Is this real accountability for anti-competitive behaviour, or just another cost of doing business for Big Tech?
My cynicism is tell me that unfortunately it is the latter.
If they stop providing value to users, they are putting their ad business at risk. It's never free, providing value to share holders is a top priority.
Them not launching in Europe gives the local market a chance to build up its own players. China was very successful in this thanks to the Great Firewall.
And you think local players are going to look at users with this comically detached worldview and be like "Yeah, we want to build services for that group of people to use"?
Regardless of whether the ads reach you or not, you as a data point add to the count that make the package enticing to advertisers, so you're helping them sell the package anyways.
Ain't nobody buying user data on users who block all ads and trackers, it's worth almost nothing (what are you going to do, show them ads?). Fun aside, the reason why people get so many awful scam and malware ads when they turn off their ad-blocker is exactly because no other advertiser will bid on them, because they have no ad-profile/ad-value.
And yes, people don't like being monetized without the company doing it being transparent about how and what they're doing.
An ad blocker has nothing to do with protecting you from Google fingerprinting and categorizing you.
And yes, there's local players building that are targeting precisely those users. No data harvesting is a major selling point of many European startups. Think of Proton, Mullvad, Nextcloud as a few examples.
It's also great that European startups have privacy services, I pay for proton myself, but none of these guys make any money compared to the ad model giants.
The cattle are free to leave the farm and pay full price for their feed elsewhere and get guarantees. But again, so far virtually zero cattle have been slaughtered at the "free" farm in the last two decades, and the pay-for-feed farms are comparatively vacant.
Raise your hand if you use an ad blocker.
I rest my case.
Exactly! This is what is genius about Trumps tariff strategy, as you correctly point out. Blocking Chinese EVs gives a chance to bully up local players.
They just continued on making bad cars, making no improvements, not adjusting to the new environment, other than begging the government to save them., US steel was the same way. Note the executives at the top of all these companies had no hesitation in blaming their workers on the production line for all their troubles.
The game plan is still not to compete. I sometimes wonder, I should say I believe that no one at Ford or GM at the top even cares about cars. There doesn’t seem to be any love whatsoever. It’s just another MBA at the top making a commodity.
One thing Europe has going for them is that there are a few car companies in Germany and Italy that seem to still care about the joy of driving, of making a good car, although that seems to be disappearing too.
Those are just more avenues for Google to collect data to shove ads down everyone's throats.
Good that regulations keeps Google from releasing more pf their shit here. Governments should really tighten the screws there.
(Even India has fined them 100s of millions of dollars - https://ssrana.in/articles/google-fined-anti-competitive-pra... ).
The former is nigh impossible, the latter is fairly trivial with sufficient will.
Internet wont be human steered by the time this is over
Just agents running x402 payments over mcp servers
(I can’t possibly understand this being downvoted.
The downvote button isn’t an “I disagree” button.)
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
and yes, downvoting is a perfectly fine disagree button, what else do you think it is
Anyway, downvote = “This doesn’t belong here.” or “This doesn’t attempt to contribute to the discussion.”
If everyone here downvoted each time they disagreed, there would be few comments alive…and little discussion.
The reply button is the disagree button.
Otherwise, for comments of any length, it isn’t even clear what’s being disagreed with!
That’s what they do. It’s how HN works. I’m pretty sure pg said that a while ago. You can write a reply if you want to engage, you don’t have to. You can downvote or not if you disagree, that’s up to you.
Edit: found it, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
Edit 2: that comment is almost 20y old! Fuck I’m becoming old
That’s what you do.
> You can write a reply if you want to engage, you don’t have to.
Downvoting is engaging - in my opinion,
just incompletely - if nobody else has replied yet enumerating your dissenting viewpoint.
Here’s mine (the reply to the pg comment - their account is older than yours, if that matters): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117237