I'm not convinced making the ad tech sector more competitive would prompt that outcome but, "It would disrupt mature products" isn't a compelling argument to allow the existence of a monopoly.

Google is a monopoly, they exert monopoly power and enjoy monopoly pricing.

I think the more likely outcome would be more dynamic products under smaller bannerheads.

Whatever Google stopped tracking they did because of regulation not out of user backlash or goodwill.

Why should they siphon data to a third parties when they themselves want the data, and its a competitive advantage to keep that data for themselves.

What we are seeing is chrome becoming the new IE where alternatives browsers are not longer allowed on the internet. "You’re using a web browser that is not supported. In order to use [Insert website], please download Chrome for the best experience. Download Chrome here!". (https://www.datanyze.com/browser-support/ie/index.html)

Like Manifest V3, which explicitly makes it harder to strip out Google's own ad products on websites you visit?

> without Google all that BS would get bundled in the browser.

Or maybe it wouldn't. There are already lots of other browsers that don't.

You crush up the bitter pill in a spoonful of jam to make it easier to digest.

> Is apple doing similar things with Safari for nefarious reasons?

Yes? Look at what they tried to get away with with PWAs as an example.

This is illegal for a reason. It does NOT benefit consumers to make it impossible for anybody to compete with you. This is anti-competitive, not competition.

After all there's a reason people here care about PiHole and such, because ISP's are doing such shenanigans. Or TV makers peeking at pixels so they can phone home to report on what you're watching.

When it comes to Google, we already find ourselves dealing with worse.

Maybe we'll get something from Mozilla eventually - but I'm not holding my breath. I suspect it'll only happen if there's a massive awareness campaign that produces a demand signal for it in the general public (as opposed to just tech nerds).

And while Trump may set tariffs based on his mood at any given moment, this case isn’t a whim. I think a lot of thought is being given to what to do about Google. We may or may not like the results, but that doesn’t mean it was slapdash.

Then how do they still manage to mistakenly deport the wrong people and have to cover it with a smoke screen of lies? If this is what their "careful and thoughtful" planning looks like, I'd hate to see what their recklessness looks like, because it all looks like the same level of shit show from my angle.

It’s always a mistake to assume that people are stupid or incompetent just because you don’t believe in what they are doing. It looks reckless to you because that’s what most of the media in the country tells you, if you had a different Information diet, it would not. That’s why I intentionally read sources slanted in the other direction.

Epistemology has never been harder than it is right now

No, they didn't. They explained why breaking Google up would kill all of those "free" services.

"Google is a monopoly, they exert monopoly power and enjoy monopoly pricing."

No, they aren't. There are a multitude of other ad platforms available for anyone to use. Google has no power to stop them. "Most desirable service" does not constitute a monopoly in an open market. Monopolies can only be created by government dictate, like old AT&T or modern cable companies.

By virtually every definition I can find, a monopoly is a an entity that functions as the sole, or effectively the primary, provider of a good or service in some market. That seems to perfectly describe Google’s position wrt web-based advertising. Do other ad-platforms exist? Absolutely. Do they exhibit the kind of market dominance or control that Google does? Nowhere close.

> Google has no power to stop them.

Fact? I’d argue that Google’s sheer size and dominance means they don’t need to stop them. Potential competitors simply don’t stand a chance given Google’s size, number of resources, and reach. Explain how that’s not a significant factor into Google “power to stop” a potential rival?

It's not a binary. By distilling the entire concept to a dualist perspective, you have evaporated most of the concept itself.

What is monopoly pricing?

And also: breaking everything else off of the ad company is the obvious answer to the ad monopoly. Every other part of Google exists to feed its advertising monopoly and maintain its edge there.

Other parts of Google(mostly good for the world like maps and youtube and search) can't survive without ads.

it's not clear to me that an ad monopoly makes products cost more, even without getting into ads distracting the whole workforce

are expensive ads higher quality? but are they therefore pushed more to justify the cost?

does the higher cost improve the information conveyed?

This argument was stronger a couple of years ago. But search is being commoditized at such a rapid pace that it's not clear that this is true anymore.

When analyst measure companies moats, they measure their strength in years/decades. How many years would you give Google Search at this point?

Whether AI and search are similar enough to call them competitors, at least right now, is highly debatable. I don't know about other people, but I for one have definitely not started asking chatbots questions instead of looking for informed, human-authored content.

EDIT: Note that I mean downward trend in total, not the percentages shown by statcounter. Statcounter does have a separate chatbot page though, if you're interested in that. Still doesn't answer your totally valid question of how many people are chatting instead of searching, though. Maybe Google or ChatGPT could tell us :)

1. In terms of US monopoly status, the USA chart would be more relevant than worldwide (also tangential but is Baidu really that weak in China or is there just no data?)

2. Google certainly has a stranglehold on mobile search (unsurprising given that both Apple and Android use Google search). In USA desktops Bing still isn't that strong, but it is 10% and not very low single digits. It makes sense to me that search volume has moved to mobile. It's super convenient to search quick things on phones wherever you happen to be vs finding a computer. But if for example a remedy was to essentially ban Google from Apple's mobile devices then it would really move the chart quickly given Apple's dominance in US mobile marketshare.

3. The biggest issue is those are percentages and not volumes. If search becomes irrelevant because people switch to other modalities it's not going to appear as a decline in these charts.

Less and less people are using search engines to shop, ex:Amazon makes >$57B a year from search ads, but also look at Temu and Shein which are mostly glorified product search platforms.

No one is searching for "funny videos" when you can just open Instagram and Tiktok.

The only real unique thing that search engines can do is queries that are not directly commercial (e.g. education, information seeking, etc.) and competition is insanely intense (w/ ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc) there.

Aside, ChatGPT is horrendous at filtering web search.

https://searchengineland.com/google-ads-search-and-chrome-bo...

I'm not convinced that any of these would change for the worse. Maybe we will start using more content and services that aren't made by Google. That sounds good to me. Of course, the overall situation will be improved the most by breaking up Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon, too.

The fact that you and I are happily using Linux is great evidence that software made collaboratively is better than software made competitively.

Maybe an uncertain future isn't certainly bleak.

That is why the banks should have been broken up into smaller banks long before we reached that point, and it is why Google should have been broken up long ago. The only way to prevent the situation you describe is to never allow any single entity to become so important to so many people.

It's like planting a tree. The best time to break up a big company is twenty years ago (before it became so big). The second-best time is now.

A world without Google would not be a world with less disposable income for regular people, but it might be a world with less disposable junk.

Even if you discount the effectiveness of ads (which seems foolish given how many people have so much staked on them working), the eye-watering prices Google charges for them get directly passed to the consumer in the form of higher prices.

Monopolies are rarely if ever good for consumers, but some monopolies are better than others at offloading the responsibility for their harm onto other businesses.

If the argument is "more ads = more junk" then the argument is essentially "my values are more important than other peoples values". I'm also anti-consumerism, but if someone sees an ad and finds a product intriguing enough to purchase, they believe that thing might have value in their life. We might not agree, but we should not have the ability to control what other people find value in. I think this is equivalent to an argument of coercing people to conform to our values instead of convincing them to have our values.

More insidiously, the proliferation of this type of "junk" crowds out other business models, meaning that increasingly people can't even "test" whether they would prefer something else. It's basically the tyranny of small decisions. It's not just a matter of "I will trade you five minutes of my eyeball time for 6 months of email", because every such transaction increase the likelihood that in the future you will find yourself with no option other than to engage in such a transaction in order to, say, pay your electric bill.

It's my claim that my viewpoint is actually in accord with a majority of people's values, in the sense that if we considered an alternate universe with less ad junk, more people in that universe would look at ours and say "Wow, I'm glad I don't live there" than vice versa. It's just that there are lots of clever boiling-frog ways to get people to act against their own values without their being fully aware of it. The mere fact that something has happened doesn't mean most people actually wanted it to happen, or are happy it happened, or even realize they would in fact be happier if it hadn't happened.

I assume you're a fan of GDPR banners?

>my viewpoint is actually in accord with a majority of people's values

It's not hard to install some privacy and adblocking extensions in your browser.

I think you're still doing that thing where you assume others share your values.

The argument has nothing to do with values or imposing them on others, it's simply this: These things are not and never were free. Google wants you to think they're free, but either the ads are effective at driving revenue and consumers are paying for Google's products in the form of increased consumption or Google is a parasite that lies to businesses about the efficacy of their ads and consumers are paying for Google's products in the form of the parasitic Google tax. Most likely it's a bit of both.

Either way, Google offering these products for "free" did not have a positive effect on consumer wallets and paid solutions emerging to replace Google if it actually does dissolve will not have a negative effect.

Modern companies have become very, very good at making consumers believe they are getting a good deal by trading an obvious benefit for the possibility of a hidden harm. The type of data tracked by internet companies is only one form of this.

I'm fine seeing ads. I wouldn't pay commercial rates for the services I use.

I find ads maybe 20% useful and for me that's a good deal.

The point of the poster above is that you're ultimately paying for your free email with a Google tax on every carton of milk and every smartphone you buy. That is, if advertising were banned and you had to pay for Gmail, most of your other purchases would be just a little bit cheaper, because they wouldn't be paying for Google ads to support your free email.

And this is just basic finance: the advertising budget has to be paid for somehow, so it is priced into the goods themselves (either through higher prices or lower quality, of course).

In the case of advertising, those untrue things are usually "X is a much bigger problem than I thought" and "Y will solve problem X and make my life a lot easier". That you can convince people of these things doesn't make them true in all cases. Washing machines are extremely useful; egg cookers, very much unnecessary. Yet commercials will often look the same for both kinds of products (not for washing machines today, obviously, as the case for why they are useful to have has long since become obvious, and commercials are mostly about which brand is better).

This is an often overlooked thing in discussions about advertising. A major part of the propaganda effort is not "which brand of X should I buy", it's "I need to own an X". That's where they lie to people the most, and convince them to waste money, not on an inferior product, but one that shouldn't have existed at all.

If Google can use targeting advertising to identify customers who eat a lot of eggs, and tell them about the existence of egg cookers, that's a win for everyone except the chickens.

But even if you're right about this being useful to some people, advertising is not the right tool for discovering this: advertising will always exaggerate any positive of something and downplay any negative. The goal of advertising, and the incentive, is not to neutrally inform people about products they might use. It's to convince people to buy this product by any means necessary. If it weren't explicitly outlawed, advertisers would probably add "enlarges your penis and cures cancer" to every single product ad.

Maybe they've got a big kitchen.

>advertising is not the right tool for discovering this

What is the right tool? How would new products find customers without advertising? I think any alternative would be much slower and less effective.

>advertising will always exaggerate any positive of something and downplay any negative.

Customers know this. You're underrating how smart customers are.

>If it weren't explicitly outlawed, advertisers would probably add "enlarges your penis and cures cancer" to every single product ad.

You really think people are stupid and they need someone like you to protect them from their stupidity, huh? Of course advertisers wouldn't do such a thing. It would be terrible for brand equity.

I'm not sure, but I don't think that speed is a major concern here. Even if it becomes harder to introduce new product categories, that would be a small price to pay for stopping the huge waste of money (and CO2) that advertising tries to induce.

Most likely, professional product review sites are a better solution, with a good enough legal framework to prevent them from becoming direct advertising or attack sites. Ultimately, what you need is an impartial expert trying a product and reporting their experience.

> You really think people are stupid and they need someone like you to protect them from their stupidity, huh?

No, I just think systematically lying to people is a bad thing and should be legally discouraged. False advertising is a huge problem, even with laws that try to punish it.

And sure, maybe they wouldn't put those specific claims on every product, but you can bet that without false advertising laws, you'd see much wilder claims in every single ad than you do today.

Economics is the distribution of finite goods amongst infinite desires.

It’s the objective way to optimize an economy given some normative set up.

What does this mean?

> Even if you discount the effectiveness of ads (which seems foolish given how many people have so much staked on them working), the eye-watering prices Google charges for them get directly passed to the consumer in the form of higher prices.

But then...why is anyone buying them if they don't work? How do you run this experiment without Google in to show that hand-curated ads on TV etc would've been a better, cheaper way to do ads in the long run than automated ones?

For consumers ads are a net negative. They inflate the cost of the product and favor incumbents and monopolists to retain that position.

Ads certainly work on average and Google has positioned itself in a way that they can extract much of the created value for businesses who buy them.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, if they're getting value from those purchases.

Plus, maybe they just would've learned about the product through some other channel, e.g. by watching TV. Which has more positive externalities: Google, or TV?

We are getting them for free. What a strange point to try to make.

And that would be fine. To me this is like saying "if we had jailed those meth makers and dealers 20 years ago, all these meth labs today would never have existed". If these services cannot exist without a business model built around transparent, bounded transactions (e.g., no hidden data harvesting), then they should not exist. The problem is precisely that Google and others of its ilk have essentially gotten millions of people addicted to "free" services whose true costs are hidden.

> The reason Google is the size it is today is because it provided better services at better prices than all the competitors.

No, they've just been better at hiding the costs, exploiting legal loopholes, and exploiting their privileged position to raise barriers to entry for other participants.

Free email existed before Google - Hotmail and Yahoo come to mind immediately, but there were plenty of others. You also got a free email address from your ISP - even AOL users had email.

Gmail came in with 1 GB storage and grouping emails as conversations. To me, both of these aspects were revolutionary, and other email providers shortly followed suit.

* 1GB storage in 2004 to 15GB storage 21 years later suggests that something vital has stalled. Every other storage metric (price of RAM per MB, price of hard drives per MB, price of cloud storage per MB) has improved 100 fold over the same time period[1,2].

1: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-comput... 2: https://jcmit.net/memoryprice.htm

Which freemail service isn't ad- or surveillance-supported?

> suggests that something vital has stalled

Why does it have to be a technology-driven limit? I dare say Google thinks that anyone with more than 15GB of email is a serious enough user to pay for it.

The original marketing was the the storage would grow forever, and you could believe it. Google was riding the an incredible high from smashing out what felt like constant Amazing New Things throughout the noughties. In fact, when they originally made the claim, back when Don't Be Evil was still the motto and they hadn't bought DoubleClick, I'm sure they believed it. By the time the final upgrade (or rather joining, of 5GB photos/Drive to 10GB mail) to 15GB came round in 2013, there was definitely a hint of the horns in the hairline.

Example: you can't create a new email label in the Android client. You have to log on to email in a browser and do it there. This was true when smartphones were a niche way of connecting to email, and it's still true today.

None of their services are free. You just pay for them in other ways, even if you don’t realize it.

The whole “attention” thing is just a proxy.

Finally, I have, in fact, benefitted personally from products that were advertised to me on the basis of user tracking data so a bit ambivalent about the anti-tracking argument.

dropbox was free synced storage several years before google drive

youtoube was an independent free ad supported video site before google bought it

there are a million and one free website hosting services

People weren't paying for email before gmail. It was predated by hotmail, Yahoo mail, and innumerable free online email offerings by small players. Being free wasn't even a selling point for gmail; the selling point was that they gave you a lot of storage.

Speaking of things that happened before Google, Yahoo Maps and Firefox are older than Google Maps and Chrome. And... Google Flights is a Google acquisition, not a product that they developed.

And then...

> Can you imagine how the world will be affected when these go away?

> Google Fi

> Google Fiber

> Google Pay

Yes, no one will notice.

> Google Groups

It already has gone away. Also, Usenet is something else older than Google.

> Google OAuth

Eliminating "sign in with [popular site]" would be a hugely positive change.

and google literally acquired and then killed deja news. If anything this is yet another argument for the antitrust.

google bought youtube 19 years ago because their own attempt was doing poorly and youtube was booming right after its founding, they didn't win in the space because they were good at it, they bought success in a way that probably shouldn't have been allowed

you're acting like google invented ad supported online services

the problem is now that google doesn't have to be the best any more, they can be third best at nearly everything but still own the market share because they can afford to give things away for free which ruins competition

People didn't need them 20 years ago, so why do they need them now?

> "They are all FREE too, mind you."

No proprietary software is free. You either pay with your money (you do this with games, for example), or you pay with your data (and this is what you do with Google). Sometimes with both (you do this with Microsoft).

So yeah, I think the world would be a better place if they had not been developed by Google.

They still can be broken up. As for not being competitive on the global market - neither is regular labor compared to slave labor. And just like companies employing slave labor are (or should be) barred from the US market, so can companies that are too large. Solving such prisoner dilemmas is exactly what government is for.

That's why we need anti-trust in the first place.

Moreover, it seems to me these laws ought to strengthened to make executives/decision makers even more accountable.

The people who made Google a monopoly aren't stupid and knew full well what they were doing. They should not be able to hide behind Google's corporate structure and also should be penalized for their bad behavior.

Moreover, CEOs, directors, boards etc. should also be held accountable even when they are not directly responsible (like captains of ships are). This would have the effect of ensuring that those in charge would mandate an ethics and behavior policy for the company and ensure that all employees were aware of it, and violation thereof would result in dismissal.

Thst said, to be fair, you can't blame management for the unacceptable behavior of a wayward or stupid employee. Commonsense must prevail and laws must allow for such things.

The problem is that once the monopolist is entrenched and all competition killed off, those cheap bundles stop being cheap. Hence why you need someone to take the long term view and nip these kinds of things in the bud. A democratically elected government is the best avenue for that.

That fantasy doesn't seem to take into account the specific realities of current day.

The consequences should be weighed and considered, but shrugging and letting Google keep on keeping on because it's too big to fail isn't a viable option.

When I compare the cost cutting happening in my supermarket over pennies and then compare it to the exuberant prices at airports, festival venues and sport stadiums it is clear how much many industries are ripping customers off.

Note that a legal monopoly is not the same as the extreme simplification of "zero other options". "In law, a monopoly is a business entity that has significant market power, that is, the power to charge overly high prices, which is associated with unfair price raises." [1]

"In United States v. Google LLC, the federal government alleges that Google has unfairly hindered competition in the search market through anti-competitive deals with Apple as well as mobile carriers. The government alleges that, as a result of these practices, Google has accumulated control of around 88% of the domestic search engine market.

In doing so, the government alleges, Google has additionally monopolized the search advertising market at the expense of competing services. Per the government's estimation, Google has been able to accumulate control of over 70% of the search advertising market. As a result of lack of competition, Google has been able to over-charge advertisers versus what they would pay in a competitive environment." [2]

Statcounter seems to align quite closely with the government's assertion. [3] Extra creepily, it appears to be even a hair worse globally, where Bing is less used (not that I like Bing or MS either). [4] But there is no international framework I'm aware of to handle global-scale monopolies, so that's outside the scope of the suit.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2... [3] https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/un... [4] https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share

  - Google Maps
  - Google Mail
  - Google Drive
  - Google Docs
  - Google Groups
  - Google Forms
  - Google Cloud
  - Google OAuth
  - Google Analytics
  - Android
  - Android Auto
  - Fitbit
  - Google Fi
  - Google Fiber
  - Google Flights
  - Google Translate
  - Google Pay
  - Waymo

Android: they lost a court case over this one that has lots of details if you care to look.

The rest are a weird mix of paid services that should be fine to stand up on their own or not even products at all (OAuth).

If enough users choose Chrome willingly on the desktop to make it the majority, do you think unbundling is going to help some scrappy startup hosting video at scale with all of the associated cost is going to arise instead of everyone just downloading YouTube?

Google Drive has plenty of competition and it’s not even the majority.

If Chrome was able to compete in a level playing field, then so should the other Google services. You seem to believe that Google makes an effort to tie together its services because they are stupid and don't realise they are not gaining anything from it.

Standard Oil bought or bankrupt competitive refineries, pipeline companies, regional railroads, even mom&pop gas stations & groceries often at considerable costs to ensure no part of the oil supply chain was profitable for its competitors.

There is absolutely nothing that Google has that can’t be avoided - or that’s even best in breed. Even Google Search hasn’t been good in years. My default search engine is now ChatGPT with web search.

Also, let's dispense with inappropriate jabs such as referring to other perspectives as "fantasy".

I think GP was arguing for exactly what I asserted, and it's a literal fantasy to imagine doing something 20 years ago.

I'd like to point out I wasn't being dismissive, at all. Sorry you read into it that way.

Perhaps you've never heard the expression about "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now." It's an aphorism, absolutely not literal. [1] Additionally, even if it were intended literally, which it clearly was not, saying it should have been done 20 years ago is not the same as fantasizing. It also obviously concludes that it should be done now, which is not fantasy.

I didn't say you were dismissive. If you have valid points, you should be able to make them without rewording everything into something else that you can tear down. That's called a straw man argument. "... the informal fallacy of refuting an argument different from the one actually under discussion, while not recognizing or acknowledging the distinction" [2]

[1] https://english.stackexchange.com/a/603725 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

I was not, as I explained in another comment.

Maps and Satelleite view are astounding, especially when you consider that they are free.

>How is this a desirable outcome?

The list speaks for itself. There are many valid complaints against google, but this is not one of them.

Search Engine: Google is fantastic with its index. Very poor with the results it returns. Sampling of the problems:

- There's a reason people add site:reddit.com - the default results are often very low quality. Sure, Google has the good quality stuff indexed, but over the last 5 years they've been declining like crazy in actually showing you what you need.

- When I search for something on mobile, I get fairly unstructured results. First, an AI blurb. Then the first batch of results are videos. Then some web sites. Then a break with "People also ask...". Then more web sites. Then image results.

99% of the time I just want the web sites. Before, if there were video/image results, they'd be on the top and I'd conveniently scroll past them to get to the meat. I can't do that any more. Google keeps breaking the flow by adding more and more sections. When I hit "More search results", the problem continues.

Thank God for Kagi.

> gmail

Lots of people don't use it (including me). Other than people losing their mail, I'm not sure what is lost if this goes away. Email providers are aplenty. What am I missing by not using Gmail?

> maps

I'll grant you this one.

> android

It's nice to have an alternative to Apple, but that's the only good thing about it. Using Android reminds me of the old Windows. Very unstable. Full of spyware/bloatware.

> chrome

The only thing Chrome was better at than Firefox was stability - for a brief period in its history. Firefox is just better. If a site works on Chrome and not Firefox, that's not because Firefox is inferior.

Calling Chrome an "incredibly, breathtakingly good product" is just insane. It's merely an OK browser.

> Gmail

Gmail is the best email provider of all time by a huge amount and has been since it's inception. I use proton mail as well and it's worse, a lot worse. It's slower, has fewer features and is not as good looking. From what I've seen of apple Mail and outlook they are worse still.

> Android

Personally, I prefer Android. There are a lot of things I'd miss going to iPhone. Like custom launchers, having a different browser, an app drawer, the way widgets work, ect...

> Chrome

I am concerned about the chromium engine creating a browser monoculture so I use Firefox. I have used Firefox every day for years and I have to say it's worse. Whenever I use chrome for a small thing I need I realize that its better. It's faster, better looking, things just work on it (I know part of this is because of its dominance but that's irrelevant when evaluating product quality). I don't use it but I'm not going to pretend that it's worse.

It is a bit like comparing a bank, a stock option broker, and a gambling site, and discussing which provide a better product to hold your money. It make no sense comparing them unless we view them as providing the same service.

Being free to run whatever code we want as users (F-droid is a treasure). Plus actually having a "disable animations completely" button to remove unneeded slowness.

Right, we've been through all that stuff with Internet Explorer—sites often preferred it over others even though its HTML extensions weren't standard W3C. Chrome is better but it's still favored for the same reasons.

Gmail is well below mediocre, it’s so sluggish and unresponsive even on fast hardware. Compare with fastmail; it’s hard to go back.

The search engine consistently gives me pages of blog spam before a useful result. Eg Kagi is dramatically more useful despite having a tiny fraction of the resources to work with.

People at Google work on many things, but they also build lots of shit.

I agree. The search index is great, the presentation is shitty.

As for maps: The most prominent features on it are ads. The rest is low contrast. For navigation the map is really bad. The satellite view is great.

Yeah not mediocre: It's great tech enshittified.

I literally laughed out loud at this. There is nothing further from the truth when you look at what else is out there. I feel like a lot of these comments are shilling for Google they're so biased.

Search is not amazing. Search is littered with garbage. Try out Kagi or even DDG for a day, but let's not pretend search hasn't been a dumpster fire for years now.

Here's a prior comment of mine explaining one poor search scenario: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43348712

I've just found another, "G Jones collab album" hardly has any results about his collaborations. In the first page of results there's only one relevant link and it's for Acid Disk 2 with EPROM. Spelling out "collaboration" doesn't make much difference. The results in Google are much more relevant to the key word here being "collab".

As an aside, I love duck.ai and use it frequently especially with work as I trust the privacy.

In fact, that's how things used to be before Google and their ilk used ads to make an ecosystem, and their ecosystem was better and free at the point of use than what came before

Also most people would probably prefer not to pay for the ad fees that google extorts from pretty much any company.

You can pay for Google One right now, roughly exchanging cash for storage capacity on the otherwise free services. I see no viable competition for that model. Protonmail is comparatively expensive.

I really don't want the Internet to turn into the mess that is video streaming where every independent licensing agency tries to capture an audience for $15/month.

Another great example is Let's Encrypt. It's a public good to provide quality TLS certificates and the marginal cost is $0 with some sponsorship. I'd far rather other core Internet services like e-mail and basic file sharing are sponsored.

- one skippable 5s ad

- two skippable 5s ads

- one unskippable 5s and one skippable 15s ads

- aforementioned or two 15s ads, one skippable

- two 15s unskippable ads

- removed the prerenderer 'skip' button to make it more difficult to immediately skip

- removed the ad amount indicator and precise length indicator (now just a bar) to psychologically drive people into sunk cost feelings

God knows what they're cooking up next.

And for large swathes of content, there is no alternative to YouTube.

I'm a firm believer in the issue being one of pricing, not that the consumer is willing to pay nothing at all.

I have this view because we've already seen how users flocked to iTunes, then Spotify/Apple Music and Netflix/other streaming services when the pricing was right. We are also now watching as people depart streaming services and return to direct sales and P2P file-sharing due to incrementally higher prices.

To me that's a sure indicator of price being the problem, not an insatiable appetite for zero cost.

The math largely makes sense too. Particularly in music if you're the type that has a taste for a genre of music, rather than just wanting to listen to the top 40.

It's crazy to me how entitled people are and how completely blind they are to how the ad supported model works.

Then these same people complain that youtube has no competitors. Yeah, no shit, who in their right mind would invest in a customer base like youtubes? Oh, that's right, Vid.me, and they went bankrupt in a year. Wonder why...

YouTube is no longer using ads to pay the bills. They're using them to be user hostile.

Normally I would say "just use a different service". But YouTube is a de facto monopoly.

Hence, if YouTube wants to act user hostile, you are well within your moral rights to be service hostile.

The same people telling us to 'just watch ads' then complain when the web gets a bit more crappy the next week, when another service or site uses the shifted window of tolerable behaviour to become more user hostile in chase of a bigger cut of the loot.

No, that’s not how it works, at all.

I give money to some people on Patreon, I pay for Nebula, but I am never going to give Google a single euro willingly. I’ll leave YouTube in a heartbeat the moment the people I follow (whom I am already giving money otherwise) make their content available elsewhere.

It's good you do it, thank you, and people run at the opportunity to show everyone they are doing the right thing (creating an illusion of popularity), but I can tell you from having seen the stats - essentially nobody does it.

Nebula, which you mention, has about 700k subscribers. Yet they host YouTube videos for creators who collectively have over 120M subscribers...that is a 0.6% conversion rate.

I believe you, really. I still prefer that than people profiting off me without my consent.

There is hope, there are some media who manage with strategies ranging from complete paywalls (like Nebula, though I would be very curious to know how profitable it is for the uploaders) to the opposite (like the Guardian, who seem to be getting enough money despite very little friction to get to the articles).

Thinking about good old-fashioned newspapers, most of the readership did not pay, either. There is no reason why a combination of subscribers, non-invasive advertising, and sponsorship could not accommodate a certain number of freeloaders.

> Nebula, which you mention, has about 700k subscribers. Yet they host YouTube videos for creators who collectively have over 120M subscribers...that is a 0.6% conversion rate.

Nebula has a chicken and egg problem, and YouTube has an infinitely broader reach. It certainly is not perfect. That said, I don’t think Nebula needs to make as much money as YouTube, just enough so that people can make a living producing good stuff instead of slop optimised for ads.

Remove active content from online advertising and I'll disable my ad blocker.

And a lot of them already suffer from subscription fatigue.

I built my free web stats service in 2004 because I couldn't afford an Urchin license. Google bought Urchin Live and rebranded it as Google Analytics, and gave it away for free. My service barely pays for itself 20+ years later, but I'm still here and would have an offering for that market on day one that Google Analytics shut down. So would dozens of others.

Nearly everything that was acquired was a) already free, and b) built (and given away for free) in hopes that someone like Google would acquire them.

If you look at most startups, their exit strategy is acquisition. Some would live to IPO, but that is a much tougher road.

It could be argued that IPO is a less likely exit strategy because of Google’s and others’ position, but I think it’s disingenuous to imply that startups (that are already giving away their products for free) are getting acquired as a last resort.

Most CEOs plan and hope for it.

And that is a part of the problem.

Were all built within google. For most people (who do not sell software on the internet) we get a great trade from the current state of things!

Google Maps was built on the acquisitions of Where 2 Technologies, Keyhole and ZipDash.

Chrome is based on WebKit, built at Apple.

Waymo's hardware came from the acquisition of 510 Systems, and the software came from the acquihiring of the team that developed Stanford's self-driving cars for the 2005 and 2007 DARPA challenges, who brought their code with them.

Chrome's renderer (Blink) is indeed a fork of Safari's renderer (WebKit) but that in turn was forked from Konqueror's renderer (KHTML).

They're not disputing that google has provided all these services, they're arguing that google's ability to subsidize them prevents market solutions for these same problems being produced.

The internet is, in this view, somewhat of a planned economy with Google as the central planning committee. You get google's maps and google's docs and google's search, rather than a maps marketplace, a docs marketplace, and a search marketplace.

Google is able to enforce this on the market because it holds a unique position where it can extract a significant amount of the value generated in the internet economy in 'ad taxes'.

Both Apple and Google need to be disrupted here. We should be able to see lots of healthy verticals for every single one of these product categories. They shouldn't accrue to two players and be impossible to dislodge.

I propose the word "Googolith" to describe {Google, Apple, Amazon}, though it's not a great attempt. We do need some kind of word or language to describe these anti-competitive titans that are impossible to innovate against. The word "monopoly" gets shut down, but the control they wield may as well be monopolistic. There's no choice and there's no competing. They're practically nation states.

People may celebrate the break-up of google, but it will be short lived when they find that now everything they do on the internet that they used to do through google costs a monthly sub. Or is ad supported with zero tolerance for ad-blocking.

The reason competing with google is impossible is because people are deathly allergic to paying for things that they think are free. Vid.me sucked all the air out of the room for a few months in 2017 and was pulling tons of yotubers over. Then it went bankrupt because "People don't like subscriptions, people don't like ads."

You know what will be short lived? The disruption itself. We're not talking about the death of Sol.

The most significant fact in all of this is that everything will stabilize and we'll all be fine (except the monopoly, which is the point). And when it's all said and done, we'll come out the other side better for it.

Google drive is likewise awful. I upload something to it and there it is. I come back 10 years later and it's still there. Why doesn't it do more? Why can't it make my file better over time? Why can't they take ideas from dropbox, or box, or onedrive. Stupid monopoly forcing us all into one choice.

And as for Google Fiber, well there are so many ISPs offering gigabit plans now, what is Fiber going to offer to do better? It's like you said we need a healthy marketplace with competing companies, not just the one monopolist with shitty gigabit ethernet service.

And don't even get me started on gmail!

What functionality are you expecting?

In the first case they could have paid someone $20 on fiverrr or whatever to go and physically look to see if it's closed and update it more quickly. Not sure about the second case, but either way if a maps service put in the effort to have more accurate hours they could do so, and that would be a reasonable thing for users to pay for.

This is a point that will be recurring and merits more thought IMHO.

Google services are mostly better because they crushed competition. Cutting their advantage will also mean better alternatives (money will flow to competitors instead of being sucked by Google).

As an analogy, it's like athlete doping: they sure were faster than the other athletes, but that's part of the issue.

Google tapped into that by creating an ad economy, which since it's inception also comes with a payment optional feature (ad-blocking).

People may hate google, but by god do they ever love the internet google created.

I actually wonder how much people actually like the current web. People bitching about popups and ads is enough of a staple of our culture.

What Google "gives" isn't popping from nowhere, the billions they use to fund it still came from us, just in indirect ways.

If the parents were slowly siphoning off enough of the teen's money through a convoluted set of channels such that the teenager indirectly paid for the truck anyway and the parents ended up effectively taking a share of the money, that would be definitely worth hating.

People are blind to this, they think Google is a charity that got greedy. Meanwhile they haven't let a Google ad through their ad blocker for 15 years.

Youtube Premium is $13.99/mo or you get ads with also zero tolerance for ad blocking. We've already been there for a while wherever Google is serious about it.

I don't think people understand that it would be trivial for Google to block anyone with an ad blocker from accessing any Google domain.

And if they did that, cut off the people who use the services but never pay, those people would complain.

[0] https://www.techspot.com/news/107221-youtube-anti-ad-blocker...

And little of value would be lost.

No. Google is making money, it is not a charity. More than that, they do everything they can to obfuscate that fact and brainwash us into thinking we just get it for free thanks to their generosity. It is not the case at all. All these services are data funnels for the actual main business of Google, which is to sell ads.

If they make money off our backs, it is not unreasonable to have some expectations.