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Comment by azangru | Hacker News Reader

> It is depressing that people dont recognize that Google has invented and perfected a parasitic business model ... The article aims to offer a preliminary analysis of whether Microsoft can become a better parasite

In this model, are end users who use it to search for information parasites as well? After all, they are consuming content that other people generate online, and usually pay nothing for it. And they love to look for — and find — what they are interested in. If Google didn't satisfy that need well, people wouldn't have preferred it, and it wouldn't have grown.

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> usually pay nothing for it

Users pay with their data. That is the whole point of the business model and it is obviously lucrative enough so that the entire tech infrastructure (devices, OS, browsers etc) can be repurposed to be a user data collection channel. If you want to find a real accomplice that is essential for the model to work, it is not the users, it is the advertisers. It takes two to tango in the adtech market.

I don't dispute that search (in its various incarnations) is an essential service in a digitally interconnected world. There are countless ways to pay for it (as a digital public good, as a user subscription etc) that are fundamentally better than what we have. It is also obviously true that some decades ago Google innovated technically. A lot happened since and it wasn't positive. Normalizing it simply prolongs the agony.

Most user data is not worth anywhere near enough to keep the "entire tech infrastructure" running.

User attention is worth more but even then I would be hesitant to say such a grand claim.

Google is there to put tolls. This is a parasitic model by definition.

Search should be democratized by governments. It is central and should be for everybody. No control.

> Search should be democratized by governments. It is central and should be for everybody. No control.

I am confused. Are you suggesting that governments should nationalize the search part of Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, etc.? Or that they should build their own high-quality search engines? And what do we do until they have?

> No control.

Why do you think governments wouldn't control search engines if they were responsible for providing them?

> It is central and should be for everybody

How is the current model (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, etc.) not for everybody?

> Or that they should build their own high-quality search engines?

That may already be happening https://openwebsearch.eu/

The role of a government in a capatilistic society is to basically do the stuff that isn't profitable for corporations to do without exploiting the population. For example build roads, because if a corporation did that there would be tolls everywhere and it would be hard for poor people to improve their living standards if they couldn't economically move around. That seems to have happened on the internet. The internet is in the commons and everyone expects it to be free, the problem is that the infrastructure to navigate it was built by corporations and now we have to pay tolls through ads and trackers

Nationalize or extinguish by creating their own.

Nobody prevents government(s) from creating a search engine. Actually nobody stops anyone from creating a search engine. Also nobody stops anybody from using another search engine. The internet is the most level playing field and is more competitive than any other industry. Nowhere else is it as easy to create something new as a business and to switch services as a customer. If anything it's the customers fault and by extension a lack of education. So if you want to blame government then blame it for keeping its people dumb. And there you actually have a point.

Ah yes.

Search provided by the Russian government to the Russian people, Chinese government to the Chinese people, British government to the British people, X government to the X people..

What could go wrong?

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