[sbhn]

Facebook and google sell your attention and your clicks. They will sometimes make 100 dollars a click depending on the content of the ad and how targeted it was to your profile. For example, type car insurance into google, click the top advertisement. Ka’ching, that was 100 dollars transferred from one adwords account into Google’s. Your simple click, and the data associated with it, is someone else’s money.

[donatj]

And why is that a problem perse?

Your search query may have just saved you more than that on car insurance alone. I've gotten arguably many many thousands of dollars of value from Google in my life.

I think you're simply not considering the immense value good internet search adds to life.

[intended]

It’s not being excluded - the issues is the various secondary effects. Not to mention the honeymoon period is over and antagonists have figured out how to use this information to direct political power in ways institutions are unable to adapt to.

These two aspects are the marginal change that people are focused on now. (From my perspective).

That’s why, imo, there’s no mention of how valuable search is, same way there’s no mention of how useful browsers are.