this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2024
864 points (99.5% liked)
Privacy
31837 readers
131 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
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.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Bit confused, Google has its own browser, its own search engine, and provides a somewhat easy method to access the majority of the Internet and does it well but some people are upset because they cannot compete? What is the point in doing something so good that you become the best in the business? Everyone comes to you for your service, but you get punished because you're a monopoly? I'm thinking about Valve here as well. It's a major retail platform for PC games because nobody does it better. Publishers get upset its top dog, and their shity half arsed clients get no light.
Is it not the point of a business to make money and be good at their service that they increase revenue yearly and drive innovation?
I'm with you on this.
In this thread are people who screams monopoly, thinking they know what it means. One comment said Google is a monopoly, followed by "along with "
They're giants because they're successful and good at what they do. They're successful because people are benefiting and find values from the products they use. The moment these giants stops "exploiting" people will be when they stop bringing values to society.
They've confused economic reality with their own ideal reality.
There's much more to company's popularity than just the product quality.
Google, along with some others, pays money for browser developers to be the default engine - so that people never bother to try something else and actually see how good or bad Google is compared to everything else.
Facebook (Meta) is known for predatory business practices like forcing startups to sell out or have their concept forcefully stolen and them destroyed.
Amazon dominates by plunging the prices of their in-house products below payback to drive the competition into bankruptcy, then acts as a monopoly, driving prices up.
There's plenty more such examples, but let me stop here for now. Giant corporations have powerful levers that are only available to them as they approach market dominance. And when they get 'em, fair play is over.
... and the irony in this statement is overwhelming, after the fairy tale you've just outlined about those providing the most value to society gathering the most power & influence.
Ideal reality: Google doesn't buy advantage from browsers to make their search engine the default. This way, other search engines can compete at the same level, right?
Reality: browser developers will have their income cut down because now their main source of income is dead (see recent news on Mozilla).
Usually these kinds of policies that may or may not come up out of goodwill results in unintended consequences that negatively affect others.
The winner here are the politicians.