Comment by ulrikrasmussen

Comment by ulrikrasmussen a day ago

I am also alarmed. Google has to split off its development of both Chrome and Android now, this crazy vertical integration is akin to a private company building and owning both the roads AND the cars. Sure, you can build other cars, but we just need to verify that your tires are safe before you can drive on OUR roads. It's fine as long as you build your car on our complete frame, you can still choose whatever color you like! Also, the car has ads.

nurettin a day ago

Ok but The Road is the internet, how much of that does google/alphabet actually own?

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ulrikrasmussen a day ago

All of YouTube. The vast majority of email. All sources of revenue for ad-funded sites, basically, except for those ads pushed by Meta in their respective walled gardens. They are also the gatekeepers deciding what parts of the internet the users actually see, and they continuously work towards preventing people from actually visiting other sites by siphoning off information and keeping users on Google (AMP, AI summaries). The whole Play Store ecosystem is a walled garden which pretends to be open by building on an ostensibly open source OS but adding strict integrity checks on top which gives Google the ultimate power to decide what is allowed to run on peoples phones.
They don't have to own the servers and the pipes if they own all the clients, sources of revenue, distribution platforms and financial transaction systems.

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- nolok a day ago
  
  The rest of your list is irrealistic but I had to react at least to this one :
  > The vast majority of email.
  Not even close, less than a third in reality
  I agree that google should be cut down, but if done then other tech giant should be too, otherwise we're just trading one master for another
  
  Reply View | 14 replies
  
  CrossVR a day ago
  
  Even less than a third is absolutely massive on the scale of a protocol like E-mail.
  
  Reply View | 5 replies
  
  gus_massa 19 hours ago
  
  In the math department, we had a Moodle the students in the first year of my university in Argentina.
  When we started like 15 years ago, the emails of the students and TA were evenly split in 30% Gmail, 30% Yahoo!, 30% Hotmail and 10% others (very aproxímate numbers).
  Now the students have like 80% Gmail, 10% Live/Outlook/Hotmail and 10% others/Yahoo. Some of the TA are much older, so perhaps "only" 50% use Gmail.
  The difference is huge. I blame the mandatory gmail account for the cell phone.
  Anyway, we had weird problems with Live/Outlook/Hotmail and Yahoo because they classified some of our emails as spam. Gmail usually works better.
  Anyway^2, everyone is using WhatsApp, so it doesn't matter.
  
  Reply View | 2 replies
  
  forty 20 hours ago
  
  How much is "the vast majority"? I would say that one third of something global with potentially infinite number of providers, when the second player is probably a fraction of that, is already a pretty big majority.
  
  Reply View | 4 replies
- nurettin a day ago
  
  > They don't have to own the servers and the pipes if they own all the clients, sources of revenue, distribution platforms and financial transaction systems.
  They don't own all sources of revenue. Even on their major media platform they get siphoned off by companies like patreon. It is all a charade and not everyone is enamoured by that.
  
  Reply View | 0 replies
mschuster91 a day ago

> how much of that does google/alphabet actually own?
A ton. They got shares in a bunch of submarine cables, their properties (YouTube, Maps, Google Search) make up a wide share of Internet traffic, they are via Google Search the chief traffic source for most if not all websites, they own a large CDN as well as one of the three dominant hyperscalers...

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