#monopolies — Public Fediverse posts

@chris @unfa is this still a problem if you run graphene or lineage?

To any youtuber or play store slave: you are Google's employee, but with no workers rights whatsoever. Google can take away anything and not be accountable.

#monopolies  #capitalismsucks

"If Kagi (a startup with a handful of engineers) can extract useful search results from Google's databases, then Google – a thrice-convicted monopolist that's had its pick of thousands of the top computer scientists from the world's most prestigious universities for a generation – could also do so.

They just choose not to.

They're too big to fail. They're too big to jail. They're too big to care.

Google's AI search isn't a way to fix its broken core product: it's a way to partially remediate the damage Google itself inflicted on the open internet, while imprisoning the web in a walled garden that would make Steve Jobs drool:
(...)
It's a deadly combination: Google has committed hundreds of billions to stock buybacks and its AI money-furnace, financed by mass layoffs targeting the people who keep the core services useful. The too-big-to-care company is still the internet's gatekeeper, but half the guards at the gate have been fired and the other half have pulled so much overtime that they keep falling asleep on the job.

Google has become a scammer's paradise.

Take Google's "answer box." This is the part of the search results page that tries to answer your query directly, without sending you elsewhere for that info. Back in 2023, Google's Answer Box was taken over by scammers who impersonated airline help desks. When Google's users searched for airlines' toll-free phone numbers, Google directed them to phones that rang in the scammers' boiler room, where they were tricked into giving up their passport info and credit card numbers to boiler-room thieves:"

https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/05/absentee-landlord/

#Google #Search #SearchEngines #AI #AISearch #Scams #AIOverview #BigTech #Monopolies #Antitrust

the audacity of selling #privacy as a feature yet not allowing regulators audit their technology to verify their claims.

this is a toot about #Apple #iOS

#NBAFinals2026 #ABCtv #Disney #monopolies

Pluralistic: Google steers Americans looking for health care into "junk insurance" (25 Nov 2025)

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/25/open-season/

"In an unprecedented move, the Japan Fair Trade Commission on Tuesday issued a cease-and-desist order against Google for violating the country's anti-monopoly law by forcing manufacturers to preinstall the company’s apps on their Android smartphones.

This is the first time that Japan has issued such an order against any of the major U.S. technology companies referred to collectively as GAFAM — Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft.

“By binding smartphone manufacturers and telecommunication carriers, Google has made it difficult for other competing search engine applications to be used on Android phones,” Saiko Nakajima, a senior investigator for digital platform operators at the commission, said.

“Google's conduct in this case has created a risk of impeding fair competition concerning transactions — thus, we have determined that this is an act in violation of the Antimonopoly Act,” she added."

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2025/04/16/companies/google-anti-monopoly-law/

#Japan #Google #Android #Monopolies #Antitrust #Competition #BigTech #Antimonopoly

There's a cheat-code in US #antitrustm it's been increasingly used since the #Reagan administration, when the "#ConsumerWelfare" theory ("#monopolies are fine, so long as the lower prices") shoved aside the long-established idea that antitrust law existed to prevent monopolies from forming *at all*.

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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

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