I think strip mining is a good analogy. Like google has strip mined the internet and left a toxic pit behind, if companies have their way they'll do the same to any captive open source project, turing any public parts into nothing but minimum viable bait to try and get people to pay for something.
> Like google has strip mines the internet and left a toxic pit behind
Can you clarify what you mean? I think there's a sense in which sometimes people say that google ruined the internet b/c (a) their prominence and their algorithm induced the creation of awful content farms, and (b) they pulled ad revenue away from some businesses that create content leaving us with a more impoverished web experience.
If you're making a different kind of assertion, please elaborate on it.
Wrt (a), I think site owners that had useful content weren't for the most part pushed to remove it, but were often pushed to pad it to the point that it feels less valuable to users (like recipe sites where every recipe is 12 paragraphs of prose before the actual recipe, IIUC), so I think this still fits in with the "dilution" framing, rather than removing valuable material in a way that excludes others from its use.
Wrt (b) I do think that when google displays content on the search page in a way that stops most users from continuing on to the page from which the information was sourced, that does seem effectively extractive. But I think that's distinct from the OSS project-capture problem.
> if companies have their way they'll do the same to any captive open source project, turing any public parts into nothing but minimum viable bait to try and get people to pay for something.
I actually think google is a good illustration of the full spectrum of OSS projects. They're definitely "getting their way" but:
- gson, guice, protobuf, snappy, the go language are all examples of projects that are very useful and pretty separate from any revenue-generating google product
- kubernetes, istio, etc are projects that can easily be used without touching any google revenue-generating project, but if you're using some of their revenue-generating projects, you may likely want something like this. Perhaps this is OSS but writing for your paying customer-base as a target audience?
- android, chrome, tensorflow are all about building little googleverse of customers in their orbit
I'm not GP and I personally think the strip-mining analogy is bad. But attempting to steelman GP's position based on other things I've read that I've pieced together:
I think an example is LLMs like ChatGPT. Basically consider a website that has good info on it. The LLM scrapes the site and regurgitates it's content to their user, and the original site never get a visit or recognition. The end result is the death of the site (much like strip mining results in).
I don't know if "killed" is the good word, but simply block google.com in your /etc/host and you will see how broken surfing on the web now is. Google is now technically owning the internet and is clearly using this position to its advantage, not to the advantage of its users.
Google didn’t break the internet. They failed to execute on social and rewarded shitty players with traffic.
Since the 80s or earlier, companies always sought to exert control over their audience. Things like Compuserv were early entrants, followed by Prodigy and eventually AOL and Microsoft’s entry - MSN.
Google made the network aspect of the internet better and ended up being a sort of gatekeeper. Facebook reinvented AOL, and a thousand copycats did variants of the same… Discord, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit.
Social wounded the internet. If anything “killed the internet”, it was Reddit and Twitter, cancer-like services both of which metastasized to destroy small-time internet properties, only to consolidate them into poorly managed, unprofitable companies.
I think strip mining is a decent analogy as well, so long as you include the fate of the participants. Take diamond mining as an example. The miners themselves tend to be dirt poor, and searched for stuff of value on exiting the mine, yet the outcome is big money for the corp controlling the mine.
By becoming the de facto entry point into the internet, Google's existence has spawned a horde of SEO spam sites that dilute and push down real content on the internet.
> Google's existence has spawned a horde of SEO spam sites that dilute and push down real content on the internet
They don't push real content "down the internet" they push it down the google rankings.
And while Google search is not as great as it was, it remains a strong contender for the best way to find stuff on the internet.
I don't think the internet would be better off without it.
You can however make good arguments for Google News, "Instant Answers" in Search, and other products, taking (impressions) from the internet.(And Chrome, Chrome worries me.)
I disagree, the analogy is weak. Strip mining is about harvesting naturally occurring resources in the most invasive way. The internet is not a natural resource. It was created by and for humans, from zero to unfathomable scale in thirty quick years. It is a reflection of ourselves, our systems, and our social and financial incentives. Google definitely deserves some blame as they certainly have helped shape those incentives, but it's not like they came in and started dynamiting some pristine wilderness, do you remember what search was like before Google came along?
For a certain use-case, I'd say I agree. I would argue that the basic web browsing experience for the less technically minded is worse than it was in the past.
For example, I am still working with my partner to get her to recognize and ignore the top level garbage: sponsored links and obvious SEO bait* when she blasts off a "Best <kitchen widget> 2023" search.
*You know, those listicles offered up from a handful of different sites that tend to be a 'top ten' list of a selection of 15 or so different products that are mostly just 7 actual different products white labeled by some brand and sold on amazon through a referral link in the listicle.
Web is not limited like physical real estate and SEO spam does not take away some virtual land from useful content. If you think Google is useless and full of spam the best way to deal with it is to simply not use Google
Yeah, but back then we were all just cramming "Britney Spears" into our Meta Keywords tags; we weren't actually eroding the quality of our entire web properties to court a live-or-die relationship with a single traffic vendor.
The toxic pit in this case is the transformation that occurred "ecologically" to the way contributors and agents on the web interact with eachother. This was strongly affected by the major centers of gravity in the 2010s like google and facebook. Unfortunately, their stewardship was focused around leveraging centralization towards profit rather than towards making the web a better place for users. And so here we are today.
FTR, I think youtube is one (among a few) exceptions to this overall trend from google.
The way ContentID is put to use may be the best interpretation of copyright. You get to reuse someone's work and the original author gets paid. There are some false flags reported with it but it's hard to say how many are due to actual violations (when you legally license a song from me but you didn't know I illegally sampled Taylor Swift and so you go complain about YouTube when your video is demonitized). I heard the bigger issue is false DMCA takedowns by shady companies who don't participate in Content ID...
Then it's that country that starts legal pursuits against them ? The average person only has to complain to the authorities, they don't need to sue the company, don't they ?
