Comment on Google has sent internet into ‘spiral of decline’, claims DeepMind co-founder
Chunk@lemmy.world 11 months agoWell, if your argument is: “any company that becomes a monopoly will abuse monopoly power”, then sure I agree with you. You got me there!
My argument is: “given a reliable financial alternative to advertising, a company will be able to resist enshitification for a long time, as long as there is no absolute tyrannical monopoly.”
I assumed the last part was implied and I’m sorry for the confusion!
dlrht@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Makes sense, but yea it didn’t really answer the overall question of “if it hits peak market penetration how will it avoid going the Google route” since google also started with the same premise. I suppose the answer is hope it doesn’t become a monopoly
SamBBMe@lemmy.world 11 months ago
It’s also privately owned by one guy, so it doesn’t have to submit to investor pressure.
Steam, for example, is basically a monopoly for PC game sales, but hasn’t enshittified because it is privately owned.
dlrht@lemm.ee 11 months ago
While I agree that this does avoid enshitification, it’s always possible for a privately owned company to IPO. That’s why all of us are even here to begin with
Silentiea@lemm.ee 11 months ago
It’s also certainly possible for a privately owned company (even one owned by a single individual) to undergo enshitification, it is only (if anything) less likely.
SamBBMe@lemmy.world 11 months ago
It’s probably as good as we are going to get.
The best options would be an open source, donation supported search engine, but the money required to host/develop that is immense.
We are all freeloading off of Lemmy right now, unless you are donating to the people who are running the servers. The cost to run a search engine is much higher though – kagi pays (iirc) double digit cents for each search, even before development costs, with the average user doing 700 searches a month. The costs are way higher.