Yeah, same. It is hard; we start to need a collective boycott.
We can all do our part, by using their products as little as possible, contribute to open alternatives (OpenStreetMap, Fediverse, Linux, Nextcloud...) and by stimulating our (non-techie!) friends and family.
I wouldn't hold your breath. The government is reliant on them for surveillance, censorship, and propaganda. It is a synergistic relationship, not adversarial.
We cannot vote with our wallets because there’s no real competition. That’s the problem with the big tech companies and other monopolistic companies in other areas.
Everything that gets money from ads. The network effects are too strong for competition against their ads platform and their ability to do targeted advertising based on data only they have. You can’t build a new ads platform and then use that to monetize your company’s other services, because the existing ad networks are so mature and established.
Phones. Your choice is Apple or Google.
As you said, YouTube. Again, they have users and creators in one place, so it’s hard for a new platform to compete.
There are also a lot of enterprise contracts that bundle many things together. Like cloud and their workplace apps (whatever it is now called).
But also, just their size is a problem. Look at their AI story. First off, many customers get forced into packages where they get Gemini included as part of the bundle (which means they’re paying for it automatically and have less of a reason to pay for something else). But also - Google was slow to build useful products here. Even though they are late and made many failed attempts like Bard, they can afford to take losses for years that no small company - or maybe even large companies that aren’t mega corps - can absorb. Those other competitors would go out of business and have to be careful and move slowly in spending. But Google’s capital lets them make mistake after mistake but still compete and eventually win. So it’s not a fair competition.
It should have been the government providing an identity verification API, like they already do in the physical world with physical IDs. Governments dropped the ball, and so now Apple and Google get to be infrastructure.
Do you think identifies never need to be verified? Seems like a central function in operating an accountable society, hence birth certificates, passports, etc.
There should not be a requirement to verify identity, but if a website owner only wants to provide access to their website to people with verified identities, why is that not their right?
> Do you think identifies never need to be verified? Seems like a central function in operating an accountable society, hence birth certificates, passports, etc.
Verifying identity for specific services tied to your finances or body is a whole different topic.
> if a website owner only wants to provide access to their website to people with verified identities, why is that not their right?
I like the GDPR's general point of view that the right to privacy is more important than the right to trade privacy for access. An anonymous verification might be fine, but this system is not, and random websites needing your specific identity is not.
A mechanism to verify identity does not preclude a mechanism for anonymous verification of other attributes. I do not see why someone else should be able to tell you (a business or person) who you have to allow access to your computers and your bandwidth that you pay for. Costco has the right to verify my identity when I walk into their store, I don't see why computing resources would be different.
> I do not see why someone else should be able to tell you (a business or person) who you have to allow access to your computers and your bandwidth that you pay for.
The spirit of the law isn't to tell you that, it's to limit how much you can track people without their consent.
> Costco has the right to verify my identity when I walk into their store, I don't see why computing resources would be different.
That falls under "Verifying identity for specific services tied to your finances or body". You bought a membership, they're checking your membership.
If it was a store without a membership, then for practical purposes in real life we let them look at your ID but they shouldn't be allowed to record any identifying data off of it. When it's all done by machines we should use cryptography to make it anonymous from the start.
The US government is a feckless facade, the US is a corporation run economic zone. The nice thing about being corporate run is that the rulers are unelected and unaccountable!
These days every time a government as much as thinks of imponging on a supranational corporation's right to do whatever the hell it pleases you'll hear no end of cries ranging from "overregulation" to "tyranny".
The technical challenge is actually the smaller one. The real one is to get people to care. Don't be tricked by the HN/techie bubble. Most people don't understand the problem, or don't see it as a problem because nothing smacked them in the face yet. Any attempts to explain it makes you sound like a lunatic to some, or just a bit of a worrier to others.
Whether it's targeted ads, or training AI on their data, or verifying their age and implicitly identity, or "fraud defense", most people happily take it in exchange for a convenient freebie which is why things keep escalating.
It's understandable, people are assaulted with all kinds of abuses from every direction. There are more immediate threats that they can grasp more easily so this stuff has to wait its turn.
> Most people don't understand the problem, or don't see it as a problem because nothing smacked them in the face yet.
Or don't approach the world with a fundamental mindset of having agency to (help) fix things they see as broken. Just because people see something as bad doesn't mean they inherently see a bright flashing line from that to "so I should do something about it rather than accept it".
"Technical" isn't really what I meant in the first place. It's about convenience/UX. Lots of OSS has been technically great but very lacking in that part, understandably.
The prime recent example of this is gamers. I've seen many people say a version of this: "I tried Linux before but it was too complicated/didn't run most games/when I ran into something I had no idea how to solve it, so I just went straight back to Windows. Now I installed Bazzite cause I was fed up with Win11 and I'm super happy with it. If I do run into a problem I just ask AI and it solves it".
I've genuinely seen dozens of comments similar to this. The fact is that there needs to be a very convenient and user-friendly alternative ready to go for the moment that some people do start to care. You need both just as much as each other. And until very recently, those alternatives didn't exist, not at the level of convenience required.
Fair enough. Then as I said, the technical part has been a huge barrier because it has prevented the majority of those who do care from migrating. That changing is really nice, and I'm convinced it's partially behind the acceleration of Google and friends taking over the internet with attestation and such as this post is about.
Just doing a casual search will show you so many people migrating off of managed SaaS to self-hosted solutions and from closed source platforms to OSS ones over the last 12 month, the acceleration is massive and it's due to the combination of LLM themselves and the quality of these things going up. Just 3 years ago it was still very niche, common on HN but near unheard of outside of it. A lot of people who always wanted to do it but just didn't have the time. The SaaS stocks getting crushed isn't just all vibes, there's a real move behind it.
IMO the biggest issue is that some non-tech people will occasionally be straight up hostile and will whine about not having "features", but then again it only takes a small amount of people taking action inflict real change. Also medium term we need to start making phones (smart OR dumb) that are FOSS as possible.
> Linux
Open/FreeBSD too, we need to have more redundancy.
You think systems that have adblockers installed will keep being able to pass WEI / Google Cloud Fraud Defence checks?
This is an attestation scheme. Attestation is about controlling what software you are and aren't allowed to run. If a future version of this allows desktop browsers rather than just phones, it will almost certainly try to do similar forms of attestation, and prevent you from controlling your own software stack.
The problem is this type of controlling move, that will be used to benefit their company, is one among many things a company like Google can do that is unethical. They won’t stop. They are too powerful and can get away with it repeatedly. Even if this one thing is stopped, there will always be another dark pattern or another privacy violation or another anti-competitive thing.
We really need brand new legislation that makes it much easier to break up companies that are too big, and also to tax mega corporations at a much higher rate than all other companies. Then we can have fair competition and the power of choice. But the existing laws end up with no real consequence for these companies, and even if there’s some slap on the wrist, it takes years in court. New laws must make it very fast and low cost for society to take action.
But remember: once again, don't simply get angry at Google the institution. Get angry at Page and Brin personally. They have the power to prevent this, a power they were careful to preserve when they gave Google its IPO. They are fully responsible for Google's choices here. But, partly because they aren't constantly jumping up and down drawing attention to themselves on social media, they've tended to escape the same personal scrutiny given to eg. Elon Musk. That needs to end.
