Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
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if you use the Internet as in open a web page you are absolutely being forced to use Google's products. You just don't realize it because they are not tangible things you physically use, they're API calls to make the websites you're using work.
because so many people use chrome, they are able to define web standards that feed back into their ad serving platform. What this means is that even if you use Firefox or Safari you may not be able to access websites if those browsers do not support web standards that support Google's main product, ad serving.
yes apple is bad but i don't think many people grasp how deep Google's roots go. everyone using the Internet has a profile in Google somewhere without really knowing or agreeing to it.
What?
This is simply false. Google is in a lot of places. But it isn't Google forcing 3rd party sites to use Google.
Yes AdSense is terrible. The tracking it does is insane.... but Google doesn't come to other websites and say "you must use me!" There aren't laws requiring its use.
Companies use Google because it makes them money and it's easy.
Apple does the same shit that chrome does but they don't make standards. They make inscrutable shit that people have to reverse engineer or pay for to be able to interact with apples market share.
You talk about how other browsers have to support the standard that Google sets... yes, that happens. Chrome also implements standards others make. Chrome also ports standards to other browsers (especially webkit).
People act like Google always gets it's way... when it just doesn't. Google fails at so many things constantly...
The fact that people don't understand that amazon has more than 3x the influence that Google does in Internet infrastructure... or that Facebook analytics is used nearly 2x more than Google's or that many of Google web standards that were proposed over the past 10 years have been superseded by open source or secondary solutions not proposed by Google and that Google had to implement them...
My point isn't that Google isn't pervasive or that Google isn't intrusive. My point is that it is hypocrisy to not also sue Apple for the same things... and that hypocrisy is telling.
it's the choice of a company not of the end user, which I feel is a more apt comparison to Apple. None of these products are being forced to use but when you look at the current state of things, the companies choose to use Google/Facebook because it makes them money. From a user standpoint there's not a lot you can do to avoid them if you want to use the Internet.
I think we both agree these companies are monopolies and need to be broken up, but you have to start somewhere. imo Google+Amazon are the biggest threats to consumers followed by meta, apple and Microsoft.
I'm in this really weird situation where I think fundamentally we do agree, but you keep saying things that I think are factually incorrect.
3rd parties don't force apple services on you like they do with Google (although it is becoming more common)... Apple forces 3rd parties to pay for the right to advertise or sell to its market share.
Apple is significantly more monopolistic than Google. Google is just bigger. Google has way less monopolistic actions and stances. It's just apparent that people don't understand the difference.