Friday Linkblog, don’t-be-evil edition

I’ve been meaning to link to these for a while, but keeping some thematic unity with this week, the Verge has has a whole series of articles on Google at 25. My favorites were: The end of the Googleverse and The people who ruined the internet.

(Also, that second article links to Ed Zitron’s excellent The Internet is Already Broken, which I also recommend)

As someone who was both a legal adult and college graduate before Google happened, it’s deeply strange to realize that I lived through the entire era where Google “worked”; before it choked out on SEO content-farm garbage, advertising conflicts of interest, and general enshittification.

And then, Google lost the antitrust case against Epic; see: The Verge, Ars.

(As an aside a certain class of nerd are losing their damn minds that Google lost but Apple didn’t. The Ars comment thread in particular is a showcase of Dunning-Kruger hallucinations of what they wish the law was instead of what it really is.)

I bring this all up so I can tell this story:

Back in the early 2000s, probably 2003 or 4 based on where I was and who I was talking to, I remember a conversation I had about the then-new “don’t be evil” Google. The persons I was talking to were very enthusiastic about them. Recall, there was still the mood in the room that “we” had finally beat Microsoft, they’d lost the antritrust case, the web was going to defeat Windows, and so on.

And I distinctly remember saying something like “Microsoft just operated like an old railroad monopoly, so we already knew how to be afraid of them. We haven’t learned how to be afraid of companies like google yet.”

And, reader: “LOL”. “LMAO”, even. Because, go back and read the stuff in Epic’s lawsuit against Google—Google was doing the exact same stuff that Microsoft got nailed for twenty years ago. To call myself out here on main, we already DID know how to be afraid of google, we just bought their marketing hook, line, and sinker.

We were all so eager to get past Microsoft’s stranglehold on computers that we just conned ourselves into handing even more control to an even worse company. Unable to imagine computers not being dominated by a company, so hey, at least this one isn’t Microsoft, or IBM, or AT&T!

(This is the same fallacy that bugs me about Satanists—they want to rebel, but buy into all the same fundamental assumptions about the universe, but they just root for the other team. Those people never actually go outside the box they started in, and become, say, Buddhists.)

A decade ago this is where I would have 800 words endorsing FOSS as the solution, but I think at this point, deep down, we all know that isn’t the answer either.

Maybe this time, lets try regulating the hell out of all of this, and then try hard to pay attention and not get scammed by the next big company that comes along and flirts with us? Let's put some energy into getting out of the box instead of just finding one with nicer branding.