According to the article, the evil Google has made life harder for affiliate marketing industry, SEO industry, alternative medicine sites... Well, Google has certainly made quite a few unpleasant things, but mentioning these as examples makes it hard for me to sympathize the author's case.
(Added:)
Allegations of Google's manipulating the search results to influence voting behavior are much more interesting.
so OP does SEO and also complains about google being evil. I have no sympathy for someone doing SEO to basically ruin the "organic" results and then complain about how google controls the results. So what, you want to control the result for profit instead of them?
It's arguable that the worst thing Google has done is be the ultimate fruition of the ad model.
Most people are so accustomed to "free" services from google, that they don't even see it as transactional, but rather as exploitive. "I'm trying to watch my youtube videos, and google keeps shoving these ads in my face. Google, please fuck off!" or "I'm trying to organize my business expenses but Google sheets won't load. Where is your god damn support!?!"
Google put themselves in a position where they can only be evil, because the vast majority of people (the author here included), just will not be able to step back and see what google is, and weigh it against alternates. Google is bad for leeching off my right to a private gmail account, but they are not good for saving me $5/mo for email...e-mail is free. Everyone knows that.
Even worse, if Google were to turn into a paid services company, they would be even more evil for cutting off the millions, sorry, billions of poor users who don't have the money to pay for all that google offers. The backlash against youtube red was immense (that was its unfortunate launch name) and even today people still see youtube premium as an evil thing.
So sure, google does evil things, but it should be stated within the framework of their business model, rather than being unaware or ignoring it.
To be fair, email was not something that people really paid for, ever. It was bundled with your internet subscription service, at least in France, this is how the vast majority of people got their first email address (some still use it, some accounts being over 20 years old).
What Google did was actually provide a better service at no added cost, so technically "free" competing with already "free" (you were paying for it in the internet subscription but since it is bundled, there was no way to offload the cost anyway). The reason I got my google account was bigger storage (1GB was a lot back then), bigger joint files support and just better webmail overall.
To get your Gmail there was even a waiting list if I'm not wrong, it was just that much better!
Nowadays things are a bit different since email has become something everybody relies on instead of just a new cheaper way to communicate, so the case could be made that it should be paid for. But at this point everybody would go back to their provider supplied address.
The rest of Google stuff was built with ADS money but the thing is that they kind of stand on their own nowadays. Plenty of businesses use their suite and regular users having access for free is a nice side effect.
I do agree that it's a kind of distorted competition since you can't really compete with all the "free" money Google is getting. But what are you going to do? I feel like most things in the world got there by not playing by the rules. I do wish it was a more even playing field, but at least Google is providing a lot of value unlike Apple that makes you pay for subpar stuff and still find a way to abuse the rules in a worse way. Some Google properties like Maps have no alternative that is on the same level and not even Apple with all its money has gotten close (today's Apple is seriously incompetent but that's another story).
The problem is at the core of internet economics, the network/scaling effects are so huge that it feels like it should basically be a public utility. Not unlike a national train network, it would be wasteful to build multiple parallel tracks and have them compete.
As for YouTube, I feel that's actually the thing that is the least legitimate. If it weren't "free", I wouldn't pay for much of the content on there, much of it being low quality entertainment and a lot of the good stuff competing for funding from other media businesses. The problem is that payment isn't really a solved problem on the internet, I can't buy a single video for say, 1€, as I would for a single baguette. So, the incentive is to bundle everything into a subscription indiscriminately. At least the deal is better for content producers than it is for music subscription services.
It feels like much of the web is being held back by the lack of true innovation in the financial sector, that are really happy to take a cut from every subscription and thus have no real incentive to provide micro transactions that could support another type of economy for the web.
> Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two nerds who left Stanford before getting their master’s degrees to found Google, were at the start endearing.
> If you run your eyes down this list, you’ll see that Google and YouTube together, which are both owned by Alphabet, have twice the traffic of the next eighteen sites combined—over 200 billion visits per month for Google and YouTube.
This is also why the whole debate about Alphabet/Google profiling and spying on users is just an incidental detail and at best a distraction from the real mechanism, which is to incentivize everyone making as many network connections as possible all the time. The network itself is what does the analysis, like Room 641A and friends. It's all about that metadata. Contents don't really matter.
When the product people get things like “message-send causes notification on recipient's phone” to be realtime-enough, even a single type of metadata like “this IP address made a network connection at this time” will be enough to eventually filter a person's complete social network out of a large enough timespan of metadata collection.
I found it incredibly confusing to read the following:
> Once the federal government gets into the business of allowing free speech, it can define what’s allowable free speech. And you need only look at our northern neighbor or our friends across the Atlantic to see how that’s working out.
I had to scan the article for other clues that the author is, in fact, American, and was, in fact, referencing Canada and Europe as supposedly worse of in regarding to free speech than the US.
The US consistently ranks below Europe and Canada when rated on free speech metrics by third parties [1] -- and has been trending downwards.
>In 2015 Google’s parent company Alphabet retired the old motto, now substituting for it “Do the right thing.” The old motto was better. Negation has advantages that positive assertions lack.
Setting aside the specific case of Google, while I think the author makes a strong argument for the value of negation, particularly for institutions, there's also something enervating as an individual about trying to do nothing wrong, rather trying to do good. It's so easy to self criticize, to second guess oneself, and ultimately let anxiety and fear of "doing the wrong thing" take hold. I think most people would be better served by seeking to do the right thing, rather than merely not being evil.
"Lord Acton’s admonition about power corrupting and absolute power corrupting absolutely has, in the years since its new motto, been borne out at Google. "
I couldn't read the article because the author is too lazy to fact check himself.
The article perpetuates the myth that Google retired the Don't Be Evil motto. Untrue. It was previously mentioned twice, now it's mentioned only once. The original click bait article was mistaken and people continue to fail to read Google's mission statement.
11 comments
[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 31.7 ms ] thread(Added:) Allegations of Google's manipulating the search results to influence voting behavior are much more interesting.
Most people are so accustomed to "free" services from google, that they don't even see it as transactional, but rather as exploitive. "I'm trying to watch my youtube videos, and google keeps shoving these ads in my face. Google, please fuck off!" or "I'm trying to organize my business expenses but Google sheets won't load. Where is your god damn support!?!"
Google put themselves in a position where they can only be evil, because the vast majority of people (the author here included), just will not be able to step back and see what google is, and weigh it against alternates. Google is bad for leeching off my right to a private gmail account, but they are not good for saving me $5/mo for email...e-mail is free. Everyone knows that.
Even worse, if Google were to turn into a paid services company, they would be even more evil for cutting off the millions, sorry, billions of poor users who don't have the money to pay for all that google offers. The backlash against youtube red was immense (that was its unfortunate launch name) and even today people still see youtube premium as an evil thing.
So sure, google does evil things, but it should be stated within the framework of their business model, rather than being unaware or ignoring it.
What Google did was actually provide a better service at no added cost, so technically "free" competing with already "free" (you were paying for it in the internet subscription but since it is bundled, there was no way to offload the cost anyway). The reason I got my google account was bigger storage (1GB was a lot back then), bigger joint files support and just better webmail overall.
To get your Gmail there was even a waiting list if I'm not wrong, it was just that much better! Nowadays things are a bit different since email has become something everybody relies on instead of just a new cheaper way to communicate, so the case could be made that it should be paid for. But at this point everybody would go back to their provider supplied address.
The rest of Google stuff was built with ADS money but the thing is that they kind of stand on their own nowadays. Plenty of businesses use their suite and regular users having access for free is a nice side effect. I do agree that it's a kind of distorted competition since you can't really compete with all the "free" money Google is getting. But what are you going to do? I feel like most things in the world got there by not playing by the rules. I do wish it was a more even playing field, but at least Google is providing a lot of value unlike Apple that makes you pay for subpar stuff and still find a way to abuse the rules in a worse way. Some Google properties like Maps have no alternative that is on the same level and not even Apple with all its money has gotten close (today's Apple is seriously incompetent but that's another story).
The problem is at the core of internet economics, the network/scaling effects are so huge that it feels like it should basically be a public utility. Not unlike a national train network, it would be wasteful to build multiple parallel tracks and have them compete.
As for YouTube, I feel that's actually the thing that is the least legitimate. If it weren't "free", I wouldn't pay for much of the content on there, much of it being low quality entertainment and a lot of the good stuff competing for funding from other media businesses. The problem is that payment isn't really a solved problem on the internet, I can't buy a single video for say, 1€, as I would for a single baguette. So, the incentive is to bundle everything into a subscription indiscriminately. At least the deal is better for content producers than it is for music subscription services.
It feels like much of the web is being held back by the lack of true innovation in the financial sector, that are really happy to take a cut from every subscription and thus have no real incentive to provide micro transactions that could support another type of economy for the web.
> If you run your eyes down this list, you’ll see that Google and YouTube together, which are both owned by Alphabet, have twice the traffic of the next eighteen sites combined—over 200 billion visits per month for Google and YouTube.
It's interesting how the founding mythos gets compressed by time to omit key details: https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...
This is also why the whole debate about Alphabet/Google profiling and spying on users is just an incidental detail and at best a distraction from the real mechanism, which is to incentivize everyone making as many network connections as possible all the time. The network itself is what does the analysis, like Room 641A and friends. It's all about that metadata. Contents don't really matter.
When the product people get things like “message-send causes notification on recipient's phone” to be realtime-enough, even a single type of metadata like “this IP address made a network connection at this time” will be enough to eventually filter a person's complete social network out of a large enough timespan of metadata collection.
> Once the federal government gets into the business of allowing free speech, it can define what’s allowable free speech. And you need only look at our northern neighbor or our friends across the Atlantic to see how that’s working out.
I had to scan the article for other clues that the author is, in fact, American, and was, in fact, referencing Canada and Europe as supposedly worse of in regarding to free speech than the US.
The US consistently ranks below Europe and Canada when rated on free speech metrics by third parties [1] -- and has been trending downwards.
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries...
Setting aside the specific case of Google, while I think the author makes a strong argument for the value of negation, particularly for institutions, there's also something enervating as an individual about trying to do nothing wrong, rather trying to do good. It's so easy to self criticize, to second guess oneself, and ultimately let anxiety and fear of "doing the wrong thing" take hold. I think most people would be better served by seeking to do the right thing, rather than merely not being evil.
Acton was wrong.
Robert Caro: Power doesn't corrupt; it reveals.
The article perpetuates the myth that Google retired the Don't Be Evil motto. Untrue. It was previously mentioned twice, now it's mentioned only once. The original click bait article was mistaken and people continue to fail to read Google's mission statement.