Google should have been split up into shreds like 2 decades ago. Search wants to have income from ads? Good sell it to anybody who pays the most, just like every single newspaper does. Gmail wants to sell our data, or ad space? Good sell them, and not just reuse them internally. Chrome wants to monetize every single request you do? Go, sell them on the open market. And not this fake, "we're separate companies, but only on paper" way.
This should have been done a long time ago.
Firefox, and the browser market would be much more healthy. Btw, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, now even Twitter/SpaceX and all of these should have been forced the same way. And of course not just in this field, but all of them, like oil companies. They can pivot, of course, with some grace period, but that would mean giving up something at the end.
And if we are there, we can abolish most of trade secrecy too, which exists only to keep up the status quo while hindering progress.
Google is the answer to an Internet that largely blocks ads and uses backdoors to circumvent pay walls. A single massive pillar with enough surface area to carry all the dead weight.
If people want a better internet, they can start fostering one, rather than endlessly complain that someone else should be fostering it for them.
There will probably be upwards of 1000 people who read this comment that have used Google services for 15+ years, never loaded a single ad, and complain about Google ruining the internet. Please, pick-up a mirror. Nobody wants to build a competitor to serve your cheap ass
Google is routinely buying and destroying competitors.
They lower prices to kill competition en-masse. They promote their own products in search and elsewhere over paid ads.
Search Engine have chicken and egg problem, you can only have a good search if enough people use it to tune the ranking and see enough search spam cases.
“Just compete with a monopoly on their own field with one hand tied behind”
Every Google competitor has the problem that 40% of users won't load ads and 99% won't pay a subscription.
They don't need to do anything adversarial, the greed driven mindset of the internet (ads suck, everything should be free) staves off any real competition.
That 40 percent is definitely not true in the general audience. Also they will load ads, just not all of them. Surveys ask that. Especially on mobile, and apps. Also, when we measured on our car rental site, with near perfect precision (it's absolutely not difficult), then the number was around 20%. Also, according to download statistics, there are less than half a billion people who use ad blocking browsers or other solutions on Android. And that's downloads, which is obviously inflated, even obvious from browser statistics (no not 100% of Firefox users are on Android, it's almost the opposite).
It's not nothing, but it's probably around 20%.
Also as others stated. I pay for everything, if they give me the opportunity to pay them for ad free versions. I don't see ads on my Android, and I don't use a general ad blocker on it (except my browser, but I rarely visit sites which would contain ads, and basically all of them from Hacker News). I don't use free search, email, newspapers, I pay for YouTube, and I would pay for Facebook if I would use it. I don't even use Hacker News freely, because I paid for the app which I use to not see ads, and have more features. Heck, I pay even for my torrent, because I support them.
You're in the wrong neighborhood with this sentiment. But yes, the general populace is not like this.
Good for you, now get others to do it. Definitely not the wrong neighborhood though, HN is extremely pro ad-block and every paywall link has an archive.ph link in the comments.
Hell the top story right now is about a tool for backdooring twitter...
I don't see how we could have more vulnerability, on a massive scale, than to have two companies which pre-install both the OS and the browser, on their own hardware in the case of Apple, for 95% of the planet.
Microsoft was sued by the USDOJ in 1998 precisely for this, that it was leveraging the pre-installation of Windows to force Internet Explorer to be the default browser for PC consumers. That that was bad for both security and for the web seems pretty obvious in retrospect, when you think about the trajectory of IE.
Apple's insistent blocking of non-webkit web engines, including V8, on its own hardware/iOS is an even more egregious and dangerous phenomenon.
Browser security and browsers themselves would be vastly improved if they weren't a monopoly of the two mobile OS makers.
