For months, Google has maintained that the web is “thriving,” AI isn’t tanking traffic, and its search engine is sending people to a wider variety of websites than ever. But in a court filing from last week, Google admitted that “the open web is already in rapid decline” (with regard to advertising, kinda-sorta)
But in a court filing
Why is this legal? It’s always like this with large companies. " Yeah we were just lying to everyone all the time, but this filing for court is the absolute truth!"
It’s the same as Fox News which always says they’re fair and balanced news and they bring the news nobody else does, but in a court filing… They suddenly claim that no reasonable person would believe them to be a real news organization… Uuuh huh…
Any court should dismiss this filing immediately and punish them for submitting a false filing, or continuously lying outside the courts. This sort of crap should be inadmissible.
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They are making it happen.
There will be such a thing that arises as a “grey net” I think. Not the dark web, but also not mainstream internet.
So basically the fediverse?
I mean at some point even websites seem grey net when the mainstream internet is basically AOL Future.
I think if there’s going to be an Eternal August version of the internet, it will be hidden in plain sight created by some of the same people that want to use it.
I think the term you are looking for is “Deep Net”, although it originally meant websites that weren’t indexed by web searches.
Helloooo darkweb!
Not to mention a lot of site traffic is now getting tanked by the UK blocking everything because of the “online safety act” that’s actually anything but (source)
Most recently my friend couldn’t access a Reddit post about a dental issue of all things because it got marked as NSFW and it asked for her face or ID (can’t remember) so she could see it (I ended up making her download TOR)
And Reddit completely.blocks you from reading when coming from a VPN exit, unless you are logged in (at least with. MullvadVPN).
Brave new world… :-(Not if you put “old.” before the “Reddit” into the address bar, the old UI doesn’t force you to login
At least on TOR
Thanks, will try that!
It is a 50/50 shot for me if it makes you login with old or not
I miss the old internet. Thanks capitalists
You got internet because of capitalists as well.
Came out of government-funded research actually. Back when we could still achieve scientific feats on behalf of our country.
It was private at that time. My point is that it spread so quickly to millions of people worldwide because of capitalists specifically the telecom companies and ISPs stepping in. Without them, the internet could never have developed on such a scale.
No it wasn’t
First connections were between universities. Tim Berners-Lee at CERN then came up with web pages to easier share information
There was nothing capitalist about the internet back then
The telecom companies got paid by the government to do it, they just as easily could have paid themselves to do it but we as a society are allergic to the idea of taking money out of the hands of poor billionaires and their potential profits
That doesn’t undermine my argument that it was ultimately because of the capitalists that the internet spread in the first place.
It does undermine your argument though, because you are saying that it only spread because of capitalists. I’m telling you it spread because of government funding and capitalists were just the medium by which the funding was used. The capitalist part is replaceable and unnecessary.
Could you explain how it doesn’t undermine your argument?
And how would you know without the internet being developed under a different system at the time?
That’s not an argument. I don’t need to speculate on hypotheticals when reality already proves the point.
We got internet thanks to scientists and engineers. No amount of capitalists, politicians, managers or business people can create an internet. They say ‘here’s some money to make stuff’ and that’s the limit of their involvement.
TIL DARPANet wasn’t a government funded project… \s
Late stage capitalism ftw
Late stage cancer is still cancer.
Yup, it wouldn’t have gotten to late stage if it was treated before it went metastatic
The problem for years has been good stuff being drowned in slop.
It’s not going to be fixed.
Capitalism has distilled its parasitic behaviour down to a science to suck the life out of anything that dare to stand out, and leave its corpse dry, for the sake of more profits.
Ever since search engine “optimization” became a thing — which was not long after the Internet was opened to the public in the ‘90s.
Doctorow is never wrong.
By their hands
We really need to change the mindset about what the internet experience should be. I think everyone got too used to the idea of centralized services like Google search, Github, Discord, Twitter, reddit, and etc. and that didn’t turn out well. We need to go back to federated protocol based system instead. Let’s go back to the decentralized federated architecture of email, web, irc where no one corporate entity is the sole owner of said service. I think Lemmy and Mastodon are good start but we have to start replace things like Google search, Github, and Discord with decentralized counterparts. We have to learn from our past mistakes and start reconstructing a better internet infrastructure one piece at a time. It will take lot of effort and patience but it’s really the only way out of the mess we put ourselves into by being addicted to simplicity of centralized corporate controlled systems.
The cat is out of the bag and long gone.
People got used to the simplicity of centralized services, and corpos made great efforts to make everything 1-click.
So when the average users need to do more than 1-click, they won’t use the software.
It would help if anti-trust laws were applied and these mega-corpos got broken in a thousand pieces. Centralized monolith services would have a harder time to thrive and give space to federation/decentralization.
Prior to GitHub, everyone just hosted their own Git repositories. The nature of Git is pretty decentralised. And Linux kernel development still uses old-fashioned mailing lists for development co-ordination, rather than something like GitHub. I have heard before someone say the difference between Git and GitHub is similar to the difference between porn and Pornhub.
Prior to Discord, there was IRC.
I hope forgejo’s federation efforts come along. Being able to host projects on my own instance, yet receive contributions without having to allow people to register on my instance, would give me the push to completely abandon Github.
the difference between Git and GitHub is similar to the difference between porn and Pornhub.
🤣
IRC is still there. The user numbers just aren’t that great anymore 😒 I fucking hate discord and what it did and how it took over. And also, of course, murican.
Lots of “muricans” hate discord too
I hate that everyone fucking uses discord for everything, discord when I’m using it is strictly to game and for online game related activities.
People are just clueless and lazy, and take the easiest way “that everyone else does too”. And here we are. Recently had to join one…and was asked for a phone number before being allowed to enter. Lol. Yeah sure. Guess I won’t join then 😐
This makes me think that a big part of the solution is some sort of very low barrier to entry guide or product for self-hosting. Like something even a non-technical person can do. Imagine if it became the norm to have a little always-on device that serves up your personal website, instead of social media accounts…
I love the idea, but until stuff simplifies significantly that’s simply not happening. I’m a moderately technical person and all the self hosting options are such a chore. Even simply looking up info about them can sometimes be harder than installing and starting the centralized option.
We need a startup to just make and try to sorta standardize a mini pc product pre-installed with a proxmox-like setup with an easy web interface and self-hosted solutions pre installed. 5-10 apps for main internet service needs like email, social media, content hosting/publishing and personal media libraries.
Give it a cute name like “Web-Pal”, keep it open and Customizable for powerusers, watch the internet become a better place while you’re the household name for devices that are as essential as a router.
Exactly my thinking. You could even have some sort of containerized environment so that people can easily just download and run containerized apps for various things. A podman image for your music server, for your photo hosting… almost like apps but less proprietary and less closed source
If you could sell this for $500 or less you have yourself a customer
I think this is a really good idea. A baby server for every privacy concerned house. Make it simple enough that customizing software features is like putting together Legos, but leave in the potential for complexity as some users grow.
I don’t know how this will help during World War III when billions of people will die.
Seriously? WTF? We’re talking current reality here, we can’t do anything to start or stop war, so just keep moving and living.
If the internet were a forest, Google opines the forest is in such poor shape while Google uses and sells chain saws.
In your analogy I think Google sells chainsaws, lumber, wood stoves, and paper pulp.
You forgot the part where they will give you a sponsored clutch pencil, and make you buy their special lead refills…
s/admits/boasts/
Yeah it is, and it’s their fault that it is.
Google has no right to say the open web is in decline, when they’re the main cause of it, this is basically them saying, ‘Yeah, we won this stupid war that we started, screw you, peons,’ this comes off like if MS broke WINE and then admitted no one uses desktop Linux anymore, it will have been their faults that hypothetical scenario happened, this is what Google saying the open web is in decline when it’s largely their faults that it is comes off as to me.
Well they don’t get all the credit. Oh, wait, they control how much of the market? Ok, nevermind.
(the DOJ says 91%. Google somehow claims it’s only 10%, to which I literally LOL’d).
That difference is so large, they must be quoting different numbers. Something like DOJ is looking at Advertising providers or search providers alone, while Google quotes a number for percentage of all websites visited or something.
This is the nub of the issue. Markets need effective competition. Without it, you get fiefdoms and serfs, and shit products. Antitrust laws have been terrible for decades. Thanks to broken political thinking. Smash up the tech monopolies and not just tech will improve.
It’s not entirely their fault. The AI companies share a good portion of the blame too.
The AI companies are doing something different and possibly worse by stuffing all of the open sites full of AI slop and then re-training their models on said slop.
Wasn’t there some mythological figure that was doomed to eat its own excrement or something?
A bunny?
Ouroboros
Human Centipede
Jon Stamos?
Google is an AI company, even if that’s not all they are.
google went from one shiney thing to the next, much like microsoft. at first it was thier chrome browser, then its youtube+chrome+(failed ventures) and now AI, in between all of it pixel phones which they largely given up on.
