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Data trading for ad revenue must be regulated

266 points by samizdis 5y ago

mupuff1234 5y ago
Saying society is screwed because ads are more expensive seems like quite a stretch to me. Looking at the NYTimes stock as an example it seems that they are doing pretty well these days (although some might argue their quality has gone down)
- deleted 5y ago
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- deleted 5y ago
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- franczesko 5y ago
  Just imagine, how content publishing and journalism alone would have developed, if publishers wouldn't be cut off by the advertising cartel of Google and Facebook.
  - bryan_w 5y ago
    Or if they would have rubbed 2 brain cells together in 2005 and actually tried to come up with an attractive web presence. It's like the news media saw what was happening with music and napster/the internet and thought, "Glad that could never happen to us" and went right back to the printing press to fire off the next day's issue.
- TravisLS 5y ago
  NYTimes digital revenue is mostly subscriptions. Other publishers with lesser brand names are much more beholden to Google.
- iso1210 5y ago
  > Saying society is screwed because ads Stop your sentence there and I'd agree with you
- onimishra 5y ago
  > (although some might argue their quality has gone down) Isn’t that the entire thing the article argues? That journalism (real journalism, that is meant to keep those in power on the straight and narrow), suffers because not enough money goes to the actual journalists? Stock is the public’s perception of something’s value, but the actual value to society can not be measured in stocks.
- WORMS_EAT_WORMS 5y ago
  It’s not just ads - there’s a general feeling with a lot of their products and services priorities have shifted away from protecting the user. You could find a bone to pick with any big company. It’s just clear priorities at the company have shifted from their fun growth days of just doing what’s best/right for users to optimizing for money and other KPIs - search, ads, you name it. It’s definitely noticeable and their size/monopoly definitely has influence on society.
- ATsch 5y ago
  In the original context I read the statement "either google is screwed or society is screwed" as referring to the lawsuit, not Google's behavior. That is, to project some of my own opinions: If something like this is not enough to cause major consequences for a big company like google, there is little hope that anything will.
joshruby16 5y ago
shameless plug: https://sirch.org https://sirch.org Anyone want to join? josh@sirchit.com
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
samizdis 5y ago
In hindsight, I find it hard not to feel complicit, having invited friends and family to Gmail back in the day when invites were a thing. I had actually believed Google's "don't be evil" line, when it launched what was a brilliant stripped-down search product. (And yes, I defected from AltaVista with the crowd. Oh, how I miss case-sensitive queries; how I miss all those relevant results.) I was far too gullible.
- riffraff 5y ago
  I don't know. Google 20 years ago felt good. All the stuff about FLOSS vs proprietary software. Support for open standards. The summer of code. A search that seemed to reward quality content over paid results. There was reason to doubt, but I think at some point the motto was legitimately aligned with the company interests and everyone benefited from it, until it wasn't.
- AlgorithmicTime 5y ago
  >I had actually believed Google's "don't be evil" line The thing is, so did the founders of Google. The issue is not that they were lying to you.
  - xiphias2 5y ago
    Eric Schmidt put in that line because many times engineers said ,,that would be evil'' when another person suggested something, and Eric wanted to create a strong engineering culture for hiring the best software engineers. He talks about it in the first Tim Ferriss interview. I was quite happy at Google while he was CEO and I hated it when Larry took over, things got boring....Sergey would have been so much more fun.
- dtech 5y ago
  I'm not sure what we should've done. Google for a long time won users by making almost objectively better products. It's only in the past decade or so that they started to abuse their monopoly. Putting the blame at government failing to enforce existing and create new anti-trust legislation seems much more sensible than blaming users picking the best products.
swiley 5y ago
Do not use software that you cannot self host.
- yoran 5y ago
  Unfortunately that is very impractical. And way too broad of a measure. There are plenty of cloud-based services that have a business model that is based on providing that service and not on selling ads.
- Hnrobert42 5y ago
  You mean like this site?
  - dane-pgp 5y ago
    Well done, Mr Gotcha. https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/ https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/
    - Hnrobert42 5y ago
      Haha. Fair. I do have a “gotcha” streak in me. But I also wanted to point out that you can’t boycott all software that is not self-hosted.
    - Redoubts 5y ago
      Seems particularly irrelevant to this thread.
- dade_ 5y ago
  I found this rule more practical (and I hold to it): Do not rely on software you cannot self host or holds your data hostage in a proprietary format. Data export must be a supported feature.
  - kaladin-jasnah 5y ago
    Isn't data export a requirement for GDPR compliance? Many apps have this feature (exporting my data) and I usually take advantage of it.
teddyh 5y ago
I thought the linked Twitter thread was more informative: https://twitter.com/fasterthanlime/status/1452053938195341314 https://twitter.com/fasterthanlime/status/145205393819534131...
- samizdis 5y ago
  In case anyone else prefers it via Threadreader: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1452053938195341314.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1452053938195341314.html
eussg 5y ago
Can we get a list of people who were in charge of these projects? Google is a such a gigantic org its much more useful to know the individuals driving these strategies.
Gravityloss 5y ago
https://www.theregister.com/Profile/cookies/ https://www.theregister.com/Profile/cookies/
mrjin 5y ago
I really missed the days when Yahoo! was the first choice search engine, the results were hand picked by human, limited but really relevant. Then came google, the results were much richer but relatively inferior, however still acceptable. Years later, Gmail was out and I immediately expressed my interest and got invitation directly from Google. Unfortunately, Gmail did not workout for me. From the very first day, I started receiving spams. Note that it's a new id which I never used anywhere. Then I asked for the function to reject particular senders, and the responses I got were always something like "our spam filters are good enough, blah blah blah". Wasn't feel confident with that, so Gmail was never my primary email. I felt not quite right with Google since then, but not quite sure what was wrong until recent a couple of years. Googles' recent moves such as trying to blend in Ads with search results, trying to block Chrome API access for Ad blockers' etc. made it clear that it's almost if not already time to ditch Google. The only thing I cannot find a substitute is the search engine, the others are simply not good enough.
- bodge5000 5y ago
  From what I've read about them, and how they are now, I highly doubt a future with yahoo would be an improvement. They actually have quite an interesting history. From what I can remember, they refused to brand themselves as a tech company to avoid Microsofts wrath (Microsoft of course used to be a lot more aggressive with competition than we see today) and subsequently failed to attract the best engineers.
jrochkind1 5y ago
> And the court filing has claimed that AMP's primary purpose was indeed to create huge amounts of data for Google's internal use, while denying that data to other services. If true: insider trading… Where does the insider trading come in, anyone have details?
- BlueGh0st 5y ago
  The claims of "insider trading" appear to be in regards to their ad-bidding schemes and manipulation. Not actual public securities fraud.
dmitriid 5y ago
It's not even the beginning of an end game. We're in midgame, at most. 10 years ago Ars Techinca published the evergreen article called "Owning the stack: The legal war to control the smartphone platform": https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/09/owning-the-stack-the-legal-war-for-control-of-the-smartphone-platform/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/09/owning-the-stack... At the time it explained, with great accuracy and insight, all that was happening in smartphones: all the visible and invisible wars and battles to control everything, from hardware to apps, in order to control ... well ... everything. It didn't occur to me then, but it also explains everything that's happening on the web. It's the same damn war. Alphabet aka Google derive 80% of their revenue from online ads. For all intents and purposes it has no other source of income. However, it still own just a very thin slice of the stack that brings in money. So, it does all it can to take control of as much of the stack as possible: - AMP, subsume websites and ad distribution channels. - Chrome, subsume web standards and replace them with "if it works in Chrome, it's a standard" (web.dev serves as a propaganda machine for this, as well) - Google Services, subsume as much of digital life as possible under a single controlling entity (AOSP is a lifeless husk, and will remain so) and so on. Google is very intentional
- ocdtrekkie 5y ago
  When you consider this, realize that Microsoft switching it's entire browser stack to run on Chrome's engine is likely to make business textbooks as an example of an abject folly. The new Microsoft Edge was literally a choice to hand the entire stack of the Internet over to their top competitor.
- kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
  Remember when we thought Microsoft was evil, and Google was a force for good?
  - ConceptJunkie 5y ago
    At the time it was arguably true. But it seems every company gets increasingly amoral at it becomes more powerful, and eventually becomes evil. I think one reason is the relentless pressure for growth by shareholders. Another is the simple fact that power corrupts.
1cvmask 5y ago
I had written this regarding the rebranding of Facebook to Meta and the genius of the Google (Alphabet) co-founders extricating themselves from being the evil personas: “La plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu'il n'existe pas." ("The devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.")” ― Charles Baudelaire The smartest thing that the Google co-founders did is to step out of the "picture" and have a "nerdish" dignitary Sundar Pichai be the face of the company. The type of headlines we won't see anymore since they have "stepped down". Email exchanges between National Security Agency Director Gen. Keith Alexander and Google executives Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt suggest a far cozier working relationship between some tech firms and the U.S. government than was implied by Silicon Valley brass after last year’s revelations about NSA spying. http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/5/6/nsa-chief-google.html http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/5/6/nsa-chief-goo... https://pando.com/2014/05/13/emails-showing-googles-closeness-with-the-nsa-director-really-arent-that-surprising/ https://pando.com/2014/05/13/emails-showing-googles-closenes...
- Terretta 5y ago
  > Email exchanges between National Security Agency Director Gen. Keith Alexander and Google executives Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt suggest a far cozier working relationship between some tech firms and the U.S. government … Or, Alexander is just selling a product on the back of cyber threat consulting: ”At IronNet Cybersecurity, as the Founder, Chairman & Co-CEO and President, General (Ret) Keith Alexander provides strategic vision to corporate leaders on cybersecurity issues …” https://www.ironnet.com/company/leadership/keith-alexander https://www.ironnet.com/company/leadership/keith-alexander
jrochkind1 5y ago
As a web developer, the AMP story is notable. On many HN comment-threads people complained that AMP pages were in fact a lot slower than the alternatives they could do, and undesirable in other ways too, and AMP didn't seem to be achieving Google's stated goals for it. Either Google has ulterior malicious motives, people posited; or perhaps is just inertially stuck enforcing something that didn't work out how they intended. Looks like the ulterior malicious motives were it. Some people in HN threads are inclined to attribute all sorts of malicious conspiratorial motives to facebook/amazon/apple/google that others think are without evidence and likely have other explanations or at any rate who can say; these revelations probably make many of us a bit more inclined to suspect the conspiratorial malicious explanations with or without evidence. "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you."
- kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
  I have some nontechnical friends who deeply distrusted and disliked Google. But I always believed Google’s “don’t be evil” line. I’ve learned a lesson.
  - ConceptJunkie 5y ago
    I went through that same change of opinion several years ago. I now believe that Google is thoroughly evil.
- jrochkind1 5y ago
  For instancce, here's an example of a HN thread from two years ago, on an article on "fighting back" against AMP (!), in which the top comment: > I worked on amp for a leading newspaper, and everyone who says that amp is about "making the web faster on mobile" is either very naive or doing marketing for google. —https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21712733 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21712733 I guess that user was... right? There's a reply disputing it, in part, although even the replyer seemed to accept that Google had ulterior motives, they just weren't willing to accept that Google would actually make the web slower and lie about it to achieve their ulterior motives... > Of course AMP has other motives than simply making the web faster for mobile, but it also does make the web faster for mobile
hoffs 5y ago
So this is just a rehash of same court document few days ago?
literallyaduck 5y ago
Let's call Google a publisher because it is and make it responsible for the content of every AMP page.
shadowgovt 5y ago
Cutting through all the commentary in the reporting, the key idea worth considering is that Google has built something very similar to a stock exchange wholly owned and operated by a trading firm that can trade on it, and that arrangement is illegal in the financial sector for a reason.
sviswaysevil 5y ago
Honestly, Google was always evil. The founders come from an elitist Stanford background. Eric Schmidt is definitely evil and always has been. He’s a well known misogynist. Hell, all of these people were palling around with Epstein/Maxwell/Edge.org during their supposed “not evil” phase. The very substrate of the company was unethical from the get go. Edit: Hey Googlers you can flag this but it’s true: https://www.reddit.com/r/Epstein/comments/llvdoj/thick_as_thieves_eric_schmidt_jeff_bezos_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Epstein/comments/llvdoj/thick_as_th... https://www.businessinsider.com/profile-scott-borgerson-tech-founder-and-ghislaine-maxwells-secret-husband-2020-12?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/profile-scott-borgerson-tech... https://mobile.twitter.com/xeni/status/1231068297505886208 https://mobile.twitter.com/xeni/status/1231068297505886208 https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/jeffrey-epstein-john-brockman-edge-foundation https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/jeffrey-ep... https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/jeffrey-epstein-bezos-musk-billionaires-dinner https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/jeffrey-ep...
another_why 5y ago
Data trading for ad revenue must be regulated like finance, aviation, medicine, and power. The giants who've cheated us must be broken up to their smallest viable constituent parts, and their future interactions be through a framework of radical accountability. Considering that more than 50%(70? 90?) of IT is 100% based on those ad revenues, sounds very reasonable, yeah. Bees against honey. All those, who cry the most about evil giants, will stand in the lines demanding to fuck off from Google the moment something will REALLY start to happen with those revenues
- yulaow 5y ago
  I am personally not against ads, I just want to have the contextual ones and not the profiling/tracking/I_must_know_everything_of_you ads. Simple solution? Just ban any form of profiling for ads and force the whole industry to go back to contextuals.
  - another_why 5y ago
    Companies pay insane money for ads, because they bring clients who really-really will buy what they sell. That simple solution will lead to drop in the evil giant's ad profits from which it actually lives
    - yulaow 5y ago
      It depends. I think, but I could be wrong, that if there is no alternative to the contextual ads the market will adapt and the price for them will not drop (a lot), compared to the old and now banned profiling ones, because these new ones would still be the best possible solution for companies which want to publicize themselves.
      - another_why 5y ago
        The amount of money you can gain from context ads is limited - you have so much space on the website and it will be forever reserved by the companies with the most money(monopolies) who will pay exactly the amount those ads bring to them, no more, no less. Non-profiled context ads reached their limit. No growth - no need for development
EastSmith 5y ago
Every ad that was generated by user targeting should have a tobacco style warning + link with explanation: 1) who targeted you 2) what information they have on you and 3) why/how they got it.
javajosh 5y ago
The deal we struck with Google for all that nice free stuff, the affordable mobile phone ecosystem, the entertaining videos etc. has proved a deal with the devil Wow, what a bad deal! Perhaps we should just, you know, undo the deal and give back the mobile phones and entertaining videos. If it's a choice between societal collapse or land-lines and physical-media-driven home theater, is that even a choice?
dav_Oz 5y ago
Shoshana Zuboff's book "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" [1] at times glances over some important technicalities but its eloboration on the social impact and consequences I found to be spot on. Here an excerpt from Chapter 3 "IV. The Discovery of Behavioral Surplus": "[...]Google would no longer be a passive recipient of accidental data that it could recycle for the benefit of its users. The targeted advertising patent sheds light on the path of discovery that Google traveled from its advocacy-oriented founding toward the elaboration of behavioral surveillance as a full-blown logic of accumulation. The invention itself exposes the reasoning through which the behavioral value reinvestment cycle was subjugated to the service of a new commercial calculation. Behavioral data, whose value had previously been “used up” on improving the quality of Search for users, now became the pivotal—and exclusive to Google—raw material for the construction of a dynamic online advertising marketplace. Google would now secure more behavioral data than it needed to serve its users. That surplus, a behavioral surplus, was the game-changing, zero-cost asset that was diverted from service improvement toward a genuine and highly lucrative market exchange. These capabilities were and remain inscrutable to all but an exclusive data priesthood among whom Google is the übermensch. They operate in obscurity, indifferent to social norms or individual claims to self-determining decision rights. These moves established the foundational mechanisms of surveillance capitalism. The state of exception declared by Google’s founders transformed the youthful Dr. Jekyll into a ruthless, muscular Mr. Hyde determined to hunt his prey anywhere, anytime, irrespective of others’ self-determining aims. The new Google ignored claims to self-determination and acknowledged no a priori limits on what it could find and take. It dismissed the moral and legal content of individual decision rights and recast the situation as one of technological opportunism and unilateral power. This new Google assures its actual customers that it will do whatever it takes to transform the natural obscurity of human desire into scientific fact. This Google is the superpower that establishes its own values and pursues its own purposes above and beyond the social contracts to which others are bound." [1] https://www.worldcat.org/title/age-of-surveillance-capitalism-the-fight-for-a-human-future-at-the-new-frontier-of-power/oclc/1141860372 https://www.worldcat.org/title/age-of-surveillance-capitalis...
kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
I don't like a lot of things that Google does, but it might be worth noting that trying to circumvent government regulations is not automatically evil. Government regulations are not automatically good.
ForHackernews 5y ago
I see HN has followed their standard practise of "The thread must always be named for the title of the article unless we don't like it"

266 points by samizdis 5y ago

Saying society is screwed because ads are more expensive seems like quite a stretch to me. Looking at the NYTimes stock as an example it seems that they are doing pretty well these days (although some might argue their quality has gone down)

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
franczesko 5y ago
Just imagine, how content publishing and journalism alone would have developed, if publishers wouldn't be cut off by the advertising cartel of Google and Facebook.
- bryan_w 5y ago
  Or if they would have rubbed 2 brain cells together in 2005 and actually tried to come up with an attractive web presence. It's like the news media saw what was happening with music and napster/the internet and thought, "Glad that could never happen to us" and went right back to the printing press to fire off the next day's issue.
TravisLS 5y ago
NYTimes digital revenue is mostly subscriptions. Other publishers with lesser brand names are much more beholden to Google.
iso1210 5y ago
> Saying society is screwed because ads Stop your sentence there and I'd agree with you
onimishra 5y ago
> (although some might argue their quality has gone down) Isn’t that the entire thing the article argues? That journalism (real journalism, that is meant to keep those in power on the straight and narrow), suffers because not enough money goes to the actual journalists? Stock is the public’s perception of something’s value, but the actual value to society can not be measured in stocks.
WORMS_EAT_WORMS 5y ago
It’s not just ads - there’s a general feeling with a lot of their products and services priorities have shifted away from protecting the user. You could find a bone to pick with any big company. It’s just clear priorities at the company have shifted from their fun growth days of just doing what’s best/right for users to optimizing for money and other KPIs - search, ads, you name it. It’s definitely noticeable and their size/monopoly definitely has influence on society.
ATsch 5y ago
In the original context I read the statement "either google is screwed or society is screwed" as referring to the lawsuit, not Google's behavior. That is, to project some of my own opinions: If something like this is not enough to cause major consequences for a big company like google, there is little hope that anything will.

joshruby16 5y ago

shameless plug: https://sirch.org https://sirch.org Anyone want to join? josh@sirchit.com

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

samizdis 5y ago

In hindsight, I find it hard not to feel complicit, having invited friends and family to Gmail back in the day when invites were a thing. I had actually believed Google's "don't be evil" line, when it launched what was a brilliant stripped-down search product. (And yes, I defected from AltaVista with the crowd. Oh, how I miss case-sensitive queries; how I miss all those relevant results.) I was far too gullible.

riffraff 5y ago
I don't know. Google 20 years ago felt good. All the stuff about FLOSS vs proprietary software. Support for open standards. The summer of code. A search that seemed to reward quality content over paid results. There was reason to doubt, but I think at some point the motto was legitimately aligned with the company interests and everyone benefited from it, until it wasn't.
AlgorithmicTime 5y ago
>I had actually believed Google's "don't be evil" line The thing is, so did the founders of Google. The issue is not that they were lying to you.
- xiphias2 5y ago
  Eric Schmidt put in that line because many times engineers said ,,that would be evil'' when another person suggested something, and Eric wanted to create a strong engineering culture for hiring the best software engineers. He talks about it in the first Tim Ferriss interview. I was quite happy at Google while he was CEO and I hated it when Larry took over, things got boring....Sergey would have been so much more fun.
dtech 5y ago
I'm not sure what we should've done. Google for a long time won users by making almost objectively better products. It's only in the past decade or so that they started to abuse their monopoly. Putting the blame at government failing to enforce existing and create new anti-trust legislation seems much more sensible than blaming users picking the best products.

swiley 5y ago

Do not use software that you cannot self host.

yoran 5y ago
Unfortunately that is very impractical. And way too broad of a measure. There are plenty of cloud-based services that have a business model that is based on providing that service and not on selling ads.
Hnrobert42 5y ago
You mean like this site?
- dane-pgp 5y ago
  Well done, Mr Gotcha. https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/ https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/
  - Hnrobert42 5y ago
    Haha. Fair. I do have a “gotcha” streak in me. But I also wanted to point out that you can’t boycott all software that is not self-hosted.
  - Redoubts 5y ago
    Seems particularly irrelevant to this thread.
dade_ 5y ago
I found this rule more practical (and I hold to it): Do not rely on software you cannot self host or holds your data hostage in a proprietary format. Data export must be a supported feature.
- kaladin-jasnah 5y ago
  Isn't data export a requirement for GDPR compliance? Many apps have this feature (exporting my data) and I usually take advantage of it.

teddyh 5y ago

I thought the linked Twitter thread was more informative: https://twitter.com/fasterthanlime/status/1452053938195341314 https://twitter.com/fasterthanlime/status/145205393819534131...

samizdis 5y ago
In case anyone else prefers it via Threadreader: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1452053938195341314.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1452053938195341314.html

eussg 5y ago

Can we get a list of people who were in charge of these projects? Google is a such a gigantic org its much more useful to know the individuals driving these strategies.

Gravityloss 5y ago

https://www.theregister.com/Profile/cookies/ https://www.theregister.com/Profile/cookies/

mrjin 5y ago

I really missed the days when Yahoo! was the first choice search engine, the results were hand picked by human, limited but really relevant. Then came google, the results were much richer but relatively inferior, however still acceptable. Years later, Gmail was out and I immediately expressed my interest and got invitation directly from Google. Unfortunately, Gmail did not workout for me. From the very first day, I started receiving spams. Note that it's a new id which I never used anywhere. Then I asked for the function to reject particular senders, and the responses I got were always something like "our spam filters are good enough, blah blah blah". Wasn't feel confident with that, so Gmail was never my primary email. I felt not quite right with Google since then, but not quite sure what was wrong until recent a couple of years. Googles' recent moves such as trying to blend in Ads with search results, trying to block Chrome API access for Ad blockers' etc. made it clear that it's almost if not already time to ditch Google. The only thing I cannot find a substitute is the search engine, the others are simply not good enough.

bodge5000 5y ago
From what I've read about them, and how they are now, I highly doubt a future with yahoo would be an improvement. They actually have quite an interesting history. From what I can remember, they refused to brand themselves as a tech company to avoid Microsofts wrath (Microsoft of course used to be a lot more aggressive with competition than we see today) and subsequently failed to attract the best engineers.

jrochkind1 5y ago

> And the court filing has claimed that AMP's primary purpose was indeed to create huge amounts of data for Google's internal use, while denying that data to other services. If true: insider trading… Where does the insider trading come in, anyone have details?

BlueGh0st 5y ago
The claims of "insider trading" appear to be in regards to their ad-bidding schemes and manipulation. Not actual public securities fraud.

dmitriid 5y ago

It's not even the beginning of an end game. We're in midgame, at most. 10 years ago Ars Techinca published the evergreen article called "Owning the stack: The legal war to control the smartphone platform": https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/09/owning-the-stack-the-legal-war-for-control-of-the-smartphone-platform/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/09/owning-the-stack... At the time it explained, with great accuracy and insight, all that was happening in smartphones: all the visible and invisible wars and battles to control everything, from hardware to apps, in order to control ... well ... everything. It didn't occur to me then, but it also explains everything that's happening on the web. It's the same damn war. Alphabet aka Google derive 80% of their revenue from online ads. For all intents and purposes it has no other source of income. However, it still own just a very thin slice of the stack that brings in money. So, it does all it can to take control of as much of the stack as possible: - AMP, subsume websites and ad distribution channels. - Chrome, subsume web standards and replace them with "if it works in Chrome, it's a standard" (web.dev serves as a propaganda machine for this, as well) - Google Services, subsume as much of digital life as possible under a single controlling entity (AOSP is a lifeless husk, and will remain so) and so on. Google is very intentional

ocdtrekkie 5y ago
When you consider this, realize that Microsoft switching it's entire browser stack to run on Chrome's engine is likely to make business textbooks as an example of an abject folly. The new Microsoft Edge was literally a choice to hand the entire stack of the Internet over to their top competitor.
kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
Remember when we thought Microsoft was evil, and Google was a force for good?
- ConceptJunkie 5y ago
  At the time it was arguably true. But it seems every company gets increasingly amoral at it becomes more powerful, and eventually becomes evil. I think one reason is the relentless pressure for growth by shareholders. Another is the simple fact that power corrupts.

1cvmask 5y ago

I had written this regarding the rebranding of Facebook to Meta and the genius of the Google (Alphabet) co-founders extricating themselves from being the evil personas: “La plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu'il n'existe pas." ("The devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.")” ― Charles Baudelaire The smartest thing that the Google co-founders did is to step out of the "picture" and have a "nerdish" dignitary Sundar Pichai be the face of the company. The type of headlines we won't see anymore since they have "stepped down". Email exchanges between National Security Agency Director Gen. Keith Alexander and Google executives Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt suggest a far cozier working relationship between some tech firms and the U.S. government than was implied by Silicon Valley brass after last year’s revelations about NSA spying. http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/5/6/nsa-chief-google.html http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/5/6/nsa-chief-goo... https://pando.com/2014/05/13/emails-showing-googles-closeness-with-the-nsa-director-really-arent-that-surprising/ https://pando.com/2014/05/13/emails-showing-googles-closenes...

Terretta 5y ago
> Email exchanges between National Security Agency Director Gen. Keith Alexander and Google executives Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt suggest a far cozier working relationship between some tech firms and the U.S. government … Or, Alexander is just selling a product on the back of cyber threat consulting: ”At IronNet Cybersecurity, as the Founder, Chairman & Co-CEO and President, General (Ret) Keith Alexander provides strategic vision to corporate leaders on cybersecurity issues …” https://www.ironnet.com/company/leadership/keith-alexander https://www.ironnet.com/company/leadership/keith-alexander

jrochkind1 5y ago

As a web developer, the AMP story is notable. On many HN comment-threads people complained that AMP pages were in fact a lot slower than the alternatives they could do, and undesirable in other ways too, and AMP didn't seem to be achieving Google's stated goals for it. Either Google has ulterior malicious motives, people posited; or perhaps is just inertially stuck enforcing something that didn't work out how they intended. Looks like the ulterior malicious motives were it. Some people in HN threads are inclined to attribute all sorts of malicious conspiratorial motives to facebook/amazon/apple/google that others think are without evidence and likely have other explanations or at any rate who can say; these revelations probably make many of us a bit more inclined to suspect the conspiratorial malicious explanations with or without evidence. "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you."

kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
I have some nontechnical friends who deeply distrusted and disliked Google. But I always believed Google’s “don’t be evil” line. I’ve learned a lesson.
- ConceptJunkie 5y ago
  I went through that same change of opinion several years ago. I now believe that Google is thoroughly evil.
jrochkind1 5y ago
For instancce, here's an example of a HN thread from two years ago, on an article on "fighting back" against AMP (!), in which the top comment: > I worked on amp for a leading newspaper, and everyone who says that amp is about "making the web faster on mobile" is either very naive or doing marketing for google. —https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21712733 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21712733 I guess that user was... right? There's a reply disputing it, in part, although even the replyer seemed to accept that Google had ulterior motives, they just weren't willing to accept that Google would actually make the web slower and lie about it to achieve their ulterior motives... > Of course AMP has other motives than simply making the web faster for mobile, but it also does make the web faster for mobile

hoffs 5y ago

So this is just a rehash of same court document few days ago?

literallyaduck 5y ago

Let's call Google a publisher because it is and make it responsible for the content of every AMP page.

shadowgovt 5y ago

Cutting through all the commentary in the reporting, the key idea worth considering is that Google has built something very similar to a stock exchange wholly owned and operated by a trading firm that can trade on it, and that arrangement is illegal in the financial sector for a reason.

sviswaysevil 5y ago

Honestly, Google was always evil. The founders come from an elitist Stanford background. Eric Schmidt is definitely evil and always has been. He’s a well known misogynist. Hell, all of these people were palling around with Epstein/Maxwell/Edge.org during their supposed “not evil” phase. The very substrate of the company was unethical from the get go. Edit: Hey Googlers you can flag this but it’s true: https://www.reddit.com/r/Epstein/comments/llvdoj/thick_as_thieves_eric_schmidt_jeff_bezos_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Epstein/comments/llvdoj/thick_as_th... https://www.businessinsider.com/profile-scott-borgerson-tech-founder-and-ghislaine-maxwells-secret-husband-2020-12?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/profile-scott-borgerson-tech... https://mobile.twitter.com/xeni/status/1231068297505886208 https://mobile.twitter.com/xeni/status/1231068297505886208 https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/jeffrey-epstein-john-brockman-edge-foundation https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/jeffrey-ep... https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/jeffrey-epstein-bezos-musk-billionaires-dinner https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/jeffrey-ep...

another_why 5y ago

Data trading for ad revenue must be regulated like finance, aviation, medicine, and power. The giants who've cheated us must be broken up to their smallest viable constituent parts, and their future interactions be through a framework of radical accountability. Considering that more than 50%(70? 90?) of IT is 100% based on those ad revenues, sounds very reasonable, yeah. Bees against honey. All those, who cry the most about evil giants, will stand in the lines demanding to fuck off from Google the moment something will REALLY start to happen with those revenues

yulaow 5y ago
I am personally not against ads, I just want to have the contextual ones and not the profiling/tracking/I_must_know_everything_of_you ads. Simple solution? Just ban any form of profiling for ads and force the whole industry to go back to contextuals.
- another_why 5y ago
  Companies pay insane money for ads, because they bring clients who really-really will buy what they sell. That simple solution will lead to drop in the evil giant's ad profits from which it actually lives
  - yulaow 5y ago
    It depends. I think, but I could be wrong, that if there is no alternative to the contextual ads the market will adapt and the price for them will not drop (a lot), compared to the old and now banned profiling ones, because these new ones would still be the best possible solution for companies which want to publicize themselves.
    - another_why 5y ago
      The amount of money you can gain from context ads is limited - you have so much space on the website and it will be forever reserved by the companies with the most money(monopolies) who will pay exactly the amount those ads bring to them, no more, no less. Non-profiled context ads reached their limit. No growth - no need for development

EastSmith 5y ago

Every ad that was generated by user targeting should have a tobacco style warning + link with explanation: 1) who targeted you 2) what information they have on you and 3) why/how they got it.

javajosh 5y ago

The deal we struck with Google for all that nice free stuff, the affordable mobile phone ecosystem, the entertaining videos etc. has proved a deal with the devil Wow, what a bad deal! Perhaps we should just, you know, undo the deal and give back the mobile phones and entertaining videos. If it's a choice between societal collapse or land-lines and physical-media-driven home theater, is that even a choice?

dav_Oz 5y ago

Shoshana Zuboff's book "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" [1] at times glances over some important technicalities but its eloboration on the social impact and consequences I found to be spot on. Here an excerpt from Chapter 3 "IV. The Discovery of Behavioral Surplus": "[...]Google would no longer be a passive recipient of accidental data that it could recycle for the benefit of its users. The targeted advertising patent sheds light on the path of discovery that Google traveled from its advocacy-oriented founding toward the elaboration of behavioral surveillance as a full-blown logic of accumulation. The invention itself exposes the reasoning through which the behavioral value reinvestment cycle was subjugated to the service of a new commercial calculation. Behavioral data, whose value had previously been “used up” on improving the quality of Search for users, now became the pivotal—and exclusive to Google—raw material for the construction of a dynamic online advertising marketplace. Google would now secure more behavioral data than it needed to serve its users. That surplus, a behavioral surplus, was the game-changing, zero-cost asset that was diverted from service improvement toward a genuine and highly lucrative market exchange. These capabilities were and remain inscrutable to all but an exclusive data priesthood among whom Google is the übermensch. They operate in obscurity, indifferent to social norms or individual claims to self-determining decision rights. These moves established the foundational mechanisms of surveillance capitalism. The state of exception declared by Google’s founders transformed the youthful Dr. Jekyll into a ruthless, muscular Mr. Hyde determined to hunt his prey anywhere, anytime, irrespective of others’ self-determining aims. The new Google ignored claims to self-determination and acknowledged no a priori limits on what it could find and take. It dismissed the moral and legal content of individual decision rights and recast the situation as one of technological opportunism and unilateral power. This new Google assures its actual customers that it will do whatever it takes to transform the natural obscurity of human desire into scientific fact. This Google is the superpower that establishes its own values and pursues its own purposes above and beyond the social contracts to which others are bound." [1] https://www.worldcat.org/title/age-of-surveillance-capitalism-the-fight-for-a-human-future-at-the-new-frontier-of-power/oclc/1141860372 https://www.worldcat.org/title/age-of-surveillance-capitalis...

kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago

I don't like a lot of things that Google does, but it might be worth noting that trying to circumvent government regulations is not automatically evil. Government regulations are not automatically good.

ForHackernews 5y ago

I see HN has followed their standard practise of "The thread must always be named for the title of the article unless we don't like it"