[ignoramous]

> Far from being the greater good, Google is remarkably pig-headed, often downright incompetent outside of selling ads...

As is the nature of dualities, the web has benefit immensely from Google's investments even if it would have chartered a different (and in your opinion, a better) course had Google not existed in the first place. Someone pointed out, you couldn't say the same for Amazon. As for incompetence: imho, webrtc, which Google standardized and open sourced, is likely the single most important innovation on the interwebs (in terms of impact) just ahead of Microsoft's XMLHttpRequest.

[josephg]

> webrtc, which Google standardized and open sourced, is likely the single most important innovation on the interwebs (in terms of impact) just ahead of Microsoft's XMLHttpRequest.

Thats a really weird claim. We can point to some real ways google has benefited the web: Their search engine is excellent, and was a huge leap forward when it was released. SPDY/QUIC are set to become the next HTTP2/HTTP3. And google chrome has made the browser a much more powerful and compelling platform over the last few years. If anything they're investing too much - and hurting the web by making it hard for other browser vendors to keep up.

But webrtc?? Webrtc is still mostly a toy, barely used outside of video conferencing. Its insanely overcomplicated for any other use case. And I still haven't seen a compelling reason to use it for anything else. Decentralized communication doesn't buy you much when the site itself is still loaded from a centralized server.

More important / impactful than XMLHttpRequest? No, I think not.

[tristan957]

What is the point of having a WebRTC standard if Google doesn't even follow it? Mozilla Firefox is given the shaft for many services because they don't support Chrome-only WebRTC APIs? Chrome and Google are bad for diversity on the web.

[_0w8t]

This all assumes that without Google this would not happen. But I fail to see why is this so. Linux happened without single corporation controlling it.

[ineedasername]

Linux was helped along massively when IBM embraced it and invested a $billion in it in 2000.

RedHat benefited significantly from funding by large corporations in it's early days.

Undoubtedly these companies helped shape the Linux ecosystem. A single company doesn't control it, but as big as Google is a single company doesn't control the web either.

[pjmlp]

Not only IBM, also Compaq and the daily hated Oracle were early contributers.

[ignoramous]

> This all assumes that without Google this would not happen.

To be fair, I am not the one that's assuming things here. I am speaking of how Google has indeed contributed when they really didn't have to (as pointed out with the example of Amazon).

> Linux happened without single corporation controlling it.

A consortium of corporations, sure: linaro.org

[nwallin]

What does linaro.org have to do with linux? I've been using linux since a decade before linaro.org was founded, and this is the first I've heard of it. Did you mean the Linux Foundation?

[ignoramous]

linaro.org contributes ARM-related work that directly impacts largest deployment of Linux (Android). And how long before ARM takes over servers as well?

I meant to highlight that Linux, not in its entirety but parts of it, is indeed driven by orgs (that you haven't even heard of).

[keeganpoppen]

there's no chance that webrtc is a more important innovation than XMLHTTPRequest... the web would be just a bunch of hyperlinked text and images without XHR...

[rixed]

This made me realize how much I would actually love that, somehow.

[kalleboo]

Yeah it would have been an interesting world if Java hadn't sucked so bad (and MS hadn't tried to kill it) and the web had remained a hypertext document platform and all the deep interactivity ended up in applets and Java Web Start apps. Both pros and cons to that.

[josefx]

Java, Flash, Silverlight, lets not pretend that Java was the only attempt. Sad part is that flash and java plugins got killed over security exploits while the always growing API surface of current JavaScript implementations still gets consistently owned in Pwn2Own style competitions.

[pjmlp]

No worries, we can replicate the experience with WebAssembly now.

[josefx]

Last I heard you still had to call out into JavaScript, manipulating the same old DOM to get anything done.

Maybe someone could set up a library that implements Swing on top of a HTML Canvas? Just waiting for all the classes to download would help with that nostalgic feeling.

[beebeepka]

Google was great until 2004 or so. I think uncle Sam made them an offer they could not or simply did not want to refuse. Then this Schmidt guy came and did the actual damage

[mr_toad]

Google was great until after they won the second browser war and gradually became used to power.

They’re a lot like a revolutionary government that gradually becomes corrupt and as bad as the regime they overthrew.

[pjerem]

Like mostly everyone, I was amongst those people who heavily recommended Google (really cool) products to friends & family.

Retrospectively, I feel so stupid to have promoted « free products paid by an advertising company » for years.

I know Google duped everyone on this so I don’t feel to be stupid alone. But still, in hindsight, there were no possible future where Google could stay on top without doing dirty things. We didn’t see the targeted ads coming.

[rixed]

I certainly hate ads more than the average person, probably even more than the average hell, but it feels strange to hear people sometime speak about Google as if targeted ads were the worse thing that could happen on the internet.

I've seen censorship, identity theft, money laundering, online harassment, online crime, information theft on very large scale to target, arrest and hang political opponents... All of which Google used to oppose more than any other big tech co. But somehow, the pitchforks are out against targeted ads.

[pjerem]

You know, I'm not saying that Google is evil or that it behaves with bad intentions. And I have no problem with targeted ads as a product. It's a pretty efficient product that helps a lot of business to have their chance. I acknowledge that. But at what cost ?

For me, Google is "evil" for what it is, not what it does. And I think that Google is an utterly dangerous company with such unbelievable amount of precious data that could change the course of the history in a really bad way if it falls into the wrong hands in the future.

Who knows who will control Google in 5, 10 or 50 years ? Nobody knows. But we can be sure that in 50 years, the data that Google collects about us today will be lying on some hard disk drive, ready to be used for who knows what.

Google is able to define and store indefinitely "who you are". And the human history is full of times where "who you are" or even "who you were" were some really dangerous information that threatened your liberty or your life.

[Railander]

> But we can be sure that in 50 years, the data that Google collects about us today will be lying on some hard disk drive, ready to be used for who knows what.

I would sometimes worry about that. At some point internet privacy will be completely erased, not by malicious or greedy corporate practices but by algorithms scraping all of big data on the internet. This will ultimately be inevitable, almost everything you've ever posted on the internet will at some point be retroactively traced back to you.

The upside is that this isn't what's going to happen to your data, nor to my data. This is what's going to happen to _everyone's_ data. As long as the whole world bites the dust together, I can see the actual damage being minimized.

Of course, this does not take into account living within governments that don't care about human rights and that you happen to disagree with or be critical of.

[rixed]

Yes, there are reasons to be worried. Not sure Google knows that much about us though. At least compared to Amazon, your bank, your phone/broadband provider...

50 years from now the technology should have improved so much that Google will look laughably blind and powerless, I'm afraid. Let's not forget that Google, for all its evil, is still just an aging part of the dying old internet, that was naively brought into existence to be interesting and useful at a time when the world was not expecting that such a thing was possible. Now the technology is slowly aligning with expectations and will soon assist on surveillance and control. We will miss targeted ads.

[vineyardmike]

> As for incompetence: imho, webrtc, which Google standardized and open sourced, is likely the single most important innovation on the interwebs

Complex browser-based alternative to TCP? Standardized alternative to Socket.io? I can't say its not useful but webrtc is hardly the most important thing...