Google’s Plan To DRM The Web Goes Against Everything Google Once Stood For
Google’s Plan To DRM The Web Goes Against Everything Google Once Stood For
The grand old enshittification curve strikes again. Remember, as stated by Cory Doctorow, the process of enshittification entails these steps: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse t…
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In what should be surprising to Noone, Google was just paying lip service about what it stood for from the beginning. When their motto was 'do no evil' it was a lie, they just stopped pretending.
Ever used email before GMail?
Ever had one of those in-dash or on-window outdated GPS units that cost a pretty penny to keep current?
Ever had online storage and file transfer/sharing before Google Drive?
Ever searched before Google itself presented their search engine?
Ever had a "smart"phone before Android?
They may suck now with the increased enshittification of services... before they came along the web was a very rough place. And expensive as hell. Don't discredit Google because you weren't around to see how they improved things. Before it became about appeasing the stockholders, what Google bringing to the web was a -really- exciting time. Getting 1GB (and an ever increasing quota) for free webmail was fucking astounding, absolutely unheard of... and that was with the best spam filtering anyone had ever seen. Now everything that wasn't done before Google did it is taken for granted.
That said. I have to admit there's a sense of sadness within me when it comes to all of this. Google HAS gotten worse. And it's compounded by the fact that I remember how much better they used to be. Now I've come to have to accept that I'll be retiring my (singledictionaryword)@gmail address and start using Google services less. I'll still be using Android, but exclusively third party roms and without dependence on GApps as default... and knowing that it has come to this fucking sucks.
1999-2009-ish was a fun time online. Endless possibilities. Google was a big part of that.
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Before Gmail, my old Hotmail account had a whopping 2MB of storage, and others were similarly small. Gmail was a few GB right from the start, forcing the rest to compete and offer more storage.
Yahoo was something like a whopping 10 or 15MB. Gmail debuting with 1GB of space was a nearly 1000 fold increase at the time.
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Yahoo mail was garbage tier before Gmail forced them to redesign.
Honestly. You really had to go experience the horrors of free web based email before Gmail ever got existed to truly understand the full scope of what they accomplished.
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Making quality stuff for free does not mean they were not doing shady things in the background.
I have no plan to boycott Google or anything, but they were nwver benevolent and usage has always been a tradeoff of data tracking for convenience.
Hard disagree. Back in its early days, Google was genuinely decent. They competed by building better stuff than everyone else, and that's it.
There was no decent free email and no free maps before Google. You used to have to pay hundreds for decent mapping software.
The good old Web 2.0 days, when companies were falling over themselves to provide free APIs and see what people could do with them.
Google started going to shit when they brought out Android and everybody started trying to build walled gardens, and went full evil when that moral vacuum Pichai took over.
Google was collecting your data without informing you from the very beginning. Just because they wrote good software and offered free stuff doesn't mean they weren't doing shady stuff in the background.
I still use Google services, but only because the free part of the trade is currently working in my favor since I block all their ads.