It should not be a "vote with your wallet" situation. It should be governments shattering that organization into appropriately sized companies.
Phones. Your choice is Apple or Google.
As you said, YouTube. Again, they have users and creators in one place, so it’s hard for a new platform to compete.
There are also a lot of enterprise contracts that bundle many things together. Like cloud and their workplace apps (whatever it is now called).
But also, just their size is a problem. Look at their AI story. First off, many customers get forced into packages where they get Gemini included as part of the bundle (which means they’re paying for it automatically and have less of a reason to pay for something else). But also - Google was slow to build useful products here. Even though they are late and made many failed attempts like Bard, they can afford to take losses for years that no small company - or maybe even large companies that aren’t mega corps - can absorb. Those other competitors would go out of business and have to be careful and move slowly in spending. But Google’s capital lets them make mistake after mistake but still compete and eventually win. So it’s not a fair competition.
This is false. Sent from my Librem 5.
That's no better, and in many ways far worse, than the corpos doing it.
There should not be a requirement to verify identity, but if a website owner only wants to provide access to their website to people with verified identities, why is that not their right?
Verifying identity for specific services tied to your finances or body is a whole different topic.
> if a website owner only wants to provide access to their website to people with verified identities, why is that not their right?
I like the GDPR's general point of view that the right to privacy is more important than the right to trade privacy for access. An anonymous verification might be fine, but this system is not, and random websites needing your specific identity is not.
The spirit of the law isn't to tell you that, it's to limit how much you can track people without their consent.
> Costco has the right to verify my identity when I walk into their store, I don't see why computing resources would be different.
That falls under "Verifying identity for specific services tied to your finances or body". You bought a membership, they're checking your membership.
If it was a store without a membership, then for practical purposes in real life we let them look at your ID but they shouldn't be allowed to record any identifying data off of it. When it's all done by machines we should use cryptography to make it anonymous from the start.
For an example, see EU's GDPR, DMA etc.