SirEDCaLot

That I would actually very much agree with. As Elon himself said in the early days of the Twitter takeover, "free speech does not mean free reach".

This is also why I think engagement algorithms are a cancer on our civilization. If it is in a platforms monetary interest to amplify the most vile anger inducing stuff, be that stuff that is actively bad like hate speech or simply divisive like a lot of political crap, that is bad for our society. It pushes us farther apart when we should be coming together to fix the problems that we can agree on.

You don't have to be a porn star or even a porn consumer to oppose laws banning porn.

And you don't have to be a shitbag to recognize that, while well-intentioned, censorship is still censorship.

I have absolutely no love whatsoever for the people who would spread such crap. I would love to get rid of it. But banning the speech doesn't do that. It's like smashing the altimeter in the airplane and then declaring that you're not crashing anymore. But the reality is, smashing instruments in the airplane is never a great idea whether you are crashing or not. It just prevents you from seeing things you don't want to. And you get hurt in the process.

Censorship, historically, has never ended up anywhere good.

No it's actually pretty simple. No containers. Your passkeys can be managed in the browser (Google Passwords), by a plug-in like BitWarden, or in a third party hardware device like YubiKey.

And, with respect, this view is more naive (IMHO) because it's focused by size of company, and you can't do that. You can't have one set of laws for small companies and another set of laws for large companies.

So if Google has to pay to link to IA, then so does DuckDuckGo and any other small upstart search engine that might want to make a 'wayback machine this site!' button.

Google unquestionably gets value from the sites they link to. But if that value must be paid, then every other search engine has to pay it also, including little ones like DDG. That basically kills search engines as a concept, because they simply can't work on that model.

Thus I think your view is more naive, because you're just trying to stick it to Google rather than considering the full range of effects your policy would have.

Strong disagree. If I make a website people like, and Google links to it, should Google have to pay me? If so, Google basically can't exist. The record keeping of tracking every single little website that they owe money to or have to negotiate deals with would be untenable. And what happens if a large tech journal like CNET or ZDNet Links to the website of a company they are writing an article about? Do they have to pay for that? Is the payment assumed by publicity? Is it different if they link to a deep page versus the front page?

What you are talking opens up a gigantic can of worms that there is no easy solution to, if there is any solution at all.

I will absolutely give you that what Google is doing is shitty. If Google is basically outsourcing their cache to IA, they should be paying IA for the additional traffic and server load. But I think that 'should' falls in line with being a good internet citizen treating a non-profit fairly, not part of any actual requirement.

I had not realized that. They should absolutely be allowed to do it, but it's super shitty of them to basically offload that cost onto IA. IA of course would be well within their rights to try and monetize it. Look at incoming traffic that deep links a cached page and has a Google.com referrer, and throw a splash page or top banner asking for donation.

I don't agree. Free linking has always been a vitally important part of the open internet. The principle that if I make something available on a specific URL, others can access it, and I don't get to charge others for linking to a public URL is one of the core concepts of the internet itself.

That's a very good point. Things like chat GPT can accelerate the process of doing something that takes time but a human knows when it's done correctly. But in anything where finding truth is the goal, it shouldn't be trusted yet.

Most of this AI stuff is trash. I think Google AI has maybe once given me a useful answer. Amazon has this thing called Rufus that just slows down the process of searching customer reviews. Just like Google, it's maybe once or twice given me useful information and none of it worth the wait that it takes for the search results to come up.

But we are pouring billions into it and increasing our data center power usage by 10x because It's The Future ..

This 100%. Wi-Fi Alliance did it right ditching the standard names like 802.11ac and 802.11ax and going to simple names like Wi-Fi 5 and Wi-Fi 6. Everyone knows 6 is better than 5 so there's no confusion.

USB-IF needs to do the same thing, and also stand up a little bit to the manufacturers who want to build the cheapest possible products. Set a couple of certification levels. Like level 3 cable supports 30 w and 480 Mbps USB 2.0, level 4 cable supports 100w and 2 gbps, level 5 cable supports 100w and 10gbps, level 6 cable supports 240w and 20gbps etc We don't need infinite variations of power and data capability. It just confuses customers. But customers will understand a level 5 cable is better than a level 4 cable. And if the device says you need a level 5 cable for full capability, they will understand a level 4 cable isn't good enough.