5 ms·

(From the document..) Risks Posed by the Centralized Web - Facebook and Google, account for 81% of all incoming traffic to online news sources in the U.S. -

(From the document..) Risks Posed by the Centralized Web - Facebook and Google, account for 81% of all incoming traffic to online news sources in the U.S. - Google processes 3.5 billion search queries per day, roughtly ten times more than its nearest competitors Risk 1- Top-down, Direct Censorship Risk 2 - Curational Bias/ Indirect Cencorship Risk 3 - Abuse of Curatorial Power Risk 4 - Exclusion

will_brown 9y ago
>Google processes 3.5 billion search queries per day, roughtly ten times more than its nearest competitors The crazy thing to me is this has already been examined through many of their obviously anti-competitive acquisitions, and yet they always win. Namely, they use their position as the search engine leader to determine trends in search, purchases and advertising to buy companies in industries that will ultimately help the bottom line of their advertising revenue driven search engine to the detriment of alternative products. In other words the very people/companies who already buy Google ads now must pay more for Google ads because Google entered the market and is competing for the same ads jacking up prices. Because of Google's search engine they know exactly where they can get away with this, they know the maximum ad cost bearable by their competitors and can/will squeeze it at best or they can effectively drive you out of business leaving themselves as the sole operator in the space at worst. I mentioned it the other day, the one thing people could do is boycott google search, which I know sounds ridiculous, but how hard would it really be to organize a single day google search boycott across the web where people agreed to use bing or DuckDuckGo for a single day? google shareholders would throw a fit and change would be made internally in an instant, and I'd go so far as to say political pressure would come down to seriously look into the business practices. Most importantly people would wake up, understand their power and realize they own the web not these dominant corporate entities.
- visarga 9y ago
  > how hard would it really be to organize a single day google search boycott across the web - DDG and probably even Bing would go under. - It's just a slap on the wrist for Google. I think a better idea is to create a distributed, federated crawler and search engine that does not depend on a central point of failure. Alternatively, we could still use Google for long-tail, technical searches and use a different one for important queries such as politics and social.
  - adrianN 9y ago
    Good luck creating a distributed search engine that produces results that come even close in quality to Google's. Search engines are hard. There is a reason Google dominates, and its not just inertia.
    - gardnr 9y ago
      Don't take that advice as discouragement to start. Google did have to engineer a giant distributed system to provide the search results we get. There are articles that talked about how they just had motherboards connected to hard drives laying on anti-static pads filling rooms in buildings. The racks and cabinets didn't make sense for them. Today we take for granted software stacks like lucene. Nothing like that existed when Google moved into the space. So yeah, 15-20 years ago internet search was a really difficult problem. Now, the sheer volume of research available which specifically addresses the problem space of a trusted decentralized search, to me, means that a solution is imminent. You could be the person that puts all the research blocks in the right order and launches a successful project.
      - michaelchisari 9y ago
        > giant distributed system A politically distributed system is a whole different beast. People have built plenty of distributed systems where all endpoints are under the control of a single organization (or cooperating organizations). That's essentially a solved problem. But a system which is not under a single control is a whole different approach to being distributed. Not only does A not control B, they may not intend to cooperate, and A does not necessarily have any reason to trust B or vice versa. B may even be an endpoint that is outright hostile to the network itself (ie, spam, ddos). There have been very few successful distributed systems that follow that model. The WWW is one. That's the good news: If you manage to find a viable model of decentralization, AND it succeeds in user adoption, you have literally changed the world forever. That's how hard it is: People who achieve it go down in history.
        gardnr 9y ago
- unicornporn 9y ago
  > how hard would it really be to organize a single day google search boycott across the web http://www.onedaywithoutgoogle.org/ http://www.onedaywithoutgoogle.org/
tedunangst 9y ago
Ironically, antitrust law prevents news publishers from working together and negotiating with Google. That would be "anti-competitive".
necessity 9y ago
The risk of a centralized web is censorship by government. It's that simple. Other things may be a risk also, but not because of a centralized web.
- confounded 9y ago
  Why isn't censorship by non-government interests a problem/risk?
BaronSamedi 9y ago
Maybe it's time to discuss how big is healthy for democracy. I think there is a case to be made that companies that get this big should be broken up into smaller ones. It's a tuning mechanism to keep competition alive and prevent power from getting too concentrated. It should also handle the too-big-to-fail problem we see in other domains.

will_brown 9y ago

>Google processes 3.5 billion search queries per day, roughtly ten times more than its nearest competitors The crazy thing to me is this has already been examined through many of their obviously anti-competitive acquisitions, and yet they always win. Namely, they use their position as the search engine leader to determine trends in search, purchases and advertising to buy companies in industries that will ultimately help the bottom line of their advertising revenue driven search engine to the detriment of alternative products. In other words the very people/companies who already buy Google ads now must pay more for Google ads because Google entered the market and is competing for the same ads jacking up prices. Because of Google's search engine they know exactly where they can get away with this, they know the maximum ad cost bearable by their competitors and can/will squeeze it at best or they can effectively drive you out of business leaving themselves as the sole operator in the space at worst. I mentioned it the other day, the one thing people could do is boycott google search, which I know sounds ridiculous, but how hard would it really be to organize a single day google search boycott across the web where people agreed to use bing or DuckDuckGo for a single day? google shareholders would throw a fit and change would be made internally in an instant, and I'd go so far as to say political pressure would come down to seriously look into the business practices. Most importantly people would wake up, understand their power and realize they own the web not these dominant corporate entities.

visarga 9y ago
> how hard would it really be to organize a single day google search boycott across the web - DDG and probably even Bing would go under. - It's just a slap on the wrist for Google. I think a better idea is to create a distributed, federated crawler and search engine that does not depend on a central point of failure. Alternatively, we could still use Google for long-tail, technical searches and use a different one for important queries such as politics and social.
- adrianN 9y ago
  Good luck creating a distributed search engine that produces results that come even close in quality to Google's. Search engines are hard. There is a reason Google dominates, and its not just inertia.
  - gardnr 9y ago
    Don't take that advice as discouragement to start. Google did have to engineer a giant distributed system to provide the search results we get. There are articles that talked about how they just had motherboards connected to hard drives laying on anti-static pads filling rooms in buildings. The racks and cabinets didn't make sense for them. Today we take for granted software stacks like lucene. Nothing like that existed when Google moved into the space. So yeah, 15-20 years ago internet search was a really difficult problem. Now, the sheer volume of research available which specifically addresses the problem space of a trusted decentralized search, to me, means that a solution is imminent. You could be the person that puts all the research blocks in the right order and launches a successful project.
    - michaelchisari 9y ago
      > giant distributed system A politically distributed system is a whole different beast. People have built plenty of distributed systems where all endpoints are under the control of a single organization (or cooperating organizations). That's essentially a solved problem. But a system which is not under a single control is a whole different approach to being distributed. Not only does A not control B, they may not intend to cooperate, and A does not necessarily have any reason to trust B or vice versa. B may even be an endpoint that is outright hostile to the network itself (ie, spam, ddos). There have been very few successful distributed systems that follow that model. The WWW is one. That's the good news: If you manage to find a viable model of decentralization, AND it succeeds in user adoption, you have literally changed the world forever. That's how hard it is: People who achieve it go down in history.
      - gardnr 9y ago
unicornporn 9y ago
> how hard would it really be to organize a single day google search boycott across the web http://www.onedaywithoutgoogle.org/ http://www.onedaywithoutgoogle.org/

tedunangst 9y ago

Ironically, antitrust law prevents news publishers from working together and negotiating with Google. That would be "anti-competitive".

necessity 9y ago

The risk of a centralized web is censorship by government. It's that simple. Other things may be a risk also, but not because of a centralized web.

confounded 9y ago
Why isn't censorship by non-government interests a problem/risk?

BaronSamedi 9y ago

Maybe it's time to discuss how big is healthy for democracy. I think there is a case to be made that companies that get this big should be broken up into smaller ones. It's a tuning mechanism to keep competition alive and prevent power from getting too concentrated. It should also handle the too-big-to-fail problem we see in other domains.