Hilarious to see all the people lamenting the break-up of AT&T. That break-up sparked the long distance phone race, which became the driving force for the massive laying of fiber optics... which enabled the Internet boom of the 1990s.
Long distance was expensive for quite a while even after the break-up. If you called up an out-of-state friend or relative to catch up, you expected the call to cost you at least a few bucks. (And you hoped they would be the ones to call you next time.) Even into the 90's, long distance at $0.10/minute was considered cheap. And in most rural areas, everywhere past a mile or so out of town was long distance.
I remember buying long-distance calling cards to bring our phone costs down. For about 5 years, it was cheaper to just get a local-only phone line and then buy your long-distance as phone cards. Each card came with a certain number of minutes pre-loaded. You'd dial the 1-800 number on the back, scratch off your PIN, enter it, and then you'd dial your destination number. Other than the hassle of buying and using the card, the major downside was that your own number didn't (usually) show up on the caller ID.
They were also good if you stayed in hotels a lot, since hotels would charge upward of usurious amounts for both local and long-distance calls but they would typically allow toll-free calls to go through without charge.
- An office software suite
- Global maps and GPS, City Guides
- Video entertainment
- Mobile and Desktop OS
- Web Browsers
Also, pay no mind to their competitors in all of those markets AND in their core business of search, being feeble multi-trillion and multi-billion global corporations
“But my data” Have your ever sold your data? Would the value you could ever possibly receive for your data ever equate to the value you get from the free services?
Likely No and No.
Is the free ad supported city newspaper free? Yes it is in fact free, just like FM radio is free, and broadcast television is free, and sidewalks next to billboards are free
Someone creating something appealing and giving it away for free in order to make up for it through ads in front of eyeballs does not in any way mean that the free thing isn’t free
And here we see the ostrich. When faced with the horrors of reality, sticks its head in the sand. It’s simpler in there.
That’s literally google’s business model.
You think Gmail is free bc Google is nice?
Come on…
Which is a bad thing and should stop. Right now!
Ps: it’s also not like you’re paying so little that you could say you’re getting it for…… free
Very weird.
It’s a good deal for the individual, that’s why Gmail is popular.
Trading something of low value for something of moderate value is not what “free” means…
Say the data from me or any of my peers was worth 1/100th of a cent and we give that away… that means I am trading something of minor value for something else…
I don't want to sell my data. I want companies to stop collecting it.
In fact, I don't think I've seen anyone here wishing they could sell their data.
However the value is not nothing, and if you are a company with multiple billion users, that value of data can get pretty big pretty fast
The advertisers paying to get their ads placed in front of those eyes disagree.
And ye, since another comment questions this, data or "eye-time are similar - they can be broken down to the individual.
The advertisers pay some price expecting a certain number of people to see the ad, and even if data about people is sold in bulk (too) there is a price per individual. It's a simple division to see the price they pay per person to view that cinema ad, or for one person's data, even if they always purchase those in bulk.
After all, they get to the bulk price by multiplying how much they are willing to pay for one individual with the expected (or in the case of data packages known) number of individuals.
Also Chrome exists primarily to ensure their ads business remains healthy i.e. they have massively watered down privacy restrictions.
Theres a reason that you have to log into a Google account to use those services, which means agreeing to their rather large TOS.
Buying something doesnt necessarily mean you have to pay money for it. Your time and information is worth something too.
I've never heard of Google doing this. Google sells access to and the attention of their audience. They do not sell personal data.
It literally means exactly that, because you're deriving some real value (money) from 5 minutes of your eyesight. So therefore it has value.
You, the theater owner, are selling the time people are sitting in your theater in view of a large screen to advertisers. That time is literally worth something.
If there were no people in the theater, the advertisers wouldn’t pay for the time.
You just really don’t understand how advertising works.
You’re effectively saying something like “just because people would pay for something, doesn’t mean it has any value”
I have to believe that you’re an extremely skilled troll, because otherwise idk what’s going on in your head.
I would argue that the question of "Is it free?" should not be restricted to monetary payments. If I offer you dinner for an hour of yardwork - are you receiving the food for free? If I would offer you that same dinner in exchange for letting me watch you use your computer for a while, is it free?
I think ads do incur a cost on you: In usability of a service, in your attention span / desensitization and your ability to focus, in the money you would not have spent were it not for ads.
Googles services are free in the sense, that you don't spend cold hard cash on them, but I would still argue, that you pay for them. That 2 Trillion Dollar valuation has to come from somewhere... :(
#2. You can pay? Also is the argument somehow that the free thing isn’t free because the ad in it makes the UX worse?
Also curious to know how many ads exactly do you get while using google workspace? drive? android? maps?
Finally: You can literally use Chrome, Workspace, Drive, Android and Maps without seeing a single ad, without an ad blocker, without EVER using google search, for free.
Those semantics aside:
- Maps has ads in the form of sponsored results all over the map.
- Android is only a decently functional platform with Play services installed, which includes ads. I don't have an Android phone handy but I'm pretty sure there's up-sells included in quite a few places, I just can't name any right now.
- Chrome is a browser you cannot use for its primary purpose without seeing ads.
- Workspace is a directly paid-for product.
Google is an ad company. Essentially all of its products are supported by advertising, and it's slightly odd to suggest they are not.
I would like private businesses to offer transactional costs. I do not want businesses leveraging diffuse costs; I'd prefer that only my governments use diffuse costs and that private businesses have limited ability to use diffuse costs. At least with government I get a vote.
My data has been sold, yes. By me, no, because I don't have the means. But by others and especially by nefarious actors, absolutely.
So indeed, it's not free. Just because data isn't liquid at the individual level doesn't mean it has no value.
I honestly would love it we would ditch surveillance capitalism and went back to a simpler option of paying for products and services. I think that essentially all of the complaints you here about Google (their lack of any responsiveness/customer support, their constant spying on users, the constant "Google graveyard" of discontinued products, their current corporate ossification, etc.) can be directly linked to the fact that users don't pay for their products.
Excellent criticism too that the evil monopolist that devilishly gives away extremely useful and value-add products and services in order to expand its evil monopoly is also famously criticized by the victims of those free data-mining products for sometimes discontinuing them without giving them proper notice! Surely Google can’t just stop mistreating them without adequate prior notice!
Google's search advantage could be taken away with another website that's better. There's no installed base or corporate lockin to contend with. Same with email. Same with maps. While Google uses data from each of these services to better target ads at you, the services are not very tied into each other, and you could easily grab one of those services away from Google if you just provided a better standalone service.
To me, that's not a good case for breaking up Google.
Office/GCloud does feel like the two big players but I'm sure competition would creep up here if GSuite went away (and I doubt it would, even as a standalone company).
Working for big corps these days I see that supporting Apple devices is pretty standard.
I'd say Microsoft is way less entrenched than it was 10-15 years ago technically - but they do a great job of selling Azure to enterprises. And even there AWS is a huge competitor without Google.
Hyper relevant I'd say, although the Microsoft corporate touch seems to kill every studio they buy.
> Office/GCloud does feel like the two big players but I'm sure competition would creep up here if GSuite went away (and I doubt it would, even as a standalone company).
Office is orders of magnitude bigger than GSuite. It is gigantic. Governments release documents in Word format instead of OpenOffice. It's so big. GSuite is still a minnow in comparison.
Windows, on the other hand, is a very strong platform, but Valve has been chipping away at it recently by supporting efforts like Proton to play Windows games natively on Linux. Shipping a game on PC is synonymous with shipping on Windows, Mac is an afterthought, and Linux is a pipedream. Microsoft doesn't directly profit off gaming on Windows by charging a platform fee at the moment, but they have tried in the past and could in the future at the drop of a hat.
Windows's hold on gamers at this point is less about playing the games themselves and more about secondary applications, like Discord, having subpar Linux support.
On the publishing side of things, Microsoft just recently became the third largest gaming publisher in the world by buying the fourth largest gaming publisher in the world. Microsoft owns World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Call of Duty, and (for a while now) Minecraft. They own an absurdly large portion of the gaming market despite creating not a single successful franchise in-house.
Apple is mostly too dependent on vertical integration to truly take over a market. If they allowed their OS on other hardware or something, they could pull Google power but they are entirely built around being their own unique bubble.
If Google finally gets broken up, you'll probably see hardware manufacturers like Samsung and LG truly start doing interesting things again.
Google will even with a break up, continue to control search and probably the web as a whole. Microsoft would be starting from scratch trying to build a mobile ecosystem again to compete with whatever's left of Android. And largely outside of the Windows ecosystem, Microsoft has repeatedly failed to buy control over the developer ecosystem. (All they need is one dumb PM to tick off the average GitHub user, and they're sunk there too.)
They started doing public long distance on their own (railroad) network in the 1970s. They were restrained (and frequently sued by) AT&T. The breakup opened the floodgates. They were sold like a half dozen times in the 80s.
But, MCI was AFAIK the largest early fiber pioneer.
I did a search for books about building the internet infrastructure and it turned up some other recommendations but I haven't read them so can't vouch for quality or content:
Network Geeks: How They Built the Internet by Brian E Carpenter
The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu
Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet by Andrew Blum
How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone by Brian McCullough
Maybe someone else here has read them and can comment.
Now this gives me reason lamenting the break-up of AT&T.
You’re repeating someones posthoc thesis as obvious fact.
It’s probably a good point to share. Let’s just have a little more skepticism and openness to other analysis.