[rektide]

It's a huge company of hundreds of competing ideas.

I think most no one has any respect or appreciation for the circumstance flocs & topic Api was raised in. The dogfucker skanks at Internet Advertising Bureau were actively pushing government regulators to replace cookies with some gobshit anti user trash, far worse. I genuinely feel for Google. No one sees or knows any of the other context going down at the time, but all eyes are on the team of like 40 trying to find some way to preserve some privacy, in an org & task that is the hugest fucking lightning rod for attention & negativity, being the most visible & one of the most hated companies on the planet.

I agree that Google seems to have kind of lost the will to fight for a lot of good shit. There's still tons of great Google initiatives, but if someone can't tick it off their OKR within 8 months & call it a raring success, the effort & the team has seemingly no backing, no one with real principle intelligence or spine to keep the really really smart good shit going. That's just not a reasonable time frame for adoption. The web's early adopters take 3 years, minimum, for most interesting capabilities, and there's seemingly no one anywhere with that kind of patience for rolling out. Fuck this industry. This is why we can't have nice things.

[kelnos]

Google is a huge company, yes, but the number of people who drive Blink development is relatively small (of course it is; if most of Google was focused on or even had significant input into Blink, they'd both fail).

I think you have it backwards. It's not that Google has lost the will to fight for good, it's just that Google is a corporation, and their "don't be evil" mantra was only a thing when they were small and it was convenient and profitable for them.

Google has not given a damn about doing "good shit" or about privacy for well over a decade now. Their entire business model is predicated on surveillance capitalism. If they ever truly were the "good guys", they have not been that for most of the evolution of the modern web.

Google is not our friend. They suck, for entirely predictable capitalistic reasons, and their stranglehold overv web standards needs to stop.

[quantumwoke]

While I think your viewpoint is interesting, the language prevented me from appreciating it fully. Would you mind expanding on your opinion on privacy and Mozilla/Apple’s role in the standards process a little more?

[rektide]

It feels shallow to me to let oneself be rebuffed by such petty small barbs. I try to follow the "Highest Form of Disagreement," to find the best interpretations of things first. Rather than let small fry shit cause roadblocks in my mind.

Your ask about Moz/Safari I've said quite a few words on elsewhere in this post & on others. I think the far more interesting topic is what a bunch of jackal villains the IAB is. I cannot stress enough how hard a time Google has had trying to preserve any privacy on the net when there is a huge lobbyist group close to regulators pushing so hard to end user privacy. These people have the worst most anti-user outlook imaginable, are up to absolutely no good. My strong language is a just a start on describing how awful the IAB is & what sinister monsters Google has to go to the mat & wrestle to try to preserve user privacy in a post 3rd party cookie world.

Personally I don't think it's right that I get flagged for my previous reply, but I'm glad to have made a better go at my reply this time. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35565707