Submitted 8 hours ago by artifex@piefed.social to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.theverge.com/news/773928/google-open-web-rapid-decline
For months, Google has maintained that the web is “thriving,” AI isn’t tanking traffic, and its search engine is sending people to a wider variety of websites than ever. But in a court filing from last week, Google admitted that “the open web is already in rapid decline” (with regard to advertising, kinda-sorta)
Google is so goddamn at fault for this it’s not even funny.
Even browsing existing small to medium sized sites has become such a chore, with all these verifications and rate limiters as part of the anti AI scraper effort.
So many cloudflare verification checkboxes. So many Google sign ins. So many cross site cookies and tracking for even basic functionality.
Care about privacy and restrict browsing data even a little? Captcha hell.
Glad someone else noticed this. I don’t care that the “small” web isn’t as extensive or as polished as the corporate web, but all the anti-scraper stuff and cookie pop-ups are the actual death. It’s horrible.
Off to gopher and Gemini I guess.
Some mainstream websites and services are practically unusable when using a VPN, too. I’m glad I stopped using imgur but I wish the rest of the world would catch up…
Then you get to load and execute 10MB of JavaScript while another 5MB of ad content loads and displays in the background. With the obligatory two dozen API calls to various trackers, counters, taggers, and “optimizers” in the background of course.
I am so fucking exhausted of EVERYTHING in this society being treated like a statistic.
But what pisses me off even more, is when a gigantic corporation makes a bold claim, pretending they aren’t a major contributor to what’s happening in the said claim
More like Google/Alphabet is doing what it can to close up the net, and hopes that openness on the net goes into decline.
They admitted, with obvious glee
You can tell they’re scared of it because they immediately tried to retract/clarify the statement.
Though IDK why they’d care this point since the Supreme Court already declared Google a monopoly and turned around and said they weren’t abusive enough and gave them no punishment.
That’s a weird way to spell “celebrates”.
Fucking corporate double-speak…
They denied it until the instant doing so was inconvenient to them.
Ok, well our backup is safe yeah ?
So, good, it should burn down to the fucking ground,
Topple DNS tyranny, blow up the CDNs, let datacenters become dilapidated, let the 101 rooms go unstaffed
After the fire maybe something not quite as malevolent will grow in the ashes
Well at least there’s the fediverse, onion routing, nostr ID management, simplex and others. It’s not quite a Plan B, and definitely takes some effort, but is much much better than nothing.
I tried TOR earlier this year, and the 3 minute pageloads that timeout 3/4 of the time, were very off putting. I hope we can do better
Google concern trolls the open web
Bye bye internet. Hello splinternet.
Essentially.
The fediverse, small-web, ubb-boards, xda, and parts of the darkweb, as well as places like 4chan all belong to a sort-of bound community.
Facebook, Google, Tiktok, Instagram etc make up the mainsteam internet with Tumblr and Reddit on the sidelines.
It’s getting worse, it even trickles down to software choices and piracy. Choose Linux and trust the community, run Kodi and fight constant update breakage on Youtube and corporate streaming solutions when Jellyfin and samba shares just work?
At what point does their world of influence become seemingly worse than ours by default and everyone just ignores them? Will the giants allow themselves to be ignored? I believe they will eventually make self-sufficiency impossible. Somehow, some day, you won’t have any of these choices and everyone will be nickle and dimed to death until the entire internet is an unskippable full-screen ad.
From some mobile-only average working Joes out there, that’s all it already is.
“…Muahahaha!” they continued…
DFX4509B_2@lemmy.org 8 hours ago
Yeah it is, and it’s their fault that it is.
artifex@piefed.social 7 hours ago
Well they don't get all the credit. Oh, wait, they control how much of the market? Ok, nevermind.
(the DOJ says 91%. Google somehow claims it's only 10%, to which I literally LOL'd).
cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 7 hours ago
It’s not entirely their fault. The AI companies share a good portion of the blame too.
artifex@piefed.social 6 hours ago
The AI companies are doing something different and possibly worse by stuffing all of the open sites full of AI slop and then re-training their models on said slop.
Wasn’t there some mythological figure that was doomed to eat its own excrement or something?