this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
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I agree not everything is black and white with this stuff, but good deeds do not absolve you from your bad ones. As we are currently seeing, Chromium being open source doesnt prevent Chrome from being changed in ways that is not in the interest of the users.
Also while they do release many things as open source, the software that people end up using in the end (Chrome, Maps, etc) are not open source at all, which just further solidifies their market dominance because people cant accept even giving up one little feature in favor of a different app, service, website.
Also comparing two big tech companies for their supposed upsides and downsides is pointless. They both suck and we should reduce our dependence on all of them.
Comparing Google to Microsoft in the early 2000s is not pointless at all. Back then it was Microsoft who had the monopoly on all technology, they controlled IE, the most used browser in the world, and they controlled the main operating system that people used.
When Google started Chrome they worked with other large companies to work on building web standards, many of the super important technology behind the scenes that make the modern internet work were developed at least partially by Google in collaboration with other major industry interests.
Android also had a huge impact here. These days people accessing the internet on phones is common practice, but once again Google pioneered many of the standards now used to allow build applications that run decently well on phones and can interface with the web.
And those are just two major projects you've likely heard of. Google created a lot of tech that is used behind the scenes:
I'm not saying you shouldn't try to use Google products less, but this case you're ignoring just how much Google helped save us from Microsoft's monopoly. And regardless how much control Google has now, it's far less then the control Microsoft had, and a large part of that is because Google has been more open with their technology and more willing to work to better the entire industry (yes they were likely aware that making the whole tech space better would also help them, but i have a hard time feeling that's malicious)
I really like your answer, it points to many things that have a hand from Google that I had no idea. Not wanting to defend them, but they had a very important role in most new deep learning tools as well, e.g. transformers, natural language processing, computer vision, etc. they had a huge impact in a lot of things