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146
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3 yr. ago

  • I think each of these needs to be handled in separate ways. For example, search could continue to be a conglomeration that includes maps, mail and possibly cloud. Android can just be split very easily into a separate company and same for Youtube, since that would basically be another Netflix or whatever.

    Ads, in my opinion, is the most important one though. That absolutely has to be shattered into thousands of tiny pieces, all of which need to be forced to compete with each other, for the benefit of all internet companies anywhere. It would be a massive boon to companies everywhere and would provide an opportunity for lots of innovation in the advertising space, ie. trying ads that are less intrusive or ones that are cheaper because they don't rely on tracking information.

    And another thing I think people need to understand about search is that building the search engine is not the hard part - the hard part is figuring out how to pay for it. Search is really expensive - crawling websites, indexing, fighting spam abuse. That's what really makes Google successful - the fact that they coupled it with advertising so that they could cover all the expenses that come with managing a search engine. That's much more important than the quality of the results, in my opinion.

    And as for Chrome: well, personally I think that monopoly has been the most damaging to the internet as a whole. I would love to see it managed as part of a non-profit consortium. There should not be any profit motive whatsoever in building a web browser. If you want a profit motive, build a website - the browser should just be the tool to get to your profit model, not the profit model itself. And therefore it should be developed by multiple interest groups, not just one advertising company.

    Anyway, I know this is all an impossible fantasy. Nothing in the world is done because it's right or wrong, it's done because it serves whoever holds the most power. But if there were a just world, this is what I think it would look like.

  • Agreed. It's really hard to understate how ineffective "voting with your wallet" can be. The fact is simply that nobody honestly cares. Even if you get 100 people to boycott a company, would 100 out of millions of consumers really make a difference? Of course not.

    And of course, you always have cases like this where everybody does it. Same thing goes for TVs - if everyone spies on you, the only real solution is to not have a TV. Yes, I know there are exceptions here and there, but bad practices like these force buyers into making compromises that they shouldn't have to. Capitalism should be predicated on companies offering the best product to earn their income. It should not be about companies having the least bad product and trying every terrible thing that they can get away with.

    (Of course, we all know that capitalism is a farce.)

  • It's not wrong, but it's just terribly short-sighted. You're giving greed-crazed companies total control over a device that you own and nobody else should be able to touch.

    Shiny things come at a cost. Sure, it may look convenient and super cool to have all these features, but it's important to understand the trade-offs. And this is just the tip of the iceberg - we don't even know what kinds of malice these companies will think of 5-10 years from now when these machines are even more widespread and probably come with even more invasive anti-user hardware capabilities.

    It's not wrong... it's just very very naïve.

  • Same here. Sure, KDE and Gnome may have great Wayland support by now, but what about other DEs? The situation in XFCE seems to be pretty grim:

    It is not clear yet which Xfce release will target a complete Xfce Wayland transition (or if such a transition will happen at all).

    MATE seems to have piecemeal support. No idea what the status of LXDE/LXQT are. And there are plenty of other window managers that don't have the manpower to support wayland either.

    The deprecation of X is going to leave a lot of dead software in its wake.

  • Guess we'll just have to deprecate the entire Windows OS then...