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Enshittification
🔥 Breaking Up Google
Wednesday August 14, 2024Here are my thoughts on John Gruber’s recent article and notes on the Google Monopoly.
I mean, let’s say Google was forced to spin Chrome off. How would Chrome Inc. make money? Clearly, they’d make money through TAC fee payments from Google search. >Also, if they split off Chrome they’d almost have to split off Android.
Chrome Inc will be quite profitable, making $20 billion a year from Alphabet to set Google Search as the default search engine on Chrome. The same model works for Android Inc, too.
The Justice Department doesn’t exist to figure out Alphabet’s business model nor does it care to. The fact that everything is so tied together that it’s hard to split up doesn’t is only further proof that Google is a monopoly.
If Google is disallowed from making its own web browser how in the world can they make an OS? I mean in theory they could make an OS that only offered third-party browsers but that would mean no system-level webview for apps to embed. Some people laughed at Microsoft’s late-1990s argument that Windows needed a built-in browser but that’s obviously true today. It’s no different than including a TCP/IP networking stack or printer drivers.
The OS which is Linux based can go with Chrome. Google doesn’t need their own OS to work on Mac, iOS, Windows, and other operating system they run their products on.
I don’t know what the remedy ought to be for this case, but I don’t think a breakup is it.
A breakup is better for consumers. Google’s stranglehold on the online ad industry will feel painful after it’s broken up. The only reason it feels hard to break Google into so many new companies is because it’s such a one-sided monopoly. However, that doesn’t justify not breaking them up.
Google has a long history of pushing technology that is only good for Google. Does anyone remember AMP and how Google forced the publishing industry to jump to a platform that only benefited them?
It makes sense to chop Alphabet + Google into dozens of smaller companies. Chrome, Android, Gmail, Docs (maybe Maps), and hardware should stand independently. Search and Ads should each be divided into multiple companies. The goal isn’t to make business sense; it is to divide the company into parts that compete against themselves.
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Enshittification
🔍 Google Search speculation 🔥
Tuesday August 6, 2024Eric Holscher posted this post today, and I wanted to share my speculation.
Calling it now:
- Google stops paying Apple & Mozilla for search
- Apple ships search (probably buys DDG or similar)
- Apple pays Mozilla to be default search engine
Google stops paying Apple & Mozilla for search
This judgment means that Google has to give up overpaying to be the default search engine for Apple and Mozilla. It’s the primary basis of the lawsuit, and the judge wrote a 300-page judgment. So, it’s safe to say it will happen even if Alphabet isn’t formally broken up.
Apple ships search (probably buys DDG or similar)
Short term: Because Apple already has an AI deal with Google, I expect Apple’s default search to stay the same despite Google not being able to pay them for that default. Apple will change the options menu, but Google will remain the default.
Long shot/Longer term: Apple buys a few search companies and creates its own search products, as it did with Apple Maps. Search isn’t going to look like Google search does today, or, better yet, it looked like a decade ago before it because of an ad-first search secondary service.
Apple pays Mozilla to be default search engine
I do not see this happening even if Mozilla spends most of its cash buying a search company. Mozilla won’t be able to pay Apple to use it, and they need an incentive to switch. Logistically, Mozilla would cease to exist before this could happen.
Apple doesn’t want to be a search company or incorporate ads like Google and Meta do with their products. Even Apple TV’s ads are mostly for other Apple TV content.
What about Mozilla?
Mozilla will either pivot to try to buy or partner with Kagi, DDG, or Brave (gross, but the most likely). The Mozilla Foundation is facing a potentially extinction-level event, but it has a billion-dollar nest egg to fall back on.
Mozilla has cash, but its options may not resemble the Mozilla Foundation we know today.
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Enshittification
🧐 Of course, Google is a monopoly
Monday August 5, 2024“After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” the ruling states.
Of course, Google is a monopoly. They have been for over a decade and closer to two decades.
If this quote from The Verge is true, Google’s CEO was a pretty damning witness and admitted that Google intentionally froze the ecosystem in place.
The judge found former Google executive Sridhar Ramaswamy “a particularly compelling witness,” pointing to his answer about why Google would pay billions of dollars in revenue share to maintain default status if it already had the best search engine. Ramaswamy told the court that the payments “basically freeze the ecosystem in place.” www.theverge.com/2024/8/5/…
Thanks to The Verge’s “brilliant” reporting, I can’t source this quote again, but I pulled it before they removed it and shared it across several Slacks and Discord groups.
As far as Alphabet/Google goes, the US Government should break them up and disassemble the company. That outcome may depend on the result of the 2024 election, but both the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission are signaling that they intend to follow through.
I suspect Mozilla has the most to lose over this ruling. Google accounts for a significant portion of Mozilla’s revenue and has historically kept them afloat. However, I suspect the days of Google paying any company to be its default search are numbered.
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Enshittification
🚜 De-googling update 📉
Friday May 3, 2024After my 🔥 Drop Google Chrome and try out Vivaldi for a week, I dare youarticle, I have heard from a bunch of people, and it sounds like many of us have had similar thoughts about the need to de-googling our lives.
This article, how I de-googled (as much as possible), was also worth reading. I’m not as sold on picking services for their LLM savings value, but there is some solid advice with some good alternatives here.
Since I had a Fastmail account set up for a while, I started transitioning some of my main accounts to it. This will take a LONG time, but it’s no longer something I plan to do. Once everything is moved over, moving to a different email provider is much easier than when my email account is tied to an address I have little to no control over.
#enshittification
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Python
,Enshittification
,Today I Learned
💸 Alphabet has never been more profitable
Monday April 29, 2024This Hacker News comment is quite the deep cut about Google’s recent layoff/firing of the entire Python Foundation team.
This happened the same day Alphabet reported $80.54 billion in revenue.
in addition to contributing to upstream python, we
- maintained a stable version of python within google, and made sure that everything in the monorepo worked with it. in my time on the team we moved from 2.7 to 3.6, then incrementally to 3.11, each update taking months to over a year because the rule at google is if you check any code in, you are responsible for every single breakage it causes
- maintained tools to keep thousands of third party packages constantly updated from their open source versions, with patch queues for the ones that needed google-specific changes
- had highly customised versions of tools like pylint and black, targeted to google’s style guide and overall codebase
- contributed to pybind11, and maintained tools for c++ integration
- developed and maintained build system rules for python, including a large effort to move python rules to pure starlark code rather than having them entangled in the blaze/bazel core engine
- developed and maintained a typechecker (pytype) that would do inference on code without type annotations, and work over very large projects with a one-file-at-a-time architecture (this was my primary job at google, ama)
- performed automated refactorings across hundreds of millions of lines of code
and that was just the dev portion of our jobs. we also acted as a help desk of sorts for python users at google, helping troubleshoot tricky issues, and point newcomers in the right direction. plus we worked with a lot of other teams, including the machine learning and AI teams, the colaboratory and IDE teams, teams like protobuf that integrated with and generated python bindings, teams like google cloud who wanted to offer python runtimes to their customers, teams like youtube who had an unusually large system built in python and needed to do extraordinary things to keep it performant and maintainable.
and we did all this for years with fewer than 10 people, most of whom loved the work and the team so much that we just stayed on it for years. also, despite the understaffing, we had managers who were extremely good about maintaining work/life balance and the “marathon, not sprint” approach to work. as i said in another comment, it’s the best job i’ve ever had, and i’ll miss it deeply.
They have never been more profitable, made more money, or cared less about their employees and giving back to the communities that got them there. If I had worked at Google, I would not have been comfortable continuing to work there.
I plan to keep de-Googling, which is going to hurt. Several friends shared why they can’t cut ties with their products. I get it, but that is a sign of an unhealthy monopoly.
I pay for YouTube TV and YouTube Premium as everyone else does, but I’m starting with the business tools. I’d rather pay Zoom than use Google Video. I stopped using Chrome.
Gmail is the hardest service to separate from because it’s also an identity service. I’m using it less and less until it’s only an identity service. I have >2k websites registered with my Gmail address, which could take years to clean up. I don’t need to pay for extra storage space, and I’m wondering if Google Docs is doing anything for me to pay for.
So, while it will be harder to stop using Google Products than it should be, the first step is admitting the problem and then working on it. Friends, we all have work to do.
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Django
,Enshittification
,Today I Learned
🔥 Drop Google Chrome and try out Vivaldi for a week, I dare you
Saturday April 27, 2024Last year, I switched to the Vivaldi web browser because I read a few peer reviews that pointed out that Vivaldi is a better Google Chrome web browser than Chrome.
This week, Vivaldi rolled out a new memory-saver feature that I’m excited to try out. It lets you decide how long to keep a tab in memory before hibernating and reclaiming the memory dedicated to the tab.
Vivaldi’s memory and CPU usage are already night and day better than Google Chrome. For instance, I can have one Chrome window with three tabs open ironically for Google Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs, which eat up more resources than 2 to 4 Vivaldi windows open with countless tabs.
As it turns out, all that tracking and spyware eats up a ton of RAM and CPU. Who knew? 🤷
All of my Chrome Extensions work on Vivaldi using the Chrome Store except for my custom Django News “newtab” extension that I wrote. I suspect it’s me, and I probably need 15 minutes to troubleshoot it.
Instead, I’m nudging you to drop Google Chrome and try out Vivaldi because several of my Google friends were fired this week despite the company never being more profitable.
ChatGPT told me that Alphabet/Google are worth enough to give everyone on Earth $253.16, which feels like a fair tradeoff. I’d like mine to be a check because I do not trust Google with my bank details, nor should you.
What I don’t like about Vivaldi
Vivaldi is outstanding and could be better.
The first thing you’ll want to do is access the “Settings » Address Bar » Drop-Down Menu Priority” and uncheck the “Direct Match” option.
The Direct Match option tends to match from “Brand websites,” which is one of the ways Vivaldi makes money, but it’s not the only way. When Direct Match is checked, I get recommendations for Macy’s instead of Mastodon until I discovered how to turn it off.
Check out What’s Vivaldi’s business model? to better understand how they work.
I would love to see Vivaldi let me PAY THEM MONEY annually for a solid web browser that aligns with my interests. Until then, I’m OK with them getting an affiliate cut from eBay or Amazon when I use their bookmarks.
Why not Firefox?
I hear this often, and I won’t talk anyone down from their favorite browser unless it’s Chrome or whatever Microsoft calls their latest hobby browser this decade. 🤷
Firefox doesn’t work well for me, and I say this because I have used it for over a decade. I also don’t trust their parent company because of where their money comes from and the various mistakes they continue to make.
If Firefox sparks joy, I encourage you to use it. I continue to get “the emperor has no clothes” vibes from their company, even when I want to like their products.
Share your thoughts
If you have thoughts, I’m on Mastodon, and I’d love to know what config options worked best for you.
#Enshittification