this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023
386 points (98.5% liked)

World News

39032 readers
2602 users here now

A community for discussing events around the World

Rules:

Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.


Lemmy World Partners

News !news@lemmy.world

Politics !politics@lemmy.world

World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world


Recommendations

For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works 37 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I'm not sure why this is supposedly either surprising or malevolent. Google spends a significant amount of money on developing Chrome and then gives it away for free; clearly they must be making money off of it in some other way. Their usual approach to making money off of things they provide for free is to show the users ads, and defaulting to Google search is how Chrome does that. I don't think this is any different from saying that YouTube or Gmail exist to serve Google's ad business (which they clearly do).

What's funny to me is that I've heard of companies that really do provide a free version of their product without ads or any other way to make money off of it directly. Their goal is to protect their enterprise version of the software (which is not free) by reducing people's motivation to make an open-source competitor. I could see Google maintaining Chrome without their search engine as the default in order to prevent someone else from creating a popular browser which does have a default search engine that isn't Google's, but that actually seems more anti-competitive...

[–] BananaTrifleViolin@kbin.social 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I think your second half is bang on the nail for the missing part of this story. It is not just to drive search directly, it is also to control the browser market long term.

That's what Microsoft did very successfully with Internet Explorer too. They have it away for free and bundled it with Windows, killing all competition and then used that to leverage MSN. They also didn't follow standards and through market dominance shaped the internet.

Google sort of follows standards but they have also forced through proprietary standards or have broken code which is why some websites don't work well in Firefox or Safari even now.

Chromium may be open source but it is a tool used by Google to control and dominate the internet.

Apple is exactly the same with WebKit - they talk about privacy and security but the real motivation is surpressong alternate routes to the internet from their devices whic then keeps iron control over payment methods particularly in iOS. Yet people in the apple eco system buy into the narrative that the one piece of software you're not allowed in iOS is a non apple web browser, as if that is an acceptable approach. It's just another manifestation of anti competitive behaviour and the power and money you can get by "free" software.

[–] supercheesecake@aussie.zone 4 points 1 year ago

To be fair, with Apple it’s kind of both. Because they make a large chunk of their gazillions off hardware, they can make privacy part of their platform and mean it.

Whereas with Google, trolling your private information to sell you more stuff is all they are, and everything else serves this.

It may not be perfect, but in my opinion it’s ok to view the former as a better option than the latter. If convenience and integration are also important to you.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)