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Comment by deadalus | Hacker News Reader

Google has recently banned YouTube Competitor "LBRY.tv" From Play Store.

https://www.lacortenews.com/n/google-bans-youtube-competitor...

I don't think the article is very good. It's just a regurgitation of tweets from the LBRY twitter account, and the comparison between Cuties and the comedy skit that got it banned is deceptive. One is a social criticism, and the other, according to the description of the video "Contains implied sex and mild nudity".

The article doesn't bother bringing up Google's side, or if this action is unique.

That is basically what I was gonna say. Very he-said-she-said style. No indication of what rules were broken, no indication of why. Only that it happened and that LBRY said "we don't like that!"

Looking at what trust-busting cases were like a few decades ago, I can't help but think that if Google had existed and behaved as it does today at any other time in the last century it would've already been smashed into tiny, non-evil pieces by the government.

That's because ever since the 80s the US has switched to an anti-trust regime that essentially focusses on consumer price and nothing else. Lisa Khan's long but very good piece on the issue is worth a read.

https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-parado...

I think the political winds are shifting. Both conservatives and progressives are pushing for it. Big tech is rapidly losing any political base it could have.

Only because Google doesn't budge on filtering search results for political benefit. If Google dropped this and removed all anti-trump results, there would be no possibility for anti-trust litigation.

I really don't get why this issue keeps coming up. How many times does this story have to be retold before developers realize that if you build apps/platforms/networks which are by their very nature unmoderateable or take a position against moderation then you're going to get rejected from every app store unless you're careful to make sure that users have to opt-in to all the content (like Mastodon). LBRY's unfiltered "Discovery" https://lbry.tv/$/discover 1000% what got it canned.

"We designed the system so that we can't control the content on our network" doesn't mean you get to abdicate responsibility for what users see when they open it. The implementation details of how your app works don't matter when reviews are based on what the user actually sees.

Interesting, first time visiting lbry.

The discovery page for me is about 75% really obvious MAKE MONEY FAST crypto scams and fraud, 10% weird alternative medicine or antivax stuff, 5% programming videos, 5% non-scam crypto stuff but largely oddities like "world hunger can be solved by bitcoin, fuck fiat", and the rest is misc/uncategorised stuff. Bunch of tutorials that offer free game cash/game cheats but are actually just offering malware and keyloggers.

But what's bad about the discovery page? Maybe we see different things, I don't see anything remotely controversial or even political there.

Then why are browsers allowed?

That’s the next step to big tech censorship. They are slowly but surely converting what could be generalized computing machines to limited Internet gadgets. They will ultimately also restrict which websites you can visit, which will come probably in the form of bowing to activist pressure about something outrageous, and that’ll then normalize the practice.

If anyone here thinks this is a ridiculous outcome to fear, then tell me what is tempering deplatforming, censorship, and abuse of walled gardens today? Very little - and so I expect it to keep going. This is why we need alternatives to the big tech companies in things small AND big. We need alternative phone platforms, search engines, maps, chat apps, the full stack of hardware, all of it.

> They are slowly but surely converting what could be generalized computing machines to limited Internet gadgets.

Aka "The war on general-purpose computing". Far too many people in the tech industry are fighting on the wrong side of the war.

https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html

https://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html

The same reason the Mastodon app is allowed. They allow you to access unmoderated content, but they don't proactively push it at you (the default search engines, and the news home pages on Edge/MSN and Firefox/Pocket, do proactively push content, but they're moderated).

I like Googlers but a lot of the time when Google loses in court, I feel like the court did the right thing.

Recent discussions of Google unfairly banning LBRY:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24605379

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24594663

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