I feel like those articles all look at the wrong aspect: once AI companies are forced to compete on price (i.e. in 6 months), then Google’s TPU is going to be a massive advantage that’s almost impossible for Amazon or Microsoft to replace.
Even bigger advantage Google has, in addition to TPUs and other stuff, is bundling. Bundle paid AI tiers with other products and entice users with clever pricing tiers, and you're golden. In fact this is what Google already does. Cheapest paid AI tier - 4$ and you also get two hundred gigs of cloud storage and photo backup and office and stuff. You want more storage - sure we have that, plus some higher AI usage limits on top of that, or maybe you want average storage but much more AI tokens? We have that too. Family packs? Sure. And so on. OpenAI doesn't have a photo editor or a music streaming or or funny reels network to bundle their expensive AI with.
Amazon has its own hardware in the pipeline, Microsoft would be stupid to not work on one, so best to assume they are at the very least a buyer of such a thing from AMD/Intel.
If the big cloud players slowly agree to compete on price then that means that OpenAI and Anthropic are suddenly in a much weaker negotiating position.
When you are already into some combination of Office, Windows desktops, Active Directory, .NET, SQL Server, Github Copilot, then Azure feels like the natural cloud transition.
Azure is exceptionally broken though. It only exists for those who don’t want to put all their eggs in the Amazon basket, and because Microsoft has an old relationship with many large enterprises and is good at selling to them. No body is picking azure based on a technical reason as all services are horrific to use.
It would appear that GCP and aws are in a different league of bugginess compared to Azure.
Azure seems to be relying on constant human intervention, the other 2 didn't get a special mention from Pentagon. There was a recent insider article cycle on just how broken and misguided the whole Azure department is.
Unless that market causes you to lose your job, of course. Or unless you want to buy RAM or a new graphics card. Or unless you are an artist, or a translator, or...
This is one of those things capitalists tell themselves so they can keep believing the shtick. This is a good example of "head in the sand on purpose" thinking.
Saying this about a compute rental service is hilarious
They have the power to do what exactly? Sell you some EC2 instances at reasonable prices? lol
There’s organizations that have the power to openly kidnap and execute people and we’re being melodramatic about a few buildings with computers in them
That's not an ideal tone for here. From my perspective the most incredible thing is the concentration of IO. I might like at some point for elements of my computer usage to remain private, it would be nice if that ability were preserved. A bit hard to accomplish when 1 out of 4 bits processed globally all run through the same network
Wasn’t it just a few months ago that a big tech CEO used his powers to gain access to all the US government data he wanted? Did you forget that already?
Did you see any clips from Trumps inauguration? Weren’t the CEOs of these big tech companies sitting right behind him?
Shall we even talk about Palantir?
I think it’s pretty obvious what the power of these companies are. You have to have your head pretty deep in the tech hole to think this is just about fair ec2 pricing. What I’d do to have that kind of ignorance again.
I see. So your brilliant logic is to reduce the actions and impact of multi billion dollar institutions down to simplified versions of the technical solutions they offer.
“You don’t need to worry bout them Palantir boys, they just make simple harmless dashboards. Don’t worry about the deep involvement in government surveillance, military targeting, and immigration enforcement.”
“Amazon just provides simple VMs. Ain’t no need to be concerned about worker treatment, anti-competitive practices, tax avoidance, and environmental impact.”
When their customers start using those buildings with computers in them to autonomously determine who to kidnap and execute, I suspect you might understand their point. I’d also note we are one refusal away from the US president declaring DPA control over frontier model providers and their infrastructure a national defense necessity and under his personal control.
Governments are companies that have accountability to the public, wherein the public has direct influence over their decisionmaking, unlike regular corporations where people have no influence whatsoever (without lobbying the government to regulate them, anyways).
To the extent that governments work against the people, it is largely because people in some countries are collectively very stupid and willingly support such governments.
He is politically accountable. The majority of the voting populace voted him back in and also voted for a majority of legislators whose central policy was worshipping the ground on which he stands. America is getting exactly what its people voted for, if you have a problem with that you have a problem with democracy itself.
To be clear, political accountability doesn't mean "you, one person out of over 300 million, get your desired outcome". It means the over 300 million people collectively decide what he is accountable for and what happens to him.
He can be removed from office by Congress after the midterms if the population shows up to vote for that happening. They won't, of course, because the American people as a whole do not want him removed from office, but the mechanism is there.
He will also probably stand for re-election, and if he does he probably will win despite it being in violation of the constitution, because by all accounts the American people collectively prefer the concept of Supreme Leader Trump to the scrap of toilet paper that is their constitution. That is the nature of democracy. It gives the people what they want, even if what they want is very stupid and harmful to themselves.
Maybe worry more about the organizations that actually have the power to do bad things rather than speculating about something that might happen at some point lol
AdSense is the one that people underestimate. It's a piranha pool of liquid cash, billions-scale impressions and near global outreach. Any sane nation would have banned it decades ago, unless it was propping up a global influence campaign for their government.
AdSense uses a sealed-bid auction system with arbitrary number of lots that Google controls. It's a FOMO market driven by artificial scarcity, and since Google contractually forbids AdSense-enabled websites from using competing services, it forces ad buyers to go through their closed, controlled system.
But in practice, nobody (well, nobody making lots of ad revenue from their website) uses AdSense exclusively. Most don't even use it at all - AdX is better as a header bidding fallback than AdSense. But those who do use AdSense as a fallback are using it in competition with many other ad networks.
They forbid those websites from using competitors? Isn’t that blatantly illegal? I guess it’s not actually illegal until they lose a court case for antitrust.
Every brand or product has to competitively bid for its own identity in a monopoly competitive bidding market.
It's downright evil.
Look at Google's AI rivals having to spend hundreds of millions just so customers can find them. Google Anthropic or OpenAI and see what you get.
The next admin needs to break Google up horizontally (not vertically) into competing browsers, clouds, and search products. They all need to fight. Healthy capitalism is fiercely competitive. Not whatever this invasive species that preys on everything else is.
They also need to make it illegal to place ads for registered trademarks. The EU should get in on that too.
>The next admin needs to break Google up horizontally (not vertically) into competing browsers, clouds, and search products. They all need to fight. Healthy capitalism is fiercely competitive. Not whatever this invasive species that preys on everything else is.
That sounds great if you're rich and can afford to pay for all the million subscriptions that will pop up to replace what Google offers.
Google offers an insane amount of value to people for free: YouTube, Android, Google Search, Trends, Scholar, Maps, Chrome, Translate, Gmail. These would all be paid subscription products without adsense (or some equivalent). And as paid products they would get the typical subscription enshittification over time.
Also, on the topic of AI: didn't the transformers research paper come from Google? In an alternate world that would've been a trade secret locked away inside Google.
> Google offers an insane amount of value to people for free: YouTube, Android, Google Search, Trends, Scholar, Maps, Chrome, Translate, Gmail. These would all be paid subscription products without adsense (or some equivalent). And as paid products they would get the typical subscription enshittification over time.
That's false.
There are hundreds of free offerings in this and many other spaces offered by lots of other companies.
There does not have to be one monopoly controlling all of it for the freemium model and advertising to work.
What are the great phone OSes that aren't Android based? Can you run Android-specific apps on then?
There definitely isn't a YouTube replacement. You might say that there are video sites and that's true, but there aren't any that also offer 55% of the revenue to the creator, let alone that being enough to really have a creator economy.
Most browsers these days are Chromium based or are essentially funded by these big tech companies (eg Mozilla).
Google search and translate do have alternatives, especially these days with LLMs doing a lot of the latter.
What are some of the free email providers? I'm genuinely curious, because I know some exist, but I'm unfamiliar with most of them.
> What are the great phone OSes that aren't Android based? Can you run Android-specific apps on then?
Make Google give up Android (which is Linux based) and watch an entire industry pop up.
> There definitely isn't a YouTube replacement. You might say that there are video sites and that's true, but there aren't any that also offer 55% of the revenue to the creator, let alone that being enough to really have a creator economy.
TikTok creators earn 70-90%
Twitch creators make 50-70%.
Split YouTube into ten video websites and watch a robust, de-consolidated economy sprout.
> Most browsers these days are Chromium based or are essentially funded by these big tech companies (eg Mozilla).
This is the most heinous of all because it's the insidious linchpin behind Google's evil empire. It's the starting point of the funnel Google makes all of its "search" revenue from. (I say "search" because when I type in "openai", I know what I want, but Google gives me something different and forces that player into an expensive bidding war.)
Google didn't build the browser. That was originally KHTML and then taken over by Apple. They lifted it, used Embrace-Extend-Extinguish, and launched a tracking/search ad funnel/anti-adblock empire.
Every google search result compels you to download Chrome if you aren't using it. It's the default on Android. They warn you if you're using Firefox.
When you can spend billions to dump on the browser market you can do things like this. It's especially heinous since they reinvested their ill-gotten ad dragnet gains back into the engine that powered their empire.
Google needs to have Chrome stripped from them. Period. They cannot have a browser now or ever.
Firefox is their antitrust litigation sponge. They happily pay the stooges there to chug along and waste money.
Brave can and will easily fill this void when Google is forced out.
> What are some of the free email providers? I'm genuinely curious, because I know some exist, but I'm unfamiliar with most of them.
Microsoft, Yahoo. You used to be able to run your own before Google platformized email.
> Are the free Maps alternatives good?
Yes. Apple Maps is shockingly good. Turns out competition is good.
If Google is forced out, there will be lots of competition.
I don't expect consumers to understand this, but I do expect regulators to get it. And I want more regulators to take up the mantle against Google.
Google is highly anti-competitive and drastic measures need to be taken to restore a cutthroat capitalist environment that is maximally beneficial to the economy.
"Possibility for abuse" seems like the right reason here. Does the benefiting of reducing a specific possibility of abuse outweigh the cost of an intervention? And here in particular, is there much cost to the intervention other than just shifting the money distribution from a zero-sum advertising arms race from one player to several?
I frequently see calls to not intervene if there's not bulletproof evidence of existing abuse, but why wait? Would you want Google to own a bunch of nuclear missiles just because they might not have misused them yet?
Yep. They can make every mistake imaginable and not work as hard but still win. It’s the power of concentrated capital and monopolistic behavior and what people call “moats” but really is just an unfair advantage. Why should Google or Apple be allowed to copy everyone’s AI tech and just win because of distribution through Chrome or iPhones?
We need new antitrust laws and heavy taxes just on the megacorps worth $500B or more. And aggressive enforcement.
Gemini is a copy of ChatGPT. And ChatGPT was a product invented on top of many previous ideas. The fact that one paper among many was written at Google isn’t relevant to my point.
Google entered the competition in AI products late. And now they will use their power unfairly to try and make it win. When they bundle an AI Chatbot into their existing contracts for Google workspace, they are competing unfairly. When the Chrome browser steers you towards Google properties by default, they are competing unfairly. Etc. Those unfair monopolistic actions let them come into the market years late with a viable competitor to ChatGPT or other products.
And let’s not give them too much credit for transformers. A handful of researchers were paid by Google while they came up with that paper. Google didn’t really do anything to push for it and neither Google leaders nor shareholders cared much about it at the time. Not to mention, transformers themselves were just a continuation of other prior steps in ML, from what I’ve read.
Everything it’s building now - Gemini in its various forms, and all the other AI products - are copies of other products. If they weren’t Google but another startup with the same products, they would be irrelevant and ignored. It’s their capital and anticompetitive practices that let them get away with missteps that no one else can survive.
Not that I'm opposed to new laws, but just having enforcement of the laws we already have would go a long way to fixing the problems.
The problem is how to get to the point where there is enforcement.
It definitely isn't going to happen with Republicans in power, and it also isn't a sure thing with Democrats in power either.
Lina Khan was a good start for a bit there, but she certainly didn't have universal Dem support. Establishment Democrats are going to have to grow a spine and tell the Reid Hoffmanesque donor class to get fucked.
I will preface by saying that someone with Lina Khan is sorely needed; Big Tech and other monopolies have gotten way too Big and seriously need to be reined in.
That said, from all the informed takes I've seen, Lina Khan was seriously... flawed (putting it charitably) in her strategy and tactics. To the extent that some observers wondered if she was deliberately sabotaging the agency just to highlight the need for new, more effective laws. She did have a novel theory of consumer harm, but that requires new legislation to enforce. Instead the way she went about it -- including by flouting due process -- was extremely counter-productive.
That was a big reason she was neither very effective in her goals (other than creating a lot of noise) nor have high political support from any side.
Her lack of political support from certain factions on the Democratic side was obviously because the big donors involved in the VC world want the option to continue to unload the startups they've invested in off as acquisitions to google, microsoft, et al.
Nothing noble about that stance, that's continuing to feed the Big Tech monster.
They are very much part of the problem that needs to be solved and they didn't like that she was starting to push for the solutions.
If you look into how she ran the agency, there were a lot of parallels with how the current US adminstration is being run. (Ask any AI for an overview and see the parallels pop up.) Regardless of your political leaning, I think generally we agree that is not how government institutions should be run. Even if the donor class hadn't made any noise, the Democrats were right in not supporting her tactics.
The current set of laws lead to the current situation in my opinion. Enforcement within the current laws means a court case that will take years and span multiple administrations, which gives it a lot of time to be killed. It doesn’t provide enough authority to immediately bring enforcement actions.
Even the original gold rush pickaxe guy Sam Brannan went broke, and he practically had a monopoly on pickaxes by buying up the entire supply: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Brannan
The "picks and shovels" people from the dotcom days all went broke. The stuff they had convinced themselves and their investors was crucial turned out to be not important.
Nobody actually goes broke anymore man.
They'll still be multi millionaires. They will still have a contact list.
Hell you will receive a pardon if it comes to that.
It's actually really hard for the aristocracy to end up in a Florida trailer park.
Well, I worked at a picks-and-shovels scam where four executives were convicted of federal offenses and two got prison sentences. I don't know if they are still rich or not.
Cisco is doing great. Sun got acquired by Oracle. Oracle itself is also fine (apart from it is Oracle). Akamai is doing fine.
From the pure software side, Macromedia got acquired. RedHat was doing fine before IBM gobbled it up. But I honestly can't remember any other "picks and shovels" software companies from pre-dotcom.
The glass-in-the-ground people went spectacularly broke. I also suggest you look up the stock price chart for JDSU. On the software side, Ariba and Commerce One.
Yeah, hardware companies got hit hard. But dotcom also coincided with the de-industrialization era, with manufacturing moving out of the US, with a double whammy of commodization. So it's hard to disentangle the causes.
And then I can't really remember many Internet-focused software pick&shovels companies from that era. I was only starting my professional career at that time, though.
I pray for Google to completely fail the pivot to AI. We don't need another surveillance capitalism company using AI to make us even dumber and more addicted to screens.
I so hope that Google goes down. (And I pray the same for Facebook and a couple others).
The incentive for those Adtech is to keep you hooked as long as possible so they can sell you more ads, and making you lose your only real currency in life: time.
The incentive for Apple or Microsoft is to make a good product that you will gladly pay for. This is very different.
A good restaurant makes an excellent product bit it doesn't mean that I will spend 5 hours there.
Google Analytics has >80% market share. Most of the websites you visit are helping them build a profile of everything you do on the internet with the goal of selling targeted advertisement. That is their business, it's what pays for everything else they do. I think that is what is meant by surveillance capitalism.
Every iPhone that people buy gives direct money to Apple, centralizing their power. This means, they get to dictate what apps can / cannot run on the device.
So what? Nobody is forcing anyone to buy iPhones. Similarly, nobody is forcing anyone to install Google Analytics, or go to that website.
Nobody is forcing people to do Heroin or Cocaine. We should start giving it for free to people in the street. Everyone can then decide if they want to take it or not. Oh yes and once you are hooked we should definitely never keep the dealer accountable. It's the users who always decides to use it! They are the ones to blame, never the giga corporation making money on your back!
That surely would work very very well in society. Literally the same thing is happening with Google, Facebook, TikTok etc.
You probably work for bigtech and your salary depends on people losing their braincells so I don't expect you to suddenly get some ethics and understand all of this.
Google banked on "Edge" for IoT as well, prior to that it was their network edge is better use them from compute. It's a failed strategy that won't work this time either.
I feel like those articles all look at the wrong aspect: once AI companies are forced to compete on price (i.e. in 6 months), then Google’s TPU is going to be a massive advantage that’s almost impossible for Amazon or Microsoft to replace.
Even bigger advantage Google has, in addition to TPUs and other stuff, is bundling. Bundle paid AI tiers with other products and entice users with clever pricing tiers, and you're golden. In fact this is what Google already does. Cheapest paid AI tier - 4$ and you also get two hundred gigs of cloud storage and photo backup and office and stuff. You want more storage - sure we have that, plus some higher AI usage limits on top of that, or maybe you want average storage but much more AI tokens? We have that too. Family packs? Sure. And so on. OpenAI doesn't have a photo editor or a music streaming or or funny reels network to bundle their expensive AI with.
Googles bundling really is ingenious and possibly illegal.
I bet a significant chunk of folks reading this have a recurring charge from Google for extra storage, compute, hosting, YouTube, etc.
Google became really good at nickel/diming people
Amazon has its own hardware in the pipeline, Microsoft would be stupid to not work on one, so best to assume they are at the very least a buyer of such a thing from AMD/Intel.
Microsoft has https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2026/01/26/maia-200-the-ai-... already.
> i.e. in 6 months
Why are Amazon or Microsoft going to be forced to compete on cost in six months?
If the big cloud players slowly agree to compete on price then that means that OpenAI and Anthropic are suddenly in a much weaker negotiating position.
Google has never competed on having a price advantage.
https://archive.ph/U7i8q
Don’t know about catching up to AWS, but given the state of Azure, anyone with enough data center investment should be able to overtake it.
Azure secret juice are Microsoft shops.
When you are already into some combination of Office, Windows desktops, Active Directory, .NET, SQL Server, Github Copilot, then Azure feels like the natural cloud transition.
Azure is exceptionally broken though. It only exists for those who don’t want to put all their eggs in the Amazon basket, and because Microsoft has an old relationship with many large enterprises and is good at selling to them. No body is picking azure based on a technical reason as all services are horrific to use.
Amazon is hardly anything amazing.
I much rather deal with Azure than the complexity maze of AWS products, IAM configurations, primitive Web based IDE tooling and shell.
Amazon would never had come up with something like VSCode, which was born as the Azure Web IDE.
Office, Windows and SQL server get some hate now and then but are nowhere near as buggy as Azure.
All cloud vendors are buggy, and if you aren't paying enough there are only bots to talk to.
It would appear that GCP and aws are in a different league of bugginess compared to Azure.
Azure seems to be relying on constant human intervention, the other 2 didn't get a special mention from Pentagon. There was a recent insider article cycle on just how broken and misguided the whole Azure department is.
If you want cheap that's what you get. Service costs money.
Like how my local supermarket prefers hiring teenagers.
Depending on your wallet size, all cloud services are great,
> Only Nvidia currently rivalled Google’s combination of AI hardware and integrated chip software, he added.
Does the phrasing imply that Google sees itself as #1 and Nvidia as a close #2 that may rival its greatness? not to mention other big contenders.
In a highly competitive markets, consumers win.
Unless that market causes you to lose your job, of course. Or unless you want to buy RAM or a new graphics card. Or unless you are an artist, or a translator, or...
But sure, if you want to buy AI tokens, you win.
This isn't really true but keep thinking that.
This is one of those things capitalists tell themselves so they can keep believing the shtick. This is a good example of "head in the sand on purpose" thinking.
Whenever I read about how powerful these companies are, it sends chills down my spine.
Saying this about a compute rental service is hilarious
They have the power to do what exactly? Sell you some EC2 instances at reasonable prices? lol
There’s organizations that have the power to openly kidnap and execute people and we’re being melodramatic about a few buildings with computers in them
That's not an ideal tone for here. From my perspective the most incredible thing is the concentration of IO. I might like at some point for elements of my computer usage to remain private, it would be nice if that ability were preserved. A bit hard to accomplish when 1 out of 4 bits processed globally all run through the same network
They'll buy your politicians who will give them zero checks on raising energy prices or poisoning your children's minds
Have they been doing this? Evidence?
How's a 170 million pieces of evidence for poisoning children's minds
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2019/09/...
How is this related to poisoning anyone’s mind
Looks like they collected some metrics. I’m fine with this
The trump family is literally in office and accepting bribes from every tech company in existence.
Lol how willfully ignorant can people be?
What does this have to do with my comment exactly?
Apathy is not evidence of anything, not even ignorance.
Wasn’t it just a few months ago that a big tech CEO used his powers to gain access to all the US government data he wanted? Did you forget that already?
Did you see any clips from Trumps inauguration? Weren’t the CEOs of these big tech companies sitting right behind him?
Shall we even talk about Palantir?
I think it’s pretty obvious what the power of these companies are. You have to have your head pretty deep in the tech hole to think this is just about fair ec2 pricing. What I’d do to have that kind of ignorance again.
Palantir makes dashboards haha, if anything they’re the least scary one on the list
> Wasn’t it just a few months ago that a big tech CEO used his powers to gain access to all the US government data he wanted
You’re so close! The organization you want to criticize here is the government. Hope that helps :)
I see. So your brilliant logic is to reduce the actions and impact of multi billion dollar institutions down to simplified versions of the technical solutions they offer.
“You don’t need to worry bout them Palantir boys, they just make simple harmless dashboards. Don’t worry about the deep involvement in government surveillance, military targeting, and immigration enforcement.”
“Amazon just provides simple VMs. Ain’t no need to be concerned about worker treatment, anti-competitive practices, tax avoidance, and environmental impact.”
Is that it?
They treat their workers super well, they pay a shocking amount
Everyone practices tax avoidance, there’s nothing wrong with it. If you don’t like it then adjust the tax code
When their customers start using those buildings with computers in them to autonomously determine who to kidnap and execute, I suspect you might understand their point. I’d also note we are one refusal away from the US president declaring DPA control over frontier model providers and their infrastructure a national defense necessity and under his personal control.
Then complain about the US president forcing Microsoft to do X rather than just preemptively criticizing Microsoft for doing nothing
>There’s organizations that have the power to openly kidnap and execute people and...
Like banana companies?
No, I’m not aware of any banana companies that currently have the power to murder people.
A new life awaits you in the Off-world colonies
Wait until you learn what governments are.
Governments are companies that have accountability to the public, wherein the public has direct influence over their decisionmaking, unlike regular corporations where people have no influence whatsoever (without lobbying the government to regulate them, anyways).
To the extent that governments work against the people, it is largely because people in some countries are collectively very stupid and willingly support such governments.
oh, yes, Trump famous for being held accountable.
He is politically accountable. The majority of the voting populace voted him back in and also voted for a majority of legislators whose central policy was worshipping the ground on which he stands. America is getting exactly what its people voted for, if you have a problem with that you have a problem with democracy itself.
In what way? What will happen to him? As far as I know, he is not standing for a re-election anyway, so exactly zero consequences for him.
To be clear, political accountability doesn't mean "you, one person out of over 300 million, get your desired outcome". It means the over 300 million people collectively decide what he is accountable for and what happens to him.
He can be removed from office by Congress after the midterms if the population shows up to vote for that happening. They won't, of course, because the American people as a whole do not want him removed from office, but the mechanism is there.
He will also probably stand for re-election, and if he does he probably will win despite it being in violation of the constitution, because by all accounts the American people collectively prefer the concept of Supreme Leader Trump to the scrap of toilet paper that is their constitution. That is the nature of democracy. It gives the people what they want, even if what they want is very stupid and harmful to themselves.
Seriously
I don’t understand how this is even a remote comparison lol
If we’re worried about power there are other much scarier organizations to criticize first
I am worried about these batshit insane billionaire tech bros. They are already in the White House.
Maybe worry more about the organizations that actually have the power to do bad things rather than speculating about something that might happen at some point lol
Collectively we have the power to do something about it if enough people care to. It's called democratic socialism.
https://www.dsausa.org/
DSA would be a great org if they could fix their foreign policy takes.
Doing the whole "it's both sides, really" thing after Russia invaded Ukraine just makes them look like useful idiots.
AdSense is the one that people underestimate. It's a piranha pool of liquid cash, billions-scale impressions and near global outreach. Any sane nation would have banned it decades ago, unless it was propping up a global influence campaign for their government.
I am more concern with how they make scam much less detectable.
You can hyper-target your ad or scam to vulnerable individual.
Unlike traditional media, like newspaper, you can post an ad with no visibility outside your target group -- which is hard to discover.
The report button is just some generic "second look" and automation within the same organization, there are no oversight.
I am deeply saddened that it was developed by the hero of modern rendering, Eric Veach.
> Any sane nation would have banned it decades ago
Why?
AdSense uses a sealed-bid auction system with arbitrary number of lots that Google controls. It's a FOMO market driven by artificial scarcity, and since Google contractually forbids AdSense-enabled websites from using competing services, it forces ad buyers to go through their closed, controlled system.
But in practice, nobody (well, nobody making lots of ad revenue from their website) uses AdSense exclusively. Most don't even use it at all - AdX is better as a header bidding fallback than AdSense. But those who do use AdSense as a fallback are using it in competition with many other ad networks.
They forbid those websites from using competitors? Isn’t that blatantly illegal? I guess it’s not actually illegal until they lose a court case for antitrust.
Google owns 92% of all "URL bars".
They turned this into "search".
Every brand or product has to competitively bid for its own identity in a monopoly competitive bidding market.
It's downright evil.
Look at Google's AI rivals having to spend hundreds of millions just so customers can find them. Google Anthropic or OpenAI and see what you get.
The next admin needs to break Google up horizontally (not vertically) into competing browsers, clouds, and search products. They all need to fight. Healthy capitalism is fiercely competitive. Not whatever this invasive species that preys on everything else is.
They also need to make it illegal to place ads for registered trademarks. The EU should get in on that too.
>The next admin needs to break Google up horizontally (not vertically) into competing browsers, clouds, and search products. They all need to fight. Healthy capitalism is fiercely competitive. Not whatever this invasive species that preys on everything else is.
That sounds great if you're rich and can afford to pay for all the million subscriptions that will pop up to replace what Google offers.
Google offers an insane amount of value to people for free: YouTube, Android, Google Search, Trends, Scholar, Maps, Chrome, Translate, Gmail. These would all be paid subscription products without adsense (or some equivalent). And as paid products they would get the typical subscription enshittification over time.
Also, on the topic of AI: didn't the transformers research paper come from Google? In an alternate world that would've been a trade secret locked away inside Google.
> Google offers an insane amount of value to people for free: YouTube, Android, Google Search, Trends, Scholar, Maps, Chrome, Translate, Gmail. These would all be paid subscription products without adsense (or some equivalent). And as paid products they would get the typical subscription enshittification over time.
That's false.
There are hundreds of free offerings in this and many other spaces offered by lots of other companies.
There does not have to be one monopoly controlling all of it for the freemium model and advertising to work.
What are the great phone OSes that aren't Android based? Can you run Android-specific apps on then?
There definitely isn't a YouTube replacement. You might say that there are video sites and that's true, but there aren't any that also offer 55% of the revenue to the creator, let alone that being enough to really have a creator economy.
Most browsers these days are Chromium based or are essentially funded by these big tech companies (eg Mozilla).
Google search and translate do have alternatives, especially these days with LLMs doing a lot of the latter.
What are some of the free email providers? I'm genuinely curious, because I know some exist, but I'm unfamiliar with most of them.
Are the free Maps alternatives good?
> What are the great phone OSes that aren't Android based? Can you run Android-specific apps on then?
Make Google give up Android (which is Linux based) and watch an entire industry pop up.
> There definitely isn't a YouTube replacement. You might say that there are video sites and that's true, but there aren't any that also offer 55% of the revenue to the creator, let alone that being enough to really have a creator economy.
TikTok creators earn 70-90%
Twitch creators make 50-70%.
Split YouTube into ten video websites and watch a robust, de-consolidated economy sprout.
> Most browsers these days are Chromium based or are essentially funded by these big tech companies (eg Mozilla).
This is the most heinous of all because it's the insidious linchpin behind Google's evil empire. It's the starting point of the funnel Google makes all of its "search" revenue from. (I say "search" because when I type in "openai", I know what I want, but Google gives me something different and forces that player into an expensive bidding war.)
Google didn't build the browser. That was originally KHTML and then taken over by Apple. They lifted it, used Embrace-Extend-Extinguish, and launched a tracking/search ad funnel/anti-adblock empire.
Every google search result compels you to download Chrome if you aren't using it. It's the default on Android. They warn you if you're using Firefox.
When you can spend billions to dump on the browser market you can do things like this. It's especially heinous since they reinvested their ill-gotten ad dragnet gains back into the engine that powered their empire.
Google needs to have Chrome stripped from them. Period. They cannot have a browser now or ever.
Firefox is their antitrust litigation sponge. They happily pay the stooges there to chug along and waste money.
Brave can and will easily fill this void when Google is forced out.
> What are some of the free email providers? I'm genuinely curious, because I know some exist, but I'm unfamiliar with most of them.
Microsoft, Yahoo. You used to be able to run your own before Google platformized email.
> Are the free Maps alternatives good?
Yes. Apple Maps is shockingly good. Turns out competition is good.
If Google is forced out, there will be lots of competition.
I don't expect consumers to understand this, but I do expect regulators to get it. And I want more regulators to take up the mantle against Google.
Google is highly anti-competitive and drastic measures need to be taken to restore a cutthroat capitalist environment that is maximally beneficial to the economy.
"Possibility for abuse" seems like the right reason here. Does the benefiting of reducing a specific possibility of abuse outweigh the cost of an intervention? And here in particular, is there much cost to the intervention other than just shifting the money distribution from a zero-sum advertising arms race from one player to several?
I frequently see calls to not intervene if there's not bulletproof evidence of existing abuse, but why wait? Would you want Google to own a bunch of nuclear missiles just because they might not have misused them yet?
Yep. They can make every mistake imaginable and not work as hard but still win. It’s the power of concentrated capital and monopolistic behavior and what people call “moats” but really is just an unfair advantage. Why should Google or Apple be allowed to copy everyone’s AI tech and just win because of distribution through Chrome or iPhones?
We need new antitrust laws and heavy taxes just on the megacorps worth $500B or more. And aggressive enforcement.
You mean, the inventor of the transformer technology that made ChatGPT possible, is copying ChatGPT’s technology?
Gemini is a copy of ChatGPT. And ChatGPT was a product invented on top of many previous ideas. The fact that one paper among many was written at Google isn’t relevant to my point.
Google entered the competition in AI products late. And now they will use their power unfairly to try and make it win. When they bundle an AI Chatbot into their existing contracts for Google workspace, they are competing unfairly. When the Chrome browser steers you towards Google properties by default, they are competing unfairly. Etc. Those unfair monopolistic actions let them come into the market years late with a viable competitor to ChatGPT or other products.
And let’s not give them too much credit for transformers. A handful of researchers were paid by Google while they came up with that paper. Google didn’t really do anything to push for it and neither Google leaders nor shareholders cared much about it at the time. Not to mention, transformers themselves were just a continuation of other prior steps in ML, from what I’ve read.
Let's not give too much credit to Bell Labs. A handful of researchers were paid to develop transistors and...
That's exactly how fundamental research works.
Transformers is possibly the most significant advancement in machine learning since AlexNet.
Bundling products is valid but different critism.
google literally had two divisions doing ai research. It is (was) risk averse and had its hand forced by the runaway success of oai.
There are many valid criticisms of Google, but copying AI tech isn't one of them.
Everything it’s building now - Gemini in its various forms, and all the other AI products - are copies of other products. If they weren’t Google but another startup with the same products, they would be irrelevant and ignored. It’s their capital and anticompetitive practices that let them get away with missteps that no one else can survive.
Not that I'm opposed to new laws, but just having enforcement of the laws we already have would go a long way to fixing the problems.
The problem is how to get to the point where there is enforcement.
It definitely isn't going to happen with Republicans in power, and it also isn't a sure thing with Democrats in power either.
Lina Khan was a good start for a bit there, but she certainly didn't have universal Dem support. Establishment Democrats are going to have to grow a spine and tell the Reid Hoffmanesque donor class to get fucked.
I will preface by saying that someone with Lina Khan is sorely needed; Big Tech and other monopolies have gotten way too Big and seriously need to be reined in.
That said, from all the informed takes I've seen, Lina Khan was seriously... flawed (putting it charitably) in her strategy and tactics. To the extent that some observers wondered if she was deliberately sabotaging the agency just to highlight the need for new, more effective laws. She did have a novel theory of consumer harm, but that requires new legislation to enforce. Instead the way she went about it -- including by flouting due process -- was extremely counter-productive.
That was a big reason she was neither very effective in her goals (other than creating a lot of noise) nor have high political support from any side.
Her lack of political support from certain factions on the Democratic side was obviously because the big donors involved in the VC world want the option to continue to unload the startups they've invested in off as acquisitions to google, microsoft, et al.
Nothing noble about that stance, that's continuing to feed the Big Tech monster.
They are very much part of the problem that needs to be solved and they didn't like that she was starting to push for the solutions.
If you look into how she ran the agency, there were a lot of parallels with how the current US adminstration is being run. (Ask any AI for an overview and see the parallels pop up.) Regardless of your political leaning, I think generally we agree that is not how government institutions should be run. Even if the donor class hadn't made any noise, the Democrats were right in not supporting her tactics.
The current set of laws lead to the current situation in my opinion. Enforcement within the current laws means a court case that will take years and span multiple administrations, which gives it a lot of time to be killed. It doesn’t provide enough authority to immediately bring enforcement actions.
What AI tech did Google just copy?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_Is_All_You_Need
/s
Whoever controls the spice , controls the universe.
And the spice must flow
I’ve always thought “man it would have been a great job selling shovels and pickaxes during the gold rush” back in the day.”
I know, I know, it’s really hard having these insights. We all have our crosses to bear. <giggling emoji>
Even the original gold rush pickaxe guy Sam Brannan went broke, and he practically had a monopoly on pickaxes by buying up the entire supply: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Brannan
TIL who Brannan Street in SF is named after.
Went broke "Following the divorce, he became a brewer and developed a problem with alcohol."
Well, if a divorce and drinking could make him go broke, he wasn't that wealthy, was he?
The "picks and shovels" people from the dotcom days all went broke. The stuff they had convinced themselves and their investors was crucial turned out to be not important.
Nobody actually goes broke anymore man. They'll still be multi millionaires. They will still have a contact list. Hell you will receive a pardon if it comes to that.
It's actually really hard for the aristocracy to end up in a Florida trailer park.
Well, I worked at a picks-and-shovels scam where four executives were convicted of federal offenses and two got prison sentences. I don't know if they are still rich or not.
Cisco is doing great. Sun got acquired by Oracle. Oracle itself is also fine (apart from it is Oracle). Akamai is doing fine.
From the pure software side, Macromedia got acquired. RedHat was doing fine before IBM gobbled it up. But I honestly can't remember any other "picks and shovels" software companies from pre-dotcom.
> Cisco is doing great.
https://totalrealreturns.com/s/CSCO
3Com / US Robotics - dead
Nortel - dead
Global crossing - dead
The glass-in-the-ground people went spectacularly broke. I also suggest you look up the stock price chart for JDSU. On the software side, Ariba and Commerce One.
Yeah, hardware companies got hit hard. But dotcom also coincided with the de-industrialization era, with manufacturing moving out of the US, with a double whammy of commodization. So it's hard to disentangle the causes.
And then I can't really remember many Internet-focused software pick&shovels companies from that era. I was only starting my professional career at that time, though.
Qwest
Microsoft - doing fine
Netscape - dead (server) and/or dying (Mozilla)
Intel - almost dead
Palm - dead
Qualcomm - still around
INTC shot up >300% in the past 8 months and is now at its highest stock price ever, fwiw.
I guess Netscape counts. Palm produced devices, so it was not really picks&shovels.
Who else? Borland quietly withered away, but it had never been focused on tools specifically for the Internet.
I guess they failed at the "during the gold rush" part.
Selling picks and shovels after the gold rush is a terrible idea.
Working out for nvidia right now
Hardware is important to operation of computers and software as we know them
A bunch of config management DSL startups, and web scale data storage solutions, not so much
Right, and Google owns 25% of the hardware.
I pray for Google to completely fail the pivot to AI. We don't need another surveillance capitalism company using AI to make us even dumber and more addicted to screens.
I so hope that Google goes down. (And I pray the same for Facebook and a couple others).
Huh? Why are you railing against Google? Because of YouTube? How's Google Search making you addicted to screens.
At this rate, you'll hate Apple for making iPhones so damn good, or Starlink for giving really good internet access.
You line of thinking is - gosh, these companies are providing an excellent service, and I hate them for that?
The incentive for those Adtech is to keep you hooked as long as possible so they can sell you more ads, and making you lose your only real currency in life: time.
The incentive for Apple or Microsoft is to make a good product that you will gladly pay for. This is very different.
A good restaurant makes an excellent product bit it doesn't mean that I will spend 5 hours there.
I use Google products. Between YouTube premium and uBlock origin, I don't really see any ads at all.
Google Analytics has >80% market share. Most of the websites you visit are helping them build a profile of everything you do on the internet with the goal of selling targeted advertisement. That is their business, it's what pays for everything else they do. I think that is what is meant by surveillance capitalism.
So?
Every iPhone that people buy gives direct money to Apple, centralizing their power. This means, they get to dictate what apps can / cannot run on the device.
So what? Nobody is forcing anyone to buy iPhones. Similarly, nobody is forcing anyone to install Google Analytics, or go to that website.
Nobody is forcing people to do Heroin or Cocaine. We should start giving it for free to people in the street. Everyone can then decide if they want to take it or not. Oh yes and once you are hooked we should definitely never keep the dealer accountable. It's the users who always decides to use it! They are the ones to blame, never the giga corporation making money on your back!
That surely would work very very well in society. Literally the same thing is happening with Google, Facebook, TikTok etc.
You probably work for bigtech and your salary depends on people losing their braincells so I don't expect you to suddenly get some ethics and understand all of this.
Google banked on "Edge" for IoT as well, prior to that it was their network edge is better use them from compute. It's a failed strategy that won't work this time either.
That's not the "edge" in the title. It means competitive advantage in this case.