this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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Privacy
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I hate the fact that one of the biggest and richest corporations in the world, is just a massive ad spamming dumpster fire. Imagine the good a powerful company like this could do, if 90% of their effort wasn't put into cramming ever more ads into people's eyeballs.
Welcome to capitalism. Where the rules are made up and everything is an advertisement.
That's not how capitalism works.
They wouldn't be among the biggest and richest corporations in the world if that was the case.
They just make me think of the part of ready player one where the douchebag corporate dude is talking about how much of the VR display they can make adspace before people have seizures...
Something like 80% of Google's revenue is from ads, even with that 30% cut they get from everything on their app store. So their core existence deeply conflicts with a free and open web. And it's particularly unsettling because their web browser dominates the market, so they have the leverage to force us into their vision of the future. And this domination would be very difficult to counter. It's the default browser on Android phones, and it is constantly flogged on Google.com, which is one of the most popular web portals in the world.
to me, that's one of the biggest tragedies of our time. there are several catastrophic problems to be fixed worldwide and yet we send some of our most brilliant engineers to silicon valley to work on advertising companies