From where I sit the #1 risk to the free and open internet these days is Google.
Edit: two reasons:
1) Because adtech is destroying society. Surveillance is never good. Ads as funding smears absolutely everything with perverse incentives that act consistently against both the explicit wishes and implicit best-interests of the viewers, and (it seems moreso every year) society at large.
2) Google is doing everything it can to protect and defend their control over said adtech, using all mechanisms at its disposal including a monopoly on Search, almost a monopoly (and veto power) on what defines HTML (Blink not Chrome), and like 70% of mobile platform.
How so? It seems that a search engine would need the internet to have as much information out there in the open to index and give us the results upon searching..
Because they are so dominate they exercise outsized control, but there are still a few others.
The biggest issue is that Google Search kills its own sources, which is shortsighted. Google constantly steals manually curated quality content, and regurgitates it in Knowledge Graph without attribution, such that the people who did all the work to develop and curate that information aren't compensated.
The end result: As the web Google stole from dies off, Google increasingly has worse, less accurate sources it has to draw from.
Journalists are at the forefront of this, and you can see several countries moving to charge Google for lifting news content to combat this. But there's a lot of other sources on the web that probably won't be so lucky.
When they hide data you're obviously and explicitly looking for they are making the internet less open.
Look at the google vs duckduckgo search results for this: "How a Convicted Terrorist used the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Website to Identify Targets"
Since I know how Google crawl and index work, and I know how the right-wing noise machine works, I suggest a very likely explanation is that Cernovich used Google webmaster tools to remove the URL from their index for the specific purpose of whipping conspiracy theories on Twitter.
I have as much data to support my theory as the other person does to support theirs. All we know is the page isn't in the results on Google. And yes, Cernovich has a history of PR stunts.
You might have a point if this wasn't just the most recent of a giant pile of censorship from Google.
Medical doctors can't discuss possible treatments for COVID.
Medical doctors can't discuss side effects from vaccines.
Senate testimony where an alleged Ukrainian whistleblower is named is banned. If you even say the name, not even in any relevant context, you will get banned.
The list goes on and on. There is nothing "open" about the Google web. But again, I don't believe there's anything I or anyone else could say that would change your mind.
To this day I have no idea what that statement is supposed to express despite seeing it about a dozen times per week.
Google makes money selling ads yes, but their core product is search. Like a newspaper, which does journalism, and also has an ad department, or a TV show, with ad breaks, or a sports broadcast.
Do people think Google makes their search worse to... sell fewer ads?
Google doesn’t sell data, and Google’s primary purpose is Search and organizing information, ads is just the way it’s funded.
If the primary purpose was ada, then it would stop all of the wasteful spending on engineering projects with no relation to, and no hope of, making ad money.
You’re right on the not selling data directly. I should have been more precise.
Google is in the business of collecting data and selling advertising using that data. For the purpose of making money.
Search hasn’t been part of their purpose in decades.
Let me ask you this, has search gotten better or worse in the last 5 - 10 years?
Has their data collection gotten more invasive or less over the last 5 - 10 years?
I think we both know what kind of company Google is once those questions are answered.
Subjective personal anecdotes are 100% valid forms of data.
But since you asked:
Compare Google search engine results over nearly two decades and a trend emerges: Results are filled with advertising and non-Google results are lower down. https://wapo.st/3dHj2Xf
That's still N=1. He uses a single example, product search for t-shirts, but doesn't look at all the ways search actually got better. It's cherry picking.
There are firms which evaluate search quality by employing a huge corpus of queries and human raters. I trust those more than someone running a single query for a commercial search.
The reality is, the Web didn't stay static. If Google 2020 used the same exact search algorithm as Google of 2000, the results would be worse, because of all of the massive amount of noise and spam that's been added to the web since then, to say nothing of adversarial attacks. Google of 2020 is doing a hell of a lot to maintain freshness, index an exponentially bigger web, and defeat pretty much an army of blackhat SEO adversaries from spoiling it.
It's like saying Email spam is worse in Gmail or other clients. Compared to what? 30 years ago, there wasn't much spam being sent and spammers were unsophisticated. The fact that you see almost none these days, but still a few slip through, compared to standard IMAP in 1993 is irrelevent, because the email population was tiny back then.
I'll admit that the product search category in queries has over-the-top ads. But then again, this is the one area where even going back to 2000 era, Sergey and Larry justified ads by saying say that serving up keyword based ads is in a way, satisfying query intent. If I type in "toyota cars" and I get ads for 3 toyota car dealerships nearby, why is this completely wrong? It's very likely a strong buy signal.
Personally, when I'm doing product search, I go straight to Amazon, or I use Shopping.google.com (or Froogle back in the old days)
I can do my own cherry picking. For example, when looking for actual information, especially long tail information, Google search is way better than it was in the early 2000s, and unmatched by things like DDG.
Compare long-tail search vs DuckDuckGo. Try for example "the movie where a robot kid flies a spy plane". Google returns D.A.R.Y.L as top item. DDG doesn't even have it in the top 10. This is way bette than it was in 2000.
"who wrote the c64 game mule". DDG just gives me Wikipedia. Google gives me the Answer + Wikipedia plus related games to explore.
Or try "what is the moment of inertia of a disk", on DDG the snippet displayed in the first result is far less useful than the snippet Google displays. Plus Google shows actual diagrams in the results too.
Look, I'll be the first to admit they increased the # of ads for some queries (mostly product search, real estate, travel, etc) and are using questionable dark patterns that make ads harder to discern from non-ad content. But quite obviously to me, the non-ad query results have gotten ALOT better from 20 years ago, and it's just false memory nostalgia about how queries use to work on a much smaller, and non-commercial web, that thinks they were better.
I've been on the internet/web since the 80s. It was a marvelous time in the old days before commercialization, but also in many ways, it was far less useful and worse.
Look, I wanted to keep this debate going, but your reference to MULE totally derailed my train of thought.
Damn you, now I’ve got to go find an emulator and see how bad the C64 days were all over again.
I’ve only been on the web since the mid-late 90s, but it has changed so much for the worse, perhaps not in usefulness, but in… Idealsim? I remember reading the hacker manifesto and it moving me. That crappy little text inspired so much in me. I just hope that in todays overly commercial, algorithmically driven, ML curated world, there is room for life changing chance encounters.
People say this to acknowledge out loud the perceived change in how Google makes product decisions. In the early days, the lead priority was an awesome, focused search experience. Today, the lead priority seems to be comportment with the revenue model.
This explains user-hostile deprecations like newsgroup search (a literal search engine they bought and abandoned), RSS Reader, etc.
In addition, the ever-decreasing visual distinction between organic search results and ads on Google SERPs is well documented. As is the ever-increasing encroachment of data collection into all their products. Look at how Chrome works with Google accounts now vs 5 or 10 years ago.
Google went from a search engine company who runs ads so they can afford to keep building cool things, to an ad company that runs a search engine because it provides provide data and inventory for its ad network.
This statement is as stupid as saying the New York Times isn’t a newspaper but an ad company because they make a substantial bit of their money on ads.
Yes, while the web may seem "open" due to its fragmented nature of hosting, Google wants all content to reside in their own walled garden so it can quickly kill competition. AMP was a major play towards that. Also, all (?) their money makers are closed source and proprietary - which is just fine by me, but Google should own up to what they really are instead of projecting a fake "open" image of themselves.
Google has actively replaced the free and open internet with one that is more convenient and brand flattering as soon as mass media started to fight against becoming a legacy product.
The article is a fluff piece that's comically uncritical of Google. There's obvious hypocrisy for a company that's done all sorts of user-antagonistic things to internet users as Google has, from Google AMP stealing traffic, to PRISM actively violating the 4th amendment, to Dragonfly explicitly enabling censorship. Google's gotten away with the hypocrisy due to a relentless PR engine. Maybe if you don't like predictable Hacker News snark, downvote the PR "submarine" pieces from the front page, because there's nothing of value in this article and "predictable" critique is the best it deserves.
Please don't distort the meaning of words. PR "submarine" pieces are a very real thing, but they are exactly what the phrase suggests — an article put out by a corporate PR department for publication.
This was literally an interview by a real reporter, edited into an article. You might not like that the interviewer wasn't antagonistic (let's be real — most aren't!), but this is not a "PR submarine piece" by any sane definition of the phrase.
If you want to try on a positive spin for AMP, it was Google's awkward attempt to defend against Facebook Instant Articles (which the feature set of AMP almost at times felt like a direct rip-off of) in a world where people preferred to read news articles inside of the Facebook app instead of a browser; which, in comparison, AMP was massively more open than. The issue is that, in the end, Google always feels like they get to decide the response of the web--with their search engine and browser standing in somewhat for the walled garden social network and app of something like Facebook--and then it all gets twisted to benefit them in some unique way, which sucks :/.
> There's obvious hypocrisy for a company that's done all sorts of user-antagonistic things to internet user
Does this mean any article about Google that does not criticize Google deserves this snark? Fwiw the snark is annoying not because folks disagree with it, but that saying it again and again and doing nothing is a trite form of internet me-too-ing or signalling. That Google depends on an ethically dubious set of assumptions is obvious; now how do we fix it and why are we talking about this here?
Not any article, perhaps, but an article essentially praising Google for warning about $THING when Google is a contributor to the badness of $THING, definitely deserves a healthy dose of snark tossed at it.
So, in theory, you have some metric that places Google up at #1. For that to be non-trivial, you must have more than one member of the set evaluated. And for it to be meaningful, maybe you have a top ten or you have evaluated less than ten.
All right, then, enlighten us with your top ten. And if you haven’t already, I’d like to see where on the top ten you’ve put regimes like the Chinese government and the US government.
Google's main product is letting people find stuff on the web. What benefit would a walled garden be to them unless everything was on Google infrastructure? They would need to control everything.
That isn't how this works, Google doesn't have good enough content to compete with other tech giants without the open web. If Google kills the web then Google kills itself. Most of their money comes from their search web page and not the ads from other sites, so people browsing the web is their main source of revenue. Their other sites are big, yes, but not big enough to make them one of the few most valuable companies in the world.
Anyway, Google works hard to make the open web competitive with all the walled gardens around. When they do that they put up some fences to make the experience a bit more like walled gardens, but the open web is still just a few seconds and a click away.
> If Google kills the web then Google kills itself
That's why Google instead reshapes the web as Google sees fit.
> Anyway, Google works hard to make the open web competitive with all the walled gardens around
No. It subsumes the web and replaces it with all things Google. It dominates all web-related standards bodies, pushes through half-baked Chrome-only APIs as "standards" and then presents them as fait accompli through Google-controlled properties like web.dev.
Just like how YouTube has become a more open and free platform in their care. Or how search results have become more open and free since they dominated market share.
Let me guess... You're not a huge fan of free speech because your college professor told you it was an outdated concept WHILE still using it as a shield to spew his moronic views.
Tim Pool literally has to self-censor in real-time to avoid the robot bans. It's creepy as hell and has no place in a free society (regardless if you agree with him or not).
Much like every other company, but at least I've see Google be mostly reasonable about it with a few exceptions. Much of the "deplatforming" isn't even do to Google per say but people abusing the copyright system on YouTube and many people not having adequate legal knowledge to defend themselves, or honestly just a lot of attention-seeking alt-right personality types constantly saying they are being deplatformed while they continue to use YouTube freely... Likely all one big part of a MCN pushing the same agenda.
And Apple crippled the web on its locked-down as chastity iOS devices.
These companies -- all of them -- are fucking with each other. None of us matter in the end. It's all about which company can screw the other out of engagement and eyeballs.
Meanwhile Firefox, the open web, open source, right to repair, and digital ownership all wither away.
> It's all about which company can screw the other out of engagement and eyeballs.
Well that is kind of how media companies compete against each other, but the key question is: is it beneficial or harmful to the public?
You could argue that Apple is acquiring users who they then lock in, sell to advertisers and developers (for a 30% cut on the App store) and monetize with service subscriptions, but you can also argue that half of Apple's profit is still from hardware sales, that apps and services are a big reason for buying that hardware, so Apple is still beholden to its hardware customers to some extent.
And Google has https://wellbeing.google as well as associated features in Android, and Apple has also implemented "screen time" tracking and limits.
The one exception being any sort of chat app. Now they're going from crusty old Hangouts to Chat while plenty of other chat apps have been far more polished for a long time
I've yet to see a single kick ass web app from Google. All of them are barely functioning slow-as-molasses slugs (or I'm jaded by the entire GCP experience).
I think this is somewhat of a more recent occurance, and possibly only GCP related. I've only had a couple GCP interactions now but all of them have gotten me to stay away from that specific portion of Google.
I recently tried https://deps.dev and was surprised by the speed. But then I realized I was no longer used to things being that fast, and it used to be normal
But if you look around across all the industries, it is not very hard to realize that most big names that you can easily recognize were created by few giants. Giants is the norm.
A real hero knows when to resist the fear and borrow the power from the giants.
True. Google at least does not create walled gardens like FB. You are not even allowed to post link in comment section. That's a tactic to keep users on its own platform. Recently they have stopped allowing people to browse even browse public profiles.
Giants are more visible, I won't dispute that but I'm not sure I agree with a strategy of surrendering to them because of that fact.
I don't think we need a real hero here, we need end-user solidarity perhaps in the form of public policy and market regulation. Humans would have more freedom on the internet if corporate giants didn't.
Just because it's what's "always" happened before, doesn't mean we can't do better.
This being the case is the very driving force of any innovation.
Your statement seems like defeatism wrapped in a pretty bow of faux-insight.
A tendency toward giants is also not necessarily a sustainable state of affairs.
Once technology becomes sufficiently advanced and pervasive, the window of time available for a giant to gestate, before the next giant-level disruption, inevitably shrinks to the point the system reaches an equilibrium of innovational equanimity and balance.
This is ordinary and expected, and parallels can be seen anywhere in nature.
The - relatively-brief - "time of giants" of human progress may soon be coming to a close.
> Google is literally the only tech giant with an interest in the open internet.
This statement is an oxymoron.
"Tech giants" hobble the open principles of the internet by their own existence, persistence and, by-definition, over-bearing influence.
Any entity genuinely concerned with preserving open principles would seek to limit its growth far-prior to where Google is now, and eliminate the pervasiveness of its influence, favouring and encouraging the results of diverse decentralisation over narrow centralisation.
Google and Facebook are the antithesis of everything the concept of an open internet stands for.
If there is no open internet, there is nothing to index or organize.
If anything Apple has does more harm than anyone to the Web by pushing the idea of native apps for everything served from a closed proprietary App Store that you can’t even side load around.
> You can index and organize the content of an intranet of every large organization.
Good luck. The magic of the internet is that everything is public and interlinked.
Usually within a company the incentives are such that information is more tightly controlled. A software engineer doesn't see purchase orders and an HR specialist doesn't see software assignments. Usually a directory is more useful than a search within a company. Obviously there are exceptions.
To be fair, Pichai's quote is taken out of context. In his capacity as Alphabet CEO, he worries about neutrality of the interconnects. TFA goes:
> And, when I asked about whether the Chinese model of the internet - much more authoritarian, big on surveillance - is in the ascendant, Pichai said the free and open internet "is being attacked". Importantly, he didn't refer to China directly but he went on to say: "None of our major products and services are available in China."
Google does run at least one semi-independent group to tackle such censorship, disinformation, propaganda, and abuse https://jigsaw.google.com/
Call me a cynic but I’m 99% sure that group of Google’s is probably just as ideologically progressive as Google and not independent in any substantial way. Everything from that link reads like progressive ad-copy.
Toxic language online silences important voices. We’re exploring how machine learning can reduce toxicity online and create more space for healthy conversation.
Throughout this report we use the term “toxicity,” defined as rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable language that is likely to make someone leave a discussion. We specifically use the term toxicity, as opposed to words like “abuse” or “hate speech” for both practical and scientific reasons.
> “toxicity,” defined as rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable language that is likely to make someone leave a discussion. We specifically use the term toxicity, as opposed to words like “abuse” or “hate speech” for both practical and scientific reasons.
Scientific reasons? There's nothing scientific about a term so undefined that every person can have their own custom definition.
Google attacks the "free and open internet" globally far more than a backwater country that restricts its citizens internet usage along with a million other things.
This article feels like a rosy, uncritical review of Google under Pichai. Even the opening sentence here is full of tone deaf hypocrisy:
> [Sundar Pichai] says many countries are restricting the flow of information, and the model is often taken for granted.
Like when Google, with more influence than most countries, censors content on YouTube or the Google App Store? Google’s manipulation of information amounts to political propaganda to those who aren’t aligned with their prevailing views - naturally many countries will balk at letting that kind of foreign interference/control influence their own societies.
And I can’t help but view Pichai’s perspective on taxes as a form of convenient regulatory capture / barrier to competition:
> I put this to Pichai, who said that Google no longer uses this scheme, is one of the world's biggest taxpayers, and complies with tax laws in every country in which it operates.
The article also talks about the activist streak of Google and its employees but doesn’t challenge it:
> With more than 100,000 staff, many of them hugely opinionated on internal message boards, and activist in nature, this is just impossible to control. There is a tension between Google genuinely embracing cognitive diversity by having people of all persuasions among its global staff, and at the same time really standing up for particular issues as a company.
I don’t think this tension is actually present. Google is a dyed in the wool Bay Area tech company. I don’t think it has employees of “all persuasions” in any great numbers unless they are looking at only the left side of the American political spectrum.
Google itself is actively restricting the flow of information.
It is really quite sad how Google's formerly excellent search product, has morphed into a tool for censorship, and surveillance capitalism, and in the process, degraded its accuracy significantly.
Once a company is large and entrenched, regulation is how you stay in power.
You create enough Byzantine rules that basically only the largest company can hire the lawyers and comply. It’s an effective way to kill off competition.
There're lots of things about HN that make it better than many other fora, but its collective wild-eyed, frothing reaction to literally the word Google is not one of them. You may as well be on 4chan for threads like these
Why? The only reason Pichai's comments are important is because he works for a company that is dangerous for internet freedom. Their only use is in predicting Google's business strategies and defending against them.
This might as well be a place to talk about Google in general, or Pichai in general irt "internet freedom."
The criticism here is entirely self-serving and hypocritical. Why should Google be able to undemocratically decide which parts of the internet it allows, yet deride governments for doing the same thing? At least the governments ostensibly have the best interests of their people in mind. And even the worst "authoritarian" governments need to answer to their population enough to keep legitimacy.
There is no free and open internet, and Google is part of the group of corporations that help prop up the big tech cartel that help kill off each others' competitors, share employee blacklists, and intentionally sacrifice the quality of their product to push their Bay Area bourgeoisie politics around the globe.
That is the position of many a CEO of a large company, akin to politicians in that they say lots without actually saying anything and by the time you realise that they have said nothing, they have gone.
For example "He says many countries are restricting the flow of information, and the model is often taken for granted."
Shifts any blame elsewhere in a way that does not detail this model or outlines any of the issues that define the restrictions and how they effect Google. So for all we know, he could be on about data protection laws like GDPR or the like and paints them as bad without going into any details of the pro's or con's.
Remember some law/restriction that is bad for Google may actually be good for the users.
Also when I see the term "free internet" I do feel it is a misnomer in many ways, more so in the context it is used.
I read the article and shame the BBC went for the small sound-bite click-bait title. Most of the article is about other aspects, from AI, Quantum computing, corporation TAX and the title per-say does not do the article justice.
With that in mind, it seems most comments appear along the lines of a response to the title and not the content and is just going to clog Dang up with work.
I personally found the aspect and questioning about corporation TAX more insightful and perhaps would of been a better sound-bite of a title.
Amol Rajan thrives on being contrary and questioning designed to provoke. You could see from his other questions that they were purely designed to create headlines in a similar way:
> When I invited Pichai to commit there and then to Google pulling out of all tax havens immediately, he didn't take up the offer.
> In a very revealing quick-fire round of questions, we discover he doesn't eat meat, drives a Tesla, reveres Alan Turing, wishes he'd met Stephen Hawking, and is jealous of Jeff Bezos's space mission.
The headline really is irrelevant to the majority of the interview, but I really wouldn't be surprised if he personally signed off that headline to run with from the interview (the same was used on the television news). He's a former newspaper editor after all.
This form of journalism is what I thought was starting to be considered old fashioned. I don't understand how he became the BBC's Media Editor and host of the most prestigious morning radio programme on the BBC, apart from having loads of connections and history in the publishing industry.
Free and open internet isn't under attack because major corporations want it that, it's because people want it that way. The average computer user is a non-programmer. Why would they want things more complicated for themselves? So where does the money flow? To the path of least resistance. While many companies are willing to oblige that thought process, it unfortunately creates the system that strips "free and open internet" away from us.
> Third, a lot of Pichai's big bets have failed: Google Glass, Google Plus, Google Wave, Project Loon
Every single one of these predates Pichai, who only became CEO in 2015:
* Google Wave was already turned down in 2012
* Google Plus launched in 2011 and the writing was on the wall by 2015
* Google Glass consumer edition was discontinued in Jan 2015 before Pichai started
* Loon is the only arguable exception; it was started in 2011 but only promoted into an official Bet during Pichai's tenure in 2018. However, it was also an experiment from day 1, not "the next big thing" like Wave/Plus/Glass were supposed to be.
Now you've seen how a "journalist" doesn't have the patience to spend 60 seconds searching for something you're knowledgeable about, will you (not you specifically) take as gospel anything they say about something you're not knowledgeable about?
"That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say."
The last 4 years of US politics (and 20? of UK politics) have given the lie to that belief.
[edit: added UK politics because they're just as bad]
It's the same with typical sales persons: Even though they constantly exaggerate, you want to believe (unless there's animosity). So you take it into account that they exaggerate, but not by as much as they do exaggerate. Which means it's still better for them to do it than not. At least that's my impression of these dynamics, would love good studies about it.
It's well studied that over time people believe lies even if they know they are lies, because we remember things by association, not rigorously. We easily remember that X is associated with Y, but it's hard to remember if the correlation is to Y or to NOT Y.
Are you saying most people would answer Yes to "Are politicians trustworthy?" because then I clearly live in a completely different bubble than you do and have a very different interpretation of TV speaking heads talking about the issue. In my bubble at least 90% would say that US politicians are not trustworthy (no idea about UK). Not much different if you ask about Trump or Biden either.
I kind of see it both ways. 90% of people would call all politicians liars, but every person in that 90% has their pet politician that can do no wrong.
I'm guessing a "pet politician" is a very American Thing -though I have nothing to base it on but my own opinion- since US politics are very much based on specific persons while I'm used to people looking at politics as a big group of people they vote for out of many parties.
There are currently 15 parties to vote for here in Denmark, with a government on average being based on 2-3 of them. A single person rarely get more votes than 1% in our elections because most vote for the party, not the person.
I'm speaking specifically about individuals people vote for among the hoard in any given party or set of parties. For instance, my grandfather who thinks all politicians are crooks, believes almost everything Trump says, and my girlfriend who likewise thinks all politicians are liars, takes everything AOC says as gospel. Both disagree with a lot of what the respective parties do, or want.
Eh, your view of other people's cynicism is too absolute.
People distrust politicians ... except. Except for their favorite politician, except for their party, except for the ones they voted for, except...
You see this with Congress writ large. People hate Congress, its approval ratings are through the floor. But they like their own Congresspeople. Sure, gerrymandering, safe districts, etc, but by and large people are much happier with their own Representatives than everyone else's.
>Except for their favorite politician, except for their party, except for the ones they voted for, except...
As I wrote in another reply I believe this to be A Very American Thing. At least I have never heard of anyone here (in Denmark) seeing themselves as represented by a person. It is more of a party thing. I'm sure I live in a bubble (don't we all) so my experience might not match any official numbers but in my experience people seem to just change to another party at the next election if they feel the representation does not match their expectation. This likely makes it easier not to get caught up in having to defend a specific person that "can do no wrong". But again, I have not looked it up and it is all based on my own experience and intuition. I do know that election day sees a much higher turnout here (~%85) than in the US (>65%?) though, but is it related to distrusting politicians? Who knows.
> At least I have never heard of anyone here (in Denmark) seeing themselves as represented by a person. It is more of a party thing.
This might be a parliamentary democracy thing. In the US, everything is about borders and leaders. You're happy with corrupt politicians because corrupt politicians are connected politicians, and they might bring benefits to your state/district.
Individual congressmen and women tend to have high favorability ratings in the locality that voted for them, despite congress overall consistently having practically nonexistant support, and political parties not faring significantly better.
In short, every politician is trustworthy to the people who voted for them, but not the rest- kindof an inverse of the effect, really.
I'm not convinced.
The wiki article you linked to is a paragraph in an article about a novelist, not an article about widely-accepted term. And rightfully so.
Google Plus and Google Glass were big bets in my view.
That doesn't take away from Google being unscrupulous in ending unsuccessful offerings. That's part of what made them succesful, I assume.
Journalists often use hyperbole or simplify complex facts to deliver an interesting and easily understandable story.
That doesn't make every sinplification a gross misrepresentation.
You're free to dive deeper into any topic you want, but it's delusional to expect every reader to be an expert in every field.
Bashing journalism as a whole has become common gospel, but to me it seems that the effect of that thinking is not that people become better informed.
The article sounds Google-friendly and uncritical to me, but it's also very common to cover interviews in a way that represents the views of the interviewed person.
OK, after reading a bit more about the persons responsible for the mentioned products, I'll admit the "big bets" part maybe was a gross misrepresentation.
It appears you are attempting to indict the entire field of journalism by referring to a cocktail story told by a sci-fi writer.
Wouldn't it make more sense to study the field and sort journalists into groups based on their performance over time? Even casual sports fan do that kind of work reflexively. I don't get why journalism should be treated any different, and I especially don't get the desire to find an anecdote that could reject the entire field out of hand.
Put differently-- if Glenn Greenwald publishes another leak-based story about state-level corruption, I'll read it and ascribe more veracity to him than I will Crichton's cocktail story. I'll bet you a dollar that when/if I do that, nothing bad will happen as a result.
I think most people have never in their life read an article by a journalist about something they're knowledgeable of that wasn't complete dogshit. You mention Glenn Greenwald because presumably you're not an expert on state-level corruption. Pretty much any piece of journalism on any topic you can poke plenty of holes in with some research. Hell some articles you can use the article itself to disprove the main point the journalist was trying to make. At some point overwhelming empirical evidence can elevate a "cocktail story" to a rule of thumb.
Correct. It’s been utilized in a highly limited capacity in enterprise conditions, like manufacturing. The Community Edition (aka consumer version) was killed.
You're wrong there I think. I personally was surprised by Chrome and the way it took off - initially when it started it looked like a me too product, it seemed pointless to repeat the good work at Firefox. And Android was also a good bet, though in my humble view, not as good a one as Chrome. Sundar got some big calls right.
> However, it was also an experiment from day 1, not "the next big thing"
Not sure I understand that distinction. If I label all my projects as experiments, do I also get to escape culpability for their failure while loading on the self-praise when they succeed?
Kinda? All of Alphabet's Bets including Loon are explicitly high-risk, high-reward "moonshots", meaning it's expected for many if not most to fail.
By contrast, Wave, Plus and Glass were all consumer products from the mothership that were heavily hyped as being the Next Big Thing that would revolutionize work/IM, social networks and mobile phones respectively.
A lot of Loon's early engineers were drawn from a team I was on, because Loon's founder (Mike Cassidy) was our PM's boss. When our PM left to work with him, he said "It's a crazy idea. Less than 5% chance of success." He joined it anyway. The team certainly felt it was both high risk and high reward.
A quick list of issues that early engineers had to solve with Loon:
1. Can you get wi-fi reception on the ground from a balloon? How big a transmitter, how big a power source, how long can you keep it going for, and how much weight do you need to spend on batteries for this?
2. Will your wi-fi reception cut out if a tall building happens to pass between you and the balloon? How do you mitigate this? Do you need duplicate coverage from multiple balloons? (Starlink is dealing with this now.)
3. How do you keep the balloons in one place, or at least control where they go? If one goes out of range, how do you make sure there's another covering all its receivers?
4. How much propellant/battery can you carry on the balloon for course adjustments? How long can it stay aloft before this is exhausted?
5. Where do the winds go in the stratosphere? If the balloons are not propelled, where will they end up? Can you use altitude changes to get into different jet-streams and reduce propellant use?
6. How do you respect country's airspace? How do you avoid causing international incidents? If a balloon does come down, how do you ensure it doesn't harm anyone and can be retrieved? Early in the project, Loon had an ops team of former navy SEALs whose job was to retrieve any crashed balloons without starting any wars.
And I wasn't even on the team - this is just what I got from a few lunchtime conversations. They had to invent new algorithms, first to model the wind systems in the stratosphere and then to optimize balloon placement given that wind. I know their CTO - he's got a Ph.D in stochastic optimal control (pretty appropriate for this problem). The math behind control theory, once you get past simple PID controllers, is hard.
Much of what you describe are pedestrian problems that could be addressed by straightforward, low-risk engineering. The issues with wifi reception around buildings were solved by AT&T when they developed the tech for mobile phones long ago. All the balloon control stuff- people have navigated balloons around the world for a while now. Using the altitude changes to navigate is standard.
That you need a team of NAVY SEALs to clean up your messes is a sign you're doing it wrong.
After working at Google for 12 years, I am always amazed at how people talk up their projects as risky when really, there's little or no risk involved, and the majority of the problems are political or social opposition to your plans, as well as the lack of a business model.
Parent comment is classical old guard mentality Googler who thinks if something sounds big and impressive it automatically is big and impressive. It was a marketing trick that weirdly infected employees throughout the org, glad to see here the trick has all but completely lost its effect.
> If I label all my projects as experiments, do I also get to escape culpability for their failure while loading on the self-praise when they succeed
Sure, if your funding sources are okay with spending 100% on a high-variance, low-hit-rate manner of output. Every single Google earnings call I've been on has the CEO reassuring investors about their high-risk "moonshots", emphasizing that they're only 5% of Google's budget. You'll note that the parent comment didn't use that reason to justify the other failures, which were not explicitly classified pre hoc as high-risk experiments.
I'm not sure how you think the answer could be anything other than yes. If you were working on high-risk moonshot private projects and either self-funding them or being funded by someone comfortable with the risk of your endeavor, do you think you _wouldn't_ "escape culpability" yet be rewarded for successes?
(Note also that you're using an extremely odd definition of "escaping culpability". Moonshots failing is the _expected_ outcome, and pointing that out isn't helping anyone "escape culpability".
Google might be taking this PR angle as a psyop to position themselves as a savior of open internet instead of the enemy of it. They clearly are the latter.
Combine this with "the coming war on general purpose computing"[0] , IME, DRM, difficulty to repair devices and computers that user has no control even on their car and soon we'll be living like on the dystopian essay "The right to read".
I'd argue its people running their own servers - traditionally an x86 (plus RAM, disk, modem pipe and power) running a POSIX kernel running httpd, smptd, ftpd and maybe ircd. A static IPv4 address from ARIN (via an ISP) and a DNS name from ICANN (via a registrar).
These are the necessary ingredients you must have, as an individual or a group, to participate in the "free and open internet".
I'd argue that Facebook is just a natural extension of AWS, Digital Ocean or Github pages. Facebook takes away the DNS name, and they take away your content and put it behind an algorithm, which you can bribe to let your stuff through. I'd consider a difference of degree, not kind.
Even those who go to the trouble of running their own physical server still use services like Google Analytics, which violate the privacy of every data consumer. Maybe not as bad as putting your data behind someone else's paywall and then paying them to expose it, but it's pretty bad. Since we use the web for literally every application now, it's a particularly worrying trend.
My point is that if you want a 'free and open internet' then you need to make it easy for people own, understand and run ALL of these ingredients. Like, provide them by all by default for everyone's smartphone, and run servers on your smartphone! And give them reasonable defaults, with a first-year-free DNS name. A free static IPv6 address block. Default, svelte, little mobile friendly server daemons. Then let people make crazy HTML documents with their voice and self-publish them like in the old days!
All the components are there, we just need to DO it.
The "open" Internet is done for because in recent years most governments have realised that the natural culmination of an open Internet is in fact an open, cross-mingling, world culture, community and economy, and eventually, the deprecation of the traditional idea of nation states. And you can prise that control from their cold, dead hands.
PS. Include mega-corps in 'nation states' above. They both want total control over the Internet. They will get it too, in some proportion. Because truly democratic forces are too weak and disorganised, as always.
As a casual website owner, I find Google is the main culprit. My original articles were buried under content farms full of copypastas.
Lots of my URLs were either "Discovered – currently not indexed" or "Crawled - currently not indexed", but spam sites are happily searchable with the exact same content. And I don't want spend to fight SEO.
Unless there is a flawless approach to stopping SEO that isn't something to blame them for as there would be literally nothing to do to stop SEO spammers!
Does anyone think that Google cares about the free and open Internet anymore? I don’t mean they oppose it, I just mean it doesn’t seem like it’s on the list of things the company prioritizes.
It sometimes seems like Google’s internal self-image is stuck in 2001, when they were an idealistic search engine company whose goal was to organize the world’s information.
Today they are an ad company, running some office apps and cloud computing on the side. The transition has been great for revenue but it seems like they long ago sold the moral authority to make pronouncements about the free and open Internet.
Join G and masquerade as a zealot and you will soon be invited to off-campus chat networks where employees strategize how to cancel the next “asshole” on their radar. It’s sickening and they should all go to jail for it.
What kind of methods do they use to go about “cancelling the asshole”? What information are they accessing that they shouldn’t be? What kind of tooling are they misusing to do this?
For real. Chrome is one of the biggest threats to an open internet that exists today. Every week we see some Chrome-led attempt to make the Internet more proprietary and under Google’s control. They interviewed one of the worst perpetrators of the threat against internet freedom.
Unfortunately for Google (and fortunately for the rest of us), they have no risk-free mechanism[1] to achieve this feat exclusively. Strategically, any sort of balkanization will mean Google's competitors can gather resources and improve technically while being shielded from competing with Google; Google would much rather bludgeon any nascent competitor early (by offering a better[2] product, today) before they grow any legs.
ISPs, on the other hand, can approve service providers this via prioritization, or DNS-/traffic-level blocking. Google was cognizant early, which is why it became a fervent "net neutrality" supporter.
1. I cannot think of anything else that could bring down anti-trust regulation faster than Google angling to be the sole service provider for an entire market
To echo that sentiment. Does anyone believe Google under Sundar Pichai actually believes in anything open and private, given how many google employees during his reign have tried to organize against what google stands for, only to be shut down.
I find it grotesquely comical to even see this headline with Sundar Pichai's name attached to it.
I fully expect Bing to implement it first by requiring you login to Edge to use search, and shortly before there will be some secret order requiring all search providers collect searches from everyone due to national security.
Google will attack and subvert every nationalist politician around the world because they are existentially dependent on globalism and weak national borders. Anyone who is a nationalist is racist and hates freedom according to Google. Nevermind self-determination. China is their worse nightmare because they are not dumb enough to let profiteers monitor and manipulate their citizens. Other countries are waking up to the reality that allowing these American imperialist multinationals to monitor, control, and ultimately culturally rape their indigenous culture might not be a good thing. When he says a free and open internet is under attack it means that countries are waking up and taking power back from Google. Can't happen soon enough. Will be great for startups and decentralized platforms. Go to a foreign country and clone the big tech companies and build a good-enough solution so that the people will have an alternative when they are ready to kick FAANG out.
Nationalism is followed by fascism quite easily, it o accident that many consider excessive nationalism to just be a kind of secular religion, with an easily route to toxicity, dogma, and racism.
Look no further than the fact that nationalist movements have right wing ethno-state ambitions attached to them everywhere, usually with a return to “Greater X” where X is an older empire they use to have, usually when their faction was more ethnically dominant.
Yes. What do you think Hitler expected from the 1936 Berlin Olympics? What do you think Xi wanted out of the 2008 Olympics? Why did the East Germans, and other fascist states deliberately engage in ridiculous state supported athlete doping?
Even Beijing today is abusing children in the hopes of national glory. The state puts kids through factory-like conditions to make athletes from a young childhood age, doesn't even give them beyond a 3rd grade education, because everything is maximized on winning for national glory. Franky, state-based olympic camps IMHO are borderline child abuse.
Oh yes, the Olympics are 100% about nationalism and CCP glory for China, and indeed for many other nationalist authoritarian states.
> easily followed by other forms of totalitarianism as exemplified by the USSR, China
China under Xi is fascist. Mass rallies under a glorified leader for life. Calls to return to a mythic past of nationhood under national rejuvenation. What's the difference between Nuremberg rallies, and the mass rallies the CCP runs? The near constant glorification of the CCP and Xi, the huge number of young people in the party and at the rallies (almost 100 million people in the CCP Youth League).
Let's look at some of the defining characteristics of Fascism:
1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism.
2. Disregard for Human Rights.
3.Controlled Mass Media.
4. Obsession with National Security.
#4 is especially good example of how China is using national security to crush Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and internal dissent, by claiming pretty much any thing they don't like is a national security issue. Thus, an 80 year old women with a protest sign on the street is arrested in Hong Kong for "national security" reasons.
China under Deng might not have been Fascist, but under Xi, it's definitely trending that way.
Xi wasn't even in power in 2008. Shows how politically illiterate you google employees are.
> China under Xi is fascist. Mass rallies under a glorified leader for life. Calls to return to a mythic past of nationhood under national rejuvenation. What's the difference between Nuremberg rallies, and the mass rallies the CCP runs? The near constant glorification of the CCP and Xi, the huge number of young people in the party and at the rallies (almost 100 million people in the CCP Youth League).
Your definition of Fascism is having rallies and involving young people?
> #4 is especially good example
You forgot about the multiple terrorist attacks and race riots that led to this so called "obsession". Those "protestors" set elderly people who disagreed with them on fire. Who asked you, in your comfy office job in Silicon Valley, what is and isn't a real security concern on the other side of the planet. If you're so concerned about frivolous use of "national security" then maybe do something about the literal National Security Agency your company clearly works with.
I used to be neutral on Google but it's clear that the people working there should have no power over anything.
Xi was a member of the Standing Committee in 2008 and he was given the political responsibility for the 2008 Olympics.
Maybe before your 玻璃心 breaks you should learn a little bit about your own country’s history before you go around tossing insults.
As for use of national security as an excuse, I’ve been protesting the NSA for 3 decades. I released one of the first anonymizing web proxies and designed anonymous mailers to fight FBI carnivore and NIST Clipper/Skipjack. I spoke out against the Patriot Act in 2001 when the US government used the 9/11 attacks to impose it. I spoke out against the Communications Decent Act when it was proposed and released software to combat it.
And that’s the difference. When my government uses “national security” as an excuse to crack down on freedoms or minorities, I speak out against it.
When you government uses terrorist attacks or crime to shutdown newspapers or jail Uighurs, you support it.
And that’s why it’s fascism because if you buy into the fear over some insignificant terrorist attacks which are not an existential threat to China in order to justify a total surveillance state and an authoritarian President for life who won’t even take turns and relinquish power to other Standing Committee members, then you’re defending an authoritarian dictatorship and fascist.
The governments of the world love using either terrorism, external threats, crime, or protection of children from sex as blanket justification for every encroachment of freedom.
> Xi was a member of the Standing Committee in 2008 and he was given the political responsibility for the 2008 Olympics.
Fascism is when you host the Olympics. The more Olympics you host the more fascist you are, and if you're in charge of organizing the Olympics you're the next Hitler.
> Maybe before your 玻璃心 breaks you should learn a little bit about your own country’s history before you go around tossing insults.
Googling a random insult in Chinese doesn't make your argument better. Who is "my" government? Why is everything racial for you people. What do you hope to achieve throwing in a random insult in Chinese to the Chinese person?
> insignificant terrorist attacks which are not an existential threat to China
Insignificant Terrorist Attacks. Listen to your own words. People like you are always willing to sacrifice other people's lives in the name of your nonexistent "free speech". You clutch pearls about "shutting down newspapers" but I've yet to see any of you Googlers acknowledge the fact that you clearly censor content the US deems extremist. Or are you going to go on about the 2 billion Uyghurs being simultaneously exterminated, forced to celebrate Ramadan, and then given 20 sterilization procedures every hour? Your allegations are bullshit and every actually Muslim country agrees that it's bullshit. But keep using them as a rhetorical device.
> excuse to crack down on freedoms or minorities, I speak out against it.
You mean the federal program to accuse American academics of espionage that explicitly targeted Asian men, which has so far resulted in a trial where thefbi agent in charge admitted to fabricating evidence but will likely still end in a conviction because the jury is completely white? Or do you mean the systemic police violence against black people and the occasional public exectution that caused several months of riots. I already know what people like you's opinion of it is, you don't care.
> As for use of national security as an excuse, I’ve been protesting the NSA for 3 decades. I released one of the first anonymizing web proxies and designed anonymous mailers to fight FBI carnivore and NIST Clipper/Skipjack. I spoke out against the Patriot Act in 2001 when the US government used the 9/11 attacks to impose it. I spoke out against the Communications Decent Act when it was proposed and released software to combat it.
And you still want the entire world to run off of software and services entirely beholden to the US Government. Your company censors information the US Government doesn't want people to see. You know this in your heart of hearts. You work for a company that seeks to put the entire word under the digital jurisdiction of one government but all you do is complain about countries on the other side of the planet you have cursory knowledge of because they're competition. All your "protesting" against the NSA has done nothing. There are entire engineering schools dedicated to recruiting people for them. They're as active and effective as ever.
I still don’t see a single criticism of the CCP in your messages, you seem constitutionally incapable of criticizing your own government. You easily heap around lots of criticism elsewhere, some of it correct, but won’t apply the same fierceness to abuses of the CCP. I’m sure the Germans thought their camps were justified, the same as the Americans thought rounding up the Japanese were justified. You even rightly criticize American overreaction to the security threat of Chinese espionage, but then go on to justify treatment of the Uighurs because of attacks that killed fewer people than died in US, UK, French, domestic attacks. I mean the Japanese had a NERVE GAS attack on their subways and didn’t overreact.
BTW, I don’t need to Google for insults, I do speak passable Mandarin, lived and worked in China so I’ve encountered enough glass hearted nationalists and 无毛 in online forums to be quite familiar.
There’s been a huge rise of nationalism under Xi like there has been in the US under Trump. It’s dangerous. Relatives I have in China who used to be quite moderate are now ranting and raving on WeChat about every little perceived slight against China, because that’s how Xi and the state run media have focused people’s attention.
Combine that with the new bravado of wolf warrior mentality in government diplomats and it is quite a concerning development as concerning as the rise of fascist/nationalist movements in Europe, like in Hungary, or the Trump phenomena here.
The fact that you are blind to all of this, or only see problems here or in the West, but not in China, with the way the political winds are blowing, is your blind spot.
If you break the site guidelines like this again, we will ban you. Maybe you don't owe the other side better but you most certainly owe this community better if you're participating in it. No more of this, please.
If you break the site guidelines like this again, we will ban you. Maybe you don't owe the other side better but you most certainly owe this community better if you're participating in it. No more of this, please.
So google is trying to save every country in the world from fascism... by forcing them into a technological matrix they exert total authoritarian control over. Lol. FAANG employees and their shills truly believe they are gods guiding humanity into the future.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 226 ms ] threadEdit: two reasons:
1) Because adtech is destroying society. Surveillance is never good. Ads as funding smears absolutely everything with perverse incentives that act consistently against both the explicit wishes and implicit best-interests of the viewers, and (it seems moreso every year) society at large.
2) Google is doing everything it can to protect and defend their control over said adtech, using all mechanisms at its disposal including a monopoly on Search, almost a monopoly (and veto power) on what defines HTML (Blink not Chrome), and like 70% of mobile platform.
Because they are so dominate they exercise outsized control, but there are still a few others.
Data behind paywalls/logins is useless to them.
The end result: As the web Google stole from dies off, Google increasingly has worse, less accurate sources it has to draw from.
Journalists are at the forefront of this, and you can see several countries moving to charge Google for lifting news content to combat this. But there's a lot of other sources on the web that probably won't be so lucky.
Look at the google vs duckduckgo search results for this: "How a Convicted Terrorist used the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Website to Identify Targets"
Medical doctors can't discuss possible treatments for COVID.
Medical doctors can't discuss side effects from vaccines.
Senate testimony where an alleged Ukrainian whistleblower is named is banned. If you even say the name, not even in any relevant context, you will get banned.
The list goes on and on. There is nothing "open" about the Google web. But again, I don't believe there's anything I or anyone else could say that would change your mind.
Google isn’t big brother, Google is my little brother.
Sites are often not behind a paywall if you reach them via google (and only google).
Google makes money selling ads yes, but their core product is search. Like a newspaper, which does journalism, and also has an ad department, or a TV show, with ad breaks, or a sports broadcast.
Do people think Google makes their search worse to... sell fewer ads?
Its not search.
A newspaper’s primary purpose is to inform the public, and make money while doing so.
Googles primary purpose is not search, and to make money while doing so.
Googles primary purpose is collect and sell data, and make money while doing so.
If the primary purpose was ada, then it would stop all of the wasteful spending on engineering projects with no relation to, and no hope of, making ad money.
Google is in the business of collecting data and selling advertising using that data. For the purpose of making money.
Search hasn’t been part of their purpose in decades.
Let me ask you this, has search gotten better or worse in the last 5 - 10 years? Has their data collection gotten more invasive or less over the last 5 - 10 years?
I think we both know what kind of company Google is once those questions are answered.
But since you asked: Compare Google search engine results over nearly two decades and a trend emerges: Results are filled with advertising and non-Google results are lower down. https://wapo.st/3dHj2Xf
There are firms which evaluate search quality by employing a huge corpus of queries and human raters. I trust those more than someone running a single query for a commercial search.
The reality is, the Web didn't stay static. If Google 2020 used the same exact search algorithm as Google of 2000, the results would be worse, because of all of the massive amount of noise and spam that's been added to the web since then, to say nothing of adversarial attacks. Google of 2020 is doing a hell of a lot to maintain freshness, index an exponentially bigger web, and defeat pretty much an army of blackhat SEO adversaries from spoiling it.
It's like saying Email spam is worse in Gmail or other clients. Compared to what? 30 years ago, there wasn't much spam being sent and spammers were unsophisticated. The fact that you see almost none these days, but still a few slip through, compared to standard IMAP in 1993 is irrelevent, because the email population was tiny back then.
I'll admit that the product search category in queries has over-the-top ads. But then again, this is the one area where even going back to 2000 era, Sergey and Larry justified ads by saying say that serving up keyword based ads is in a way, satisfying query intent. If I type in "toyota cars" and I get ads for 3 toyota car dealerships nearby, why is this completely wrong? It's very likely a strong buy signal.
Personally, when I'm doing product search, I go straight to Amazon, or I use Shopping.google.com (or Froogle back in the old days)
I can do my own cherry picking. For example, when looking for actual information, especially long tail information, Google search is way better than it was in the early 2000s, and unmatched by things like DDG.
Compare long-tail search vs DuckDuckGo. Try for example "the movie where a robot kid flies a spy plane". Google returns D.A.R.Y.L as top item. DDG doesn't even have it in the top 10. This is way bette than it was in 2000.
"who wrote the c64 game mule". DDG just gives me Wikipedia. Google gives me the Answer + Wikipedia plus related games to explore.
Or try "what is the moment of inertia of a disk", on DDG the snippet displayed in the first result is far less useful than the snippet Google displays. Plus Google shows actual diagrams in the results too.
Look, I'll be the first to admit they increased the # of ads for some queries (mostly product search, real estate, travel, etc) and are using questionable dark patterns that make ads harder to discern from non-ad content. But quite obviously to me, the non-ad query results have gotten ALOT better from 20 years ago, and it's just false memory nostalgia about how queries use to work on a much smaller, and non-commercial web, that thinks they were better.
I've been on the internet/web since the 80s. It was a marvelous time in the old days before commercialization, but also in many ways, it was far less useful and worse.
I’ve only been on the web since the mid-late 90s, but it has changed so much for the worse, perhaps not in usefulness, but in… Idealsim? I remember reading the hacker manifesto and it moving me. That crappy little text inspired so much in me. I just hope that in todays overly commercial, algorithmically driven, ML curated world, there is room for life changing chance encounters.
This explains user-hostile deprecations like newsgroup search (a literal search engine they bought and abandoned), RSS Reader, etc.
In addition, the ever-decreasing visual distinction between organic search results and ads on Google SERPs is well documented. As is the ever-increasing encroachment of data collection into all their products. Look at how Chrome works with Google accounts now vs 5 or 10 years ago.
Google went from a search engine company who runs ads so they can afford to keep building cool things, to an ad company that runs a search engine because it provides provide data and inventory for its ad network.
This was literally an interview by a real reporter, edited into an article. You might not like that the interviewer wasn't antagonistic (let's be real — most aren't!), but this is not a "PR submarine piece" by any sane definition of the phrase.
Does this mean any article about Google that does not criticize Google deserves this snark? Fwiw the snark is annoying not because folks disagree with it, but that saying it again and again and doing nothing is a trite form of internet me-too-ing or signalling. That Google depends on an ethically dubious set of assumptions is obvious; now how do we fix it and why are we talking about this here?
All right, then, enlighten us with your top ten. And if you haven’t already, I’d like to see where on the top ten you’ve put regimes like the Chinese government and the US government.
Google would have a walled garden if they could afford to lose the users and manufacturers that would revolt against it.
They lose the most if the internet balkanizes.
By balkanising the internet they can have a monopoly over offering ads to certain target groups that fall within their walled garden.
Anyway, Google works hard to make the open web competitive with all the walled gardens around. When they do that they put up some fences to make the experience a bit more like walled gardens, but the open web is still just a few seconds and a click away.
That's why Google instead reshapes the web as Google sees fit.
> Anyway, Google works hard to make the open web competitive with all the walled gardens around
No. It subsumes the web and replaces it with all things Google. It dominates all web-related standards bodies, pushes through half-baked Chrome-only APIs as "standards" and then presents them as fait accompli through Google-controlled properties like web.dev.
Facebook scored the mortal wound on the web — they reinvented a bigger, badder AOL closed garden.
Most of my searches result in a wall of sales or product pages. Hardly 'open' when they turned it into glorified yellow pages
These companies -- all of them -- are fucking with each other. None of us matter in the end. It's all about which company can screw the other out of engagement and eyeballs.
Meanwhile Firefox, the open web, open source, right to repair, and digital ownership all wither away.
Well that is kind of how media companies compete against each other, but the key question is: is it beneficial or harmful to the public?
You could argue that Apple is acquiring users who they then lock in, sell to advertisers and developers (for a 30% cut on the App store) and monetize with service subscriptions, but you can also argue that half of Apple's profit is still from hardware sales, that apps and services are a big reason for buying that hardware, so Apple is still beholden to its hardware customers to some extent.
And Google has https://wellbeing.google as well as associated features in Android, and Apple has also implemented "screen time" tracking and limits.
Fixed it for you.
It seems lately that Google has just become Yet Another Large Software Firm, with everything that that implies.
EDIT: typo
This. This right here.
A real hero knows when to resist the fear and borrow the power from the giants.
I don't think we need a real hero here, we need end-user solidarity perhaps in the form of public policy and market regulation. Humans would have more freedom on the internet if corporate giants didn't.
Just because it's what's "always" happened before, doesn't mean we can't do better.
This being the case is the very driving force of any innovation.
Your statement seems like defeatism wrapped in a pretty bow of faux-insight.
A tendency toward giants is also not necessarily a sustainable state of affairs.
Once technology becomes sufficiently advanced and pervasive, the window of time available for a giant to gestate, before the next giant-level disruption, inevitably shrinks to the point the system reaches an equilibrium of innovational equanimity and balance.
This is ordinary and expected, and parallels can be seen anywhere in nature.
The - relatively-brief - "time of giants" of human progress may soon be coming to a close.
This statement is an oxymoron.
"Tech giants" hobble the open principles of the internet by their own existence, persistence and, by-definition, over-bearing influence.
Any entity genuinely concerned with preserving open principles would seek to limit its growth far-prior to where Google is now, and eliminate the pervasiveness of its influence, favouring and encouraging the results of diverse decentralisation over narrow centralisation.
Google and Facebook are the antithesis of everything the concept of an open internet stands for.
If anything Apple has does more harm than anyone to the Web by pushing the idea of native apps for everything served from a closed proprietary App Store that you can’t even side load around.
You can index and organize the content of an intranet of every large organization.
Good luck. The magic of the internet is that everything is public and interlinked.
Usually within a company the incentives are such that information is more tightly controlled. A software engineer doesn't see purchase orders and an HR specialist doesn't see software assignments. Usually a directory is more useful than a search within a company. Obviously there are exceptions.
> And, when I asked about whether the Chinese model of the internet - much more authoritarian, big on surveillance - is in the ascendant, Pichai said the free and open internet "is being attacked". Importantly, he didn't refer to China directly but he went on to say: "None of our major products and services are available in China."
Google does run at least one semi-independent group to tackle such censorship, disinformation, propaganda, and abuse https://jigsaw.google.com/
Throughout this report we use the term “toxicity,” defined as rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable language that is likely to make someone leave a discussion. We specifically use the term toxicity, as opposed to words like “abuse” or “hate speech” for both practical and scientific reasons.
https://jigsaw.google.com/the-current/toxicity/
Scientific reasons? There's nothing scientific about a term so undefined that every person can have their own custom definition.
Not everyone in the world has equal financial power as a US citizen.
f google
> [Sundar Pichai] says many countries are restricting the flow of information, and the model is often taken for granted.
Like when Google, with more influence than most countries, censors content on YouTube or the Google App Store? Google’s manipulation of information amounts to political propaganda to those who aren’t aligned with their prevailing views - naturally many countries will balk at letting that kind of foreign interference/control influence their own societies.
And I can’t help but view Pichai’s perspective on taxes as a form of convenient regulatory capture / barrier to competition:
> I put this to Pichai, who said that Google no longer uses this scheme, is one of the world's biggest taxpayers, and complies with tax laws in every country in which it operates.
The article also talks about the activist streak of Google and its employees but doesn’t challenge it:
> With more than 100,000 staff, many of them hugely opinionated on internal message boards, and activist in nature, this is just impossible to control. There is a tension between Google genuinely embracing cognitive diversity by having people of all persuasions among its global staff, and at the same time really standing up for particular issues as a company.
I don’t think this tension is actually present. Google is a dyed in the wool Bay Area tech company. I don’t think it has employees of “all persuasions” in any great numbers unless they are looking at only the left side of the American political spectrum.
Executive interviews tend to lean more towards press releases than journalism.
It is really quite sad how Google's formerly excellent search product, has morphed into a tool for censorship, and surveillance capitalism, and in the process, degraded its accuracy significantly.
You create enough Byzantine rules that basically only the largest company can hire the lawyers and comply. It’s an effective way to kill off competition.
Google is ready to start encouraging regulation.
(I could provide links to studies, but I like to think the downvotes prove my point for me)
There're lots of things about HN that make it better than many other fora, but its collective wild-eyed, frothing reaction to literally the word Google is not one of them. You may as well be on 4chan for threads like these
This might as well be a place to talk about Google in general, or Pichai in general irt "internet freedom."
There is no free and open internet, and Google is part of the group of corporations that help prop up the big tech cartel that help kill off each others' competitors, share employee blacklists, and intentionally sacrifice the quality of their product to push their Bay Area bourgeoisie politics around the globe.
For example "He says many countries are restricting the flow of information, and the model is often taken for granted." Shifts any blame elsewhere in a way that does not detail this model or outlines any of the issues that define the restrictions and how they effect Google. So for all we know, he could be on about data protection laws like GDPR or the like and paints them as bad without going into any details of the pro's or con's.
Remember some law/restriction that is bad for Google may actually be good for the users.
Also when I see the term "free internet" I do feel it is a misnomer in many ways, more so in the context it is used.
With that in mind, it seems most comments appear along the lines of a response to the title and not the content and is just going to clog Dang up with work.
I personally found the aspect and questioning about corporation TAX more insightful and perhaps would of been a better sound-bite of a title.
> When I invited Pichai to commit there and then to Google pulling out of all tax havens immediately, he didn't take up the offer.
> In a very revealing quick-fire round of questions, we discover he doesn't eat meat, drives a Tesla, reveres Alan Turing, wishes he'd met Stephen Hawking, and is jealous of Jeff Bezos's space mission.
The headline really is irrelevant to the majority of the interview, but I really wouldn't be surprised if he personally signed off that headline to run with from the interview (the same was used on the television news). He's a former newspaper editor after all.
This form of journalism is what I thought was starting to be considered old fashioned. I don't understand how he became the BBC's Media Editor and host of the most prestigious morning radio programme on the BBC, apart from having loads of connections and history in the publishing industry.
Every single one of these predates Pichai, who only became CEO in 2015:
* Google Wave was already turned down in 2012
* Google Plus launched in 2011 and the writing was on the wall by 2015
* Google Glass consumer edition was discontinued in Jan 2015 before Pichai started
* Loon is the only arguable exception; it was started in 2011 but only promoted into an official Bet during Pichai's tenure in 2018. However, it was also an experiment from day 1, not "the next big thing" like Wave/Plus/Glass were supposed to be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...
"That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say."
The last 4 years of US politics (and 20? of UK politics) have given the lie to that belief.
[edit: added UK politics because they're just as bad]
So many AI models have been ridiculed for the same flaw - learning correlations.
There are currently 15 parties to vote for here in Denmark, with a government on average being based on 2-3 of them. A single person rarely get more votes than 1% in our elections because most vote for the party, not the person.
People distrust politicians ... except. Except for their favorite politician, except for their party, except for the ones they voted for, except...
You see this with Congress writ large. People hate Congress, its approval ratings are through the floor. But they like their own Congresspeople. Sure, gerrymandering, safe districts, etc, but by and large people are much happier with their own Representatives than everyone else's.
As I wrote in another reply I believe this to be A Very American Thing. At least I have never heard of anyone here (in Denmark) seeing themselves as represented by a person. It is more of a party thing. I'm sure I live in a bubble (don't we all) so my experience might not match any official numbers but in my experience people seem to just change to another party at the next election if they feel the representation does not match their expectation. This likely makes it easier not to get caught up in having to defend a specific person that "can do no wrong". But again, I have not looked it up and it is all based on my own experience and intuition. I do know that election day sees a much higher turnout here (~%85) than in the US (>65%?) though, but is it related to distrusting politicians? Who knows.
This might be a parliamentary democracy thing. In the US, everything is about borders and leaders. You're happy with corrupt politicians because corrupt politicians are connected politicians, and they might bring benefits to your state/district.
In short, every politician is trustworthy to the people who voted for them, but not the rest- kindof an inverse of the effect, really.
Let's not act like news readers or politicians are different sorts of humans than anyone else.
Google Plus and Google Glass were big bets in my view. That doesn't take away from Google being unscrupulous in ending unsuccessful offerings. That's part of what made them succesful, I assume.
Journalists often use hyperbole or simplify complex facts to deliver an interesting and easily understandable story. That doesn't make every sinplification a gross misrepresentation.
You're free to dive deeper into any topic you want, but it's delusional to expect every reader to be an expert in every field.
Bashing journalism as a whole has become common gospel, but to me it seems that the effect of that thinking is not that people become better informed.
The article sounds Google-friendly and uncritical to me, but it's also very common to cover interviews in a way that represents the views of the interviewed person.
Wouldn't it make more sense to study the field and sort journalists into groups based on their performance over time? Even casual sports fan do that kind of work reflexively. I don't get why journalism should be treated any different, and I especially don't get the desire to find an anecdote that could reject the entire field out of hand.
Put differently-- if Glenn Greenwald publishes another leak-based story about state-level corruption, I'll read it and ascribe more veracity to him than I will Crichton's cocktail story. I'll bet you a dollar that when/if I do that, nothing bad will happen as a result.
Plus was Larry's and Vic's baby.
> He's been responsible for a lot of Google products.
He might have been responsible but i wouldn't call those projects as Pichai's big bets.
for about a year, so still after all those dates. I'd guess Wave fell into his previous responsibility though.
Not sure I understand that distinction. If I label all my projects as experiments, do I also get to escape culpability for their failure while loading on the self-praise when they succeed?
By contrast, Wave, Plus and Glass were all consumer products from the mothership that were heavily hyped as being the Next Big Thing that would revolutionize work/IM, social networks and mobile phones respectively.
1. Can you get wi-fi reception on the ground from a balloon? How big a transmitter, how big a power source, how long can you keep it going for, and how much weight do you need to spend on batteries for this?
2. Will your wi-fi reception cut out if a tall building happens to pass between you and the balloon? How do you mitigate this? Do you need duplicate coverage from multiple balloons? (Starlink is dealing with this now.)
3. How do you keep the balloons in one place, or at least control where they go? If one goes out of range, how do you make sure there's another covering all its receivers?
4. How much propellant/battery can you carry on the balloon for course adjustments? How long can it stay aloft before this is exhausted?
5. Where do the winds go in the stratosphere? If the balloons are not propelled, where will they end up? Can you use altitude changes to get into different jet-streams and reduce propellant use?
6. How do you respect country's airspace? How do you avoid causing international incidents? If a balloon does come down, how do you ensure it doesn't harm anyone and can be retrieved? Early in the project, Loon had an ops team of former navy SEALs whose job was to retrieve any crashed balloons without starting any wars.
And I wasn't even on the team - this is just what I got from a few lunchtime conversations. They had to invent new algorithms, first to model the wind systems in the stratosphere and then to optimize balloon placement given that wind. I know their CTO - he's got a Ph.D in stochastic optimal control (pretty appropriate for this problem). The math behind control theory, once you get past simple PID controllers, is hard.
That you need a team of NAVY SEALs to clean up your messes is a sign you're doing it wrong.
After working at Google for 12 years, I am always amazed at how people talk up their projects as risky when really, there's little or no risk involved, and the majority of the problems are political or social opposition to your plans, as well as the lack of a business model.
Sure, if your funding sources are okay with spending 100% on a high-variance, low-hit-rate manner of output. Every single Google earnings call I've been on has the CEO reassuring investors about their high-risk "moonshots", emphasizing that they're only 5% of Google's budget. You'll note that the parent comment didn't use that reason to justify the other failures, which were not explicitly classified pre hoc as high-risk experiments.
I'm not sure how you think the answer could be anything other than yes. If you were working on high-risk moonshot private projects and either self-funding them or being funded by someone comfortable with the risk of your endeavor, do you think you _wouldn't_ "escape culpability" yet be rewarded for successes?
(Note also that you're using an extremely odd definition of "escaping culpability". Moonshots failing is the _expected_ outcome, and pointing that out isn't helping anyone "escape culpability".
[0] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Coming_War_on_General_Com...
I'd argue its people running their own servers - traditionally an x86 (plus RAM, disk, modem pipe and power) running a POSIX kernel running httpd, smptd, ftpd and maybe ircd. A static IPv4 address from ARIN (via an ISP) and a DNS name from ICANN (via a registrar).
These are the necessary ingredients you must have, as an individual or a group, to participate in the "free and open internet".
I'd argue that Facebook is just a natural extension of AWS, Digital Ocean or Github pages. Facebook takes away the DNS name, and they take away your content and put it behind an algorithm, which you can bribe to let your stuff through. I'd consider a difference of degree, not kind.
Even those who go to the trouble of running their own physical server still use services like Google Analytics, which violate the privacy of every data consumer. Maybe not as bad as putting your data behind someone else's paywall and then paying them to expose it, but it's pretty bad. Since we use the web for literally every application now, it's a particularly worrying trend.
My point is that if you want a 'free and open internet' then you need to make it easy for people own, understand and run ALL of these ingredients. Like, provide them by all by default for everyone's smartphone, and run servers on your smartphone! And give them reasonable defaults, with a first-year-free DNS name. A free static IPv6 address block. Default, svelte, little mobile friendly server daemons. Then let people make crazy HTML documents with their voice and self-publish them like in the old days!
All the components are there, we just need to DO it.
PS. Include mega-corps in 'nation states' above. They both want total control over the Internet. They will get it too, in some proportion. Because truly democratic forces are too weak and disorganised, as always.
There is a whole lot of things they did right (and do right), only they are now often messing up even basics.
Lots of my URLs were either "Discovered – currently not indexed" or "Crawled - currently not indexed", but spam sites are happily searchable with the exact same content. And I don't want spend to fight SEO.
It sometimes seems like Google’s internal self-image is stuck in 2001, when they were an idealistic search engine company whose goal was to organize the world’s information.
Today they are an ad company, running some office apps and cloud computing on the side. The transition has been great for revenue but it seems like they long ago sold the moral authority to make pronouncements about the free and open Internet.
What are the results of their actions?
They do. They want an Internet where they control the flow of information.
Everything you listed has maximum profits when there is a free and open internet, which is something Google depends on to reach its users.
ISPs, on the other hand, can approve service providers this via prioritization, or DNS-/traffic-level blocking. Google was cognizant early, which is why it became a fervent "net neutrality" supporter.
1. I cannot think of anything else that could bring down anti-trust regulation faster than Google angling to be the sole service provider for an entire market
2. "better" being measured by market success.
I find it grotesquely comical to even see this headline with Sundar Pichai's name attached to it.
Disclaimer: I worked at Google for 12 years.
Look no further than the fact that nationalist movements have right wing ethno-state ambitions attached to them everywhere, usually with a return to “Greater X” where X is an older empire they use to have, usually when their faction was more ethnically dominant.
> Nationalism is followed by fascism quite easily
It seems just as easily followed by other forms of totalitarianism as exemplified by the USSR, China, Yugoslavia, Cuba, Venezuela.
Even Beijing today is abusing children in the hopes of national glory. The state puts kids through factory-like conditions to make athletes from a young childhood age, doesn't even give them beyond a 3rd grade education, because everything is maximized on winning for national glory. Franky, state-based olympic camps IMHO are borderline child abuse.
Oh yes, the Olympics are 100% about nationalism and CCP glory for China, and indeed for many other nationalist authoritarian states.
> easily followed by other forms of totalitarianism as exemplified by the USSR, China
China under Xi is fascist. Mass rallies under a glorified leader for life. Calls to return to a mythic past of nationhood under national rejuvenation. What's the difference between Nuremberg rallies, and the mass rallies the CCP runs? The near constant glorification of the CCP and Xi, the huge number of young people in the party and at the rallies (almost 100 million people in the CCP Youth League).
Let's look at some of the defining characteristics of Fascism:
1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism. 2. Disregard for Human Rights. 3.Controlled Mass Media. 4. Obsession with National Security.
#4 is especially good example of how China is using national security to crush Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and internal dissent, by claiming pretty much any thing they don't like is a national security issue. Thus, an 80 year old women with a protest sign on the street is arrested in Hong Kong for "national security" reasons.
China under Deng might not have been Fascist, but under Xi, it's definitely trending that way.
> China under Xi is fascist. Mass rallies under a glorified leader for life. Calls to return to a mythic past of nationhood under national rejuvenation. What's the difference between Nuremberg rallies, and the mass rallies the CCP runs? The near constant glorification of the CCP and Xi, the huge number of young people in the party and at the rallies (almost 100 million people in the CCP Youth League).
Your definition of Fascism is having rallies and involving young people?
> #4 is especially good example
You forgot about the multiple terrorist attacks and race riots that led to this so called "obsession". Those "protestors" set elderly people who disagreed with them on fire. Who asked you, in your comfy office job in Silicon Valley, what is and isn't a real security concern on the other side of the planet. If you're so concerned about frivolous use of "national security" then maybe do something about the literal National Security Agency your company clearly works with.
I used to be neutral on Google but it's clear that the people working there should have no power over anything.
Maybe before your 玻璃心 breaks you should learn a little bit about your own country’s history before you go around tossing insults.
As for use of national security as an excuse, I’ve been protesting the NSA for 3 decades. I released one of the first anonymizing web proxies and designed anonymous mailers to fight FBI carnivore and NIST Clipper/Skipjack. I spoke out against the Patriot Act in 2001 when the US government used the 9/11 attacks to impose it. I spoke out against the Communications Decent Act when it was proposed and released software to combat it.
And that’s the difference. When my government uses “national security” as an excuse to crack down on freedoms or minorities, I speak out against it.
When you government uses terrorist attacks or crime to shutdown newspapers or jail Uighurs, you support it.
And that’s why it’s fascism because if you buy into the fear over some insignificant terrorist attacks which are not an existential threat to China in order to justify a total surveillance state and an authoritarian President for life who won’t even take turns and relinquish power to other Standing Committee members, then you’re defending an authoritarian dictatorship and fascist.
The governments of the world love using either terrorism, external threats, crime, or protection of children from sex as blanket justification for every encroachment of freedom.
Fascism is when you host the Olympics. The more Olympics you host the more fascist you are, and if you're in charge of organizing the Olympics you're the next Hitler.
> Maybe before your 玻璃心 breaks you should learn a little bit about your own country’s history before you go around tossing insults.
Googling a random insult in Chinese doesn't make your argument better. Who is "my" government? Why is everything racial for you people. What do you hope to achieve throwing in a random insult in Chinese to the Chinese person?
> insignificant terrorist attacks which are not an existential threat to China
Insignificant Terrorist Attacks. Listen to your own words. People like you are always willing to sacrifice other people's lives in the name of your nonexistent "free speech". You clutch pearls about "shutting down newspapers" but I've yet to see any of you Googlers acknowledge the fact that you clearly censor content the US deems extremist. Or are you going to go on about the 2 billion Uyghurs being simultaneously exterminated, forced to celebrate Ramadan, and then given 20 sterilization procedures every hour? Your allegations are bullshit and every actually Muslim country agrees that it's bullshit. But keep using them as a rhetorical device.
> excuse to crack down on freedoms or minorities, I speak out against it.
You mean the federal program to accuse American academics of espionage that explicitly targeted Asian men, which has so far resulted in a trial where thefbi agent in charge admitted to fabricating evidence but will likely still end in a conviction because the jury is completely white? Or do you mean the systemic police violence against black people and the occasional public exectution that caused several months of riots. I already know what people like you's opinion of it is, you don't care.
> As for use of national security as an excuse, I’ve been protesting the NSA for 3 decades. I released one of the first anonymizing web proxies and designed anonymous mailers to fight FBI carnivore and NIST Clipper/Skipjack. I spoke out against the Patriot Act in 2001 when the US government used the 9/11 attacks to impose it. I spoke out against the Communications Decent Act when it was proposed and released software to combat it.
And you still want the entire world to run off of software and services entirely beholden to the US Government. Your company censors information the US Government doesn't want people to see. You know this in your heart of hearts. You work for a company that seeks to put the entire word under the digital jurisdiction of one government but all you do is complain about countries on the other side of the planet you have cursory knowledge of because they're competition. All your "protesting" against the NSA has done nothing. There are entire engineering schools dedicated to recruiting people for them. They're as active and effective as ever.
BTW, I don’t need to Google for insults, I do speak passable Mandarin, lived and worked in China so I’ve encountered enough glass hearted nationalists and 无毛 in online forums to be quite familiar.
There’s been a huge rise of nationalism under Xi like there has been in the US under Trump. It’s dangerous. Relatives I have in China who used to be quite moderate are now ranting and raving on WeChat about every little perceived slight against China, because that’s how Xi and the state run media have focused people’s attention.
Combine that with the new bravado of wolf warrior mentality in government diplomats and it is quite a concerning development as concerning as the rise of fascist/nationalist movements in Europe, like in Hungary, or the Trump phenomena here.
The fact that you are blind to all of this, or only see problems here or in the West, but not in China, with the way the political winds are blowing, is your blind spot.
Both of you have behaved disgracefully.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Both of you have behaved disgracefully.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Is there any evidence behind that statement? Looks very bogus.