

The most problematic thing to replace would atm be Android. Nokia's offerings aren't quite there yet, Apple would require bit different mindset, and Windows Mobile is...well Windows Mobile. But I'm not sure if it would be that bad to step back to bit dumber phones (meaning mainly Symbian here). Although I haven't even tried any Android device, so maybe it has something amazing what I haven't realized.

I'm not overly mad at google, but I use DuckDuckGo for most my searches these days. (now all i need is ddgmail and I would be set)

I genuinely tried Bing when it first came out but it didn't stick. I have been using DuckDuckGo for a few weeks now and I have changed all my default search engines to it. Great features (! search and zero click info, not to mention not storing my search information).

Like you mentioned, Gmail on the other hand is much more difficult to drop. I spent half hour going through http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1121269 looking for a decent solution.

No. No. Yes, if I wanted to but why would I ?

I don't disagree with you, but surely the interesting thing is that there is acknowledgment in essentially mainstream media that there could be Life After Google. I think about three years ago that notion was almost inconceivable for a lot of people.

If this Net Neutrality thing angers people enough to reconsider their relationship with Google, good.

Been trying to avoid Google for years now just because it is not wise to entrust everything to a company. Currently DDG for searches, e-mail handled on my own server. Never Google Docs. AdBlock, NoScript and cookie management help too.

Still have a gmail account for reading some Google Groups, which I really do not do anymore, and a GTalk id because one person on my list has nothing else...probably time to change these too.

There's nothing wrong with not wanting to use Google's services, but I don't see how it's particularly good. Do you also avoid entrusting your food supply to grocery stores and your fuel needs to gas stations? I mean, it's possible, and some people might like living that way, but avoiding these things just doesn't stand up to a cost-benefit analysis for most people.

Do you do all your shopping in one store, buy all from one brand?

The cost of not using Google's services is very low.

I don't do everything in one place, but I don't avoid specific stores or brands for fear of "entrusting everything to them" either. I go to whatever store is best for the things I want and most convenient for me at the time.

In practice, I do about 80% of my grocery shopping at Fresh & Easy, because its goods are high-quality, its prices on most things are amazing and it is literally right around the corner from my apartment.

Similarly, I use Google for most of my searching and email because it has the best products in these areas.

I think the question "Can you even stop using it?" is closer to "Do you even have that choice anymore?" rather than "Can you avoid going to Google branded websites?". There are so many services either owned or somehow connected to Google that it would take some level of expertise to completely avoid sending at least some of your data to Google.

From Doubleclick to Google Analytics to reCAPTCHA, you can encounter Google without ever bringing up google.com or YouTube.

Mad at Google? No. Should I be?

Can I stop using it? Well, I use https://ixquick.com for search. I like Google Maps, but there are other alternatives, and I can always grab maps I care about from the gas station, so it is more a novelty and a convenience than a need. I do not depend on any Google services, partly out of disliking the idea of calling out to another server in order for mine to work.

So in a word... yes. But I know there are many people who built their business using its convenient technologies and would need to find good replacements. Maybe it is just a matter of marketing; I am sure there are plenty of alternatives for everything Google provides. What is the fear here? Leaving our easy comfort zones?

This internet/software stuff is all smoke and dreams. There are better things to get worried about.

No, No, and with lots of effort.

Ironically, I almost never use Google search (thanks DDG!), but I have multiple Gmail accounts, plus Docs, Reader, Wave (though no more I suppose), Gtalk, Calendar, Android (no desire to use other smartphone OSes). And this is just personal -- I don't have my own business.

I only use two Google products regularly these days: search and Gmail. I would like to move from Gmail but I haven't found another provider to go to. I used to like Fastmail but, for some reason, I don't like it that they are now owned by Opera.

Maybe I just need to hope that someone like Colin Percival gets interested in starting an e-mail service, as I really like the way he runs TarSnap.

I'm disappointed in Google but it doesn't really impact their existing services so I won't stop using them. I certainly won't use whatever services they end up piggy backing on this deal in a few months when the uproar has died down. I'm a firm believer things happen for a reason. Google did this deal for some future project that involves Verizon as the carrier. No doubt in my mind.

I haven't had any difficulties stopping using techcrunch!

Yes. No. Yes - I am not that important.

All I use it for is non-wikipedia search and maps, which I don't use all too often anyway.

Oh that's it, well that shouldn't be much then...

This is crazy talk.

Why is Google getting all the heat from this? Any concessions on neutrality in that non-biding agreement is to appease Verizon, why not get angry at them or at the other internet companies that stood idly by and let Google handle the net neutrality burden?

I think it's shocking to a lot of people because Google has long claimed that "what's good for the internet is good for [Google]". It was something more concrete than just the nebulous "don't be evil". It stood for support of open-standards, better infrastructure (such as their work on revising DNS) and none of the walled-garden bullshit the entrenched players relied on.

To see them compromise those principles on the wireless side of the fence is hugely disappointing and, frankly, quite puzzling in its apparent short-sightedness.

It's a non-binding, non-changing bullshit agreement.

It represents a very real change in position. Everyone thought, naively perhaps, that google was going to liberate the mobile phones of america whether the carriers liked it or not.

This then is a non-aggression pact with the carriers showing that carrier crippled phones and services are here to stay.

Google is actually in a unique situation where everyday users could continue to take advantage of free services and cost Google bandwidth/electricity while completely ignoring ads.

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