• @[email protected]
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    1039 months ago

    Dude wrote a memo telling everyone just how fucking evil we are and tried to hide it. They then got caught and try play off that he was cosplaying an evil villain from a movie. What a fucking joke. I hope Google gets broken up along with Amazon.

    • @[email protected]
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      359 months ago

      The antitrust law need to be refreshed and have teeth put back, it isn’t just those two that need splitting.

    • @[email protected]
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      119 months ago

      They should all be lined up and shot. <— That’s not me saying it. It’s a parody from a movie about someone fed up with the late stage capitalist hellscape this world has become.

    • just another dev
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      119 months ago

      Dude wrote a memo telling everyone just how fucking evil we are and tried to hide it. They then got caught and try play off that he was cosplaying an evil villain from a movie.

      Do you have a source for it being a legitimate memo? I get that the message is embarrassingly close to the truth, but if what you say is true, they’d be committing perjury - which would get them into even more trouble.

      • @[email protected]
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        39 months ago

        The article said they presented this memo he wrote. He says it was a joke and he never meant anyone to take it seriously. Like you can prove if he tells the truth or not.

        He got caught saying the quite part out loud.

        • just another dev
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          49 months ago

          The article I read only mentioned a note during a communication training, no official memo.

    • @[email protected]
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      9 months ago

      Sorry if this is a dumb question, but what is so evil about what was written in the document? To me it just sounded like the guy was bragging about their dominance.

      • @[email protected]
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        139 months ago

        The drug and cigarette analogy is dramatic, but the real heat is going to come from the claim that they only care about the supply side of the equation, not demand. In other words, their audience is locked in and has no power, and the ad suppliers (Google themselves) set the market conditions.

        That is dangerously close to monopoly talk.

        • @[email protected]
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          9 months ago

          Yeha, that’s monopoly talk. I guess I was expecting something else when I read “evil”.

          I don’t really think people are locked-in by any means, there are so many alternatives. People just prefer Google because it provides the best search results and they don’t care about privacy. The alternatives are pretty good, but people just want the best. I usually have to go back to Google to query something whenever DDG isn’t providing good results.

          Before downvoting, at least explain why people are locked-in. Aren’t there alternatives to Google? They are definetely creating a horizontal monopoly by acquiring all the companies in the chain, from advertisers to operating systems… but there are alternatives to Google (the search engine). I use DDG everyday, how am I locked-in to Google? I’m not arguing against the monopoly, I’m arguing against the lock-in.

          Google- DDG, Swisscows, Qwant

          Google Chrome - Mozilla

          Google Cloud - DigitalOcean

          Android - /e/

          Google Phones - Fairphone

          Google Meets - Zoom

          Google maps - Waze

          Google photos - Dropbox

          YouTube - Vimeo

          I really don’t see the lock-in. People just want monopoly-grade service quality without the monopoly. You can’t have both.

          • @[email protected]
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            19 months ago

            Google funds Mozilla, And nearly all non-firefox browsers are chromium based, which means google gets to set the standards of the web.

            Android is a similar story, many forks may have removed google from the equation, but google makes a decision regarding android, and it will shake all forks downstream from it.

            The others really aren’t that concerning because there are real alternatives to them.

            But Google’s AdSense might be the one that gets them in the end.

  • AutoTL;DRB
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    129 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    The document in question contains meeting notes that Google’s vice president for finance, Michael Roszak, “created for a course on communications,” Bloomberg reported.

    Sealing Roszak’s testimony made it harder for the public to understand the context of the document, Mehta worried.

    Part of the DOJ’s case argues that because Google has a monopoly over search, it’s less incentivized to innovate products that protect consumers from harm like invasive data collection.

    A Google spokesman told Bloomberg that Roszak’s statements “don’t reflect the company’s opinion” and “were drafted for a public speaking class in which the instructions were to say something hyperbolic and attention-grabbing.”

    According to Bloomberg, Google lawyer Edward Bennett told the court that Roszak’s notes suggest that the senior executive’s plan for his presentation was essentially “cosplaying Gordon Gekko”—a movie villain who symbolizes corporate greed from 1987’s Wall Street.

    The debate over how much of Roszak’s notes could be shared with the public ended with an agreement between the DOJ and Google on all trial exhibits.


    The original article contains 537 words, the summary contains 166 words. Saved 69%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • @[email protected]
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    89 months ago

    For all the talk about how evil Google is, how many people are willing to put their money where their talk is, and pay for a decent competitor like Kagi?

    • @[email protected]
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      19 months ago

      I have like 10 tabs open right now reading all through Kagi’s offering, search sources, and a bunch of Small Web stuff now. Going to give it a trial run this week and see how it performs, but I’m pretty convinced so far. Haven’t used google for a whole now but still, pulling search straight from google or bing via third parties still gives shitty results as the whole ecosystem rapidly decays