- cross-posted to:
- pulse_of_truth@infosec.pub
- cross-posted to:
- pulse_of_truth@infosec.pub
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)
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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.
Leopards eating everyone’s face these days.
This is all according to plan for Google tho. What could be better than having everyone sign up for the GoogleNet? We’ll finally back to the ways of pre-Internet AOL and Compuserve.
Pretty sure all the AI companies were hoping to wrap the internet in their AI as a user interface, for a fee oc.
I wonder what took them so long to figure it out. After all, they are the ones that broke it.
Not broken, working as intended (for them). They just happened to say the quiet part out loud this time.
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
I wonder how long old.reddit will stay available.
It is a 50/50 shot for me if it makes you login with old or not
Thanks, will try that!
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.
I miss the old internet. Thanks capitalists
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
Maybe just a liittle cancer until we get smartphones and then we can nip it in the bud and ooops why is everyone mad oh no why are all the animals dying I just wanted to scroll for gods sake
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
We all know how it came to be, you didn’t get the point but it’s okay.
I did get the point
I’m telling you that your point is wrong
Cool, I think it’s correct and to pretend that it’s otherwise won’t help when you’re in the search for truth. We can agree to disagree.
Talk about a (hazy) grey area…
https://www.secretboston.co/blog/weed-the-first-online-sale-ever-unpacking-an-ecommerce-legend
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.
I’m telling you it spread because of government funding and capitalists were just the medium by which the funding was used.
It doesn’t work just by you saying it. According to multiple sources, the government clearly didn’t want to fund commercial internet and largely backed out during the 90s.
The capitalist part is replaceable and unnecessary.
It doesn’t matter if you think it’s replaceable, I can make that claim too. What matters is what actually happened in reality.
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.
The internet would not have existed without government investment. Back when the idea of the internet was being floated around in the early 1960s the US government did contact every major telecom company in the country snd all flat out refused meaning the government had to publically foot the bill (and the work).
No, capitalists would never, ever have invented the internet.
And I never said that they invented the internet.
You are speculating on hypotheticals though, since no one can know for certain how things would have unfolded in a different world.
I’m not even going to argue that capitalism doesn’t get you some positive outcomes for certain people.
How am I speculating when my argument is based on reality?
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.
You could make the argument that nothing can be achieved without being able to dedicate the time required. That was the miracle of the agricultural revolution, we could do something with our time other than gather food. If you said ‘we got the internet thanks to farmers’ that would be indisputable, everything flowed from that. I don’t see why an internet couldn’t emerge in other economic contexts because internet technology depends on physics and those laws transcend any and all economic systems. We already know this because almost every jurisdiction has the internet.
The influence of capitalism on the internet has been a mixed bag. e-commerce: good. App ecosystem: ranging from good to addiction health crisis. Walled gardens and enshitification: bad. Misinformation and radicalisation of political groups: dire, potentially an existential threat.
If you said ‘we got the internet thanks to farmers’ that would be indisputable, everything flowed from that.
And why not? Philosophically, a strong argument can be made that the Agricultural Revolution laid the groundwork for everything we know today, including the internet. I don’t see why admitting that would be a problem as it’s simply the truth.
I don’t see why an internet couldn’t emerge in other economic contexts because internet technology depends on physics and those laws transcend any and all economic systems. We already know this because almost every jurisdiction has the internet.
I never disputed that it couldn’t be done, but it’s still a hypothetical. The reality is that capitalists stepped in, and the internet spread like wildfire. Could it be done in other scenarios? Maybe. But pointing out reality shouldn’t be inconvenient.
The influence of capitalism on the internet has been a mixed bag. e-commerce: good. App ecosystem: ranging from good to addiction health crisis. Walled gardens and enshitification: bad. Misinformation and radicalisation of political groups: dire, potentially an existential threat.
Everything has positives and negatives, everything is a mixed bag. People try to label everything in black and white boxes but reality is mostly gray. Still, it doesn’t change the fact that the internet is in people’s hands because of capitalism.
TIL DARPANet wasn’t a government funded project… \s
Thanks for helping
The problem for years has been good stuff being drowned in slop.
It’s not going to be fixed.
Ever since search engine “optimization” became a thing — which was not long after the Internet was opened to the public in the ‘90s.
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.
One of my most unfortunate thoughts is that people were as excited about radio and television before they were centralized.
Once we lost synchronous internet connection the internet started evolving.
Content currated by our betters to help us fulfill their lives.
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.
From my perspective that seems to be happening. I feel like there’s a rift between the websites I use for work and the ones I use on my own time. I realize that for most people on the internet, the big central platforms are the internet–I’m not trying to universalize my perspective.
It’s just that I remember when computers and the internet itself were niche and business was still barely aware of its potential, so this kind of feels familiar: You’ve got biz churning away in the mainstream, unaware of another culture that’s growing up, outside of their malls and parking lots.
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.
the difference between Git and GitHub is similar to the difference between porn and Pornhub.
🤣
I worked at a place that had self-hosted git and IRC for internal messaging. Was great!
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.
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
Sure sure, you’re not all idiots. Wasn’t meant this way. Just that, on top of being shit, being murican is another no-go for an app.
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…
Considering that many don’t even know anymore what a website actually is, or domains (especially TLDs that are not .com or <insert local one>)…
Also take into account that people are lazy (not meant condescending). Using the major shit is easy, “everyone else does too!” and technologically challenged people can use it.
Even IF selfhosted XYZ would be as easy as downloading something (it already starts to be “too complicated” for many) and executing it, it probably wouldn’t happen.
I, personally, fear for the future of the web. I’ve seen the peak of the web and its constant accelerated decline since.
Yeah I know more than a few people fitting that description. But I do believe things can turn around. It’s less likely to make converts of people who already have that mentality, but things can resurge among new people and I think there’s a real movement there with tech literacy.
I sure hope so, yet am not as optimistic as you 😑
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.
Great idea. From a nerd 😁
But who do you think would be the target demographic? Critical users, that don’t want to use major crap but are also not suited for doing it all by themselves, either due to skill, time, money or a combination thereof?
I wouldn’t think that group is significantly large. And definitely not large enough to seriously put a dent in the major crap apps.
Better than nothing, but probably not worth investing in such a project. Sadly so, I might add.
Platforms keep getting shittier and more exploitative, while government thirst for control with things like Chat Control, OSA and whatever the US is doing.
The more we see of that the easier it becomes to market a “your internet services in a box” to a layman.
But first they have to care. The amount of people who don’t care for e.g. privacy - even if explained in detail - is flabbergasting. Even today I heard two times “why? I have nothing to hide” or “but WhatsApp is superior!”
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.
If you could sell this for $500 or less you have yourself a customer
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
Yup. I really wish we had an open source alternative to proxmox that used containers under the hood. Would make customizing and mounting external volumes much easier too.
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.
Doctorow is never wrong.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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