I pray for Google to completely fail the pivot to AI. We don't need another surveillance capitalism company using AI to make us even dumber and more addicted to screens.
I so hope that Google goes down. (And I pray the same for Facebook and a couple others).
Saying this about a compute rental service is hilarious
They have the power to do what exactly? Sell you some EC2 instances at reasonable prices? lol
There’s organizations that have the power to openly kidnap and execute people and we’re being melodramatic about a few buildings with computers in them
AdSense is the one that people underestimate. It's a piranha pool of liquid cash, billions-scale impressions and near global outreach. Any sane nation would have banned it decades ago, unless it was propping up a global influence campaign for their government.
"Possibility for abuse" seems like the right reason here. Does the benefiting of reducing a specific possibility of abuse outweigh the cost of an intervention? And here in particular, is there much cost to the intervention other than just shifting the money distribution from a zero-sum advertising arms race from one player to several?
I frequently see calls to not intervene if there's not bulletproof evidence of existing abuse, but why wait? Would you want Google to own a bunch of nuclear missiles just because they might not have misused them yet?
AdSense uses a sealed-bid auction system with arbitrary number of lots that Google controls. It's a FOMO market driven by artificial scarcity, and since Google contractually forbids AdSense-enabled websites from using competing services, it forces ad buyers to go through their closed, controlled system.
But in practice, nobody (well, nobody making lots of ad revenue from their website) uses AdSense exclusively. Most don't even use it at all - AdX is better as a header bidding fallback than AdSense. But those who do use AdSense as a fallback are using it in competition with many other ad networks.
They forbid those websites from using competitors? Isn’t that blatantly illegal? I guess it’s not actually illegal until they lose a court case for antitrust.
Every brand or product has to competitively bid for its own identity in a monopoly competitive bidding market.
It's downright evil.
Look at Google's AI rivals having to spend hundreds of millions just so customers can find them. Google Anthropic or OpenAI and see what you get.
The next admin needs to break Google up horizontally (not vertically) into competing browsers, clouds, and search products. They all need to fight. Healthy capitalism is fiercely competitive. Not whatever this invasive species that preys on everything else is.
They also need to make it illegal to place ads for registered trademarks. The EU should get in on that too.
>The next admin needs to break Google up horizontally (not vertically) into competing browsers, clouds, and search products. They all need to fight. Healthy capitalism is fiercely competitive. Not whatever this invasive species that preys on everything else is.
That sounds great if you're rich and can afford to pay for all the million subscriptions that will pop up to replace what Google offers.
Google offers an insane amount of value to people for free: YouTube, Android, Google Search, Trends, Scholar, Maps, Chrome, Translate, Gmail. These would all be paid subscription products without adsense (or some equivalent). And as paid products they would get the typical subscription enshittification over time.
Also, on the topic of AI: didn't the transformers research paper come from Google? In an alternate world that would've been a trade secret locked away inside Google.
Yep. They can make every mistake imaginable and not work as hard but still win. It’s the power of concentrated capital and monopolistic behavior and what people call “moats” but really is just an unfair advantage. Why should Google or Apple be allowed to copy everyone’s AI tech and just win because of distribution through Chrome or iPhones?
We need new antitrust laws and heavy taxes just on the megacorps worth $500B or more. And aggressive enforcement.
When they bundle an AI Chatbot into their existing contracts for Google workspace, they are competing unfairly. When the Chrome browser steers you towards Google properties by default, they are competing unfairly. Etc. Those unfair monopolistic actions let them come into the market years late with a viable competitor to ChatGPT or other products.
And let’s not give them too much credit for transformers. A handful of researchers were paid by Google while they came up with that paper. Google didn’t really do anything to push for it and neither Google leaders nor shareholders cared much about it at the time. Not to mention, transformers themselves were just a continuation of other prior steps in ML, from what I’ve read.
Not that I'm opposed to new laws, but just having enforcement of the laws we already have would go a long way to fixing the problems.
The problem is how to get to the point where there is enforcement.
It definitely isn't going to happen with Republicans in power, and it also isn't a sure thing with Democrats in power either.
Lina Khan was a good start for a bit there, but she certainly didn't have universal Dem support. Establishment Democrats are going to have to grow a spine and tell the Reid Hoffmanesque donor class to get fucked.
The current set of laws lead to the current situation in my opinion. Enforcement within the current laws means a court case that will take years and span multiple administrations, which gives it a lot of time to be killed. It doesn’t provide enough authority to immediately bring enforcement actions.
Even the original gold rush pickaxe guy Sam Brannan went broke, and he practically had a monopoly on pickaxes by buying up the entire supply: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Brannan
The "picks and shovels" people from the dotcom days all went broke. The stuff they had convinced themselves and their investors was crucial turned out to be not important.
Cisco is doing great. Sun got acquired by Oracle. Oracle itself is also fine (apart from it is Oracle). Akamai is doing fine.
From the pure software side, Macromedia got acquired. RedHat was doing fine before IBM gobbled it up. But I honestly can't remember any other "picks and shovels" software companies from pre-dotcom.
The glass-in-the-ground people went spectacularly broke. I also suggest you look up the stock price chart for JDSU. On the software side, Ariba and Commerce One.
I so hope that Google goes down. (And I pray the same for Facebook and a couple others).
They have the power to do what exactly? Sell you some EC2 instances at reasonable prices? lol
There’s organizations that have the power to openly kidnap and execute people and we’re being melodramatic about a few buildings with computers in them
You can hyper-target your ad or scam to vulnerable individual.
Unlike traditional media, like newspaper, you can post an ad with no visibility outside your target group -- which is hard to discover.
The report button is just some generic "second look" and automation within the same organization, there are no oversight.
Why?
I frequently see calls to not intervene if there's not bulletproof evidence of existing abuse, but why wait? Would you want Google to own a bunch of nuclear missiles just because they might not have misused them yet?
They turned this into "search".
Every brand or product has to competitively bid for its own identity in a monopoly competitive bidding market.
It's downright evil.
Look at Google's AI rivals having to spend hundreds of millions just so customers can find them. Google Anthropic or OpenAI and see what you get.
The next admin needs to break Google up horizontally (not vertically) into competing browsers, clouds, and search products. They all need to fight. Healthy capitalism is fiercely competitive. Not whatever this invasive species that preys on everything else is.
They also need to make it illegal to place ads for registered trademarks. The EU should get in on that too.
That sounds great if you're rich and can afford to pay for all the million subscriptions that will pop up to replace what Google offers.
Google offers an insane amount of value to people for free: YouTube, Android, Google Search, Trends, Scholar, Maps, Chrome, Translate, Gmail. These would all be paid subscription products without adsense (or some equivalent). And as paid products they would get the typical subscription enshittification over time.
Also, on the topic of AI: didn't the transformers research paper come from Google? In an alternate world that would've been a trade secret locked away inside Google.
We need new antitrust laws and heavy taxes just on the megacorps worth $500B or more. And aggressive enforcement.
And let’s not give them too much credit for transformers. A handful of researchers were paid by Google while they came up with that paper. Google didn’t really do anything to push for it and neither Google leaders nor shareholders cared much about it at the time. Not to mention, transformers themselves were just a continuation of other prior steps in ML, from what I’ve read.
The problem is how to get to the point where there is enforcement.
It definitely isn't going to happen with Republicans in power, and it also isn't a sure thing with Democrats in power either.
Lina Khan was a good start for a bit there, but she certainly didn't have universal Dem support. Establishment Democrats are going to have to grow a spine and tell the Reid Hoffmanesque donor class to get fucked.
/s
https://www.dsausa.org/
I know, I know, it’s really hard having these insights. We all have our crosses to bear. <giggling emoji>
From the pure software side, Macromedia got acquired. RedHat was doing fine before IBM gobbled it up. But I honestly can't remember any other "picks and shovels" software companies from pre-dotcom.
https://totalrealreturns.com/s/CSCO
Nortel - dead
Global crossing - dead
Netscape - dead (server) and/or dying (Mozilla)
Intel - almost dead
Palm - dead
Qualcomm - still around
Who else? Borland quietly withered away, but it had never been focused on tools specifically for the Internet.
A bunch of config management DSL startups, and web scale data storage solutions, not so much