What the fuck is happening to the internet recently?
Twitter and Reddit CEOs completely losing their minds, and now Google of all companies wants to lock down the whole internet?
This isn't even close to being okay. It's 100% bullshit.
Interest rates going up means investors are demanding more profit so all the tricks web companies have held off on till now are coming out.
A lot of them never had to make a profit before.
Rich idiots threw money at anything because while a million dollars is more than the vast amount of us will ever have, to them it's like buying a lotto scratcher.
The underlying issue is wealth imbalance.
That wealth imbalance also pushes companies to force dumb shit like this on thier customers.
If Google were to just come out with a $10 a month plan that removed all the sleazy ways they try and profit from you, the overwhemling response would be "Oh great yet another subscription", because these subscriptions have become a significant chunk of people's income each month.
But what if greedy neoliberals hadn't been pocketing our pay rises for $20 years and that subscription was functionally $1? Most people would be happy to blow $20 supporting 20 different content providers.
Unfortunately, their greed is insatiable. There's always a room of executives doing their grubby little sums. "If people have $1, they probably have $2. We could double our profits! Then double our salaries!".
Inflation just means "If rich people find out you've got more money, they'll fuck you out of that too".
The $1 will never be enough. They'll keep charging more and more until people have nothing left to hand over. Then they'll figure out more ways to squeeze a profit out of you. Manipulating you with ads, selling your private data, turning your body into expensive dogfood -- whatever makes them a few more cents.
And one of the primary reasons they never had to make a profit was that, so long as interest rates were functionally zero, it didn't really cost the investor class much of anything to park money in a money losing operation while waiting for it to become sellable.
With interest rates back to pre-2008 levels, though, there's a price to money again. And a real opportunity cost. So, compete with bonds or watch your investors walk.
It's like in Silicon Valley when the VC tells them they don't need to be profitable they just need to market, then as soon as he dips below technically being a billionaire he demands that they focus on being profitable immediately
I know, right? It’s so weird. In every single instance of some bullshit happening it’s easy to brush it off as incompetence or an attempt at profit maximization, but overall it feels a lot like some kind of targeted disassembly of whatever made the internet great and facilitated open discussions.
I don't think it's coordinated, I think it all starts from the same root cause: Silicon Valley Bank failed. These companies all need to do something they've really not done much of in the past: turn a profit. But these companies are not run by the business geniuses we were once convinced were running the show. Most of them live so far removed from a normal persons life that they don't understand what motivates us, what we want in a platform, and as soon as we provide feedback after they've already made a decision, they decide it's because we don't understand the squeeze they're under to make money.
That's a good write up, thanks. I don't claim it's coordinated, just that it feels more and more that way.
Also, I switched to DDG a year or so ago and I haven't heard that it was a wrapper for Bing. So I went to google it (I can't not use this verb when talking about online searches, lol), and it seems like it's not really the case. It gets some results from bing and utilises their ads to make profit, but it seems like it's a small part of their output. Is that incorrect? Do you have some more info about it being a wrapper? I'm kinda curious now
I 100% would have signed up for Reddit Premium and payed monthly for Sync access if they had allowed me to hand them the money. Oh well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The enshittification of the internet shall continue.
We will fight and we will lose, as depressing as it sounds. The vast majority of people just don’t and won’t care.
We're on Lemmy. We're already winning!
We may win a battle or few, but not the war.
Then i'll scrape the songs i currently watch on youtube with jdownload and stop using the page otherwise.
All they do is make the internet less attractive. Now that works to increase profits for a while, but eventually the content creators withdraw, the platforms become worse and eventually uncool and people stop using it, or use it less. Facebook is on a decline in western countries. We went through multiple video snippet apps already and tiktok and instagram too will be declining eventually.
We dont have to win the war because the war will never end. We just gotta make the best out of the battlefields we win.
But a small minority of really determined people is enough to change the world 🙌
I love to see how people nowadays find easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.. That's how they've been brainwashing us till now.
You'll finish your enshittification and you'll like it!
What the fuck is happening to the internet recently?
Capitalism is spreading further into the dark reaches of the internet.
Google has already been a worthless pos for years. Impossible to get relevant results, even with operators. You just get ads and irrelevant SEO sites. And adding "reddit" at the end of the query will probably not work so well in the future either, seeing how that site has also gone to shit.
And they have already tried monopolising the entire internet with their amp bullshit.
So this is just in line with their vision of making the whole internet into a pile of burning shit under their total control.
This is the result of the world blindly using Chrome and other Chromium based browsers. Now with effectively full control over the browser that more than 90% of the world uses Google can force its will on the internet
Wait, is Google in the process of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish on the free internet?
And we saw this was going to happen at least 5 years ago. But since the majority don't care, we get what we deserve I guess.
Let's just hope this doesn't go through.
One comment mentions possible incompability with article 22 of the GDPR, and I sure hope the EU will stand their ground on this.
I can only imagine noyb letting all hell break loose. We need more people like him, dissecting corporations legal bs to find every last little thing we can possibly hold against them.
Obligatory use Firefox
Let's hope there's already a law that the EU can find to apply (since they already don't like the non-EU dominance of big tech), or that they make one in time.
I was just thinking that I'm sure Google will lobby the US government to get this model enforced as law, making it illegal for anyone to create workarounds, or alternative browsers. And the US legislative government being what it is, will hand Google whatever legislation it wants to turn their nightmare into a reality.
It is imperative to make as many people as possible aware
I literally swapped to Librewolf before the Rossman video was done. I was on Brave Browser before, but it's based on Chromium. Fuck Chromium and fuck Google. Fuck this shitty amoeba that tries to spread into and control everything.
I will post stupid shit on my federated forum and you will fucking live with it Google. Fuck you. Burn. It's time to break up the internet monopolies and do some trust busting. Someone pull FDR's rotten corpse out of the grave and put it back to work.
https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/1053698 - case develops.
Inb4 you can only browse the internet with Chromium.
Well, the engineers say it themselves: nothing would prevent websites developers to prevent access from browsers that do not support this "Web DRM".
My biggest fear though is that it becomes a standard which all browsers will have to support to stay relevant. And with Google building the engine used by the vast majority of browsers, they can force this upon other browser engines (ie. Safari and Firefox).
It's such a potent example why everyone who cares need to stop using Chromium based browsers before it's too late. Stunts like this would be much harder to pull if there wasn't a de facto browser monopoly.
So soon we’ll need uBlock Origin FitGirl Edition?
Hopefully we won't have to deal with a uBlock Origin Empress Edition
Just this week or was it last week, I made a comment on some post that putting privacy aside, we should still be encouraging people to use Firefox instead of any chromium browsers to break control. It is good to see that right now I am just given a very good example why Chromium being a monopoly allows Google to control the spec (even if other companies are on board)
This PR nails it
This is exactly the kind of thing that demostrates why DRM shouldn't be part of the web standards. It's very existence is abuse and this use even more so.
DRM needs to be illegal.
Laws are written by the rich. Want to stop things like this, eat the rich.
Fuck DRMs and fuck these turds
And they went ahead and blocked comments now - "An owner of this repository has limited the ability to comment to users that have contributed to this repository in the past."
Fucking cowards
EDIT: I went ahead and reported the distro as malware. Also, it feels like the internet is about to split in a open internet (basically just like tor) and a corporate internet where if you don't pay the big tech you can't access anything.
Oh do fuck off Google.
That's a good way for me to never visit your website again. Honestly, this kinda sounds like the death of the internet if I'm being honest. This would transform it from a free medium into a full blown corporate dystopia. It's really scary to see the digital (corporate) development over the past couple decades. Would be really cool if we don't move further towards some cyberpunk like future where megacorps control everything.
Ben Wiser (Google) Borbala Benko (Google) Philipp Pfeiffenberger (Google) Sergey Kataev (Google)
Congratulations, guys. You are now internet pariahs. Your unrepentantly mercenary lack of engineering ethics is now recorded for all eternity. You have nobody but yourselves to blame.
Google is hindrance to open web, like IE7 was with ActiveX.
Only difference is that IE7 wanted developers to develop for IE7, while Google also want to fully control the web and bend it according to its needs
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
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