Web by Google (TM)
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I suspect that if you broke those companies up you'd only win in the short term, then it would consolidate again. You'd need a constant pressure to prevent this situation and given that the USA would be in the best position to do that I'm not holding by breath.
The internet started decentralized because there was no money to make and we were still figuring things out. As soon as it became mainstream it started to coalesce and we're just now reaching the final stage of this evolution. Even here on HN you have threads full of people coming up with excuses for why they won't run Firefox, and that's a community that should understand the implication of those things. Good luck convincing the internet population at large.
Are there statistics on the browser usage on HN? Just for a good laugh.
slack/discord will probably disappear and be replaced by another closed system until we find the right way to do real time chat in a decentralised way.
Most companies use mail internally or to interact with customers usually using some type of external mailing service.....
I don't know if it's still in the pipeline but I remember that Google proposed an "AMP for email" not so long ago, with basically self-updating email contents.
Open email can be severely damaged if good old SMTP is only used to tunnel proprietary formats, especially if those formats are effectively just metadata that's used to fetch the actual content of the email from 3rd parties.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Neutral_Encapsulatio...
Isn't that what IRC was supposed to be? But as others have pointed out, it's trivial to roll your own chat software and monetize it. You can't do that with a decentralized standard.
If SMTP is only used to tunnel proprietary content à la winmail.dat, it doesn't really matter that it's still technically open.
Genuine question, do you mind saying (or pointing to something) what are the implications of browser choice of individuals reading HN?
I think at some point Chrome became significantly better than Firefox and did a better job listening to users, so power-users (developers) started switching, once they switched, they primarily developed for the browser they use themselves (it's just more convenient when you get a link to look at to open the inspector in the browser that is set as system standard), so support improved further on that platform, so market share would constantly rise. This in turn leads to more devs reducing their focus on Firefox, so users turn away when a site looks or functions worse.
Now, Firefox has caught up on a bunch of things, yet Google's market share is huge both in browsing and advertising. It would be good for more developers to actively support the strongest alternative platform, because this in turn might affect adoption of that browser, even if it's just small numbers (every site that doesn't work might lead to a user switching to Chrome). It would keep them at least a little more safe from a monopoly that might start imposing policies that are bad for their business, the same way app stores are causing issues because they are the only way to access mobile phones (outside of web app - which is the point of the whole discussion)
Edit: note there's probably many reasons - this is just one way of looking at it.
It's actually pretty cool, and earnings from web monetized users now cover ~3% of the operation of the site during the first month of having it implemented.
You basically just have to add a meta tag to the site that directs to a payment pointer (you also have to sign up with one of the wallets for the payment pointer).
Definitely not getting rich from the implementation, and the earnings are much lower than if I just ran ads, but it is a nice feeling to have the users of the site directly contribute to supporting the product. Plus it is such a low barrier to set it up that there is very little downside to having it added to the site.
Implementing simple "Web Bucks" is not pedestrian at all. There are real reasons why all Paypals suck, and you can't simply ignore them and hope to build an open cash alternative unbothered.
But then, with Bush Sr and then Clinton, the rules changed; Microsoft started playing the political game, and essentially avoided a similar fate.
There is no antitrust enforcement anymore. Breaking a company once indeed only buys a little time. But getting regulation workiNg again WILL work, and will likely include breaking them.
If only the US would vote in politicians that cared about competition. I can’t find any amongst either presidential or congressional candidates, though.
Or you could break up search / browser / advertising / mobile; search and browser would need to invent other ways to monetize themselves.
Additionally, separate to instagram / facebook / whatsapp ; possibly also facebook social / facebook marketplace / facebook events ; They should have a level of access that others have. Imagine Yahoo users could subscribe to Facebook events without ever setting foot in facebook.com ... I know it sounds like science fiction, but it's possible. like email....
From what we've seen with GPT-3, we can train one machine learning model by ingesting the entire scraped web and a whole lot of (online/offline?) books, and it can often produce correct answers to questions. The accuracy of those answers, presuming the questions are not subjective ones, is only going to increase. Google's status, as a search engine, in 2025 is not something I would bet money on.
The iOS/Safari thing is another issue, which perhaps other anti-trust regulators will address in Google's favor. Assuming they do not, consider that if Google stops paying Apple many billions of dollars a year and another company (or Apple) replaces the default iOS search, Google's search ad business will be severely and irreversibly damaged. Removing iOS defaults would not only remove a large chunk of Google's US mobile search traffic, it would be the more affluent chunk. Everyone who knows about marketplace dynamics knows how damaging that would be to Google if that inventory ended up with Microsoft or Facebook.
Even without regulatory intervention (which is almost 100% guaranteed at this point, barring some act of god, though I don't know how large that intervention will be) Google's days atop the mountain are certainly drawing to a close. Perhaps the ground has already given way, they know it, and the maniacal stupidity of trying to coral the web into some AMP graveyard is a reaction of desperation.
To address the original blog post, I think the author is way off the mark on video. Youtube is big, but far from the king. Google has repeatedly flopped on the social side, and isn't going to be allowed to buy TikTok. They don't appear to be taking any ground paid streaming services like Netflix or Amazon. They are big, but no where near as important relative to their dominance in search.
Hopefully those same anti-trust regulators also have statistics for browser market shares :)
What other alternatives are there for Youtube, that are even in the same region as Youtube?
I know that your parent explicitly mentioned the US, but let's not pretend either that the US found the, or even a, right answer to structuring government, or that no other country has found their own answers.
There's not one right answer here.
For many people, it probably is—the key to its longevity (and it's very young on the global stage) is working well enough for enough people enough of the time—but there are plenty of people for whom it's not working—me and plenty of other people in the US, but also the global victims of the international policies of the US. (Before the whataboutism comes in, this is not to say that other countries don't also have dissatisfied residents or bad international policies. I was responding specifically to a comment whose wording could be read as saying that the US, rather than any other country one might want to discuss, had found the right answer to government.)
> There's not one right answer here.
I agree, and that's why I was urging against wording that seemed to imply that the US's answer was the answer to 'correct' government.
Personally I'd like to live under a much more European model of governance, but that, too, isn't perfect. (And, of course, one way to do that is to move to Europe. But this thread started not from a debate about the best place to live, but from my response to a post whose wording, "we figured it out ~250 years ago", could be read as suggesting that the US had found the right solution to government.)
But it is meaningful to disagree with "we figured it out ~250 years ago" (a quote from the post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24178311 to which I was originally responding), which says that we already know the answer, even if I don't know the answer (and even if, as I suspect, there isn't just one answer—if there is even one).
> good luck with research on fixing things like covid, ebola, and polio.
Polio is gone. Ebola, to the extent that it is gone, is because of a massive worldwide effort, not because of any one government—it literally, scientifically, could not have been eradicated by one government. It's not clear to me that the US's record on dealing with COVID is such that it can afford to sneer at anyone else's ability to deal with it, "anarchy enclave" or otherwise.
> I suspect that if you broke those companies up you'd only win in the short term, then it would consolidate again.
The natural course of humans is to walk around on the ground too, yet we fly. Regardless of whether it takes energy to do, it's something we should obviously do anyway because the alternative is worse. Sorry for the bad analogy but "it's natural" and "hard" isn't a valid argument against doing something about something.
I don't really buy your story anyway though. It assumes it was a fair fight and I simply don't think that's true in the case of the web.
Here is a screenshot of my Cloudfront dashboard showing the breakdown of user agents into particular browsers when an article of mine reached the top of HN about two months ago:
Looking at the number of distinct IP addresses in Athena for that day, about 20,200 of those hits were distinct viewers:
This is not definitive, but it's something I guess. Here are a few observations based on that data:
1. On the desktop, it looks like Chrome and Firefox are at about parity for HN users. I kind of doubt this actually, and think it's more likely that Chrome still beats Firefox by a sizable margin. But even if this is off, it looks like HN users actually do use Firefox significantly more than the general population, which means the evangelization here isn't just a vocal minority among HN users.
2. On desktop Safari is a distant third. It would appear more people browse HN in any mobile category than browse HN on desktop using Safari.
3. On mobile, mobile Safari dominates. Then mobile Chrome has about half as many users as mobile Safari, and mobile Firefox again half as many as mobile Chrome.
EDIT: I pulled an Athena report of the referrer breakdown as well, if anyone's curious:
As a user Safari is fantastic and basically the whole reason I even own an iPhone. It’s just stupidly faster than Chrome on any Android flagship.
A world where there’s “choice” of browsers on every platform in practice just cements Chrome as the web because if you didn’t have to develop for Safari nobody would. On every other platform it’s “have bug-for-bug compatibility with Chrome or die.”
I wouldn't even bother owning an iOS device if it weren't for the third-party app selection (specifically for art production). Which is the most infuriating part: devs could do all of this stuff on Android, they just refuse to.
That's not fair. There are good reasons Android doesn't have art production apps. The biggest is that Android users don't pay for apps like that and devs like eating, but iOS has several other advantages like the Pencil, the better graphics APIs, the better graphics performance, etc.
This is more the result of Android being the budget option.
You make it sound as though developers have some grand scheme against Android. Devs do prioritize iOS, but if you want it to change you (and Google) should understand the reasons for it. ARKit vs ARCore is a great example.
Tango launched on a single phone that no one bought, it required specialized hardware, and it had serious performance issues. Google forged ahead with the hardware requirements for years, in which the market for Tango apps was zero. They gave it limited support and it was clearly not a priority. It was only after Apple launched ARKit all at once for every modern iDevice, in a big presentation to make it clear this would be a major iOS going forward, that Google killed off Tango and screwed over all the devs who had bought in (with a tweet, for the extra insult to injury). They launched ARCore instead, which still didn't run on the majority of Android phones and still didn't track as well as ARKit.
ARCore isn't the only time Google has behaved this way, it happens with nearly all of their efforts. Do you see why developers don't engage with these kinds of practices?
No, it's simply the same sort of tribalism that drives so much of American culture. The black-and-white, good-vs-evil format warring is nothing new; as always, it's driven by a kernel of legitimate difference and a whole lot of snowballing bias. What needs to happen is for developers to pull their heads out of their asses, realize just how enormous the Android market is, and supply experiences that justify paying for software (especially in a climate where most users don't see anywhere near the value they give in personal data returned in software utility).
>Tango launched on a single phone that no one bought
That doesn't matter. Tango was the cutting edge of mobile XR, which is a space that still won't be mature and profitable for years from now. The point would have been to get a jumpstart on developing port-able technologies and UX norms. Can you imagine how much more solid app development would have been if someone had showed up in 2003 and said, "In 10 years, multi-touch display smartphones will become the norm. Here's a dev kit that approximates what will be possible."? That's Tango. I don't know how you can argue that opportunities weren't missed or pushed back years because of this platform bias. Now the space is even contracting somewhat because Apple marketed ARKit (and forced Google to market ARCore) as a consumer-ready platform, and companies are realizing that it isn't (control isn't figured out, UX isn't figured out, applications aren't figured out; we're JUST getting the basic technology layer above ARKit/Core figured out). If we'd taken Tango seriously, we'd be so much farther ahead.
This goes for so much in the iOS/Android dynamic. It's dumb.
Not only is safari full of bugs, the bugs won't be fixed, and if they do, it will take years.
Current serious bugs: 1. Add a site to the home screen, go to another app for 20 seconds and then switch back: congratulations, it's frozen. 2. You can't even stop scrolling on the body element, so tens of thousands of developers resorts to ugly hacks like eg. https://github.com/willmcpo/body-scroll-lock that kinda works in some situations. 3. The lack of features. Who doesn't as a developer feel bad for the person who spends forever trying every single browser in apples app store in an attempt to find a browser that supports push notifications. Of course none of them do, it's all Apple's shit.
You really can't have much experience with web development if you don't know how terrible iOS is for web as a result of Safari.
Heck, Safari isn't even behaving close to Safari. You have safari on desktop, safari on iOS and safari standalone on iOS. All of them behaves completely different and has different bugs and feature support.
I really like addons and that's why I don't use chrome on mobile.
Surprisingly I also started using Firefox Focus. At first it looked like nonsense to me, no addons. But then I found out it sometimes makes sense to start from scratch, focus on some topic and delete all tabs with one tap when done. And if I find what I searched for or want to read it later, I share the page to Saved messages on my Telegram. This workflow works surprisingly well for me.
Just like democracy, you are never "done". "Oh great we are in a democracy nothing can remove that from us!" nope, gotta fight to keep it that way...
"Centralization wins" is the wrong conclusion from this dataset. Discord & Slack have seen far more investment in UX & backend than IRC & Jabber. Because chat is addictive, relatively easy to implement, and easy for users to access via website or app, there's huge incentive roll your own chat service, and then incentive to differentiate from innumerable competitors. Many users are on half a dozen chat sites.
Email is going strong, even tho it's seen rather little UX investment. Decentralization is one feature keeping it afloat in a world of uncountable chat alternatives.
Except most emails end up at Gmail SMTP servers (@gmail.com and hosted G Suite).
I'd still argue that it correlates with centralization. We could argue about causation but it still goes hand in hand IMO.
A company is much less likely to invest resources into improving IRC or Jabber because if you made huge breaking changes you'd end up with an incompatible, custom fork of the protocol (negating the benefit of using a standard protocol, since you'd effectively lose the interop with third party client) and even if you kept the standards open and federation possible you're basically hurting your own business since you make it easy for people to use your work without giving you a way to monetize it.
If your objective is to be profitable it makes a lot more sense to just create your own centralized, proprietary protocol and clients that you control end-to-end. Standardizing and federating your protocol is a massive amount of headache in the long run for very little benefit in terms of $$$.
Easier to monetize means you can fund all the work required to achieve superior user experience, and user experience is the most important differentiator. People have repeatedly shown that UX is more important than security, privacy, cost, freedom, openness... anything. If it "just works" and can be adopted with little or no friction, it wins.
Yes, central structures allow capturing of monetary value, which provide economic incentive to people and that is a powerful motivator for attracting good UX/UI/Designers to make the product improve mass appeal
For whatever reason, good UI/UX hasn't been the FOSS's strong suite. Until that changes (and there's also no reason why it can't change) it will continue to lose ground on anything that is user-facing. Anything that requires expertise however, FOSS will continue to shine.
Don't get me wrong, I'm totally uncomfortable with a monopoly of this scale; I'm a Firefox user, a Pihole user, a non-FB user. But when people (non nerds) ask me why, it's hard to answer. They're all happy enough: Chrome is fast, AMP is faster, they get to find out the stuff they want to find out from incredibly accurate search, or Facebook - so what's the actual problem here?
My answer is normally about principles or competition or fairness but in practical terms, I haven't got a lot of answers.
Help me out here.
When one entity controls the web and you run a web based business, then you have to live in constant fear that they will destroy it. By accident or by malice.
One example how this is already happening is AMP. Google says "Give us your content or we will send people interested in it to your competitors instead". And they get away with it.
Once Google feels comfortable with doing so not allowing arbitrary routing in Chrome will be on the table to control what websites people visit. The only things stopping that is a feeble threat of state intervention or the threat of competition in the browser space reclaiming market share as a result.
They can, and probably will, take Chrome wholly proprietary at some point. Microsoft kowtowing to their engine is in their favor for now, but long term its in their business interests that Microsoft not have a browser anymore. That they present Chrome as the only option to users.
We can mire in the details of what a browser is, but for 99% of people Chrome is a program you run that shows you the stuff you want. The http, html, etc underpinnings are totally irrelevant. Chrome could be doing anything as long as it were showing the content the user of it expects. Google has already done this in the past with things like SPDY. I'm sure standards realize this - its why http/2 was a thing after all - that at this point if Google creates a new protocol it is de-facto required to become a standard because that is the only way for alternative browsers to keep pace with Chrome.
As such Google gets to dictate the future of hypertext. Not the users of the platform, not standards bodies formed to collaborate, the board of directors of a publicly traded US company.
As for SPDY, standards bodies like to "pave the cowpaths" so they codify existing implementations. Apple and Mozilla supported SPDY, it eventually became http/2 as you say, and then everyone dropped support for SPDY. This sounds like everything worked as intended.
It won't help much if a huge part of Chrome's proprietary new future involves running on proprietary content as well. Just wait until Chrome has some special non-HTTP integration with "lightning fast AMP pages" that other browsers can't serve, or serves a lot slower.
This is the opposite of freedom.
"Once they have wiped out all competition, they can start charging you."
It frustrates me, why not just give me a link to an actual web page?
Facebook, Uber, TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, Whatsapp, etc. None of them are optimized for Google index.
Most top consumer internet applications don't take place in your browser.
Fusing the two never seems to work well. See blog comments for an example.
Think about what would be left if you took away all "social" apps from the internet.
Even if we don't go that far, think about non-social online apps that don't use the "web".
For example, iCloud, Dropbox, Microsoft Office, Adobe creative cloud, etc. Most users of these apps use native apps instead of a clunky browser.
Some people think Microsoft Word is a clunky native app, others that Google Docs is a clunky browser app.
Maybe they are both right.
And I'd argue that google's about the only thing propping up the internet. Chromium's a reasonably open platform (certainly more so than internet explorer, which not that long ago looked destined to become the dominant platform), gmail has kept email viable, android is somewhat open (and without it, apple might own that space entirely), etc
Every other player that's gotten traction has set up a walled garden
In fact it's exactly the same reason why Mozilla is increasingly not sustainable. Email hosting is simply not a lucrative business. That's why it's all run by large portals like Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, etc. which use them not to make money but to collect information about people, and monetize through ads or other indirect methods. Of course, this only becomes profitable at scale, and there are not that many companies at that scale.
As for Mozilla not being sustainable: I think they could be, but not the way they run their business.
Email hosting is lucrative enough for Fastmail.
I would use Mozilla if the browser was just a little bit less bad. Currently it randomly takes me about 5 seconds to move my cursor in the hackernews input box. That is not Google's fault. Mozilla's future is mostly of their own making.
Using Firefox here with a few hundred tabs open, working just fine. I suspect your setup has other problems.
Not only that but it seems the page slightly degrades sometimes.
For what? A theoretical page load time improvement? Maybe that’s naive but we already have “request desktop mode” to allow for bifurcated experiences. Why do we need a third thats seemingly even worse?
Total “get off my lawn” complaint but how do you turn the damn AMP off? :)
Call it antitrust.ly! :)
They want your canonical web page to be AMP.
That sucked.
It only makes sense in terms of trying to lock marketers and publishers into a Google-led ecosystem.
Content would furiously jump around as the page was overcome by advalanches, videos on autoplay would pop up in all the corners, as you scrolled, the page would often break at paragraphs as even more videos would load, secretly sliding in the content like some infestation. If you tried to highlight text to copy, you'd see interstitial popups of yet again more ads and then discover your clipboard was populated with ad after ad.
Then when you copied the URL, it was full of fingerprints and UID hashes from all these providers so it was hundreds of excess bytes, usually leaking personal information. You'd have to chop it off or just give up and share the extra tracking garbage at the end of the url
And this was essentially all of the local news sites. They were indistinguishable from the click here to download virus typosquatting sites. It was horrific. Often loading an article would lock up and crash the browser, it was totally completely unusable. This was the post-flash web that we all desperately wanted, here ya go!
I really don't like amp, but it has fixed that problem so effectively that you have to remind people in detail that it actually once existed.
The only way around a centralized solution is a magical "disable garbage" ad block extension in the browser, and those also exist, and are maintained once again, by a centralized group.
Ok so another solution, just stop indexing or boosting the garbage sites forcing them to change, that's what amp does yet again.
I agree that I want some greener pasture alternative from over yonder, but what?
I also think you have an exotic definition centralization.
> sites
Sites is plural, so this is not a centralized solution. There are multiple competing options.
> just stop indexing or boosting the garbage sites forcing them to change, that's what amp does yet again.
No it doesn't. AMP is faster, so AMP sites get boosted based on being faster. It's an indirect effect, at least according to Google. Google could have stopped at applying a big penalty to dog slow sites. No lock-in promoting tech required.
There was a huge missed opportunity for Firefox here to do some aggressive garbage removal in these sorts of pages. They'd probably have a much bigger share now if they had
I always say there are two parts in AMP, a very sensible set of guidelines for good design, enforced by code, and Google services. The first ones benefit users, the second benefit Google.
The unfortunate thing is that when I hear complaints, it is more often about the former than the latter. Something about "creative freedom", like the freedom to put up annoying pop-up ads and mess up with the "back" button and scrolling I guess.
As a user, I am very happy with AMP. Now we just need someone to take all the good bits, remove all Google crap, and make websites that are even better. AMP is open source, at least the good bits are.
- You want to be at the top of our search, in the search carousel? You must implement AMP. We don't care how fast or beautiful your website is. Oh, and only news sites may apply.
- You want to show people the canonical URL? To show the source of the website? No. We will show that it comes from Google, we will actively try to discourage people from finding links to your website, and we will actually launch an initiative in Chrome to kill the URL altogether
- You want to measure activity and engagement on AMP pages? Oh, no we're going to send you a different, very limited and reduced set of analytics data
- You want to show ads in your AMP pages? Oh, it will only be from the ad providers that we, the largest ad provider, allow.
- Do you want to engage in how AMP is defined and designed, and change how it works? No, you can't, we go through a totally opaque process, and we only deliver final decisions that you have no say on. Oh, yes, once we've made all the big decisions (including things like AMP for Email) that actively harm the web, we will create a token "governing organisation" that will do everything in the open, fingers crossed. Not that it matters at all.
And so on and so forth. This is a good article with links to other articles highlighting the many issues with AMP: https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/amplified/
Having it enforced by Google actually makes it easier to get funding by organizations since now administrators can’t simply just tell their devs to ignore standard.
It’s too bad the sites just couldn’t do that on their own and avoid the need for amp.
Instead they created their own monster in response.
A reasonable person might ask why they didn't go the simple route.
This isn't a rhetorical question, I'm interested to know whether that would work. As I see it AMP can be just as big a problem just by being there by default on Google properties as by being something you, the consumer, can't turn off.
I haven't found a simple way that works on both my mobile and my desktop devices yet but I'd be interested in any recommendations.
Use DuckDuckGo.
For better ranking in the dominant search engine, so you make more money from your participation in the dominant advertising network.
"Accelerated Mobile Pages" should not be showing up on desktop at all. If they do, that's poor coding by the website itself. Just like how you often get stuck on website's mobile version when browsing on desktop.
> it’s completely broken
That's a pretty big statement, could you specify in which way it is "completely broken"?
> friction increasing to grab a link
This has been mostly fixed, I haven't had an issue in the past year. On Chrome and Firefox I believe, it works natively, and in other browsers I believe it adds an extra bar at the top to grab the link.
> Not only that but it seems the page slightly degrades sometimes.
Quite the opposite, in my experience it's often a far simpler and focused page with less crap. The only slight disadvantage is that comment sections on articles are often disabled, but they are usually a click away. It makes sense anyways to not load those by default on mobile.
> A theoretical page load time improvement?
It's definitely not theoretical. It's also a way to bundle websites allowing easier edge caching which helps tremendously.
> we already have “request desktop mode”
Partly because the majority of websites never gave a shit about optimizing their mobile experience without an incentive.
> seemingly even worse?
I truly believe this is a case of "assigning downsides you notice to AMP, but upsides being mostly invisible". You wouldn't have anyone to assign it to when you see a mobile page on desktop, but if it's an AMP page, then you have someone to get angry at.
Another example would be how a spam protection could be blocking 99% of the spam, but if a couple bad content get through, you'll think the spam protection is doing absolutely nothing and it sucks, because you don't get to see the 99% of work it's actually doing.
Since it’s been a few days, just to respond to only the easiest point, copying a link to the non-AMP website so socially share takes 3 to 4 incremental clicks on mobile, so that’s what I meant by that.
But reflecting you’re spot on, since I can’t quantify the benefit AMP has had on the internet it’s hard to claim the negatives are so eggregious. Thx for that perspective.
I think google is overplaying their hand in many areas, and this will inevitably lead to the downfall of their dominance. Just like most other large businesses in history.
Likewise Microsoft still is a massive player in enterprise software even as AWS became a virtual synonym for cloud computing.
An interesting thing I have noticed is that Amazon has made staggeringly little progress at user facing SaaS -- think salesforce.com. I went to an AWS conference years ago and the gap between the speaker's enthusiasm for zocalo and the crowd that couldn't care less (e.g. The crowd that was pumped for IAM and T2 instances) was striking.
In desktop & laptop Windows still holds a 87% market share.
"Consumer computing devices" is such a vague market. If you study markets at such a big scope something like Texas Instruments wouldn't even make a blip while if you're paying more careful attention you'll find they absolutely dominate the scientific calculator market.
I would bet that MS will outlast all the other tech giants by a long way.
(edit/sidenote: along with SSO - my org has thousands of users.)
That's a very interesting observation. Google will thus prevent a native payment option at all costs, which leaves a huge opening for Brave or another payment provider. (Which is enhanced by content providers being threatened by AMP.)
I don't see Google in a very secure position. Their employees nowadays don't seem to care which will become a huge problem once Google has to actually react to a changing market. Amazon is getting product searches and Facebook can take over everything else whenever they want because Google's results don't come from analysing the web but from showing the pages that other people with the same queries are visiting.
Additionally, Huawei is forced to setup their own app store. If they have the better TikTok app, and online payment with wechat, the next generation of users will switch. China has so much more developers that a Chinese app store will become the more interesting place for new apps. With Zoom and TikTok, they have shown that they can create competitive apps.
but is Zoom chinese ?
Can you elaborate on what a native payment option would entail? How would it be different from non native payment options? How would it be different from crypto or other payment options that already exist?
>Wasn't it that the creators of Netscape wanted to put some kind of payment protocol similar to crypto in the original browser but ran into trouble with the government, can't remember anymore. 402 error was famously reserved for money trouble.
You could have one standard, in the same way that webpages are standardized. Then you could use your preferred option on any webpage. It would come with your browser, so no need to install anything. Unlike the Apple app store, you wouldn't have one player controlling everything, so the payment network wouldn't take 30% of all profits.
Of course, whatever is feasible as a standard is also feasible as a plugin, or at least, like Brave, as a new Browser, if Google limits the plugin api. The difference is that nowadays, every payment option tries to be the winner, preventing every other player from advancing. With a standard, those fights would be over and users could start paying for everything.
I think the biggest difference would be that people would pay for single articles and videos from obscure sources. Nowadays you have to hand out your credit card or register for an obscure payment network like Brave or patreon. People register for Netflix, but not for a blog they visit one time in their life. It's very likely that a webpage and a visitor use different payment options, thus payment is not possible. As a consequence, everything is paid with adverts, like the article states. With a standard, that would shift and the default option would be a clean article without ads.
Something like <payment name="transactionId"> <amount>30.00</amount> <currency>USD</currency> <ordernumber>123456</ordernumber> <method name="WireTransfer" account="234567" routing="3040567" /> <method name="PayPal" destination="company@company.com" /> <method name="CreditCard" url="https://secure.gateway.com" merchantid="123456" /> <method name="Dogecoin" walletid="D0304050600405kgjfd" amount="2600" /> </payment> This would render as a group of buttons representing the payment choices. The browser would pop up an appropriate form-- potentially in an isolated context where the fields can't be sniffed by on-page scripts, perform the remittance, and submit a structure of verifiable confirmation details in the field transactionId when the form was submitted. Since the flow is steered entirely by the user's browser, there's a stronger degree of trust and control; I could imagine, for example, bank-provided plugins that required a seperate authentication before relaying the card details, or more sophisticated 3-D Secure style checking and fingerprinting. The entire PCI compliance and trusting merchants with the card number problems would never have come into play.
There is the Web Payments API now, but it's a clunky ball of JavaScript with limited support. This could have been demoed in 1997 and universal by 2000.
If it is so simple, why was it not? Are you suggesting it was purely incompetence of the people who standardized the web back then?
I feel like this was the same stall-out that created "it took until HTML5 before we had a more or less universal slider form control" and "there's still nothing resembling a OS-native dropdown menu or rich-text widget in pure HTML."
That time period sort of coincided with the window of a couple years-- when we still had to think about 40-bit and 128-bit crypto offerings, you had to explicitly navigate to a SSL domain to check out, and things like Flooz were still considered a viable idea. Nobody really knew how to take a payment online, so we ended up basically copying the payment from from a mail-order catalog in HTML. A strong "this is the secure and easy way with big clicky buttons" proposal, supported by the leading browsers, would have steered the nascent market effectively.
I don't know? Was it?
> With a standard, those fights would be over and users could start paying for everything.
What prevents anyone from making a standard? Why do we see standards for everything else but this? What would the standard entail?
I think the real issue here is that payment is a hard problem, open payment systems like bitcoin is horrible to use, and closed payment systems like visa is closed due to trust and security concerns.
To me it seems like the author is just dismissing the inherent complexity and accusing the people who put in the time to standardize the protocols we have of being incompetent. This is not worthy of hackernews.
Good question. hakfoo's answer seems to be a good start.
I would include something for automated micro-pre-payment. If you are just browsing news sites, it would be inconvenient to constantly confirm payment. Likewise, confirming payment for every played song is annoying. But that would also require some form of trust-network to take care of spam and fakes.
Like html, I wouldn't worry about getting it right the first time. It just needs to be usable and can be refined from there.
>What prevents anyone from making a standard?
Nothing. But where's the benefit for anybody to push it? If it is a standard, then all competitors can reap the profits without any investment.
This could have been Mozilla territory: Join Brave and make micro-payment a valid option for content creators.
There are obviously subsets of the web where this doesn't apply (twitch and YouTube where patreon is common, onlyfans, etc.), but that's almost solely for video and live interaction.
Micropayments are, apparently, not what the textful web wants.
Search and payment are important as well, but only really become relevant when the content is on the web.
The simplest approach to something like this is Apache homedirs or finger plan files [0]: you write some text in a file in your home directory and a service makes it accessible to anyone who connects to your machine. Apparently plan files were somewhat popular thing at one point; you could finger the machines at id Software and read what John Carmack was doing on any given week [1].
The problem with this approach is that the internet (not just the web) is not end-to-end. Assuming your ISP isn't using CGNAT, I have to:
- Punch a hole in my firewall or setup up a DMZ host. Unless my workstation is the only thing on my network and hooked directly into my modem, but nobody does that. Everybody has a LAN with private addressing.
- Setup dynamic DNS, since there's no guarantee that my ISP has given me a static address. In practice this isn't that bad, but if I lose power in a thunderstorm you need to have the same name you had before.
- Harden and update whatever service I run. It'll get probed regularly, and is a high value target since it presumably runs on the same machine where I run my password manager or buy things using I credit card.
A VPS is just a convenience and security measure here. You get a public IP address without any additional management (default-deny firewall, NAT) and can isolate your private data from the VPS which is more likely to be compromised.
The alternative would be to make a new network which gets rid of all the extra layers of management - just your machine, with a publicly accessible name that you can point people to. No smart network appliances in-between imposing NAT, DHCP, or firewalls beyond the one on your machine. I think there are P2P networks which work like this, or Tor if you give your machine a name in the .onion namespace. I don't know of any which are better on the security aspect though.
If the network hosted “just your machine”, then your website (or whatever published content you have) would disappear when your machine shut down for the night.
In a way, what you did was describe a few of the benefits that IPv6 offers. I'd say "that's coming" or "it being actively rolled out" but we are about 25 years in & usage is still an underwhelming figure.
Which is a good thing, because these devices can actually run different browser rendering engines.
Perhaps the bigger problem is that devices ship with Chrome pre-installed instead of asking the user at device set-up time what browser they want to use.
I imagine if you told the user they could have a browser with extensions, ad-blocking, background playback etc they might be a bit more inclined to consider using Firefox.
Weird questions that they got asked already on their Windows machine as part of BrowserChoice.eu?
They're only "weird" because this practice of forcing your own browser (IE, Edge, Chrome, Safari) down the throat of your users has become commonplace.
Agreed, but I think the native Google Maps app is superior than any browser experience.
In theory yeah, in practise it looks a bit murky to me right now due to the state of the web. Apple is under a lot of fire right now (quite rightly) but I have a suspicion if other browser engines are allowed to run on iOS there will effectively be no incentives to develop for any other browser engine and we'll start seeing "Works best / only in Chromium" type websites and apps (I've already experienced this a fair bit using Firefox).
All the devices I've purchased have been Nexus/Pixel devices, so Chrome is a given there.
I assume at the end of the day Samsung Browser is just a reskinned Blink, though?
There seems to be an implicit assumption by those commenting on Mozilla's downsizing that the antitrust case against Google is going to take the same path as the case against Microsoft.
Google's anti-competitive conduct under examination will not be focused on Chrome, it will be focused on the markets for search and advertising.
Mozilla does not provide any potential competition in those markets.
The case against Microsoft focused on the software industry. Today, the focus is on the onlilne advertising industry.
Netscape was a software company, like Microsoft. Mozilla however is not an online advertising services company like Google.
Of course search is really hard, but how is it possible that huge companies with nearly infinite money and talent (MS / Apple / Amazon) were never able to do it? MS actually tried; it's unclear if the others even gave it a thought.
The rest of Google is different. I use Gmail but could easily switch. I've not used Chrome for over a year now and really don't miss it (either on desktop or mobile). Google maps are the best but others would be good enough if need be.
But search? Every time I try to use Duck Duck Go I'm extremely disappointed. Google search is something I don't think I could live without.
ie., people have spent years writing their sites explicitly with google SEO in-mind... add-in all the data google has via adwords...
Without giving away any trade secrets, part of it is the power of search behavior data (for example, what you click on after a search, how long before you go back to the search page, etc.). The more popular your search engine, the more search behavior data you have, which makes the search results better especially for tail queries (the less common searches).
So then you attract more searchers, and it's a cycle that is hard for a newcomer to break into. It's why academia has given up on competing with commercial search engines in the web space, and why alternative search engines are just begging at the table right now.
Google's search is the way it is now because they've now had 20 years to work on it. To create search of similar quality you'll need to spend a comparable amount of time (during which Google will not rest on laurels, but will continue to evolve).
It would've been great if someone took the pains to implement, maintain and evolve a search similar to Google's at the time when Google became available (or a few years after that). Then it's possible we would have two high quality search engines now.
But even that is a simplistic view of things. Everything that Google ultimately has feeds into its search. Google Translate? Helps Google understand pages in multiple languages. Google Maps? Helps Google learn people behaviour, places of interest, businesses etc. Google Patents, Groups, Books? Provide vast amounts of natural text to train models on. And so on and so on. A "just as good" search needs all (or nearly all that) that to become just as good.
Maybe because google's market is everyone, disruption can no longer exist?
What if selling phones and cloud compute is a superior business to search and they are smart to realize it? In reality both Apple and Amazon are bigger companies than Google, and Google is actually the one trying to chase selling phones and cloud compute?
What exactly is the expectation here, that there is one integrated protocols stack that covers all of this? I don't see why.
Nothing is stopping someone from building P2P distributed search engines, and nothing is stopping someone from building "safe and easy way of exchanging funds".
Given that we still don't have good solutions to either of these problems it seems the right answer according to this person would be to just skip the internet.
This feels like a gripe without substance, yes we know these are hard problems, saying that Google's dominance is a consequence of the IETF not integrating these into HTTP is absurd and baseless.
There is also a reasonable argument to saying that search/payments are so fundamental to what the web became that a solution at the protocol-layer would be appropriate.
If the author wants to integrate it into HTTP, well they can actually try and make that case through the open standards process.
The questions of what does native suppoert imply and in what protocol should it be integrated are still unanswered. It seems very low effort to me, at least give a high level rundown of what that practically means and what he expects to see.
Bitcoin runs on open standard protocols, why is it not native? Is it because it is not ratfied by the IETF? Same question goes for existing P2P search engines. And even with protocols, you still need infrastructure. HTTP being an open protocol does not give me free HTTP hosting, and search indexing and lookup similarly won't be free.
I think if it was easy to solve these problems and integrate them into HTTP it would be easy to solve them outside HTTP and it is not clear why the solutions must be integrated into some existing protocol like TCP, IP or HTTP.
It is not stated as a counterfactual either, it is stated as direct criticism, e.g.
> The Web’s orignal architects were off base on hyperlinks; it turns out people just want to skip right to the answer they’re looking for.
Who are the original architects? Should we remove hyperlinks? Who suggested hyperlinks as an alternative to search, or even "native search".
I expect substance, this article has none.
As for what would native payments look like:
1. I put the element <pay-me>$1.00</pay-me> in my HTML 2. User clicks on Pay Me button in any browser and I get $1.00
Something like that. Anything more complicated and for most people it might as well not exist. Grandma isn't loading up a Bitcoin wallet.
And then what? If all that is needed is a tag support then why is the problem not yet solved? I mean if it is so simple to add support in HTML, why not just add it outside HTML?
I'm not asking for the actual final RFCs, but just some idea of what everyone except you is missing which makes this an easy problem to solve for you. Just broad strokes will be awesome. At the moment all you are saying is that the architects did not know what they were doing, but can't explain what they missed.
I really hope it's not the case, because then Google will cancel it. /s
Search is probably something where there could be creative use of the p2p decentralized technologies. If when performing a search I could ask my contacts to look in their history if they have something matching, and then they ask their contact to do the same, who ask their contact to do the same, I think we could have fast and massively parallelized trust based searches. Then you can rank the results based on how many times they appeared.
Right now I'll settle for a centralized search engine/service that works like Google did before all the crazy, like before Amp, and before penalizing non-mobile-optimized sites, and so on.
Federated search scares me because it might constrain search results by being tainted with a localised world view.
Has this been attempted before? does it have a name?
Respectfully, not really. Arguably search is much worse now than in 2010.
What if someone could come up with a simple search that could easily understand “hey this is a paywall” or “hey this is a paywall but somehow securely and with privacy I checked and you have a login to this site in your password manager” or it could do time based searches better than “last day / last week / etc”.
Consumers have insatiable needs and are never satisfied. It’s not clear someone can’t create something unimagined yet that’s vastly technically superior based on solely focusing on customer experience. Even if you just assume NewEngine(tm) is venture backed and can lose money in the short run until it monetizes later it should still theoretically enable it to be closer to consumer desires than Google which has to post quarterly ad revenue figures to wall street and the SEC.
And lets not forget that a very large portion of the population would need to hear about that product on an AMP page in their Chrome browser on their Android phone, probably following a Google search or noticing a story on Google news.
That seems fairly unlikely to me. Google gives you what you're looking for immediately for the average query, and anything beyond that is a power user detail not relevant to most people.
I've used file sharing software which has the same "tree style" query forwarding. I think latency would be the big issue though, we're used to getting a result instantly -- and the right result too (Google does a lot of extra work knowing what you actually mean, not just keyword search).
Basically affinity groups maintain lists of links (sort of like social bookmarking) that are the crawl root urls. Crawling comes from Common Crawl plus updates for recency. Groups can pool resources to run their own indexes and receive a share of the profits from text display ads.
A more realistic dream would be finding good algorithms for "webscale" search engines, that all competitors (Bing, DDG) can use such that any one of them can't have excessive advantage over the others.
Secondly, human curated directories may still have future. If I search Google for interesting links or just programming blogs on specific topic, I find lot of SEO optimized low quality content instead of deep technical content so that I often have to search through HN, reddit etc.. and sort by popularity - but searching for particular topic is difficult.
This insight seems highly plausible and sad at the same time.
The result is that large swaths of the web are essentially inaccessible. It's contracting. I feel it as acutely as amnesia.
This 'Constitution' will give us the Web of a few giant tech companies, for those few giant tech companies, by those few giant tech companies.
Many here on HN, including me, wish we could have a Web of the people, for the people, by the people.
The issue, as always, is relative power—which absolutely skews heavily in Google's favor. Individuals accessing the web today have far less relative power than 25 years ago, even if they can accomplish "more" with less effort.
In the past it was Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, XFire, .. I mean those companys were so big (e. g. XFire for gaming streaming) but they failed to stay ahead of time - lets see whats up with Google or Facebook or Amazon in 15 years.
Doesn’t that strike you as a poor move?
I don’t see why we should be relegated to put up with another x-number of years of these companies behaving (arguably) badly, just so things can change and they can be replaced with another company that will do the same thing.
Dont use AMP? Well you will lose money / power.
Dont use search? Maybe miss out opportunities. How can I as marketeer convince my clients as Google traffic is 90% source of income?
I get your point but I'm not sure what could be done without harming economy (aka people).
Obviously those tools are important, not debating that, the problem is that they’re all the product of a single hegemony with an agenda, partitioning it so that it can no longer push the likes of AMP to the detriment of everyone else.
Always worth reading:
I’m not happy with the current situation and would hate to see Mozilla fail, but I can’t fault Google for the current situation.
Google misusing their position to dictate web standards, that’s Googles fault. But Google-centric standards didn’t cause Mozillas current problems. Poor management did.
Are you proposing that we don't do anything about a specific problem because there may be other theoretical problems?
That's like saying, "If this guy in this dark alley doesn't kill me now, a heart attack might eventually kill me, instead; so I'll just stand here and make it easy for his knife to find me."
They put plenty of effort into their software and at that scale it is amazing how fast it returns results.
For my websites I achieve better ranking placements in Bing then I do in Google - we should probably all start using Bing from now on?
Whenever you see the amp symbol, avoid visiting that site.
The main AMP concerns seem philosophical, which I don't think OP was asking about.
By choosing to use AMP, you are ultimately choosing to destroy the internet. You're granting the power of one company to run and control what you visit, do, use. Your surrendering your data for them to make money off to use and abuse.
Your supporting the downfall of innovation. Your eliminating development of opportunities and innovation. Denying fairness. Nothing there is philosophical, that's all real all because you choose to use Google Amp.
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The internet is made up from many devices connected somehow Without a search engine how would you locate information? You can't unless you knew Computer X has the information on what you need. Just as an encyclopedia has an index telling you to look which volume and page to open.
A search engine crawls from computers to computers in hunt for information and then records it in a catalog. So when you search "dogs" this is then retrieved within the catalog for any computers that hold information on dogs.
This costs money, so what's a way of making money? Sell search results. My information on dogs is not that useful but I do like users visiting my webpage because I may sell pet related items. So I pay google £100 to list my website at the top when someone searches "dog". Great, I am now top of the list. Others do the same and get their search results on the top too.
However, my friend who is a vet has a information piece on if a dog is sick, and the remedy on what to do. Unfortunately they don't have the money to boost their page to the top, so it gets buried. Some pseudo science website makes a page about dog cures and pays for it's rank. The information I need on how to cure a dogs cold is now buried further but that's okay, I now have a fake remedy on how to cure a dogs cold.
Next up is Google Amp.
Amp is disguised to load the pages faster, but all it's really doing is collecting information about the user who visits, and redirects them to a branded copy-paste version of the original website and sells the users information.
I'm really a company who sells placebo medicine for dogs, my medicine has killed a few dogs in the past but no worries, it's trusted because I'm with Google Amp.
At the same time google implements a new policy "You must use AMP to be part of google search engine pages 1 to 6" -- This in return costs money to implement. So now the vet piece on how to cure a dog's cold is now on page 7.
Who goes to page seven on google? The average user normally stops around page three.
Well, now you've got to pay money to get a listing and now that anybody can cram an illegitimate idea into a web page and in which so long as it's encoded as AMP content – it'll look like it's from a legit new organization endorsed by Google.
On top you are at Google’s mercy when it comes to how (and even if) your content is actually displayed. If google doesn't like your page, swipe, there goes your listing.
Your a vet, you don't have money to implement AMP, nor do you have the money to get your page to the top which you now can't because your not using AMP. So the vet isn't getting any visitors, your vet practice is unknown in the world apart from local town folk. So not only are you crippling businesses from thriving because of Amp, your supporting a dominated chosen google market.
Google wants you all within googles walled garden. Above is a jist of it. But AMP is bad, there is NO good coming from AMP. By supporting amp, your support death of freedom.
The larger threat with Amp is signed content, where Chrome address bar drops URL and has only the legal name of the site owner.
AMP does dictate the internet in a way that forces the user to see and do how Google wants you to see and do.
If Google was for open standards, I should have the ability to turn off google amp. No?
If Google was for open standards, they wouldn't force features upon users without the ability to turn them off?
If I host my own email server on my own IP range with in my colocation and send to GMAIL, I am instantly put in spam. Is that not dictating that my email to my mother is spam?
And yes, I'll admit that I am hypocrite. I use google search because it's the only search engine that yields the results I require. I try to use DDG when I can but that fails. Bing is a pile of puke. I don't want to, but I am forced to which fine, I understand the conditions that they give me. However to boast that Google is for opens standards. That's what's laughable.
Amp dictates the web and will as they see fit. But you work for google, so your bias anyway and that makes this whole discussion moot.
This doesn't make sense.
> AMP does dictate the internet in a way that forces the user to see and do how Google wants you to see and do.
This doesn't follow. AMP doesn't force the user to do anything. It encourages website creators to do specific things when building certain kinds of sites. And we're not even talking about AMP, but about signed exchanges.
> If Google was for open standards, I should have the ability to turn off google amp. No?
This doesn't follow. There are lots of open standards that you can't turn off (or that you suffer significant issues if you turn off). HTTPS, for example. Not to mention HTTP.
> If I host my own email server on my own IP range with in my colocation and send to GMAIL, I am instantly put in spam. Is that not dictating that my email to my mother is spam?
What does this have to do with AMP or Signed Exchanges? But also no. It's dictating that random email servers are almost always spam. This is both true and good for the vast majority of Gmail users, who don't have masochistic techy family members who want to host their own email server for indie-dev cred. There's nothing about this that isn't for open standards. It still uses all open standards, and is solved using open standards (DKIM, etc.). If you want to host your own email server, you need to be willing to put in the work. Unfortunately, it's a lot of work. That's not Google's fault, its spammers'.
> Amp dictates the web and will as they see fit.
In what way. You still haven't explained like, what the point is. What is the intent here? So far your post is just a bunch of scary sounding buzzwords, but you have yet to make a cohesive argument about what Google is doing and why this is a bad thing.
So here's some specific questions for you to answer: What is the walled garden you're accusing Google of creating? And again: how does an open standard allow Google to create it? And how does a walled garden let them "dictate how the internet operates?
When I pushed you to answer that question, you pivoted to entirely ignoring your previous argument and instead claimed that there were other situations where Google wasn't for open standards. That may be true, or not, but it's entirely irrelevant to your accusation that in this case, the open standard will let Google "dictate how the internet operates".
You need to draw the line from AMP to "dictate how the internet operates", and so far you've avoided actually making that connection when pressed.
My philosophy is you should always build your own rather then jumping on the next bandwagon. You should always try to reinvent the wheel with your own tools but hey, what ever floats the boat. I loathe using github, I loathe instragram, facebook, et cetera. I run my infrastructure for what I think is for the good of the internet. I've been working as SysAdmin, SysOp, NetAdmin with colocatation of my own servers to ensure I have my own open internet space. I know how much work is required, it's not an easy quest and I know how shit the internet has become since the age of 13 when I had my first dedicated server at 14; I'm 31. But that's just my view and how I was brought up because frameworks did not exist back then. You made a product and then offered that for free. Infamously PHPNuke for CMS, e107, PHPBB. But Google doesn't even make it easy to work with. Almost as they don't want other people to operate the internet outside of their territory.
So lets ignore what I wrote. I wrote it without thought and more as a grunt as it is a Sunday, 1:24am (now 2:25am). I've not got the strongest skills in debate otherwise I would be a politician and in the morning I will probably face palm. So lets just jump to your questions and save the internet bandwidth. I'll agree to disagree.
> What is the walled garden you're accusing Google of creating? I am accusing google of creating an closed ecosystem of google objects. Objects known as Gmail, GCloud, GAmp, YouTube, GplayStore, Adsense, Google Mobile Phones to name a few. that record, monitor, collect and sell users information for profit without knowledge of the user.
A walled garden is just a modern buzz word for "closed platform" which is where the service provider controls the data and data flow within. To which Google fits the criteria.
Some of them are services created are to provide the user and I would argue they lay a foundation of a trap to encourage the user to a following that google would like.
Such as - Requiring to have a account for all services - Google using the private data of these services with partnerships to create custom answers for the user
- Captcha Got to stop robots somehow, but when its repeated for on every page by a service that google offers because your IP range isn't within Google's liked list. Most site use this service, which I'm sure you would argue is the owners choice.
> How does an open standard allow Google to create it? Because someone has to create the standard in the first place. I could create a new protocol and brand it as open standard. The standards that google have are not open in the sense of transparency and that I feel are used for mistrust. They exist, you can use it for yourself, but the standard they created were forcefully to push everyone else in the same way
I am tired and want bed, it shows in this message. There is no point in continuing this debate because I won't change your mind and you won't change mine. I'm sure you'll take the stance of "I won" because that's the type of person you are. But I dislike google, Google is destroying the internet those too blind to see it, I pity them. What I've seen from the age of 13 to what I've seen now is not innovation its destruction. It's just regurgitated shite.
I'll agree to disagree, because I have my own views which I don't have time spending hours upon to make them expressible.
I said my dues, good night.
The search engine does serve your page from a CDN (for free, by the way) that they own, but don't forget it's their perogative to even rank you at all. They are a private company, not a public utility.
The rhetorical strategy used here was to make up a dystopian example of search being bad, and then say amp.
Amp isn't more expensive, WordPress templates handle it automatically today. And the whole tangent about misinformation is interesting, but it's not how things really work. While speed is a signal, reliability is also one, which means that it would be cheaper to advertise you're vet article and it would be more likely to appear near the top anyway.
And now your introducing a sack of rubbish called WordPress. What if the site is not using WordPress, may do.
You work for google, so explain it to me, how do things really work?
With Amazon dominating retail, and Facebook under its various brands dominating social media, there isn’t much scope for other players.
I don’t see another option than breaking theses companies up at this point.
Like if you’re looking to regulate a market this seems like one of the last you’d peg as not being healthy.
Amazon was there first, but it's getting cheaper by the day to buy a bunch of hardware, stick it in an increasingly cheaply electrified building, run a bunch of fiber to it and slap some virtualization software on it.
Amazon can read your secrets.
Can you share how you know this to be true?
I certainly hope it's true, but I have no way of knowing myself.
In New York we have almost as many ESCOs as there are shady looking prepaid phone cards. Maybe they save you 0.001% over the real electric company if you cash the check for 78 cents they send you every six months.
I thought the point of that was financial engineering. Used to be if you wanted to shut down a coal burning power plant the power company would be sued by creditors. Now the creditors can sue a shell company with no assets and get nothing.
It is good that coal burning power plants are being shut down, but rather than having an engineering or environmental based plan they do it this way. There will be plenty of money for solar roofs if they government is paying but private money will not be there for other investments if it doesn't have to be paid back.
They buy a lot of dark fiber, and IRUs, and wavelength services from carrier-of-carrier type big ISPs, but by no means do they control the internet.
But they are not in the same business of long distance OSI layer 1 ISP operations as CenturyLink/level3, zayo or Verizon are. Where I would be really worried is if I saw amazon making a serious bid to acquire a company similar to Zayo, NTT, KT, France telecom/opentransit, or Telia.
I guess that a state owned company would willingly be sold by its owner because states urgently need money.
For example Orange sa (ex France telecom) is owned at 25% by the French state and French state just had passed a budget which is financed at half by debt (2021). Selling a company for $b30 would provide some relief in 2021 budget.
[0] https://www.infrontanalytics.com/fe-en/FR0000133308/Orange-S...
For example Google has tried to provide free Wi-Fi, at the time some people were afraid it would be some rehearsal for a Wimax deployment, it never happened.
8 years ago, Google made a lot of noise with their high altitude platforms (their so called balloons). They met some Telcos, but it went nowhere.
Long time ago Google had also a project to provide phone calls with interesting fees. It was a MVNO in practice but it never got traction even if Google had access to an incredible number of Android users.
Show me one FAANG with anything even 5% of the outside plant wholly contolled fiber route miles of the size and scope of the railway ROW sprint, qwest and level3 networks. Or legacy wiltel.
The only real exception, Google has successfully made a big deal of itself in submarine fiber by throwing its money and weight around.
Using jio as an example of "why don't the faangs just build their own massive ISPs at OSI layer 1 by throwing money at it" is so dreadfully wrong and misinformed I won't even dignify it with a further response.
Google can now dictate which webshop is shown first in search results on a product level.
I know retailers are sick of this. They need Google to be found on the web but they don't like how Google is destroying retail.
Its hard to see right now but history tells us it will come and they will fall, every incumbent always gets complacent and stops innovating and someone comes and cleans up. For example YT hasn’t fundamentally changed in a decade, and the user experience is starting to feel a little off (sponsored content, a gamed recommendation algorithm etc. are all degrading the experience).
I don’t know how / where we’ll consume the bulk of our video in 2030, but there’s a significant chance it won’t be YouTube.
Walmart is still 2x the size of Amazon in terms of revenue, and like Bezos said in his congressional briefing, it's easier and cheaper to build and online platform than it is to build out Walmart's existing physical retail presence.
Walmart supports 3rd parties as well I think.
We can always narrow things into absurdity to imply a monopoly. But as a matter of fact, Amazon isn’t a monopoly in retail, or even online retail. To give an anecdote of my online buying in the past few months: I bought furniture from Crate and Barrel and Design Within Reach, in-line skates and street hockey gear from Pure Hockey, pilot supplies from Sporty’s, a silly tshirt from some random Facebook ad/vendor, some paracord and survival water from Amazon, an aircraft emergency raft from some raft company in Florida, some Surefire flashlight batteries from Amazon, a piece of furniture from Wayfair, sunscreen from the Sun Bum website.
I know not many would care what I bought over the past few months, but without even consciously trying, Amazon was just a part of my normal shopping mix, not even a majority of purposes were from there and the dollar amounts were even smaller of my total shopping spend.
Of course there are people that use Amazon more frequently and regularly, but that doesn’t make it a monopoly. You can easily buy from other places. Amazon retail is really nothing more than a highly efficient version of Sears. Ubiquitous, but hardly a monopoly.
Yes
The technological difference, which may be underappreciated, is the AI/ML enabled discovery feed. TikTok learns what you like very quickly as you mindlessly scroll through infinite reels of content.
A) what happens if Google decides to stop funneling money to Mozilla? What becomes of Firefox?
B) at what point do you think the $350+ million/year cash flow to Firefox will get cut off?
C) do you think Mozilla has a reasonable chance of success of replacing that amount of money with a deal with Microsoft/bing?
There are some companies that probably have a strong interest in google not controlling the web entirely. Though it will be hard to replace that revenue entirely.I think there's at least 3 reasons why Google wants to continue funding Firefox:
1. To get access to 200M+ users for their search ads
2. To have a competitor that helps Google make money and so Firefox can serve as evidence, that Chrome has competition and Google isn't trying to stomp out competition, in anti-trust cases.
3. To stop other search engines (e.g. Bing) from partnering with Mozilla.
If Google were to not renew the contract next time, then they take two risks:
1. What if a lot of former Firefox users switch to something other than Chrome?
2. What if someone continues funding Firefox so Google loses out on the additional reach for their search ads?
The benefit of cutting off the funding could be quickening Firefox's downfall and, perhaps, the bulk of Firefox users switching to Chrome.
I think Google will cut off the deal when the number of Firefox users drops enough for the risks to be negligible. Until then, Firefox will continue to slowly lose users and the bulk of those will switch to Chrome/Edge/Safari. I wonder what the breakdown is. I'd suspect the platform default largely dictates which browser a former Firefox user switches to.
But they seemed to dithched focus on web platform as it is still such mess for both users and developers, so meh.
Chrome for me is done, using it only for PWA.
That could be the last blow to any meaningful Firefox market share.
And from the same journalist, words to not use if you work at Google and are talking about your employer or its offerings. https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2020/08/07/google-doc...
There is one small silver lining: when and if Google manages to successfully turn the rest of the web into ca. 1992 style information providers for their updated version of videotext there might be just enough breathing room to create something even better.
After all the web killed AOL, with Google going after the AOL playbook they set themselves up for a similar debacle. When it isn't 'the internet' anymore a service will quickly lose value.
We need anti-monopoly action to avoid complete dominance by these tech companies. Google services need to be split up and run independently.
It doesn't seem as if most of us care.
Microsoft is not a better company in any way, but two companies controlling the most widely used browsing platform is better than one company controlling it.
My impression is that this is what's different this time: it was chosen by developers themselves
Does it matter?
We still give cancer treatment to smokers. We still give dialysis to alcoholics. We still pull the plastic out of our own oceans.
I am curious to hear what the author would propose instead. I’m not sure keeping a local cache of all web text would work very well.
Every non-Google service I log into that allows external auth supports at least Facebook and plain old e-mail in addition to Google. Maybe your experience is different, but I use a lot of very mainstream services both free and paid.
I know people who don't have Google accounts. I only use Gmail as a throwaway address for when I expect spam (e.g. signing up for dodgy-looking web sites). I happily admit I'm a huge fan of Google Maps and would not at all mind paying for it, and I actually do pay for YouTube, but everything else from Google has pretty good alternatives as far as I can see. (And even Maps has acceptable alternatives, it's just that much better.)
AMP is like putting all the non-Gmail mail you receive on your Gmail account into a separate folder, and only including Gmail senders in your Inbox.
It’s not just limited to Google; it’s for any site providing only third-party OAuth login. I can never remember which one I signed in with, and if that service ever shuts down, it’ll be a pain to figure which of the hundreds of services I’ve signed up for using that OAuth login. It’s much easier to change an email.
And yes, I do use a paid alternative to Gmail (ProtonMail)
I’m not going to try too hard to convince you of digital privacy, but would you really be fine with me just browsing through your browsing and search history, INCLUDING whatever you do in incognito? I’m sure you’ve made at least one anonymous account before. Why’s that? And what’s right today may not be so right in the future. Are you ok with everybody from your boss to your children knowing everything you’ve ever posted? Shouldn’t we have a right to be forgotten?
> what can we do we live in a society full of internet connected stuff we're going to be monitored no matter what anyways
We live in a democracy, well I assume you do too. Just because it’s the way how things are today doesn’t mean it can’t be changed in the future.
> I don't have anything against them or any other huge IT company if they're doing stuff good for us let it be
I’m not saying they’re not doing great things for the world, but it all comes at a price.
I love that. Quoting for emphasis.
Mozilla never provided a way of donating directly to Firefox.
I'm using the internet to buy things, research things, share memories, call people, pay, get payed etc.
Just because 20 years ago people build small websites (including me) doesn't mean the internet should be a bunch of private niche websites.
Not many people ever found my websites. No one cared.
Also, Apple isn't the 'alternative to Google'. The open web is an alternative to Google and Google is doing what it can to strangle it.
1. Lack of native distributed search led to Google’s monopoly.
“The Web’s orignal architects were off base on hyperlinks; it turns out people just want to skip right to the answer they’re looking for.”
This doesn’t make any sense. Google’s entire early innovation was to use hyperlinks as an indicator of popularity and thus a proxy metric for veracity, and PageRank was born.
Original attempts at distributed search based on other metrics like text analysis were tried (Webcrawler, AltaVista which was used by Yahoo, Inktomi which was used by Lycos, HotBot, etc) but didn’t produce better results, and Google eventually grew to #1 by 2004 (6 years after intro).
Google could not have existed without the hyperlink. The reason it has a monopoly today is largely due to investment cycles and intellectual property law: after the dot com bust, there wasn’t exactly an appetite to build new search engines given PageRank was patented and would need to be licensed (it expired in 2019).
This monopoly doesn’t matter as much: generic search engine use has been declining for years in favour of other approaches to finding content (social media, syndication, domain specific aggregators, etc).
Decentralized Index/search (not just distributed but truly decentralized) remains an open research problem. it may be possible to improve and deploy with the right incentives and investment, but it’s ludicrous to think this was possible in 1992-1998.
2. Lack of native payments led to advertising to take off.
This has no factual basis: CGI-bin scripts to purchase things with HTTP POST calls existed as early as 1993. Amazon and eBay launched in 1995. PayPal started when Google did, in 1998.
More importantly, most viewed the web as another visual media like Television, which was ad-driven. People generally didn’t like paying for things that felt free, like information, or music, or movies.
But again, the Ad Words monopoly remains tenuous. Facebook has been steamrolling it in growth and will eventually eclipse it. We are also seeing a lot more willingness for people to pay for content to avoid ads.
3. “poor native video support (it is hyper_text_ after all)”
It was called hypermedia widely by around 1995 when images and audio (Real Networks in particular) took off, there just wasn’t the processing power, bandwidth, or compression algorithms available to make this real until 1998 when MP4 came out.
Google’s early attempt at video, Google Videos, was a market failure. They had to buy YouTube which (most importantly) made it easy to publish videos compared to others, but it took many years for it to reach #1.
And that position too is threatened between Facebook, Instagram, Netflix, etc.
In summary, Google is #1 in a number of markets due to a combination of smart business moves, smart technology, being an early player, and the business/investment climate at key inflection points of the industry. There are a large number of competitive pressures against Google that make this lead tenuous. Google is as vulnerable as AOL or Microsoft were in the late 90s, when they were thought to be unassailable.
As for the health of the web, let’s remember that regardless of all the claims of the death of the web, whether native mobile, or WebSockets, or walled gardens, GraphQL, or single page apps or accelerators like Amp (which had to change offer direct hyperlink access due to complaints), the web remains entrenched, omnipresent, and has no clear replacement.
This matters because the core architecture of the web: URLs, HTTP, MIME, and (to a somewhat shrinking extent) HTML remains the foundational glue that holds all this mess of media and technology together, and is fundamentally about enabling decentralization. URLs still are the main way that native mobile apps integrate with the network. HTML is still the default fallback UI. HTTP is still the primary application protocol by far.
All of this was the design intent of the architecture of the Web: to last decades, regardless of how the origin servers or user agents evolved. It’s an architecture ripe for innovation to make decentralized alternatives to today’s incumbents.
To paraphrase John Lennon, centralization is over, if you want it.
But this requires the experience to be actually better for users, and not just in an “eat your vegetables / don’t give your privacy away” manner. Starting a new venture to take this on requires a combination of investment, insight, and commitment that’s not easy to assemble. But it can and probably will happen, relative to legislation or very possible social catastrophes that entrench the current players longer than needed.
!!!
My facebook experience is similar to how it was in '08. Updates from friends, though those are getting less common.
- creating a discussion forum like HN -- whether via PG's custom Lisp programming or installing/hosting software like PhpBB/Vbulletin is way more difficult for non-techie users. Compare that to the easy steps of creating a new Facebook group.[1]
- HN is a mixture of real names, pseudonymous, and anonymous identities. Facebook is mostly real names.
- HN has no integrated calendar of related events, no rich media like photos and videos, no realtime chat with group members. Facebook groups can include that. Yes, HN demographic hates all that distracting "noise" but Facebook demographic does not.
What's worse is it's very walled off, it's not really searchable or properly indexed. FB's search facilities are a joke, such as they are, but they are only available to FB users. Information that goes in there is basically available to FB and to nobody else.
I never used AOL, but I believe it was similar to Compuserve - a walled garden with forums, file downloads, instant messaging and such.
Like AOL, Compuserve reached popularity during the infancy of the web - the web, viewed through Netscape Navigator at the time, was really rather basic, and comparatively empty, or at least so it seemed to me at the time.
I actually remember thinking Compuserve was far superior to the web, and scoffed that the web would never take off. How wrong I was!
It was a bit difficult for us to understand the image and all the memes about AOL, so you had to learn that it meant "Internet for noobs / Joe Six-Pack" in American texts.
It was the same walled garden as it was in the US, and I was 'locked in' that garden without knowing. I must've been 12 or 14 years old and this was our very first internet.
I sure remember it was a “thing” in Canada, especially before most people were on the internet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_(web_decentralization_pr...
AOL was dominant (~30 million dialup subscribers at its 2002 peak) but didn't build any "sticky" products such as Facebook's social graph (a very valuable online Rolodex contacts database of real names). Each dialup user of AOL didn't interact with each other that much back then because the internet wasn't as central to life like today. Thus, switching from AOL access via telephone modems to cable broadband was easier than today's idea of switching away from Facebook's connected contacts. (E.g. Even Google with all its billions and web dominance couldn't get Facebook users to switch to Google+ in 2011.)
That said, I still believe Facebook dominance can be supplanted but it will happen by accident : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15263715
Speak for yourself as a kid I would go on AOL chatrooms all day every single day. The kids rooms were packed with at least like 30 instances of them and like 10 to 20 kids in between. Learned what a/s/l meant back then something you dont hear as often these days hah.
MSN Messenger had MSN chat which was IRC esque and MSN Groups had their own instances or chat it was glorious. Anywhere you went with chatrooms the internet attracted people like crazy! AOL was definitely full of those types.
AOL also had annoying (to me) parental control settings. Thankfully I could justify internet access outside the AOL program by stating that games didnt work online otherwise I would be restricted to AOLs trashy browser.
My phrase of "interact that much" was relative to today's Facebook type of social penetration. Yes, I also interacted with others on old USENET, BBSs, Compuserve (CIS userid), AOL, etc. Many of us did.
But Facebook's social graph is the phenomenon that bridged the gap of grandparents seeing updates on the grandkids, high school alumni and past coworkers "finding" each other again and extending weak ties ("friend each other"). This type of social interaction is very sticky and difficult to switch away from. USENET/CIS/AOL level of interaction was much weaker.
There's IRC, which tends to have a much higher technical barrier to entry though, and a lack of centralization makes for a more difficult discovery and user experience.
I also wonder if by tying it to a paid service in the first place gave a bit more ammunition for moderators to handle the "obnoxious 12-year-old" class of troll.
Some clients are nice enough to include a list of common / popular servers, but they don't provide much more context about them. I would love to see some of those modern IRCv3 features but I'm not sure of clients supporting them and IRC networks supporting them.
But I definitely agree that Facebook is a lot stickier: I have the impression that most of my Facebook graph would like to move somewhere else, but the combination of the difficulty of that coordination problem and no strong candidates for a replacement has kept us on Facebook.
But mostly now people just use their phones for interacting with the Internet. And 10 years on it is still the case that the open web from a phone kinda sucks. Facebook works great on a phone, as a mostly consumption-only, attention-sucking, twitch-scroll heavy medium.
Here facebook is the tool, but what matters to them is not to get random info through the feed. It’s to ask people and hear what people have to say, often very close people (family, friend, real world connections). In this respect messaging could be the main use actually.
This is the equivalent of some of our parents who wouldn’t open the phone book to find some garagist when they have car issues. They’d phone a friend and ask them for recommendations.
People who used the phone weren't deluged by calls designed to make it impossible to distinguish bot-strewn propaganda from organic activity of real-life friends. (We did get plenty of junk calls, but they were easy to distinguish from the real thing, and people were motivated to avoid them, not to get deeper into their filter bubbles by seeking out more of them.)
While your point is valid and reasonable in it's own right, posting it in a discussion about Google isn't really the right place.
Although I guess it becomes one when that becomes like the bulk of what HN viewers see in the first few screens of comments. I guess it could be argued we should have more discipline in HN comments because of the affordances. But that applies to replies to the comment turning it into a big thread of different opinions too, if you just left it alone/non-controversial, it wouldn't do that.
Not saying that this is happening here, but forums need to be resilent and really focus hard on the issue at hand or be completely played by the professionals.
There have been news articles about governments employing this practice [0], so it is not much of a stretch to imagine corporations doing it.
[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-23695896
Tangential conversation can be useful and constructive sometimes; but other times it'd be nice to apply a contextual overlay to a conversation which emboldens the on-topic discussion items and de-prioritizes side discussions.
It's possible to argue that that's what the HN community itself should do naturally via upvote/downvote behaviour -- but in practice there are various (often valid) reasons why an unrelated thread of commentary can become more popular than on-topic discussion.
Rabbit hole[1] successfully descended and eventually escaped. Luckily it was a very shallow one. :)
A simple example of this is 'Google abandons products.' it's been more and less teue at different times, but it's almost always presented as a truism when the reality is more nuanced, and depends on a bunch of factors (is it a paid product, is it out of beta, do they publish a support lifetime, etc.) Google do seem to abandon a lot of stuff, but they also have a lot of stuff which can skew perceptions if you are mostly aware of certain products, and they seem to follow a sort of consistency as to how likely they are to persist.
An overly broad assertion about Google abandoning products may be met with responses like thus, even if the people responding agree that Google does it more than others. That's not defending Google because it's Google, it's adding nuance to a discussion (there are of course just defenders).
Note: I'm not trying to argue this Google criticism, it's used as an example. Even if you think this is a bad example because that's not how you see this argument usually played out, it's probably more constructive to discuss communication strategies and misunderstandings than to rehash a very played out Google criticism here more than I've done.
Ultimately though, how I engage with comments is going to be a product of my biases and opinions as an informed technical person, which in cases like this might lend support to countervailing points despite the fact that I find the primary content valuable.
I also find that I'll very frequently close the top couple of comments to look for other perspectives. That approach seems sufficient this this case.
The OP - perhaps without realizing it explicitly - makes an important distinction between the kinds of information-sharing systems that are in place on the modern web. Borrowing from Marshall McLuhan's distinctions between oral and literate cultures [0] we can see that Google and Facebook have a similar relationship. Both engage our hunter-gatherer mindsets in novel ways, but only one clearly does so with utility.
Google's usefulness as a search engine provider is in how it provides relevant information to users who are querying for something specific. Google search users are not sitting and waiting - they're searching and exploring. Google, therefore, plays to our hunter-gatherer mindset by directly aiding us in our searches.
Facebook's usefulness as a social network is in its ability to facilitate individual communications within a vast, centralized ecosystem. Users of Facebook are often searching for something - connections, information, relationships, etc., - but the way it engages its users' hunter-gatherer mindsets is very different. Instead of delivering targeted answers relevant to queries, Facebook forces its users to search through seemingly endless threads of often low-quality conversations, not really doing much of anything to aid in the search. Its users are simply sitting and waiting for the correct information to scroll into view. The search function on Facebook is not like Google's - it doesn't look for information, it simply takes you to a new part of the social square to which you want to go. Facebook, in essence, attaches a hunter-gatherer mindset to the very antithetical gossip found in the social square.
IMO, it is perfectly fine to have this conversation right here. Facebook has added a new dimension to the modern web: the expectation for there to be a well-regulated, always-available social square online. If the outcome of Google's actions are as inevitable as the article states, it would be proper to discuss where Facebook's unique "contributions" to the web fit into this article's analysis.
This same thing happened on the last thread about Google.
Discourse is full of distractions and side topics and healthy diversions, thats what makes it interesting.
Not everything has to be perfectly efficient like a well run board meeting complete with agenda and minutes taken.
I'm all for a healthy avoidance of bikeshedding and derailment but this isn't a derailment. This is a tangential anecdote entirely valid to bring to the table as it gives insight into what can happen if google continues down this path.
We don't need to postulate what might happen with Google, we can look at Facebook and say, hey, you know what, these same things are going to happen here, let me tell you how that worked out.
If you can't manage to figure out how to bring this conversation back to google without locking the gate on natural discourse that's on you. Not us. Not ap.
Stop gatekeeping.
Also, what does this have to do with bikeshedding? Both Facebook AND Google are serious issues.
I quickly found that many of my local business have an online presence only on Facebook. No web site, no freebie aggregator type thing, nothing, just FB. This in a major European city.
It makes me wonder if it might be useful, as a public service, to have some kind of free business listing that (with your permission) automatically duplicates what you put on Facebook, just to encourage people to at least be discoverable outside that walled garden.
You know that Facebook would immediately start either offering incentives to keep all your data in the walled garden, or spreading FUD about the duplicator ("how can you trust what happens once your information leaves our loving embrace?").
It's funny (in a sad way) but even for my friends who own restaurants, where I'd be more than happy to give them free hosting or help them upload stuff or whatever, they don't see anything other than FB as worth the effort even to just keep track of.
Obviously that's not universally true, plenty of places (especially higher-end ones, and ones with significant delivery business) have dedicated web sites that are kept up to date.
[0] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/9kek83/linkedin-data-scra...
There's plenty of worry to go around. I would like to put aside the (very understandable) fear about Google for a second because I think the GP makes a good point.
My parents used to use the open web, but have also more or less exclusively started to use Facebook to "surf the web" and get all of their information. The 2016 election was a joke, my mother would constantly tell me about all these things she'd found out about "on Facebook". She'd click these links and keep getting more and more radical misinformation. I was honestly shocked at what her Newsfeed looks like. The worst thing is she isn't an abnormality, she's fairly typical of her generation.
I'm concerned by _any_ closed platform, especially when there isn't enough competition. I realize that's descriptive of many things my employer builds as well. But please don't discount the dangers of other closed ecosystems, it's a certainly related topic. The web by _anyone_ makes it a poorer place to be and there's attackers on all sides.
Google does plenty to spread misinformation as well, Youtube is a sewer giving outright conspiracy nutcases a platform, they continuously promote Breitbart, infowars and other despicable websites through Google News (the suggestion alone that I would like to see any of that content is revolting), they try to pretend that they care about end user privacy, including plastering all of Brussels' airport Zaventem full of posters and displays proclaiming that, never saw such a poster outside of that airport, just maybe they figured that's a good investment to reach regulators on the hoof.
Google is a dishonest and manipulative company that tries hard to pretend it is a sheep. But the teeth are clearly visible and those bloody pawprints tell a different story. I for one am not buying the 'Facebook is more evil than Google' line for a second, if only because FB at least stays in its lane, Google is everywhere.
Well, glad you're not in charge, then. If these publications really are crackpots then surely people will stop reading them? Freedom of speech and all that.
Disclosure: Googler.
If you really are a Googler - any anonymous coward can say that - you're not doing Google a service.
You also obviously don't understand what free speech means, which is depressing of someone skilled & intelligent enough to work at the big G.
Free speech is not the right to say what ever you want. It's the responsibility to stand behind and defend what you speak with real evidence.
The simple fact is these publications are promoted because they are popular, making no comment on accuracy. A massive corporation, even if I trust them as my employer, should never have such massive influence on our public conversation.
Popularity is a poor metric, but at least it's not censorship. I think even putting the thumb on the scales is dangerous.
Edit: I do see what you're saying, and I'm not advocating for a society where anything can be said without social consequence. I just think it's far too dangerous for FAANG companies to have that power all to themselves. The most well intentioned people can do terrible things...
It's really not as simple as you think.
Yeah, I do. These outlets are all as bad as each other. The only difference is a right-leaning individual is biased in favor of Breitbart propaganda and a left-leaning individual is biased in favor of CNN.
Respectfully, there's plenty to fix in your own house and you as a Googler have 1,000 times more of a voice to push for change than the average person.
Distributed platforms don't prevent moderation; they let you choose your moderator (including no moderator at all).
"The web is open!" they would say. It's a key part of the web. It's part of our core values! We're going to change the world!
Yet 95% of these people are now at Facebook or Google actively trying to rip apart what made the web good, stable, and open.
It's repugnant. Every person you know working at Facebook should be ashamed of themselves and they should be socially ostracized.
- phone - text messages - Facebook
She has no concept of the internet outside of the Facebook app.
Replace'Facebook' with 'WhatsApp', outside U.S. especially for developing economies, your comment would be completely valid but even more dangerous as unlike Facebook's content WhatsApp's content cannot be put under public scrutiny and much of its users haven't even used a browser before let alone email.
That's interesting that you do. I can't see it because I just don't go on Facebook. And it isn't a moral stance - I have an account, and occasionally I will respond to a relative or a friend. It's just such a small part of my life that I just don't see the danger you do.
But in the end, the US government will most likely have to split the company in order for stuff to really change.
DuckDuckGo is my default search engine, and it's not perfect or a panacea, but it works well enough (and there's "!g" for when it doesn't).
What we really need to do is be willing to pay for our tools, though.
Wikipedia estimates there are 21 million developers in the world, so if one out of twenty developers donated $1 / month to Mozilla, they'd be getting $1 million / month. You could sustain a few small dev teams on that. Not tons, but it's something.
If you took it to $5 / month, now you're looking at a lot more manpower.
If donations are given to specific software projects rather than the foundation as a whole, and bookkeeping is in the open, you can have decent confidence your money is actually going where you'd like it to go, too.
Just some half-baked thoughts.
I would gladly donate to mozilla the day I knew my money didn't go to Bakers already filled pockets or to some worthless diversity cause like a "queer feminist filmmaker" that is obviously on their payroll.
Mozilla as an org takes in a lot of money already, it is just that they seem to spend it on nothing of value for the most part. It's sad, but it's the reality.