Facebook, Google, your reign may soon be over | Hacker News Reader

Facebook, Google, your reign may soon be over

washingtonpost.com

35 pointscs7029 comments

As someone who was on the internet before Google, I want them to disappear.

People these days believe they are a force of good since they are driving innovation in technology. But they are so powerful now that other companies are just using their platforms and browsers. Almost all real popular innovation in tech comes from Google.

They have had ties with the American security agencies from the start and its out in the open if you just spend a couple of minutes googling it.

Still, when Google says they delete information, people trust them. It's really hard for me to understand why Google is trusted to this degree. Is it something in our brains, unable to process information when it conflicts with emotional beliefs?

Google is the best place to find trustworthy sources of infomation about just how untrustworthy google is.

i've honestly been happier with ddg than google for a while. Google search was a lot better during the page rank days. Maybe the SEO war is too awful or maybe google is curating results far too much. Quite frankly, it scares me that google personalizes every single damn search result.

"You Either Die A Hero, Or You Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become The Villain." [1]

I don't think anyone ever sets out to build a dystopia. You just wake up one day and find that all the little compromises you made along the way have eroded your freedom and what was once cool and innovative is now stifling and controlling.

The way out is making some hard choices and not letting convenience dictate your every decision. Might be backing some losing causes by choosing to do things like paying a little extra to buy books from a local bookstore, but at least I'm making some choices while I still can.

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0468569/quotes/qt0484282

This is largely due to shareholders ' inexorable demand for growth. Once you've given up control of your company to people that demand an ever increasing amount of revenue, you damn well better provide it or you're going to be looking for a new job. And at the end of the day, nothing quite pays like fucking people over...

Google's stock structure is actually pretty interesting. At least in terms of voting.[0] The TL;DR is Larry Page and Sergey Brin still maintain an out sized influence over the direction of the company despite not owning the majority in an economic sense.

Obviously there is still regular stockholder desires, but in terms of overall direction the pair still seem to be pretty firmly in control.

I did some research on this a while back as I was trying to figure out how much stock someone would need to own to influence Google in a significant way. Turns out it is basically impossible to unseat them.

[0] https://blogs.wsj.com/cfo/2015/08/12/googles-multi-class-sto...

But now India has its own billion-person digital platform: the extraordinary “Aadhaar” biometric ID system, which includes almost all of the nation’s 1.3 billion residents (and whose creation Nilekani oversaw). It is the only one of these massive platforms that is publicly owned. That means it does not need to make money off user data. It’s possible to imagine that in India, it will become normal to think of data as personal property that individuals can keep or rent or sell as they wish in a very open and democratic free market. India might well become the global innovator for individuals’ data rights.

I would think it would be better to have multiple eco systems that share data with users permission.

As someone looking at global warming with the appropriate fear, it seems to puzzling to me that we still don't talk about regulating the production of CO2. Tech companies will be (and should be) regulated that's for sure. But let's not take our eye off the ball.

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