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Comment by hamoodhabibi | Hacker News Reader

The year is 2024: companies that used scraping to build its products are now trying to legislate scraping as an illegal act

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This is nothing new. Google built an entire business on scraping and indexing content, and then aggressively blocks anyone from scraping that index.

If you think about it, it's kind of weird that there is no official API for Google search. They've got one for all their other products.

Google: if your website is full of ads, we'll downrank you. >:(

Also Google: we automatically enabled vignette interstitials on your website. :)

Google: if your website is slow to load we'll downrank you

Also Google: builds tool that claims you load a bunch of JS & CSS from their ad network, thus making your own website slow

If you are fast to load we will present a slower amp link instead

Don't forget bloated Google Analytics and ad tracking garbage.

The Google Search API was one of the first big Web 2.0 examples of an API. Basically every big colorful "how to do APIs" or "learn JavaScript" book in Barnes and Nobles used the Google Search API as their main example of what an API was and how useful it was until 2011 or so, when Google started turning it down.

Now I'm curious how many tech companies actively used questionable practices to build their foundation, then lobbied to make those practices illegal to mitigate competition. I've a feeling this is so common that they don't even see the irony in it anymore.

All of them. Building a value moat and rolling up the ladder 101.

Irony is something made out of metal in the VC money fueled world of make it useful then make it expensive.

That's what FTX was attempting to do with regard to cryptocurrency

If only they could have stolen billions instead, it would have been so much simpler

I read The PayPal Wars and it was wild to me how the author goes back and forth between complaining about how much regulation sucks and talking about how great it was that could take advantage of regulation in their fight about eBay.

"Lyft joins Uber in fight for stronger taxi regulations"

Waiting for The Onion to write it. Or the NY Times; both are just as likely.

All of them. It’s no coincidence Facebook is leading the charge to regulate social media, AI, and other technology usage.

Regulation is a nice “free”* moat once you’ve made it.

*lobbying costs aside

Don't you remember the open letter for getting current AI devs to halt under some false premise while the true reasoning was to give time for the late starters to catch up?

These people have no morals, and if social media were to suddenly disappear, I think the planet and all that live on it would be better for it

To be fair, they didn't say that what Stability AI did was illegal, just that they didn't like it and were banning the people involved from their service.

But the training data isn't important!

Your sarcasm is valid on its own, but here the issue is more towards DoS rather than copying of the content.

Which companies?

Maybe they should have just not thrown such a slow pitch over the plate with running the whole thing on discord in the open.

I am not sure what they expected to happen.

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