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Comment by rektide | Hacker News Reader

It's a bit stickier, in that Google's very existence depends on there being a healthy, compelling world wide web, and there being just not that many people funding or supporting or driving that quest.

Google has to be a power for good open source & web. Otherwise they risk losing their whole business to apps & closed Oses, where they have next to no competitive advantage.

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This is why I continue to support them despite all their issues. Not because I trust them to do the right thing out of principles at all, but just because their financial interests are more aligned with the open web than the other big tech companies.

I want to agree with you but at the same time I have contempt for Google as they pulled stuff like AMP in an attempt to take hostage of the (open) web.

Edit: not to forget Google uses their hold on the browser market share to push many platform APIs that only further their own goals with little care for privacy.

AMP had some really awful aspects to it, was a power grab. But it also tackled a very real existential crisis, that sites were being incredibly poorly built with ghastly performance, and they did make an ok toolkit. Going power mad & hosting all the content themselves was obscene though.

I agree entirely with your reasoning. But just watching what has happened to numerous Google products in the last decade (perhaps starting with Google reader?), it has become clear to me that Google's ad revenue is what wags the dog, so to speak, regardless of long-term considerations.

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