I wouldn't hold your breath. The government is reliant on them for surveillance, censorship, and propaganda. It is a synergistic relationship, not adversarial.
We cannot vote with our wallets because there’s no real competition. That’s the problem with the big tech companies and other monopolistic companies in other areas.
Everything that gets money from ads. The network effects are too strong for competition against their ads platform and their ability to do targeted advertising based on data only they have. You can’t build a new ads platform and then use that to monetize your company’s other services, because the existing ad networks are so mature and established.
Phones. Your choice is Apple or Google.
As you said, YouTube. Again, they have users and creators in one place, so it’s hard for a new platform to compete.
There are also a lot of enterprise contracts that bundle many things together. Like cloud and their workplace apps (whatever it is now called).
But also, just their size is a problem. Look at their AI story. First off, many customers get forced into packages where they get Gemini included as part of the bundle (which means they’re paying for it automatically and have less of a reason to pay for something else). But also - Google was slow to build useful products here. Even though they are late and made many failed attempts like Bard, they can afford to take losses for years that no small company - or maybe even large companies that aren’t mega corps - can absorb. Those other competitors would go out of business and have to be careful and move slowly in spending. But Google’s capital lets them make mistake after mistake but still compete and eventually win. So it’s not a fair competition.
It should have been the government providing an identity verification API, like they already do in the physical world with physical IDs. Governments dropped the ball, and so now Apple and Google get to be infrastructure.
Do you think identifies never need to be verified? Seems like a central function in operating an accountable society, hence birth certificates, passports, etc.
There should not be a requirement to verify identity, but if a website owner only wants to provide access to their website to people with verified identities, why is that not their right?
> Do you think identifies never need to be verified? Seems like a central function in operating an accountable society, hence birth certificates, passports, etc.
Verifying identity for specific services tied to your finances or body is a whole different topic.
> if a website owner only wants to provide access to their website to people with verified identities, why is that not their right?
I like the GDPR's general point of view that the right to privacy is more important than the right to trade privacy for access. An anonymous verification might be fine, but this system is not, and random websites needing your specific identity is not.
A mechanism to verify identity does not preclude a mechanism for anonymous verification of other attributes. I do not see why someone else should be able to tell you (a business or person) who you have to allow access to your computers and your bandwidth that you pay for. Costco has the right to verify my identity when I walk into their store, I don't see why computing resources would be different.
> I do not see why someone else should be able to tell you (a business or person) who you have to allow access to your computers and your bandwidth that you pay for.
The spirit of the law isn't to tell you that, it's to limit how much you can track people without their consent.
> Costco has the right to verify my identity when I walk into their store, I don't see why computing resources would be different.
That falls under "Verifying identity for specific services tied to your finances or body". You bought a membership, they're checking your membership.
If it was a store without a membership, then for practical purposes in real life we let them look at your ID but they shouldn't be allowed to record any identifying data off of it. When it's all done by machines we should use cryptography to make it anonymous from the start.
The US government is a feckless facade, the US is a corporation run economic zone. The nice thing about being corporate run is that the rulers are unelected and unaccountable!
These days every time a government as much as thinks of imponging on a supranational corporation's right to do whatever the hell it pleases you'll hear no end of cries ranging from "overregulation" to "tyranny".