Sherman Act: "Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a felony."
People do go to prison for Sherman Act violations. Here are some older Department of Justice statistics.[1]
This sounds exactly like the LIBOR rigging scam, various commodity market scandals. People rightfully go to jail for this stuff -- meanwhile we see the big tech companies bid rig
What can we as people in top 1% with 1) information about big tech abuses 2) skills to fix this do?
Individually we can use browsers like firefox or brave and probably donate time or money to them, but I think it's not enough.
I think we would need something like a movement against those abuses, but probably the biggest win would be a business model that could win with them in the free market.
Is this possible? Has anyone tried something like this?
Incentivize the economy to not overproduce bullshit ad nauseam. Vote with your wallet, and push for it culturally, or spiritually - offer alternative experiences and goals to consumerism. Stop working for companies producing products nobody asked for, which are made for “economic growth” as a goal in it self. (If your factual constraints allow for it.)
As long as there is this enormous pressure to sell you ever more things, nothing will change for the better… just change: More influencers, more product placements and sponsor guided “content“, more MLM type bullshit all around. Someone will figure out how to recruit your friends and family to explicitly advertise the next innovation in problem creation inside your last domain of unquestioned trust and honesty - mark my words! How about a gamified “hit” on your friends? Getting big-data intelligence briefings and some psychological guidance on someone you used to care about, and some shitty internet points as reward for their conversion: “Agent 1337biz, your next target is your colleague John Doe. The file is transmitted as we speak. Further our influence, your loyalty will be rewarded! Hail, Hydra”.
You aren't addressing the question. The poster asked what specifically tech workers could do. You are giving examples of things _anyone_ could so to help fix the situation, aside from "just stop working for them".
> Stop working for companies producing products nobody asked for
What is this in reference to? Nobody asked for Google to create their ad marketplace? No, there is huge demand for and complicity with targeted ads among millions of small businesses.
I tell everyone about Firefox and uBlock Origin. Blocking YouTube ads is enough of an argument to convince anyone to at least try it out. I've never seen someone who didn't love the ad-free web experience. It's actually safe to just install this software on random computers: people's quality of life will be invisibly yet thoroughly improved, they will notice that things are just better even if they can't explain why. They'll be a lot safer from malware too.
The objective is to reduce the return on investment of advertisers as much as possible. This will only happen in significant enough numbers once a significant portion of the population is blocking ads. It's our moral imperative to spread ad blocking technology far and wide.
> It's actually safe to just install this software on random computers
+1, i actually did this a couple times on some friends computer when i noticed they hadn't any blocker installed (although i did tell them afterwards).
Let's run a crowdfunding to rent some maleware on shady forum to install ublock origin without consent :)
Huh, I think it's really critical to understand that the ad blocker is there, so you can turn it off sometimes. I run across forms all the time that silently fail to submit until I turn off the ad blocker.
... the biggest win would be a business model that could win with them in the free market.
The alternative business model is so simple and is already in place --- simply advertise based on expressed interest.
This is what DuckDuckGo is doing very effectively. Show ads based on search words. No global, privacy invading network required. Amazon is doing the same quite effectively. Their ad business is growing by leaps and bounds simply by showing ads based on search terms.
That's how Google used to do things back in the day! I still don't get how in the hell could personalized ads be more profitable. All I've heard is the "we'll keep showing you ads for toasters after you bought one because you'd buy another if the first one breaks" meme but where's the hard evidence on personalized ads getting more clicks?! Contextual at least intuitively seems to make way more sense.
I think more whistleblowers and legal ramifications for C-level execs (prison time preferably since they can happily pay any fine thrown at them) is the only real way to do it at this point.
The few experiences I had with whistleblowers is that it's way too sensitive and may never be handled officially by any system/government. They would have done it already :).
How would anyone compete with a scam business model? Ad buyers don't care if it's effective. Or rather they need convincing-looking gibberish to convince their bosses that they're worthwhile. Bosses don't want to seem stupid and are afraid of missing out, so they let it continue.
I suppose a free-speech distributed search service could make a difference if it was actually better than google. Imagine with distributed hosting similar to mail/dns-servers, where ISP:s could redirect their traffic to local mirrors.
Really slick alternatives to walled-garden apps as interfaces to standard protocol services like imap/matrix/etc, and make sure the servers are reliable and painless to set up.
stop working at those companies. but a good number of people around these parts have already decided going through fb/google hazing is worth it for the paycheck. screw ethics. you already know, once a company reaches monopoly position, a lot of corners have been cut and it has been unethical. that's a discussion HN at large is not ready to have atm.
"You can’t buy ethics offsets for the terrible things you do at your day job."
and:
"But here’s the thing. You can’t help Uber build Greyball during the day, or help Palantir design databases to round up immigrants as your main gig, and then buy ethics offsets by doing a non-profit side hustle. We need you to work ethically during that day job much more than we need you working with that non-profit."
> a business model that could win with them in the free market.
The entire point here is that the market is not, at least in this particular instance, "free". When a market is very explicitly being manipulated by a cartel who jointly hold a monopoly position over said market... they are in a position to prevent effective competition permanently.
> What can we as people in top 1% with 1) information about big tech abuses 2) skills to fix this do?
Nothing. This can't be fixed. Where there is power, there will be abuse. This is an unfixable trait of humanity. What can be done is reducing the impact of abuse and regularly investigate and educate about them. Transparency is important here, and regulating individual power.
> I think we would need something like a movement against those abuses,
Those already exist. Just support them. Or do you mean specific cases like misusages in the ad-market?
> Is this possible? Has anyone tried something like this?
History is a constant battle of powers about abuse. Those problems are neither new, nor special. Abuse will always exist, and it's the daily struggle of humanity to find the balance between the benefits and losses for all the different groups around the world.
>What can we as people in top 1% with 1) information about big tech abuses 2) skills to fix this do?
support politicians and lobbyists with your money / influence that are in favor of bringing robust anti-trust legislation to bear on the companies in question. The free market mythology is just one of the reasons we are in this situation to begin with.
If you browse HN from 10 years ago, you'll see exactly the same advice, except instead of "replace Chrome with Firefox" it was "replace IE with Chrome".
That combination works but it doesn't solve the issue for apps and smart devices. At that point your only real options are PiHole or a VPN with builtin ad filtration.
individually we need to stop working for unethical companies
we are the ones building these tools, reading these articles / comments sections, and talking with our colleagues and friends working on developing these products
we just have to accept that our takehome might not be as large at the end of the pay-cycle. feels better spending it tho :)
Individually it doesn't work. Unethical behavior is generally profitable, more so then the ethical behavior it is 'out competing'. The Unethical groups then use this profit to buy out and corner the market.
and on a larger scale, a different social model with less consumerism, thus less ads and less big corps trying to ensure more profits by any means. The more we delegate the less we see. I don't like to transfer web to real world but a more peer to peer life could help. Sorry for the fuzzy comment but with the advent of advanced robotics and ubiquitous computing, we'll probably have no choice but to rethink daily lives.
"individually we need to stop working for unethical companies"
Has there been a single case in history where this worked? has this been an issue for drug gangs, mafia, loan sharks, tobacco, alcohol or gun companies or any kind of evil organisation, ever? If not, maybe we should stop parroting it?
I am very much interested in furthering this discussion. Every so often there is something big like this in the news, we talk about it for a few days and then forget about it. Nothing substantially changes. No big consequences for the guilty. How do we fix this?
Stop using their junk. Delete your facebook, switch to fastmail or protonmail. Join patreaon and support content creators directly. There are plenty of things you can do you just have to start doing them.
Can a campaign like Mozilla did to promote firefox when ie6 was a monopoly work?
Promote a different browser when someone uses chrome with the possibility to get explanations about it. Contacting admins of sites that only works in chrome, this kind of thing.
Could this information be used to try to push chromium based browser like brave and edge to switch to another engine, lowering the influence of google on the web?
This will not adress the whole google service spectrum but chrome is the trojan horse for a lot of google strategies.
It's extremely hard to out-campaign Chrome's campaign of being pushed via google.com and youtube.com, unfortunately.
Though I'd like to see Mozilla try more promotion channels like video sponsorships, maybe go heavier in regions where Google is not as dominant as in the US…
Why should the burden be on common people ? It’s the government and policy makers job to enforce the law and make appropriate policies and legislation. Common people pay taxes (a lot of it) for them to do their job. Why do commoners have to wade into politics and then get exploited by the politicians to fight brother against brothers?
Maybe the people leaving ad-tech are the people you should hire? FB and Google pay top compensation, so anyone who doesn't work there anymore probably decided to eschew money for some other purpose.
E.g. I didn't know how gross ad-tech was until I saw how the sausage was made.
This movement is called open source. We should educate people about importance of privacy and show them open source, privacy respecting, self hosted alternatives to closed source, tracking, proprietary services. If all of us converted only one person, this would make a legion of conscious people.
Median net worth in my state is ~$800,000. I'm worth quite a fair bit less than that, so I'm apparently not even in the upper half. (I'm a SWE, I've worked, at times, for large tech companies, include one in FAANG, who paid in line with about what I'm earning now, adjusted for experience.)
(Nationally, the median net worth is $121,000 (!) — so I'm upper half there, but still not 1%, since 20M Californias are worth far more.)
Reminds me that one of these days I should work out the day I became net-worth positive… (since, like many Americans, I started with a fair bit of college debt…)
"business model that could win with them in the free market"
Does "free market" mean there are no laws? Is so, start kidnapping their executives.
No, we have laws? Well then perhaps police and courts should do their jobs, but I guess harassing everyday joe is easier than holding megacorps to account.
The solution to the technopolies is decentralized technologies. I used to write full explanations of how that would work, but my comments about it always get buried. So I don't bother really explaining anymore.
Data intermediaries - our data is placed there, like our cash in a bank - and Fuckerberg and Co have to pay us for access. Like the banks pay us interest for giving them cash. Point being Google, FB, Twitter et al pay out more and get less and therefore are less exploitative douchebags whose activities and unintended consequences at scale are also less.
Poison pill. You're assuming and entrenching the practice of gathering such heaps of data and tracking behavior are okay to do in the first place. Remember, the money is a symptom of the root problem. A microcosm of humanity has built a surveillance infrastructure to monitor the rest with no consent. That's the problem.
The swindle with FLOC was pretty obviously tied in this, but people still went in circles discussing whether it's private or not, and downvoting those who said FLOC is a trap.
Let's consult the plan, nothing is even secret about this:
- Google disables third-party cookies, crippling competitors to its Analytics, and thus their data for ads.
- Google throws them the FLOC bone to avoid being sued, dressing it up as a privacy measure. Meanwhile FLOC is controlled by Google's code in the browser.
- Google itself continues to vacuum up users' stats for all sites through the browser, never needing the cookies or FLOC.
So, if this is not a case of Google using its monopoly on web services (email and video) and the monopoly on the browser to prop up its monopoly on web ads, then I don't know what is.
The baffling part, really, is: with Goog already being ahead of the rest of the planet by having surveillance in The Browser, why don't they chill the hell out and stop right there. It's almost like someone inside decided to set up a multibillion-dollar morality performance and demonstrate what happens when a company is being too greedy.
Also, we probably need to remember that even if Goog is told off and has to dial its appetites back, it still sits on a database of surveillance data on people through the web, the browser, the services and Android. Which database, for example, is used by the US police for location->people requests, of which folks by definition only some are potential subjects of investigation (see e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/13/technology/google-sensorv...).
Everyone reading this on Chrome should switch their browser today. Get off of Gmail while you're at it. There is no perfect alternative, but all those reasons why you think you can't switch don't add up to anything a fraction as bad as what Google is doing.
Seriously. Anyone who cares at all about privacy should never have touched Chrome in the first place. The reasons for its existence were obvious from the outset.
Frankly, I'm not sure about the current state of things, seeing as it likely has changed several times in the past few years. However, a) I'm not sure why Goog would want to bother with browser accounts otherwise, and b) my use of Chrome ceased soonish after I had the following experience in the early 2010s:
- set up a new empty site, listed absolutely nowhere, on quite dedicated hosting.
- open it in Chrome.
- a couple minutes later, observe Googlebot appearing in the visitor logs of the site.
Lastly, if you go to the ‘My activity’ settings on Google, you can see: “Include Chrome history and activity from sites, apps, and devices that use Google services”, which I guess can still be dissected further. And I have some website visits from 2016 listed there: including Wikipedia, which doesn't seem to use Google Analytics currently (not sure about 2016)—though these could be visits through Google search.
Also, text in the linked tweet directly says that Google tracks users on third-party sites through Chrome.
tl;dr If logged in to Chrome, your Google Account can be used as an "identity signal" in place of a first-party cookie. This allows cross-domain and cross-device tracking.
Last time I checked, they also removed the "identity consistency between browser and cookie jar" flag that controlled automatically signing into Chrome if you signed into a Google service like YouTube. It is no longer possible to turn it off.
Yes, they also probably have also an AI collecting what makes your activity a unique profile even if you are not logged in. Thanks to google search, map, analytics, android, dns, amp, google fonts and the like, you almost always load something from a google server if you browse the web.
The baffling part is 99.9% of the internet inclusive but not limited to HN were sold as they "Do No Evil". Even after they drop it.
None of these is new. The strategic thinking of Google has been clear since Day 1. And now revealed in multiple email shown in court, both in terms of Chrome browser during Firefox era and Ads. ( And possibly Google Earth ? )
While it is nice to see sentiment finally changing after nearly 20 years. For some strange reason I just feel rather sad about it.
> The swindle with FLOC was pretty obviously tied in this, but people still went in circles discussing whether it's private or not, and downvoting those who said FLOC is a trap.
The brigading on HN in particular seems extremely obvious when it comes to Google related articles.
Personally, i don't think there's anything wrong with holding a monopoly as long as it stems from merit.
However, we are proven time after time that power corrupts. Unless there's a regulatory body to watch their every move it seems they'll abuse their dominance to maximize profits.
Even if a monopoly were achieved on merit (I don't necessarily agree that it was in this case), the incentive to maintain that merit disappears once the power is obtained. Even if that weren't true (i.e. if power didn't corrupt) they could simply degrade naturally while the bar for entry would remain too high due to economies of scale and other reasons. And don't forget the incentives against downsizing: layoffs hurt labor, reduced consumption hurts suppliers while withdrawal of products and services hurts customers and the brand simultaneously. People have made better arguments than I have but my point is even a moments thought should make you reconsider your position.
The big tech companies (and more) act as a cartel, doing things for each other to kick out smaller rivals or just censor and deplatform people and groups they don't like. This is just evidence that it's more than wink-and-nod deals, which I think most of us suspected anyway.
Social media, search, payment processors, hosting sites... they all work in lockstep for the benefit of the cartel. We lose privacy, opportunity, and freedom and these companies gain more power.
There needs to be a bigger crackdown on the power that these companies hold, and not just when some documents happen to leak. America is in the best position to do this theoretically, but neither head of the American uniparty even pretends like they're going to do anything about it.
This is a list of accusations, right? This is all pre-trial, so a journalist would want to put the word "alleged" in front of this rather than writing it up as though they'd discovered the undisputed truth? Just checking, I know it's not going to make a difference. Not a fan of Google at all, but I do like to pretend there's a process.
Only a journalist who is worried about the possibility of being sued for defamation really needs to consider using alleged in reporting. The truth is an absolute defense to defamation. If you are confident in your reporting, and especially if you have good lawyers, then you don't need to hedge. (Source: was a lawyer who used to do some of this work at one time in my life)
Edit: If you are just reporting second-hand on someone else's work and haven't done the investigating yourself, then you might indeed want to say alleged whatevers.
Burden of proof is not identical between a journalist and a judge (or a jury of your peers). A journalist who has verified something to be true to the best of their ability is within their remit to report it as fact.
in this case, the journalist is reporting on the contents of a lawsuit. the journalist is not making any claim to have verified the truth of the allegations, only the existence of the allegations.
Well I imagine so. But it still means google management decided to fund (relatively expensive) top notch research just to act as a front for their criminal operation.
I tend to doubt that a team of top-notch economics researchers is entirely unable to notice that the market they are studying is being manipulated (even if they are in the dark about specifics of the manipulation)
Readit News
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28975222
A full article on Jedi Blue:
"Google acknowledges it foresaw possibility of probe of 'Jedi Blue' advertising deal with Facebook"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28975782
A big discussion of an article on "Project NERA":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28974798
An enormous thread on alleged Google Facebook collusion - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28965949 - Oct 2021 (335 comments)
People do go to prison for Sherman Act violations. Here are some older Department of Justice statistics.[1]
So when will we see the first arrests?
[1] https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/about/commissio...
But you'll get more internet virtue points phrasing it your way.
That sounds rather cartel-like
Individually we can use browsers like firefox or brave and probably donate time or money to them, but I think it's not enough.
I think we would need something like a movement against those abuses, but probably the biggest win would be a business model that could win with them in the free market.
Is this possible? Has anyone tried something like this?
As long as there is this enormous pressure to sell you ever more things, nothing will change for the better… just change: More influencers, more product placements and sponsor guided “content“, more MLM type bullshit all around. Someone will figure out how to recruit your friends and family to explicitly advertise the next innovation in problem creation inside your last domain of unquestioned trust and honesty - mark my words! How about a gamified “hit” on your friends? Getting big-data intelligence briefings and some psychological guidance on someone you used to care about, and some shitty internet points as reward for their conversion: “Agent 1337biz, your next target is your colleague John Doe. The file is transmitted as we speak. Further our influence, your loyalty will be rewarded! Hail, Hydra”.
> Stop working for companies producing products nobody asked for
What is this in reference to? Nobody asked for Google to create their ad marketplace? No, there is huge demand for and complicity with targeted ads among millions of small businesses.
The objective is to reduce the return on investment of advertisers as much as possible. This will only happen in significant enough numbers once a significant portion of the population is blocking ads. It's our moral imperative to spread ad blocking technology far and wide.
+1, i actually did this a couple times on some friends computer when i noticed they hadn't any blocker installed (although i did tell them afterwards).
Let's run a crowdfunding to rent some maleware on shady forum to install ublock origin without consent :)
Dead Comment
The alternative business model is so simple and is already in place --- simply advertise based on expressed interest.
This is what DuckDuckGo is doing very effectively. Show ads based on search words. No global, privacy invading network required. Amazon is doing the same quite effectively. Their ad business is growing by leaps and bounds simply by showing ads based on search terms.
https://nypost.com/2021/10/19/i-found-an-amazon-folder-with-...
I suppose a free-speech distributed search service could make a difference if it was actually better than google. Imagine with distributed hosting similar to mail/dns-servers, where ISP:s could redirect their traffic to local mirrors.
Really slick alternatives to walled-garden apps as interfaces to standard protocol services like imap/matrix/etc, and make sure the servers are reliable and painless to set up.
and:
"But here’s the thing. You can’t help Uber build Greyball during the day, or help Palantir design databases to round up immigrants as your main gig, and then buy ethics offsets by doing a non-profit side hustle. We need you to work ethically during that day job much more than we need you working with that non-profit."
-- https://deardesignstudent.com/ethics-cant-be-a-side-hustle-b...
The entire point here is that the market is not, at least in this particular instance, "free". When a market is very explicitly being manipulated by a cartel who jointly hold a monopoly position over said market... they are in a position to prevent effective competition permanently.
Nothing. This can't be fixed. Where there is power, there will be abuse. This is an unfixable trait of humanity. What can be done is reducing the impact of abuse and regularly investigate and educate about them. Transparency is important here, and regulating individual power.
> I think we would need something like a movement against those abuses,
Those already exist. Just support them. Or do you mean specific cases like misusages in the ad-market?
> Is this possible? Has anyone tried something like this?
History is a constant battle of powers about abuse. Those problems are neither new, nor special. Abuse will always exist, and it's the daily struggle of humanity to find the balance between the benefits and losses for all the different groups around the world.
support politicians and lobbyists with your money / influence that are in favor of bringing robust anti-trust legislation to bear on the companies in question. The free market mythology is just one of the reasons we are in this situation to begin with.
If you browse HN from 10 years ago, you'll see exactly the same advice, except instead of "replace Chrome with Firefox" it was "replace IE with Chrome".
we are the ones building these tools, reading these articles / comments sections, and talking with our colleagues and friends working on developing these products
we just have to accept that our takehome might not be as large at the end of the pay-cycle. feels better spending it tho :)
Has there been a single case in history where this worked? has this been an issue for drug gangs, mafia, loan sharks, tobacco, alcohol or gun companies or any kind of evil organisation, ever? If not, maybe we should stop parroting it?
They may have defrauded you.
Look at lichess.org, it’s possible.
Promote a different browser when someone uses chrome with the possibility to get explanations about it. Contacting admins of sites that only works in chrome, this kind of thing.
Could this information be used to try to push chromium based browser like brave and edge to switch to another engine, lowering the influence of google on the web?
This will not adress the whole google service spectrum but chrome is the trojan horse for a lot of google strategies.
Though I'd like to see Mozilla try more promotion channels like video sponsorships, maybe go heavier in regions where Google is not as dominant as in the US…
Yes; it worked. somehow, they blew the goodwill away.
/me still a Firefox user. I'll fly away if something better comes along - FF is very much a compromise.
E.g. I didn't know how gross ad-tech was until I saw how the sausage was made.
Median net worth in my state is ~$800,000. I'm worth quite a fair bit less than that, so I'm apparently not even in the upper half. (I'm a SWE, I've worked, at times, for large tech companies, include one in FAANG, who paid in line with about what I'm earning now, adjusted for experience.)
(Nationally, the median net worth is $121,000 (!) — so I'm upper half there, but still not 1%, since 20M Californias are worth far more.)
Reminds me that one of these days I should work out the day I became net-worth positive… (since, like many Americans, I started with a fair bit of college debt…)
Does "free market" mean there are no laws? Is so, start kidnapping their executives.
No, we have laws? Well then perhaps police and courts should do their jobs, but I guess harassing everyday joe is easier than holding megacorps to account.
But they decrease my taxes! Too bad pay up.
Well explained here - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Np5ri-KktNs
Go into politics.
Yes, that simple. Easy? No. Simple? Yes.
Dead Comment
(https://twitter.com/fasterthanlime/status/145209451374118912...)
The swindle with FLOC was pretty obviously tied in this, but people still went in circles discussing whether it's private or not, and downvoting those who said FLOC is a trap.
Let's consult the plan, nothing is even secret about this:
- Google disables third-party cookies, crippling competitors to its Analytics, and thus their data for ads.
- Google throws them the FLOC bone to avoid being sued, dressing it up as a privacy measure. Meanwhile FLOC is controlled by Google's code in the browser.
- Google itself continues to vacuum up users' stats for all sites through the browser, never needing the cookies or FLOC.
So, if this is not a case of Google using its monopoly on web services (email and video) and the monopoly on the browser to prop up its monopoly on web ads, then I don't know what is.
The baffling part, really, is: with Goog already being ahead of the rest of the planet by having surveillance in The Browser, why don't they chill the hell out and stop right there. It's almost like someone inside decided to set up a multibillion-dollar morality performance and demonstrate what happens when a company is being too greedy.
Also, we probably need to remember that even if Goog is told off and has to dial its appetites back, it still sits on a database of surveillance data on people through the web, the browser, the services and Android. Which database, for example, is used by the US police for location->people requests, of which folks by definition only some are potential subjects of investigation (see e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/13/technology/google-sensorv...).
Is there an easy way to download that or move it to another provider?
- set up a new empty site, listed absolutely nowhere, on quite dedicated hosting.
- open it in Chrome.
- a couple minutes later, observe Googlebot appearing in the visitor logs of the site.
Lastly, if you go to the ‘My activity’ settings on Google, you can see: “Include Chrome history and activity from sites, apps, and devices that use Google services”, which I guess can still be dissected further. And I have some website visits from 2016 listed there: including Wikipedia, which doesn't seem to use Google Analytics currently (not sure about 2016)—though these could be visits through Google search.
Also, text in the linked tweet directly says that Google tracks users on third-party sites through Chrome.
Ads: https://support.google.com/ads/answer/2662856#zippy=,when-yo...
Analytics: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9445345?hl=en&re...
tl;dr If logged in to Chrome, your Google Account can be used as an "identity signal" in place of a first-party cookie. This allows cross-domain and cross-device tracking.
I’m pretty sure it does not track any activity on non-Google properties.
Dead Comment
Any time you ask, "why?", the answer is money for the investors.
Of course most people don't care, so here we are.
The baffling part is 99.9% of the internet inclusive but not limited to HN were sold as they "Do No Evil". Even after they drop it.
None of these is new. The strategic thinking of Google has been clear since Day 1. And now revealed in multiple email shown in court, both in terms of Chrome browser during Firefox era and Ads. ( And possibly Google Earth ? )
While it is nice to see sentiment finally changing after nearly 20 years. For some strange reason I just feel rather sad about it.
The brigading on HN in particular seems extremely obvious when it comes to Google related articles.
Deleted Comment
However, we are proven time after time that power corrupts. Unless there's a regulatory body to watch their every move it seems they'll abuse their dominance to maximize profits.
Social media, search, payment processors, hosting sites... they all work in lockstep for the benefit of the cartel. We lose privacy, opportunity, and freedom and these companies gain more power.
There needs to be a bigger crackdown on the power that these companies hold, and not just when some documents happen to leak. America is in the best position to do this theoretically, but neither head of the American uniparty even pretends like they're going to do anything about it.
Edit: If you are just reporting second-hand on someone else's work and haven't done the investigating yourself, then you might indeed want to say alleged whatevers.
Sure, if you discount 100% the cost of defamation litigation.
The law (at least in the United States) is "innocent until proven guilty". Until it goes to court, they are presummed innocent.
The phrase "alleged" is put in to all reputable journalists work because they follow the law.
So at this point, even if none of that ended up being true (unlikely), I still hope it will hurt their reputation badly.
Unfortunately a growing sentiment in this day and age.
One of the tweets is about Chrome forcing logins to Google products (and vice versa), which has officially been a thing for like 5 years, at least.
This anti-feature is very well known and is why many of us switched to Firefox.
But it's all rigged in the end.
So Google pushed the perverseness as far as basically creating a fake research lab to cover it all.