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- Killing the web with AMP - Killing email with gmail specific garbage - Killing mobile phones with walled gardens - Killing browsers by implementing their o

- Killing the web with AMP - Killing email with gmail specific garbage - Killing mobile phones with walled gardens - Killing browsers by implementing their own spec and fuck everybody else - Killing open source tools by releasing closed source extensions for VS Code Google has done a complete and total 180 in the past 10 years. I remember when the name inspired and made you feel safe that this thing you were using was made with character and thought to your well-being. Now it's a dry-heave feeling having to touch anything Google.

stephenr 8y ago
I don’t think they’ve done a 180, I just think we understand (through experience) their tactics better now.
- incongruity 8y ago
  We saw/feared where it would go and now it’s gone there. Was it there 10 years ago? I don’t think so. At least not so explicitly.
  - stephenr 8y ago
    They’ve been an advertising company since 2000, so I’d argue that yes it was there, people just didn’t recognise it/gave them the benefit of the doubt.
    - 0815test 8y ago
      Granted, advertising in the early 2000s was vastly different though. It was served organically, with none of the tracking or embedded-scripting nonsense that's ubiquitous today (whether from Google or other actors). The very notion of "ad-blocking" or "tracker-blocking" would have made no sense back then.
      - zu03776 8y ago
        While tracker-blocking in today's sense would have made no sense, there certainly was ad-blocking and cookie-blocking before the 2000s. AdSubtract advertised it's ability to block doubleclick.com cookies in March of 2000: https://www.computerworld.com.au/article/91102/adsubtract_blocks_ads_cookies/ https://www.computerworld.com.au/article/91102/adsubtract_bl... The article also mentions Siemens' WebWasher product which blocked cookies. Other cookie-blocking products were released in the same time period.
      - Sylamore 8y ago
        I remember using Privoxy back in the early 2000s because even then certain ad networks were regularly serving up malicious content and pop-ups. at that time Google was the good guy serving up only text ads.
      - stephenr 8y ago
        I was referring more to their motivation for doing things, not specific shitbag things they do now.
0815test 8y ago
Because IE6, Outlook-Web/Hotmail and Windows Mobile were so much better, right? I understand your POV, but this has nothing to do with Google specifically. Nothing has changed structurally since 10 years ago, the game is the same as it always was. The Internet will detect damage and route around it, as usual.
- wahern 8y ago
  The brain damage caused by Outlook/Exchange and IE remain with us. The brokenness and complexity don't go away; it slowly grows, making it increasingly difficult for decentralized communities, and increasingly easier for large corporations, to take the reigns. In many respects the Internet doesn't route around damage so much as accumulate damage. And that's partly the result of apologists within the engineering community endlessly excusing Google (and more recently Mozilla), as well as increasingly greater numbers of engineers having no memory or even conception of running fundamental services independently. As the base layers become increasingly complex economies of scale increasingly prefer centralization, both in design and especially implementation. There will always be competition. In many respects Cloudflare is a breath of fresh air, pushing against the stampede to AWS. Likewise, Mozilla viz-a-viz Chrome. But there are certain interests that large players will always share to the detriment of small organizations and individuals. DoH and DoT embedded in the browser intrinsically favor large organizations, and specifically Google and Cloudflare. And why do they promote DoH and DoT in the browser rather than promoting it at the system level (i.e. in Windows, Systemd, etc)? Because it's (a) less costly for them and (b) furthers their competitive commercial interests in their battle with other large organizations. One reads endless apologia on HN about how people would rather send their DNS requests to Cloudflare and Google rather than their ISP, as if those were the only realistic options, and no matter that doing so doesn't require delegating even more functionality to the browser oligopoly. They've already given up. They see their own role as choosing sides as consumers rather than actively participating as producers of these technologies, which is so utterly depressing from the perspectives of preserving an open internet and promoting free software. (For example, web developers are fine with DoH because they don't see how it effects their own server-side and client-side development. It doesn't matter to them that it would make it increasingly difficult to independently implement and maintain the software and systems--they're just consumers. QUIC? Not their concern--that's the responsibility of nginx and node.js, no matter that those projects likely never could have been founded outside large corporations if they first had to climb the steep hill to HTTP/3 and QUIC.) How do we stop this? By keeping an eye on long-term goals. While IPv6 and DNSSEC are more complex than some alternatives, from a long-term perspective they minimize overall complexity and substantially preserve independence, such as it is. Some options are even more clear cut: push DoH and DoT into the system resolver (and OpenBSD is doing, and projects like unbound and even, IIRC, systemd already support).
manigandham 8y ago
This is natural for corporations which grow to this size. It's not about good vs evil, they just weren't at a scale where they could do these projects which are all based in some combination of good intentions, serving customers, and profit.
- Wowfunhappy 8y ago
  This isn't some law of physics. A corporation could decide that their ultimate goal is to improve society, the planet, employees’s lives, consumers’s lives, etc above pure profit. This would of course result in less profit.
  - 0815test 8y ago
    They could. But if they commit to relinquishing control of their enterprise to outside VC investors (as practically all SV companies do; there's no such thing as a self-bootstrapped unicorn!) they won't.
    - Wowfunhappy 8y ago
      If you want an example of a tech company that actually decided to prioritize public good, I'd present Kickstarter, which has specifically registered itself as a public benefit corporation. They are admittedly a lot smaller, and I'm sure there were a lot of situational details that made it possible, but they did it.
    - manigandham 8y ago
      There are billion-dollar companies like Zoho and Atlassian that have been bootstrapped.
      - 0815test 8y ago
        Atlassian and Zoho are B2B enterprise shops. Not unicorns, and not facing the same bad incentives as consumer-facing companies.
tomComb 8y ago
- Yeah, hate that Google walled garden. Much better to go with Apple. - Yeah, that gmail specific stuff is evil, except it isn't gmail specific at all. - Yeah, killing browsers with Chrome. Just like IE6 except it's open source, cross-platform, evergreen, and pushes standards forward rather then trying to subvert them. The biggest problem now is others like MS using their browser engine is reducing diversity, but I guess that's their fault for making it open source. evil! - And yeah, they have now officially destroyed VSCode (which includes lots of closed source MS stuff) by releasing a closed source extension.
- sosborn 8y ago
  > - Yeah, hate that Google walled garden. Much better to go with Apple. For a lot of people, it is.
  - sgjohnson 8y ago
    I trust Apple not to sell my data. And I'm willing to pay the hardware markup for that.
    - systemBuilder 8y ago
      Yeah but I bet you get on your iPhone and POST on Facebook to your heart's content you hypocrite!
      - skinnymuch 8y ago
        Are you joking or serious? You stated you were a Google employee before.
        tomComb 8y ago
        What are you talking about. I never stated that because I am not!
        8y ago

stephenr 8y ago

I don’t think they’ve done a 180, I just think we understand (through experience) their tactics better now.

incongruity 8y ago
We saw/feared where it would go and now it’s gone there. Was it there 10 years ago? I don’t think so. At least not so explicitly.
- stephenr 8y ago
  They’ve been an advertising company since 2000, so I’d argue that yes it was there, people just didn’t recognise it/gave them the benefit of the doubt.
  - 0815test 8y ago
    Granted, advertising in the early 2000s was vastly different though. It was served organically, with none of the tracking or embedded-scripting nonsense that's ubiquitous today (whether from Google or other actors). The very notion of "ad-blocking" or "tracker-blocking" would have made no sense back then.
    - zu03776 8y ago
      While tracker-blocking in today's sense would have made no sense, there certainly was ad-blocking and cookie-blocking before the 2000s. AdSubtract advertised it's ability to block doubleclick.com cookies in March of 2000: https://www.computerworld.com.au/article/91102/adsubtract_blocks_ads_cookies/ https://www.computerworld.com.au/article/91102/adsubtract_bl... The article also mentions Siemens' WebWasher product which blocked cookies. Other cookie-blocking products were released in the same time period.
    - Sylamore 8y ago
      I remember using Privoxy back in the early 2000s because even then certain ad networks were regularly serving up malicious content and pop-ups. at that time Google was the good guy serving up only text ads.
    - stephenr 8y ago
      I was referring more to their motivation for doing things, not specific shitbag things they do now.

0815test 8y ago

Because IE6, Outlook-Web/Hotmail and Windows Mobile were so much better, right? I understand your POV, but this has nothing to do with Google specifically. Nothing has changed structurally since 10 years ago, the game is the same as it always was. The Internet will detect damage and route around it, as usual.

wahern 8y ago
The brain damage caused by Outlook/Exchange and IE remain with us. The brokenness and complexity don't go away; it slowly grows, making it increasingly difficult for decentralized communities, and increasingly easier for large corporations, to take the reigns. In many respects the Internet doesn't route around damage so much as accumulate damage. And that's partly the result of apologists within the engineering community endlessly excusing Google (and more recently Mozilla), as well as increasingly greater numbers of engineers having no memory or even conception of running fundamental services independently. As the base layers become increasingly complex economies of scale increasingly prefer centralization, both in design and especially implementation. There will always be competition. In many respects Cloudflare is a breath of fresh air, pushing against the stampede to AWS. Likewise, Mozilla viz-a-viz Chrome. But there are certain interests that large players will always share to the detriment of small organizations and individuals. DoH and DoT embedded in the browser intrinsically favor large organizations, and specifically Google and Cloudflare. And why do they promote DoH and DoT in the browser rather than promoting it at the system level (i.e. in Windows, Systemd, etc)? Because it's (a) less costly for them and (b) furthers their competitive commercial interests in their battle with other large organizations. One reads endless apologia on HN about how people would rather send their DNS requests to Cloudflare and Google rather than their ISP, as if those were the only realistic options, and no matter that doing so doesn't require delegating even more functionality to the browser oligopoly. They've already given up. They see their own role as choosing sides as consumers rather than actively participating as producers of these technologies, which is so utterly depressing from the perspectives of preserving an open internet and promoting free software. (For example, web developers are fine with DoH because they don't see how it effects their own server-side and client-side development. It doesn't matter to them that it would make it increasingly difficult to independently implement and maintain the software and systems--they're just consumers. QUIC? Not their concern--that's the responsibility of nginx and node.js, no matter that those projects likely never could have been founded outside large corporations if they first had to climb the steep hill to HTTP/3 and QUIC.) How do we stop this? By keeping an eye on long-term goals. While IPv6 and DNSSEC are more complex than some alternatives, from a long-term perspective they minimize overall complexity and substantially preserve independence, such as it is. Some options are even more clear cut: push DoH and DoT into the system resolver (and OpenBSD is doing, and projects like unbound and even, IIRC, systemd already support).

manigandham 8y ago

This is natural for corporations which grow to this size. It's not about good vs evil, they just weren't at a scale where they could do these projects which are all based in some combination of good intentions, serving customers, and profit.

Wowfunhappy 8y ago
This isn't some law of physics. A corporation could decide that their ultimate goal is to improve society, the planet, employees’s lives, consumers’s lives, etc above pure profit. This would of course result in less profit.
- 0815test 8y ago
  They could. But if they commit to relinquishing control of their enterprise to outside VC investors (as practically all SV companies do; there's no such thing as a self-bootstrapped unicorn!) they won't.
  - Wowfunhappy 8y ago
    If you want an example of a tech company that actually decided to prioritize public good, I'd present Kickstarter, which has specifically registered itself as a public benefit corporation. They are admittedly a lot smaller, and I'm sure there were a lot of situational details that made it possible, but they did it.
  - manigandham 8y ago
    There are billion-dollar companies like Zoho and Atlassian that have been bootstrapped.
    - 0815test 8y ago
      Atlassian and Zoho are B2B enterprise shops. Not unicorns, and not facing the same bad incentives as consumer-facing companies.

tomComb 8y ago

- Yeah, hate that Google walled garden. Much better to go with Apple. - Yeah, that gmail specific stuff is evil, except it isn't gmail specific at all. - Yeah, killing browsers with Chrome. Just like IE6 except it's open source, cross-platform, evergreen, and pushes standards forward rather then trying to subvert them. The biggest problem now is others like MS using their browser engine is reducing diversity, but I guess that's their fault for making it open source. evil! - And yeah, they have now officially destroyed VSCode (which includes lots of closed source MS stuff) by releasing a closed source extension.

sosborn 8y ago
> - Yeah, hate that Google walled garden. Much better to go with Apple. For a lot of people, it is.
- sgjohnson 8y ago
  I trust Apple not to sell my data. And I'm willing to pay the hardware markup for that.
  - systemBuilder 8y ago
    Yeah but I bet you get on your iPhone and POST on Facebook to your heart's content you hypocrite!
    - skinnymuch 8y ago
      Are you joking or serious? You stated you were a Google employee before.
      - tomComb 8y ago
        What are you talking about. I never stated that because I am not!
        8y ago