> It's an interesting problem because we do see innovation from private companies (tech, scaling, UX, etc) that I don't think we'd see in a publicly/government-

> It's an interesting problem because we do see innovation from private companies (tech, scaling, UX, etc) that I don't think we'd see in a publicly/government-owned platform. I mean, would you need half of that scaling if not for the demands of surveillance capitalism? How much of Google's tech stack is built around, for example, delivering email, and how much of Google's tech stack is built around harvesting user data for Adsense? I'm sure gmail runs on something that would be as far from a standard email server as anything I could imagine, but I feel like there's a natural ceiling in terms of the sheer amount of compute you could reasonably bring to bear to accomplish the task of mail transfer, whereas I could easily see the demands of running intensive, page-by-page analytics on a variety of websites and apps all at the same time easily demanding an absolutely stressful amount of server traffic and compute, let alone the delivery of the ads after that work is finished. And, that also presumes that gmail as a service is made better by being run on the infrastructure of a hyper-scaler. Running it across datacenters worldwide. Is it? Is the experience meaningfully better for the end user in the bargain, or is it everything around that service that requires such vast resources? Like, genuinely, how much electricity could we save if we just turned off user data collection tomorrow?