this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2023
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Sorry if this is a dumb question, but what is so evil about what was written in the document? To me it just sounded like the guy was bragging about their dominance.
The drug and cigarette analogy is dramatic, but the real heat is going to come from the claim that they only care about the supply side of the equation, not demand. In other words, their audience is locked in and has no power, and the ad suppliers (Google themselves) set the market conditions.
That is dangerously close to monopoly talk.
Yeha, that's monopoly talk. I guess I was expecting something else when I read "evil".
I don't really think people are locked-in by any means, there are so many alternatives. People just prefer Google because it provides the best search results and they don't care about privacy. The alternatives are pretty good, but people just want the best. I usually have to go back to Google to query something whenever DDG isn't providing good results.
Before downvoting, at least explain why people are locked-in. Aren't there alternatives to Google? They are definetely creating a horizontal monopoly by acquiring all the companies in the chain, from advertisers to operating systems... but there are alternatives to Google (the search engine). I use DDG everyday, how am I locked-in to Google? I'm not arguing against the monopoly, I'm arguing against the lock-in.
Google- DDG, Swisscows, Qwant
Google Chrome - Mozilla
Google Cloud - DigitalOcean
Android - /e/
Google Phones - Fairphone
Google Meets - Zoom
Google maps - Waze
Google photos - Dropbox
YouTube - Vimeo
I really don't see the lock-in. People just want monopoly-grade service quality without the monopoly. You can't have both.
Google funds Mozilla, And nearly all non-firefox browsers are chromium based, which means google gets to set the standards of the web.
Android is a similar story, many forks may have removed google from the equation, but google makes a decision regarding android, and it will shake all forks downstream from it.
The others really aren't that concerning because there are real alternatives to them.
But Google's AdSense might be the one that gets them in the end.