Comment by ulrikrasmussen

Comment by 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.

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

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CrossVR a day ago

Even less than a third is absolutely massive on the scale of a protocol like E-mail.

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- nolok a day ago
  
  Oh I am not saying they're not a gigantic provider, I'm saying less than a third is very far from "the vast majority" and exageration and misinformation help no one's case, be they on purpose or due to lack of knowledge.
  
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  JimDabell 20 hours ago
  
  I would shy away from calling them a majority myself, but it’s a fair point.
  Remember that email involves at least two parties. It doesn’t matter if I use a non-Google provider, I still have to follow all of Google’s email rules, or email will be useless to me because I wouldn’t be able to send mail to Gmail or Google Workspace users.
  In a practical sense, Google have very direct control over almost all email.
  
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  rpdillon 20 hours ago
  
  They're probably the biggest provider in existence.
  
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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.

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- lxgr 18 hours ago
  
  In what way would you consider WhatsApp a replacement for email? Instant messaging is a completely different use case.
  
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  inemesitaffia 14 hours ago
  
  Not for everyone.
  Anyway, I got asked to provide a "real" email address by support at my mobile provider.
  I gave them a yahoo email.
  
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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.

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- calfuris 20 hours ago
  
  I don't know exactly where to draw the line on "the vast majority," but surely it must be higher than the bar for a simple majority, which is "more than half." If you want to describe something in the lead but under the 50% mark, the word you're looking for is "plurality."
  
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  forty 18 hours ago
  
  In French it's not the case, you can have relative or absolute majority, which might explain my confusion.
  According to this definition https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/majority : "c : the greater quantity or share" that also seems to be a possible meaning in English
  
  Reply View | 2 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.

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