#monopolies — Public Fediverse posts

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

Global Press Freedom Hits Record Low, U.S. Drops to 64th in the World: Reporters Without Borders http://www.democracynow.org/2026/5/6/clayton_weimers_reporters_without_borders_press #WorldPressDay #PressFreedom #fascism #BlameTrump #BlameTheGOP #journalism #monopolies

This #SpaceX Situation: Not Good!

by Jason Koebler, Feb 5, 2026

Excerpt: "There are many reasons that 'AI data centers in space' may be a pipe dream and may not happen, but what he is proposing is a magnitude of #SpaceJunk that no other company could plausibly promise to launch. Data centers or not, SpaceX is now dominating #LowEarthOrbit in a way no other company or country has. While Musk has been gutting the federal government, interfering in #elections, allowing people to generate #CSAM, engaging in white supremacy, planning trips to #EpsteinsIsland, implanting #chips into people’s brains, siphoning off taxpayer money to build ridiculous tunnels, giving his sperm to whoever will take it, turning his cars into experimental robot taxis, and pretending to build #HumanoidRobots, #SpaceX has somewhat (?) quietly #colonized and dominated low earth orbit.

"Musk has taken this space for his own use, concerns about #LightPollution, satellite collisions, and telecom #monopolies be damned. This has always been concerning, but explicitly intertwining the aspirations and fate of SpaceX with Musk’s CSAM generating social media website, his #AIBullshitMachines, and his right wing political project is horrifying and monopolistic. What happens next, I have no idea."

Read more:
https://www.404media.co/this-spacex-situation-not-good

Archived version:
https://archive.ph/vUubi

#TechBros #Technopoly #DarkSkies #SpacePollution #AISucks #DataCenters #SkyNet #KesslerEffect #KesslerSyndrome #USPol #WorldPol #SpaceNews #EpsteinFiles

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/

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/

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/

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

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

Boot KP out of ALL their #monopolies!

#KingPower cites economic doldrums while #closing storefronts in 3 #Thai #airports
"Among te 7 issues was an apparent deviation from te terms of reference in the #contract btw King Power & #AOT due to a #government #policy shift in 2024, #duty reductions for wine, a lack of proactive state measures to bolster confidence for #Chinese #tourists, & a general #downturn in overall #tourism. Admitting to a lack of confidence in persisting"
https://www.bangkokpost.com/business/general/3049031/king-power-cites-economic-doldrums-while-closing-storefronts-in-3-thai-airports

”Fromm asserts, then ‘this lag makes freedom an unbearable burden’. It is this freedom from bonds which, according to Fromm, leads to a desire for submission. Authoritarianism constitutes a regressive attempt to resolve the tension between a threatening outside world and a precarious self.”

3/3

Fromm/Adorno/Horkheimer’s post-#fascism analysis from 1950’s sounds eerily similar.

Too similar for comfort. It is happening again.

#1933again #criticaltheory #monopolies #capitalism

#CyberSecurity #Monopolies #Microsoft #Windows #CrowdStrike #Monocultures: "CrowdStrike will likely face a wave of lawsuits seeking to hold it responsible for shutting down the world’s computers. It’s easy to blame the company. But there’s a bigger culprit: monoculture. Roughly 73 per cent of desktop computers worldwide run a Microsoft Windows operating system. Because Windows systems are so common, they are a popular target for hackers, who can exploit more computers with a single attack than if they targeted MacOS or Linux systems. As a result, there’s a massive market for software like CrowdStrike’s. Almost 60 per cent of Fortune 500 companies use CrowdStrike, which helps explain why impacts on commercial systems were so profound, even though 8.5m machines is a tiny fraction of the number of computers used worldwide. The reliance on a single operating system and a single threat checker for critical commercial IT systems makes global outages possible. Consequently, computing is profoundly more vulnerable than it needs to be.

To understand how we got here, it helps to look at an apparently unrelated industry: agriculture."

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/technology/67625/when-monoculture-leads-to-monofailure

No, You're Not Crazy. Everything IS More Expensive. This Is Why. | Leeja Miller
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjYWMs9al0U

#economy

#PriceGouging #Monopolies #politics #PeterTiel #Trump #Reagan #Bush #TechMoguls #Republicans #Corruption

#Democracy #MiddleClass #AntiTrust
#Obama #Biden #Democrats

The payoff from Thiel’s early gamble in Trump is a lesson that has not passed others by.

As with their other obsession, #crypto, the best time to have invested in Trump was 2016,
and the second best time is today.

We already have a word for what we’re watching now:
it’s #oligarchy.

And we’ve already seen how this plays out.

In Putin’s Russia, political and commercial interests are one and the same.

Thiel is betting
– again
– on the same phenomenon in America.

Betting that he will be first among a new breed of tech bro oligarchs
– a new super-class of #broligarchs.

In Trump’s America, there will be hard choices for everyone, including the billionaires. --
Though it may be less hard for them.

Vance has said he wants to #deregulate crypto and
unshackle AI.

He’s said he’d #dismantle Biden’s attempts to place safeguards around AI development.

And while he has it in for the #legacy #monopolies of Google and Facebook
– the platforms that his ideological bedfellows in the “new right” see as part of the “censorship industrial complex” suffocating rightwing speech
– Silicon Valley is betting on a gloves-off, regulation-free, pro-business #goldrush.

Another Peter Thiel acolyte was on stage at the Republican National Convention last week,
electrifying the crowd:
#Hulk #Hogan.

Hogan is less well known as one of Thiel’s longterm bets, though in some ways he’s even more instructive than Vance.

In 2007, the online magazine #Gawker outed Thiel and ran a series of unflattering articles about him.

It took him years, but he ultimately got his revenge, covertly funding Hulk Hogan to the tune of $10m to sue the publication for invasion of privacy and forcing it into #bankruptcy.

On stage at the RNC, the wrestler, a permatanned orange, ripped off his shirt for the man who increasingly looks like he’ll be America’s next president.

Or, if JD Vance, is correct, the man who will prove to be the #Caesar he says America needs.

A man who he has already urged to fire the nation’s civil servants to
💥 “replace them with our people”,
to defy the courts and rule his own way.

Or, to put this in simple terms:
to foment a #coup.

Thiel knows what every investor knows. That a crisis is an opportunity.

And that if Trump succeeds in tearing up the federal administration,
there is not only billions to be made in the ensuing market #turmoil but that a new breed of oligarchs,
close to Caesar’s throne, will be the first to share the spoils.

And chief among them will be Thiel.

It’s not a stretch to see how #Palantir, his data-mining company
– that under the Conservatives got its teeth into the NHS
– will profile and surveil and target Caesar’s enemies.

And Thiel’s track record in winning, in successfully betting on the longest of odds, on biding his time, is maybe the most chilling of all the factors in a fortnight that has started to feel like the start of a run on the bank.

Biden’s debate disaster,
Trump’s victorious assassination survival,
and now Silicon Valley’s ascension to the presidential ticket.

The broligarchs have made their move
– and the rest of us need to understand exactly what that means.

#tech #elite #Sandberg #Page #Bezos #Peter #Thiel #tech #bro #Vance #Elon #Musk #Marc #Andreessen #Ben #Horowitz #Winklevoss #Chamath #Palihapitiya #David #Sacks #Palantir #Vance #Mithril #Capital #Narya #Capital

Lots of #BannedBooks and #OutOfPrintBooks on the #InternetArchive. This isn't about #copyright -- this is about #censorship! There are only FIVE major publishers in the US -- and they keep trying to merge to create even bigger #monopolies! Often, big publishing companies buy out #IndependentPublishers and #SmallPublishers, so they can stop printing their books!

#Books #Corporations #Monopoly #Censorship #Copyright #History #Culture #Libraries #DigitalLibraries #ProgressivePublishers #IA