Given that we are going full authoritarian fascist now, perhaps the EU should ban Google, given the US tik tok precedent.
this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2025
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What a twist. In the 90s, the internet forced countries to wake up to the new modern era. It was a combination of American companies wanting both to expand and provide goodwill.
And now, this new era is going to tell American companies to fuck off.
I like this. I don't think I need a large company fact-checking anything tbh. They already got too much influence and power, I don't need them to control the narrative even more.
wish the eu would just actually ban american companies there is really no need for them anyway
Fascism is good for business.
Can't believe Google's doing this, they seemed to be the most dedicated to this of the big companies. Especially on Youtube.
picking up the sarcasm
The rich are trying to pivot the Trump vicory into world domination before we can organize and dethrone the oligarchy.
Google/Meta helping to spread misinformation is a big part of that.
I wish I was kidding.
Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives
Or fortune... but you can't take it with you so your point still stands.
That's pretty bold for a really fucking useless search engine. The EU could just block it and redirect google.com to a gov run searxng instange and everyone in europe would be better off overniggt
It would likely be impossible to redirect google.com without either sparking a cyberwar or building something like the great firewall of China, quite possibly both.
Blocking is somewhat possible, but to redirect, they would have to forge google certificates and possibly also fork Chrome and convince users to replace their browser, since last I checked, google hard-coded it's own public keys into Chrome.
Technical details
I say blocking in somewhat possible, because governments can usually just ask DNS providers to not resolve a domain or internet providers to block IPs.
The issue is, google runs one of the largest DNS services in the world, so what happens if google says no? The block would at best be partial, at worst it could cause instability in the DNS system itself.
What about blocking IPs? Well, google data centers run a good portion of the internet, likely including critical services. Companies use google services for important systems. Block google data centers and you will have outages that will make crowd-strike look like a tiny glitch and last for months.
Could we redirect the google DNS IPs to a different, EU controlled server? Yes, but such attempts has cause issues beyond the borders of the country attempting it in the past. It would at least require careful preparations.
As for forging certificates, EU does control multiple Certificate authorities. But forging a certificate breaks the cardinal rule for being a trusted CA. Such CA would likely be immediately distrusted by all browsers. And foreig governments couldn't ignore this either. After all, googles domains are not just used for search. Countless google services that need to remain secure could potentially be compromised by the forged certificate. In addition, as I mentioned, google added hard-coded checks into Chrome to prevent a forged certificate from working for it's domains.
Nah. Demanding the ISPs to block traffic to Google domains would be quite effective.
This isn't like the great firewall of chine where you want to prevent absolutely all traffic. If you make it inconvenient to use, because CSS breaks or a js library doesn't load or images breaslk, its already a huge step into pushing it out of the market.
Enterprise market would be much harder, a loooot of EU companies rely on Google's services, platforms and apps, and migrating away would take a lot of time and money.
Demanding the ISPs to block traffic to Google domains would be quite effective.
Filter it based on what? Between ESNI and DNS over HTTPS, it shouldn't be possible to know, which domain the traffic belongs to. Am I missing something?
Edit: Ah, I guess DNS over HTTPS isn't enabled by default yet.
You block the DNS ups as well I think. Browsers should have more than one DNS address anyway in case one go down
The backup is usually a different server from the same DNS provider. E.g. google has 8.8.8.8 as primary and 8.8.4.4 as secondary. Plus the backup doesn't even always work on Windows.
Also note, it is not browsers but operating systems that do primary DNS. Browsers may use DNS over HTTPS for security and privacy instead of the one in the OS, but that usually requires the OS DNS to resolve the address of the DNS over HTTPS server, since it is considered a security feature built on top of classic DNS instead of replacement.
PS: Don't get me wrong, EU could definitely block google.com sooner or later. It just wouldn't be as easy as usual. The real risk is if Alphabet stops offering all of its services, chaos ensues. Companies unable to access their google spreadsheets. Services and data hosted on google cloud lost. People protesting lack of youtube...
And even if Alphabet doesn't do that, I expect a lot of issues just with google being unavailable and most people not even knowing there are other search engines. It's really going to be last resort to try blocking google, I expect fines or some such.
I think that if EU was to retaliate against any of the big tech players (which isn’t going to happen imho since eu institutions don’t really display the affinity for swift and decisive justice it would require) it would make more sense to start blocking the advertising and/or data collection. Like a continent-wide pi hole. Still getting the message across while not impacting the users as much. At least not immediately. That said, the gatekeeper platforms should be prohibited from providing services like DNS resolving which are critical for the operation of other services than just theirs.
They probably also could just prevent EU companies and branches from buying google ads directly. Vast majority of ads is geo-located, so there would be almost no ads to show in the EU.
They could even make it look exactly like Google. What's Google going to do about it? Get wrecked is what.
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In other words, a company, acting on behalf of its own shareholders, tells a government, which represents 100% of the citizens in a given territory, to shove its legislation where the sun doesn’t shine. And not only is this not inherently absurd, but it also stands a significant chance of succeeding in getting the government to comply.
They probably wouldn't have had to if the school system hadn't dropped language arts from most curriculums ages ago. Students now are getting a markedly shitter education and don't even know they're being fucked over.
It's by design, the politicians only need 28% to win, easier to scrape those votes off the bottom of the barrel of knowledge
What really stings is watching groups and communities which historically have been supportive of each other getting fragmented by overt social media operations. It's asinine and just makes it easier to marginalize and oppress the people that most frequently need a voice.
Our country is now run by Twitter and Truth Social, and too many people are already lost to social media disinformation campaigns (counter-intelligence)
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Good, hope they get banned in the EU so people will switch to competitors
DuckDuckGo: Use us because Google is so evil they were banned in Europe
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