Can you clarify what you mean? I think there's a sense in which sometimes people say that google ruined the internet b/c (a) their prominence and their algorithm induced the creation of awful content farms, and (b) they pulled ad revenue away from some businesses that create content leaving us with a more impoverished web experience.
If you're making a different kind of assertion, please elaborate on it.
Wrt (a), I think site owners that had useful content weren't for the most part pushed to remove it, but were often pushed to pad it to the point that it feels less valuable to users (like recipe sites where every recipe is 12 paragraphs of prose before the actual recipe, IIUC), so I think this still fits in with the "dilution" framing, rather than removing valuable material in a way that excludes others from its use.
Wrt (b) I do think that when google displays content on the search page in a way that stops most users from continuing on to the page from which the information was sourced, that does seem effectively extractive. But I think that's distinct from the OSS project-capture problem.
> if companies have their way they'll do the same to any captive open source project, turing any public parts into nothing but minimum viable bait to try and get people to pay for something.
I actually think google is a good illustration of the full spectrum of OSS projects. They're definitely "getting their way" but:
- gson, guice, protobuf, snappy, the go language are all examples of projects that are very useful and pretty separate from any revenue-generating google product
- kubernetes, istio, etc are projects that can easily be used without touching any google revenue-generating project, but if you're using some of their revenue-generating projects, you may likely want something like this. Perhaps this is OSS but writing for your paying customer-base as a target audience?
- android, chrome, tensorflow are all about building little googleverse of customers in their orbit
I think an example is LLMs like ChatGPT. Basically consider a website that has good info on it. The LLM scrapes the site and regurgitates it's content to their user, and the original site never get a visit or recognition. The end result is the death of the site (much like strip mining results in).
Since the 80s or earlier, companies always sought to exert control over their audience. Things like Compuserv were early entrants, followed by Prodigy and eventually AOL and Microsoft’s entry - MSN.
Google made the network aspect of the internet better and ended up being a sort of gatekeeper. Facebook reinvented AOL, and a thousand copycats did variants of the same… Discord, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit.
Social wounded the internet. If anything “killed the internet”, it was Reddit and Twitter, cancer-like services both of which metastasized to destroy small-time internet properties, only to consolidate them into poorly managed, unprofitable companies.
Nonsense. If google scrapes your site, your site is not affected. Where is the toxic pit, exactly?
They don't push real content "down the internet" they push it down the google rankings.
And while Google search is not as great as it was, it remains a strong contender for the best way to find stuff on the internet.
I don't think the internet would be better off without it.
You can however make good arguments for Google News, "Instant Answers" in Search, and other products, taking (impressions) from the internet.(And Chrome, Chrome worries me.)
From experience, many people can truly not tell the difference.
Sorry, what?
For example, I am still working with my partner to get her to recognize and ignore the top level garbage: sponsored links and obvious SEO bait* when she blasts off a "Best <kitchen widget> 2023" search.
*You know, those listicles offered up from a handful of different sites that tend to be a 'top ten' list of a selection of 15 or so different products that are mostly just 7 actual different products white labeled by some brand and sold on amazon through a referral link in the listicle.
FTR, I think youtube is one (among a few) exceptions to this overall trend from google.
- US company false DMCA's your video
- you are in Nigeria for example, whom do you complain?
- YouTube subject to US laws and must comply, while you can't do much
- YouTube probs doesn't have much incentive to investigate or sue false DMCA