My real worry with Google's voyage into enshittification (thanks to Cory Doctorow @pluralistic the term) is YouTube.
Through YT, for the past 15 years, the world has basically entrusted Google to be the custodian of pretty much our entire global video archive.
There's countless hours of archived footage — news reports, political speeches, historical events, documentaries, indie films, academic lectures, conference presentations, rare recordings, concert footage, obscure music — where the best or only copy is now held by Google through YouTube.
So what happens if maintaining that archival footage becomes unprofitable?
@ajsadauskas@pluralistic@technology@fanf that is why @brewsterkahle created https://archive.org -- support them so we can keep an archive of important things, otherwise commercial companies will restrict and control the information in the future, and those who write the last are the real winners...
@fheinderyckx@brewsterkahle@internetarchive@bookstodon Oh, this again. Kahle has a problem-- switched from something close to the legal way to lend e-books to straight-up pirating the things back in 2020, got sued, lost because the case was Just That Simple-- and wants to make it everyone's problem. Only, it's not? E-book lending works okay for libraries. The e-book licenses expire because the paper ones do too, or rather the books wear out.