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Comment by chrshawkes | Hacker News Reader

While Google created that walled city, they also destroyed every other city into a pile of rubble after tapping into endless resources from a completely unrelated industry. YouTube had an unfair advantage over just about any other company trying to build something similar.

Google is famous for making things free until they are not, than your screwed. I like when they arbitrarily change rules about SEO, AMP's and such. Don't want to play by the new rules? No problem, you and your company will be thrown onto the scrap heap.

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The more this metaphor is fleshed out the more it sounds like it's referring to civilization in general and how ancient cities/city-states actually operated (to some level of similarity).

Build a city, invite people in, tax them and rule them, and destroy or absorb every rival you can get away with. Have technology or resources your competitor doesn't have? Sucks to be them.

I guess I'm not that surprised that even though we can collectively build better systems for ourselves after time and lots of understanding where the alternatives lead us, our nature shows itself in various other areas.

Yeah, that's exactly how it was. Then we pushed for the rule of law, a set of fundamental rights, democracy, and a social safety net and while this stuff still happens it's a lot better than it was.

Time will tell if we're able to keep it up. Certainly there are new threats and opportunities.

Many of the of the same pundits supporting censorship on Google search and Youtube used to be extremely critical of Walmart's business practices. This isn't about principles.

Is there a way to disable amp in my browser? It’s hard to get to the real sites

Use Firefox and/or DuckDuckGo.

Yes, install Firefox Mobile.

As far as I know, no. You can request the desktop site and that should stop you from getting AMP pages as search results, but it doesn't always work either.

Apparently it's "for our own good" not to have the option to turn it off.

Am I the only one gets annoyed when people use "than" while it should be "then"? And hell a lot of such people!

> people use "than" while it should

Don't you mean "when"? "people use 'than' when it should..."

GP's second sentence could also use some grammar love ;)

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