He also became an influential antitrust scholar, arguing that consumers often benefited from corporate mergers and that antitrust law should focus on consumer welfare rather than on ensuring competition.
Yeah, it’s fine if you drive all your competition out of business, as long as the consumer “isn’t harmed”^TM^ . But, of course, how are you going to prove that the consumer isn’t harmed?
The harder and more complicated something is the bigger barrier to entry there is to competing against it.
When video games were simple and fit on a single floppy disk or tape - a single person could develop an entire commercially released game. John Romero could make Dangerous Dave in a week or two, by himself.
Now that games are like Grand Theft Auto V they require hundreds of millions of dollars to create with teams of hundreds of people over nearly a decade. The voice acting in motion capture alone cost many many times more than a game would cost to make in the '80s.
The same goes with web browsers. Chromium is open source and free, it works well, so why spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to make your own new thing?
What benefit did Microsoft get from spending all that money on EdgeHTML versus just using Chromium? None. That’s why they switched to Chromium.
Oh… so to answer your question no one is “allowing” a few tech companies to denominate, just the complexity and cost of creating new products leads to these natural monopolies sort of forming. You’re free to spend the tens of millions of dollars to make your own browser if you want to and break up this domination. I doubt you’ll do it you’ll probably just use Chromium.
Tech giants are buying everyone left and right because people don’t want to pay for these innovative products. Imagine paying a monthly subscription for Waze! Who would do that? Literally no one. Innovative products can’t exist without paying customers.
Software development is very expensive. And everyone just wants free stuff. Imagine the outcry if Firefox would drop revenue from Google search and switched to a subscription model a-la Adobe! People would literally lose their minds and call Mozilla Nazis.
Some day someone is gonna have to explain this take to me.
Standards for the web are a good thing. Websites being slightly different to straight up breaking depending on what browser you use is an awful user experience.
I see nothing wrong with everyone defaulting to blink and v8. Makes the web better for everyone be it users or developers.
Chromium is open source! It feels like people’s blind hatred / paranoia of big tech makes people reject it on principle more than anything.
Standards are good. What's not good is that Google controls the standards.
Open source or not, Google currently has the ability to dictate web standards as they see fit.
Why? There are 2 reasons:
Chrome has a 63.55% marketshare (as of the time of this writing) of all web browser usage
Maintaining your own fork of Chromium or even your own separate browser engine (Like Firefox does) is extremely difficult.
There's a reason so many of these browsers just use Chromium. It's because Google is doing the Lion's share of the work. Modern web browsers are some of the most complicated pieces of software ever written. They are comparable in complexity to entire operating systems.
When Google makes a change to the Chromium project everyone follows suit, lest you fork it which leaves development and ensuring interoperability entirely up to you. The complexity of this task depends on how far you want to take your browser.
Even those who fork Chromium will pull changes made by Google to the original Chromium project because making and maintaining your own web browser is really, really difficult.
They are trying to develope enough dependency on them that they could stop being open source and the majority of browsers and websites dependent on their development just fold and allow google to control the internet.
Big companies only let stuff be open source in order to rugpull it if and when it would allow them to be successfully anticompetitive.
Well it is really easy. Read this hyperbolic statement:
Is having a government good for a country? Yes. Then why don’t you want an unelected elite control your country?
Sounds stupid right?
The people like standards. People don’t like when google can define standards alone. Especially when they have at least tried and most people hated the idea. Remember google topics? The thing that google advertised as more privacy protecting while just opening you up more track you even better by giving you more identifying features?
Lastly google is an advertisement company, trying to shape the web in their favor when most people will agree that the web became very privacy invading. Like come on and you ask why people don’t like that google, an advertisement company, has the ability to just force a new web standard in a world where advertisement companies are invading their privacy?
Well that’s the whole fun of 50 chromium forks, upstream which is chromium will fuck them up, they will make breaking changes just so that forks can finally not steer around it without putting heavy lifting in it.
my man literally the first four posts I see are just complaining about google adblock, and I keep seeing it over time yes we get it you don’t like ads and google is adding adblock. move to firefox/ublock (or no ublock if you want to support the content creators) and let it go imo, there aren’t even that many ads on youtube, I barely notice them normally cuz theres only one every 3 videos or so and it’s like 5 seconds long for a 20 min video (if there are more ads inside a video I’m pretty sure that usually means the creator put them there, not youtube)
Mainstream media promotes Chrome everywhere possible. The last bastion of promoting Firefox is FOSS community platforms. The fuck do you expect, us to stay quiet and “let it go”?
I’ve noticed that the average listed salaries on Indeed have gone down about 30% in the last 2 years, which is great because prices of damn near everything have gone up at least as much.
It is sad, but through the events of the last few years (Reddit, Twitter, politics) companies have realized they can do whatever they want. While they will lose a significant portion of users, the mass majority will stay. The ones that leave are the ones they can’t abuse and they don’t want them anyway. Profit is better taking advantage of the complacent and losing the activists than the other way around.
Anywho, I will move to Firefox just like I moved to lemmy. Although I’m not sure moving to Firefox actually fixes anything other than giving Google less money. Now I just need to figure out how to have a phone without apple or Google getting a peice.
google pixel 5 bought used, unlock the bootloader and flash it with grapheneOS. download Firefox with AdBlock and use fdroid and aurora store (found on fdroid) for apps.
To be fair, the only reason I can see for having a smart fridge is , if you’re at the shops or at work, and you need to check if you need anything, you can just use that.
But, like, I can’t see any other purpose. And even that one is instantly voided by using that magical little thing, and making yourself a list.
I was just using it as an example because I just figured it out on my fridge (it’s useless). I was just trying to figure out if I would be going backwards 10 years if I switched, that was just the first thing that came to mind as an example.
No, you do you. I just don’t understand the engineers’ motivation for creating an IoT fridge.
From the creators of the IoT fridge comes the first IoT toilet, complete with a bowl camera and mic that stares up your ass and notifies your family when the bathroom is in use and whose taking a crap. You can even review your past shits in 4k! 😛
I could maybe see some uses for a fridge on wifi. The only useful things it does is notify me if the temp rises beyond a point or if the door is left open for a really long time. As far as the temp rising without the door open the only cause is either the fridge failed ( It better fucking not) or the power went out. If the power goes out, so does my router so…
That is actually somewhat useful. I don’t know if that use-case is worth it to me, personally, to have a potentially insecure device on my home network, but I suppose you could give it its own network and write decent firewall rules to protect your other gear.
Never really thought about that. Hmm. I mean, it’s GE, a somewhat reputable company, but apparently they were just bought out by a company in China. But it goes through my network, communicates with a cloud service, who communicates with the app on my phone. It would seem possible that whoever runs that cloud service has the ability to do whatever they want in my network through my fridge.
I run a raspberry pi for some automation in my house and use tailscale as a VPN so I can access it as a server when I’m not home. As long as I can trust tailscale, it is encrypted straight from the raspberry pi to my phone. There is no middle man. But having that cloud service for the fridge app is something I need to research.
i mean, they will run. the question is if the app developers hate you.
and since for the most part app developers care about having you as a user so they can sell your personality to advertisers, what i actually mean by “if the app developers hate you” is “if the app is a bank”.
Many banking apps will work on secure roms like calyx/graphene. Techlore set up a submittal system here you can check: plexus.techlore.tech
As a concrete example, it indicates if the app works without google spyware at all vs if it works with the microg spyware simulation service, and indicates my former bank chase has support for migrog but not totally-google-free operation.
However, sadly (and I assume because the head dev of graphene has clear mental disorders and took a massive dump all over techlore for months at a time a couple summers back), somehow the play services question doesnt get answered on the techlore site. For that, you have to go to a different site: privsec.dev/…/banking-applications-compatibility-…
sorry ik it’s months later. yes, things work for the most part. anything that doesn’t I just enable exploit protection compatibility mode for and it works no problem then. you can even just straight up install Google play as a normal app without admin privileges.
What really has me paranoid is all the ones suddenly deciding to power trip and give out bans over nothing. We need to create a safe place on the web where the corporations can’t get to us.
They remove any videos that being critical towards TikTok. Especially, they’re trying to flood Indonesian market with cheap Chinese goods via TikTok Shop.
Fairphone 4 from certain vendors comes preloaded with e/OS which is like a deGoogled Android. Might work for people looking to move away from Google. I’m considering it myself for my next phone.
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