Nobody seems to give a crap about Google’s monopoly on search, not even Google | Hacker News Reader

Nobody seems to give a crap about Google’s monopoly on search, not even Google

thejollyteapot.com

26 pointspcr9103038 comments

People are starting to care a great deal and it will become the biggest issue over the next few years. The dangerous effects of big tech's monopoly on information and social exchange on the internet have to be dealt with.

And their ability to decide what people know about politics

Well, big tech hardly has a monopoly, the organisations that had most of the power before still exist, even though their power has diminished. For example, 20-30 years ago a major political event was never mentioned on TV or radio by the broadcasters in this city, even though it involved eleven-digit state expenses, seven-digit numbers of people, and lasted a decade. The same TV/radio channels exist today, and their boards still have some power, even though Facebook has diminished their power very much.

Since you're someone who is much more critical of big tech and I am, I'd love to hear your opinions about what "dealt with" means, particularly wrt. how the state was before in your opinion and whether you want reinstate that or get to some third state.

I don't want to go back to NBC, CBS, ABC hegemony if that's what you're talking about.

I think Google and Apple should be regulated to allow for fair competition. Apple should be forced to meet web standards. They should be forced to allow competing app stores. They should be forced to allow right to repair. Google should be forced to allow competing search engines on their embedded Android widgets. Consumers should be allowed to strip out proprietary apps.

Facebook and Twitter and YouTube should be forced to federate and allow for interoperability. Consumers should be allowed to migrate their social graph to competing platforms (including followers, friends, etc).

Social platforms that engage in editorial commentary by injecting opinions into posts by users should lose section 230 protection, which was designed to protect free speech, not protect inhibitors of free speech and censors.

Some of big tech should be broken up, as Ma Bell was. As Standard Oil was. Data is the new oil. It's time to bust up the data brokers.

PrivacyWall is probably referring to the "PrivacyWall" android app [1] run by Social Game Media Inc according to the trademark[2].

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.privacywal...

[2] http://uspto.report/company/Social-Game-Media-Inc

FWIW, Google Search has one feature that DDG doesn't - the ability to view cached results. This article is blocked by my corporate firewall. Search for it with Google, which is not my default search engine, and click on the cached link. Now I can read the article. So yes, while DDG is my primary search engine I still occasionally fallback to Google.

I think a lot of the reasons for monopolies being allowed by American politics is because of how these companies are bringing in revenue from abroad. You wouldn't want to split Google or Amazon up because they'd be less of a threat to other countries local competition.

The algorithm is in charge and is assigning opinions to people, or rather in this case no opinion. All hail our algorithm overlords!

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