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this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024
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Some things, sure, but I think that list of things is fairly small and completely unrelated to services Google provides. I don't want government anywhere near something as important to free speech as search.
And I think Google would be just fine, they'd just have to adjust their business model a bit. That means they'd probably have to raise/introduce prices to certain services to make them viable. For example:
Each of Google's businesses is absolutely viable on its own, but if they can't be sold together, they'd have to adjust some prices down and other prices up, which is good for competition.
I don't think it'll be that easy. Once people have to pay (or the functionality is reduced to compensate) there are plenty of alternatives waiting to provide better products for the same price if not better. The Google singularity depends on being a whole suite of premium product being offered for free, once that's gone it won't have the same oomph as a brand.
How do you feel about Musk owning Twitter? Because that's (depressingly) considered important to free speech, but the "free speech" crowd happens to cheer as Brosef openly censors things he doesn't like and promotes baseless falsehoods and whatever else tickles his whims. I don't want to assume you're in that camp, but 9 out of 10 "Keep govt out of my free speech" folk tend to celebrate Musk's particular brand of it and consider it "free speech" when he censors but oppression if it's done to somebody who agrees with them.
Do you think search would be free and open under the ownership of some private equity group or another billionaire with money to burn like Musk? Hell, do you think it's free and open NOW under Alphabet? They play dirty ALLLLLL the fucking time with search. If we brought Google (or some other search engine, or hell built a new one) under a government team we could just......pay the engineering team to build and maintain a product without all the games of profit and clout chasing that gives you relevant results instead of specifically engineered middling results designed explicitly to make you have to run another search (and all the other crap they do.)
Meh. I've hated Twitter since it was created, so him owning it doesn't really impact me in any way. Twitter also had its own moderation issues like pretty much any social media company, it just had a liberal bias instead of a conservative one.
I'm absolutely in favor of free speech and I agree with Musk's criticisms of Twitter, but I also agree with the criticisms of Musk on the same grounds. He's not better for free speech, and he's arguably worse.
I don't think search can ever be free and open, at least not in any real way. There are just far too many motivations to slant it one way or another, whether that's for profit, political gain, religion, etc. It's a more meta version of the issue of news media, and the solution isn't to have government own it, the solution is to make sure there's competition.
Free speech is guaranteed not through policy, but by ensuring nobody has a monopoly. That's why I'm here on Lemmy despite not agreeing with the majority here politically (most of you seem to be quite far left), it's why I use Odysee and Rumble despite not agreeing with the majority there (they're a lot more conservative than me), etc. We all need to do our part to combat centralization, and I think the government has a place in breaking up centralized services when they get too influential.
If we did that, there'd be political pressure each election to boost certain causes over others. There's a good reason I don't use Yandex, I'm worried about ties w/ the Russian government. I don't think any government should be a gatekeeper to information in any capacity, I think it does a much better job policing other groups' abuse of their position.
Hm, but Twitter started with the censorship. It was published under Twitter files - that they actively banned anyone who didn't supported their worldview and it as on order from the Government.
It's documented in Twitter Files (how it internally worked) and also recently Mark Zuckerberg admitted the same type of censorship.
Brave Search and Brave browser is my favorite.