The Web by Google tm

https://landshark.io/2020/08/16/web-by-google.html

Interesting take which I completely agree with, Google controls the web and any large company with this amount of control needs legislating.

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Google needs to be broken up into a dozen smaller companies, according to US antitrust laws.

Smaller monopolies have been broken up for smaller reasons.

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How dare you!?

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We need hook up Google to nuclear rockets all over the World and rename to Skynet, to make planet safer. :innocent:

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Once you start legislating the Web, you are on the slippery slope as internet users in countries like China, North Korea, Saudi Arabia and Russia would tell you - if they could.

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Not the web,the monopolies controlling it need addressing.

It is like the 1849 goldrush and Google hit the mother lode.

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Anti-trust is little different though (if it would work), since Google arguably have power more than any government to subvert and manipulate any information…

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If I were Tim Berners-Lee, I would ask for my ball back.

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One day we will all call ourselves citizens of the United Nations of Google. Pax Universae.

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I agree wholeheartedly with this, but does this even happen anymore? I remember lots of monopolies being broken up in my childhood, but can’t name any major ones in the past decade, or longer. I think most of these larger companies have politicians bankrolled. That is the real issue.

Edit to add, and before Google, the king of the monopolies is Amazon. Lets start there and work outward.

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In USA, when thinking about it…probably last big one was Microsoft?
And it was long time ago.

Indeed, corruption and power struggle by politicians and alphabet agencies is about the only reason why anti-trust laws doesn’t work for tech giants this days. :face_with_head_bandage:

Only very big public pressure can possibly change that, and general public doesn’t seem to care a bit, embracing all the spyware and monopolization - that is very sad. :confused:

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Google made a great search engine. Google made a great browser. Google raised a great video platform. Google came up with a great microtransaction scheme for a medium where a user visits a property once for two minutes and then maybe never again. Google is a internet juggernaut, because they invested a lot of resources into the net. They made themselves the web first company.

And yes, this gives them a lot of control to push properties like AMP. But it’s not a sin if somebody comes along and fills a void with a solution. Everybody was free to do that, and they did.

Has Google to much power over the web? Probably. But we have to acknowledge that we need better alternatives, a “let’s just break it up and take it away” is a poor short term solution.

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I would tend to agree. Breaking up Google would not address the root of the issue. Which is the environment that allowed Google to be so dominant in the first place. I would think all of us enjoy healthy competition, which is what drives favorable conditions for the consumer.

I think legislation which ensures a new company with good ideas that could upset the dominance of Google, Amazon, et al, couldn’t just be gobbled up or bullied around would be a good step.

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Yep, that would mean establishing true free market…Personally i would love that to be case! :yum:
Which again would be deeply political action against corruption / alphabet agencies :upside_down_face:

No legislation alone could (nor it should) solve it just like that, but if we’re still thinking in current paradigm - at least following existing laws with anti-trust would be nice start :laughing:


Damn…I still remember old days, when Netscape CRUSHED Internet explorer (for a brief moment), because it was just better and no other reason. :heartbeat: Then Firefox was on :fire:…

Also MDN is superb - best resource for learning standards…

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Need aleast legislatzd… If here a big company buys something they must break somenpieces and sell a part because of monopoly… but once you got money naturaly you buy everynew tech and add it to your firm. Facebook apple all does that. Is it bad google has everything yes but they also do good things for a parr yes. And probably also the bad things. Company breakup is also sensitive for the tax paying probably what is best…

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Like here in belgium pharma growing like ‘paddestoellen’ but after a year bigger pharma buys all out…

Personal gouvernment helps also with this kinda business.

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I think refining anti-trust laws would be great. Using the metric of the US v Microsoft case, it’s very easy to show how companies like Google or Amazon have long since gone way beyond the causes of why the anti-trust case was brought up in the first place.

It seems to me the power of lobbying is one of the issues here. We certainly need the concept of lobbying, which helps educate our legislators on a huge swath of topics that no person could be reasonably expected to have total knowledge of when it comes to making laws. We just don’t need the seemingly overwhelming influence lobbying seems to have these days.

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That’s all true what you’ve said here. But not the legislature, no, WE ourselves are in charge to react!
It’s the customer that makes Amazon, Google, Facebook etc. grow.

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Its a little bit more than just “probably”.

Its still a solution nonetheless and it can trigger a chain reaction that leads to the development of new and better platforms. For example, why its almost impossible to join the Search Engine domain? Because its impossible to compete with google in the search engine game. Even a company as big as Microsoft hasn’t been able to produce a search engine as reliable and accurate as Google’s. So you tell me.

I think the internet needs to go back to the times of fragmentation and smaller communities, and not just big 4-5 companies taking over everything.

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Well…Technically it’s possible (at least was 5-10 years ago, which is VERY good start still), i know that:

  • Yandex (Russian company) have made search very effective and in the beginning was pretty small, in some respects even better than google (depending on what and how you search). Now it looks a lot like Google with all that services like maps, taxi etc, but then it got hijacked by Government and alphabet agencies in Russia.

  • WeeChat - technically it’s super-advanced program with search and what-not-else, you can do practically anything from this program, but should i tell that it got very quickly hijacked by Chinese government and agencies…? Same old story.

I think the only good way out of it:

  1. Get closed team of extremely skilled people to create search algorithms stable and working on a level of at least Google 10 years ago (very hard, but definitely possible). Make sure it works SUPERB at this point.

  2. Release it open-source, so engine would be easy to spread fast from day 1 to make it virtually unstoppable force.

This would allow to decentralize and fragment in a very quality ways, because it would allow to innovate on top of a very quality foundation - very fast, for different teams! :slightly_smiling_face:

And going underground + keeping closed for development period, would exclude possibility of subversion / unfair practices of corporations.

Kinda Bitcoin style, it appears from nowhere and it is very advanced tech for it’s time - rest is history, then you can only deal with it.

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Algorithm alone is one part of the equation, the other problem a new company will have to solve is the huge amount of data Google has access to that they use in order to train their machine learning models. Which they obtain by embedding their analytics on almost every website you go on the western hemisphere.

A lot of the information Google search engine uses to give you the results is not obtained by crawling alone, but its instead provided voluntarily by webmasters in an attempt to make their websites more relevant and for SEO. And is a vicious cycle.

Adoption too. How would you convince people to give you all this information in order to make your product better? Even big, established companies have problems with this, for example Microsoft and their Bing product. Webmasters will go out of their way to make sure their SEO is optimized for Google, but they won’t do the same for Bing most of the time, because the Work/Reward ratio is just not worth it.

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