alt Hacker NewsI'd add that we've seen how the leadership/reputation of different AI leaders, and with 2 decades of history with Larry and Sergey, they seem to come up on top as the most respectable.
Did they ever really abuse the power Google could have wielded? I could be missing something, but for the most part they seem to just get down to building and pushing technology/science forward and avoid drama rather than welcome it.
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> Did they ever really abuse the power Google could have wielded?
Plenty of times. Perhaps the worse is pushing Manifest v3 with no support for real ad blockers in Chrome. Not to mention no support for ad blockers in Chrome mobile.
Also, their stealing of newspaper content.
Their new push for AI summaries instead of actual search in their search product, stealing even more clicks from sites that actually produce information.
YouTube pushing Shorts to everyone, and now the weird text posts that you can't hide.
In general their gigantic push for ads everywhere all of the time.
> Did they ever really abuse the power Google could have wielded?
The "Do no evil" never being an official slogan and people saying it's no longer true for the last 10 years or so, they're just really massive. They do mess up a lot, but when you're Microsoft, Apple or Google sized, its nearly impossible to get everything right all at once.
They are a search and ads monopoly, so there is that.
Google, with the help of Facebook, destroyed the independent online publishing business. They made it impossible to maintain an honest publication and tunneled users to low quality websites until there's not much left of respect.
What are you talking about? They've literally contracted with the DoW with no red lines.
That's "trustworthy" to you?
> Did they ever really abuse the power Google could have wielded?
Is this a sarcasm?
Both founders are in the Epstein files, with Sergey Brin visiting Epstein's private island.
Eh, people are pretty upset about the ad-driven nature of the internet which was largely spearheaded by Google.
However, I don't think the alternative would have made people any happier (and frankly they probably would be justifiably even more angry)
They're literally not upstreaming Android security fixes:
https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117282080803799576
> Google should not be gatekeeping security patches to the standard Android platform code from Android OEMs but that's what they've started doing.
The whole Android developer verification program controversy.
These 2 are the recent things that come to mind that are most adjacent to "power-abuse".