[bigyabai]

AdSense is the one that people underestimate. It's a piranha pool of liquid cash, billions-scale impressions and near global outreach. Any sane nation would have banned it decades ago, unless it was propping up a global influence campaign for their government.

[j16sdiz]

I am more concern with how they make scam much less detectable.

You can hyper-target your ad or scam to vulnerable individual.

Unlike traditional media, like newspaper, you can post an ad with no visibility outside your target group -- which is hard to discover.

The report button is just some generic "second look" and automation within the same organization, there are no oversight.

[pixelpoet]

I am deeply saddened that it was developed by the hero of modern rendering, Eric Veach.

[parineum]

> Any sane nation would have banned it decades ago

Why?

[bigyabai]

AdSense uses a sealed-bid auction system with arbitrary number of lots that Google controls. It's a FOMO market driven by artificial scarcity, and since Google contractually forbids AdSense-enabled websites from using competing services, it forces ad buyers to go through their closed, controlled system.

[streptomycin]

But in practice, nobody (well, nobody making lots of ad revenue from their website) uses AdSense exclusively. Most don't even use it at all - AdX is better as a header bidding fallback than AdSense. But those who do use AdSense as a fallback are using it in competition with many other ad networks.

[SilverElfin]

They forbid those websites from using competitors? Isn’t that blatantly illegal? I guess it’s not actually illegal until they lose a court case for antitrust.

[echelon]

Google owns 92% of all "URL bars".

They turned this into "search".

Every brand or product has to competitively bid for its own identity in a monopoly competitive bidding market.

It's downright evil.

Look at Google's AI rivals having to spend hundreds of millions just so customers can find them. Google Anthropic or OpenAI and see what you get.

The next admin needs to break Google up horizontally (not vertically) into competing browsers, clouds, and search products. They all need to fight. Healthy capitalism is fiercely competitive. Not whatever this invasive species that preys on everything else is.

They also need to make it illegal to place ads for registered trademarks. The EU should get in on that too.

[Aerroon]

>The next admin needs to break Google up horizontally (not vertically) into competing browsers, clouds, and search products. They all need to fight. Healthy capitalism is fiercely competitive. Not whatever this invasive species that preys on everything else is.

That sounds great if you're rich and can afford to pay for all the million subscriptions that will pop up to replace what Google offers.

Google offers an insane amount of value to people for free: YouTube, Android, Google Search, Trends, Scholar, Maps, Chrome, Translate, Gmail. These would all be paid subscription products without adsense (or some equivalent). And as paid products they would get the typical subscription enshittification over time.

Also, on the topic of AI: didn't the transformers research paper come from Google? In an alternate world that would've been a trade secret locked away inside Google.

[echelon]

> Google offers an insane amount of value to people for free: YouTube, Android, Google Search, Trends, Scholar, Maps, Chrome, Translate, Gmail. These would all be paid subscription products without adsense (or some equivalent). And as paid products they would get the typical subscription enshittification over time.

That's false.

There are hundreds of free offerings in this and many other spaces offered by lots of other companies.

There does not have to be one monopoly controlling all of it for the freemium model and advertising to work.

[Aerroon]

What are the great phone OSes that aren't Android based? Can you run Android-specific apps on then?

There definitely isn't a YouTube replacement. You might say that there are video sites and that's true, but there aren't any that also offer 55% of the revenue to the creator, let alone that being enough to really have a creator economy.

Most browsers these days are Chromium based or are essentially funded by these big tech companies (eg Mozilla).

Google search and translate do have alternatives, especially these days with LLMs doing a lot of the latter.

What are some of the free email providers? I'm genuinely curious, because I know some exist, but I'm unfamiliar with most of them.

Are the free Maps alternatives good?

[echelon]

> What are the great phone OSes that aren't Android based? Can you run Android-specific apps on then?

Make Google give up Android (which is Linux based) and watch an entire industry pop up.

> There definitely isn't a YouTube replacement. You might say that there are video sites and that's true, but there aren't any that also offer 55% of the revenue to the creator, let alone that being enough to really have a creator economy.

TikTok creators earn 70-90%

Twitch creators make 50-70%.

Split YouTube into ten video websites and watch a robust, de-consolidated economy sprout.

> Most browsers these days are Chromium based or are essentially funded by these big tech companies (eg Mozilla).

This is the most heinous of all because it's the insidious linchpin behind Google's evil empire. It's the starting point of the funnel Google makes all of its "search" revenue from. (I say "search" because when I type in "openai", I know what I want, but Google gives me something different and forces that player into an expensive bidding war.)

Google didn't build the browser. That was originally KHTML and then taken over by Apple. They lifted it, used Embrace-Extend-Extinguish, and launched a tracking/search ad funnel/anti-adblock empire.

Every google search result compels you to download Chrome if you aren't using it. It's the default on Android. They warn you if you're using Firefox.

When you can spend billions to dump on the browser market you can do things like this. It's especially heinous since they reinvested their ill-gotten ad dragnet gains back into the engine that powered their empire.

Google needs to have Chrome stripped from them. Period. They cannot have a browser now or ever.

Firefox is their antitrust litigation sponge. They happily pay the stooges there to chug along and waste money.

Brave can and will easily fill this void when Google is forced out.

> What are some of the free email providers? I'm genuinely curious, because I know some exist, but I'm unfamiliar with most of them.

Microsoft, Yahoo. You used to be able to run your own before Google platformized email.

> Are the free Maps alternatives good?

Yes. Apple Maps is shockingly good. Turns out competition is good.

If Google is forced out, there will be lots of competition.

I don't expect consumers to understand this, but I do expect regulators to get it. And I want more regulators to take up the mantle against Google.

Google is highly anti-competitive and drastic measures need to be taken to restore a cutthroat capitalist environment that is maximally beneficial to the economy.

[majormajor]

"Possibility for abuse" seems like the right reason here. Does the benefiting of reducing a specific possibility of abuse outweigh the cost of an intervention? And here in particular, is there much cost to the intervention other than just shifting the money distribution from a zero-sum advertising arms race from one player to several?

I frequently see calls to not intervene if there's not bulletproof evidence of existing abuse, but why wait? Would you want Google to own a bunch of nuclear missiles just because they might not have misused them yet?