While the mass adoption of AI has transformed digital life seemingly overnight, regulators have fallen asleep on the job in curtailing AI data centers’ drain on energy and water resources.
Those kinds of things are what people often take issue with Google about. Well, the second one anyway. The first is arguably not a search and is instead a calculation, but I admit that’s a little semantical.
The first however, is Google taking information provided by third parties, and presenting it to the user. It prevents traffic from flowing through to the original site, and is something actively complained about.
And I should care about that because? Google is sparing me from visiting a website that will harass me to accept cookies, complain about my adblocker, probably request to send notifications, etc.
The same reason we don’t let companies sell photocopies of books? This isn’t a take on piracy, to be clear. This is a take on one company stealing content from another, and serving it up as if it were their own. And when Google has a monopoly on search, that fucks over everyone but Google, including you.
Extracting information from the internet that is freely available isn’t exactly stealing content. Haven’t you ever copied something from Wikipedia? Why would Wikipedia even exist if people can’t use and share its content?
You really don’t see a difference between a single user citing wiki, vs a billion dollar company going to great lengths to squeeze every cent they can out of everyone involved when looking up information?
Those kinds of things are what people often take issue with Google about. Well, the second one anyway. The first is arguably not a search and is instead a calculation, but I admit that’s a little semantical.
The first however, is Google taking information provided by third parties, and presenting it to the user. It prevents traffic from flowing through to the original site, and is something actively complained about.
And I should care about that because? Google is sparing me from visiting a website that will harass me to accept cookies, complain about my adblocker, probably request to send notifications, etc.
The same reason we don’t let companies sell photocopies of books? This isn’t a take on piracy, to be clear. This is a take on one company stealing content from another, and serving it up as if it were their own. And when Google has a monopoly on search, that fucks over everyone but Google, including you.
Extracting information from the internet that is freely available isn’t exactly stealing content. Haven’t you ever copied something from Wikipedia? Why would Wikipedia even exist if people can’t use and share its content?
You really don’t see a difference between a single user citing wiki, vs a billion dollar company going to great lengths to squeeze every cent they can out of everyone involved when looking up information?
free information
Free to access != free to redistribute