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 admits the open web is in ‘rapid decline’
Submitted 1 month ago by artifex@piefed.social to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.theverge.com/news/773928/google-open-web-rapid-decline
Comments
NateNate60@lemmy.world 1 month ago
inbeesee@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Genuinely want to know, what web standards have been ruined by the Goog?
dinckelman@lemmy.world 1 month ago
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
Omega_Jimes@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
Google commenting on the decline of open standards feels like a tobacco company commenting on cancer rates.
tomenzgg@midwest.social 5 weeks ago
HertzDentalBar@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 month ago
I miss the old internet. Thanks capitalists
T00l_shed@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Late stage capitalism ftw
FantasmaNaCasca@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Late stage cancer is still cancer.
Hikki88@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 weeks ago
You got internet because of capitalists as well.
BanMe@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Came out of government-funded research actually. Back when we could still achieve scientific feats on behalf of our country.
MattTheProgrammer@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
TIL DARPANet wasn’t a government funded project… \s
BilboBargains@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
We got internet thanks to scientists and engineers. No amount of capitalists, politicians, managers or business people can create an internet. They say ‘here’s some money to make stuff’ and that’s the limit of their involvement.
Meron35@lemmy.world 1 month ago
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.
artifex@piefed.social 1 month ago
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.
Jason2357@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
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.
T156@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Especially since discoverability has pretty much gone down the toilet, between SEO and spam sites.
You’re not going to as easily find a new and interesting website, when the first few results are just computer generated regurgitated text, stuffed with ads by the gill.
bilb@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
Time to bring back the webring and every site having a “links” section.
Blackfeathr@lemmy.world 1 month ago
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…
Cherry@piefed.social 1 month ago
And then after all that have to read a page full of ego and and thinly veiled sales waffle just to find the tiny bit of info you are looking for.
You have to give up too much time and privacy to get little back. It’s not the internet we knew. It’s a hyper monitized sales board.
I miss being excited about what online would unfurl for me each day.
Dyskolos@lemmy.zip 5 weeks ago
Yeah. We saw the peak of the web and since then its ugly decline. Surfing today is actually more frustrating than satisfying. For me. Half the shit doesn’t work, bugs me with paywally or any other wall just to - MAYBE - finally reveal not really an answer but my problem…rephrased, dragged to five hundred words, or worse, a 20 minute video of a shit bird that shows me how he types text into notepad.
I miss the times where we had to search the search-engines. And the web would be so damn fast today if not every shit would also load 583u2 libraries of blingbling and tracktrack
Dyskolos@lemmy.zip 5 weeks ago
And guess how awesome that is with blocked google. I fucking hate lazy bastard sysops who prefer recaptcha. Half the web is basically locking me out. And cloudflare is another bad thing that monopolized infrastructure.
fuzzywombat@lemmy.world 1 month ago
We really need to change the mindset about what the internet experience should be. I think everyone got too used to the idea of centralized services like Google search, Github, Discord, Twitter, reddit, and etc. and that didn’t turn out well. We need to go back to federated protocol based system instead. Let’s go back to the decentralized federated architecture of email, web, irc where no one corporate entity is the sole owner of said service. I think Lemmy and Mastodon are good start but we have to start replace things like Google search, Github, and Discord with decentralized counterparts. We have to learn from our past mistakes and start reconstructing a better internet infrastructure one piece at a time. It will take lot of effort and patience but it’s really the only way out of the mess we put ourselves into by being addicted to simplicity of centralized corporate controlled systems.
NateNate60@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Prior to GitHub, everyone just hosted their own Git repositories. The nature of Git is pretty decentralised. And Linux kernel development still uses old-fashioned mailing lists for development co-ordination, rather than something like GitHub. I have heard before someone say the difference between Git and GitHub is similar to the difference between porn and Pornhub.
Prior to Discord, there was IRC.
Dyskolos@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
IRC is still there. The user numbers just aren’t that great anymore 😒 I fucking hate discord and what it did and how it took over. And also, of course, murican.
mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de 1 month ago
This makes me think that a big part of the solution is some sort of very low barrier to entry guide or product for self-hosting. Like something even a non-technical person can do. Imagine if it became the norm to have a little always-on device that serves up your personal website, instead of social media accounts…
netuno@lemmy.cif.su 1 month ago
the difference between Git and GitHub is similar to the difference between porn and Pornhub.
🤣
smiletolerantly@awful.systems 5 weeks ago
I hope forgejo’s federation efforts come along. Being able to host projects on my own instance, yet receive contributions without having to allow people to register on my instance, would give me the push to completely abandon Github.
grrgyle@slrpnk.net 5 weeks ago
I worked at a place that had self-hosted git and IRC for internal messaging. Was great!
Croquette@sh.itjust.works 5 weeks ago
The cat is out of the bag and long gone.
People got used to the simplicity of centralized services, and corpos made great efforts to make everything 1-click.
So when the average users need to do more than 1-click, they won’t use the software.
It would help if anti-trust laws were applied and these mega-corpos got broken in a thousand pieces. Centralized monolith services would have a harder time to thrive and give space to federation/decentralization.
SugarCatDestroyer@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I don’t know how this will help during World War III when billions of people will die.
jjlinux@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
Seriously? WTF? We’re talking current reality here, we can’t do anything to start or stop war, so just keep moving and living.
grrgyle@slrpnk.net 5 weeks ago
From my perspective that seems to be happening. I feel like there’s a rift between the websites I use for work and the ones I use on my own time. I realize that for most people on the internet, the big central platforms are the internet–I’m not trying to universalize my perspective.
It’s just that I remember when computers and the internet itself were niche and business was still barely aware of its potential, so this kind of feels familiar: You’ve got biz churning away in the mainstream, unaware of another culture that’s growing up, outside of their malls and parking lots.
Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Google is so goddamn at fault for this it’s not even funny.
shutz@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
They admitted, with obvious glee
artifex@piefed.social 1 month ago
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.
goatinspace@feddit.org 1 month ago
vala@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
That’s a weird way to spell “celebrates”.
lanky_ginger@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Fucking corporate double-speak…
frenchfryenjoyer@lemmings.world 5 weeks ago
Not to mention a lot of site traffic is now getting tanked by the UK blocking everything because of the “online safety act” that’s actually anything but (source)
Multiplexer@discuss.tchncs.de 5 weeks ago
And Reddit completely.blocks you from reading when coming from a VPN exit, unless you are logged in (at least with. MullvadVPN).
Brave new world… :-(frenchfryenjoyer@lemmings.world 5 weeks ago
Not if you put “old.” before the “Reddit” into the address bar, the old UI doesn’t force you to login
netuno@lemmy.cif.su 1 month ago
The problem for years has been good stuff being drowned in slop.
It’s not going to be fixed.
Croquette@sh.itjust.works 5 weeks ago
Capitalism has distilled its parasitic behaviour down to a science to suck the life out of anything that dare to stand out, and leave its corpse dry, for the sake of more profits.
artifex@piefed.social 5 weeks ago
Ever since search engine “optimization” became a thing — which was not long after the Internet was opened to the public in the ‘90s.
BeMoreCareful@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
One of my most unfortunate thoughts is that people were as excited about radio and television before they were centralized.
Once we lost synchronous internet connection the internet started evolving.
Content currated by our betters to help us fulfill their lives.
Sam_Bass@lemmy.world 1 month ago
By their hands
willington@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
More like Google/Alphabet is doing what it can to close up the net, and hopes that openness on the net goes into decline.
phoenixz@lemmy.ca 5 weeks ago
But in a court filing
Why is this legal? It’s always like this with large companies. " Yeah we were just lying to everyone all the time, but this filing for court is the absolute truth!"
It’s the same as Fox News which always says they’re fair and balanced news and they bring the news nobody else does, but in a court filing… They suddenly claim that no reasonable person would believe them to be a real news organization… Uuuh huh…
Any court should dismiss this filing immediately and punish them for submitting a false filing, or continuously lying outside the courts. This sort of crap should be inadmissible.
BenchpressMuyDebil@szmer.info 1 month ago
Misleading title.
By the way, if you still want to use google’s search engine but want to avoid the AI stuff, see udm14.com or just add &udm=14 to your search query
Evotech@lemmy.world 1 month ago
There’s no way to avoid the ai stuff
Ai is in all the results
Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de 1 month ago
They denied it until the instant doing so was inconvenient to them.
postmateDumbass@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Leopards eating everyone’s face these days.
artifex@piefed.social 5 weeks ago
This is all according to plan for Google tho. What could be better than having everyone sign up for the GoogleNet? We’ll finally back to the ways of pre-Internet AOL and Compuserve.
postmateDumbass@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Pretty sure all the AI companoes were hoping to wrap the internet in their AI as a user interface, for a fee oc.
MattTheProgrammer@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
There will be such a thing that arises as a “grey net” I think. Not the dark web, but also not mainstream internet.
Zink@programming.dev 5 weeks ago
So basically the fediverse?
I mean at some point even websites seem grey net when the mainstream internet is basically AOL Future.
I think if there’s going to be an Eternal August version of the internet, it will be hidden in plain sight created by some of the same people that want to use it.
Blemgo@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
I think the term you are looking for is “Deep Net”, although it originally meant websites that weren’t indexed by web searches.
EnsignWashout@startrek.website 5 weeks ago
What I’m hearing is: I can replace saying “I have a dumb little WordPress blog that no one reads” with "I host a part of the ‘Deep Net’.
Sweet.
jaemo@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Bye bye internet. Hello splinternet.
Vanilla_PuddinFudge@infosec.pub 1 month ago
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.
jaemo@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
I’m from the 90s Internet. Geocities. Tripod. Webrings. My awesome gothy co-worker staying late after work to update her vampire fan-fiction site because hardly anyone had a computer and the boss let her use the company’s windows 95 machine.
We are categorically lazier as a culture now than then. I expect things to enshittify further until we collectively take responsibility and accountability for our own culture, engagement and entertainment online. As we used to. We need more stupid web tricks, this place used to have all sorts of public art and weird monuments to human quirkiness.
Until they take away from us the ability to purchase a 10$ domain, use DNS, and make HTML forbidden knowledge, anyone can be out there contributing. I realize, however, that most will not; I’ve recently started getting wide eyed stares of amazement because I have my own domain and use it for my email address, so we seem to be sliding further…
Not sure how we fix this.
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 1 month ago
If the internet were a forest, Google opines the forest is in such poor shape while Google uses and sells chain saws.
laranis@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
In your analogy I think Google sells chainsaws, lumber, wood stoves, and paper pulp.
l_isqof@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
You forgot the part where they will give you a sponsored clutch pencil, and make you buy their special lead refills…
interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
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 unstaffedAfter the fire maybe something not quite as malevolent will grow in the ashes
artifex@piefed.social 1 month ago
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.
interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
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
snoons@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
Google concern trolls the open web
MehBlah@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
They are making it happen.
vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 1 month ago
s/admits/boasts/
NoodlePoint@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Doctorow is never wrong.
floo@retrolemmy.com 1 month ago
“…Muahahaha!” they continued…
monogram@feddit.nl 5 weeks ago
jjlinux@lemmy.zip 5 weeks ago
I wonder what took them so long to figure it out. After all, they are the ones that broke it.
artifex@piefed.social 5 weeks ago
Not broken, working as intended (for them). They just happened to say the quiet part out loud this time.
DFX4509B_2@lemmy.org 1 month ago
Yeah it is, and it’s their fault that it is.
artifex@piefed.social 1 month 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).
jabjoe@feddit.uk 1 month ago
This is the dub of the issue. Markets need effective competition. Without it, you get fiefdoms and serfs, and shit products. Antitrust laws have been terrible for decades. Thanks broken political thinking. Slash up the tech monopolies and not just tech will improve.
8uurg@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
That difference is so large, they must be quoting different numbers. Something like DOJ is looking at Advertising providers or search providers alone, while Google quotes a number for percentage of all websites visited or something.
cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 1 month ago
It’s not entirely their fault. The AI companies share a good portion of the blame too.
artifex@piefed.social 1 month 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?