Whenever I read about how powerful these companies are, it sends chills down my spine.
morkalork•1h ago
_A new life awaits you in the Off-world colonies_
bigyabai•1h ago
AdSense is the one that people underestimate. It's a piranha pool of liquid cash, billions-scale impressions and near global outreach. Any sane nation would have banned it decades ago, unless it was propping up a global influence campaign for their government.
parineum•54m ago
> Any sane nation would have banned it decades ago
Why?
bigyabai•14m ago
AdSense uses a sealed-bid auction system with arbitrary number of lots that Google controls. It's a FOMO market driven by artificial scarcity, and since Google contractually forbids AdSense-enabled websites from using competing services, it forces ad buyers to go through their closed, controlled system.
echelon•8m ago
Google owns 92% of all "URL bars".
They turned this into "search".
Every brand or product has to competitively bid for its own identity in a monopoly competitive bidding market.
It's downright evil.
Look at Google's AI rivals having to spend hundreds of millions just so customers can find them. Google Anthropic or OpenAI and see what you get.
The next admin needs to break Google up horizontally (not vertically) into competing browsers, clouds, and search products. They all need to fight. Healthy capitalism is fiercely competitive. Not whatever this invasive species that preys on everything else is.
pixelpoet•53m ago
I am deeply saddened that it was developed by the hero of modern rendering, Eric Veach.
joe_mamba•1h ago
Whoever controls the spice , controls the universe.
charlie0•58m ago
And the spice must flow
irishcoffee•1h ago
I’ve always thought “man it would have been a great job selling shovels and pickaxes during the gold rush” back in the day.”
I know, I know, it’s really hard having these insights. We all have our crosses to bear. <giggling emoji>
jeffbee•48m ago
The "picks and shovels" people from the dotcom days all went broke. The stuff they had convinced themselves and their investors was crucial turned out to be not important.
newsclues•20m ago
Working out for nvidia right now
ohNoe5•17m ago
Hardware is important to operation of computers and software as we know them
A bunch of config management DSL startups, and web scale data storage solutions, not so much
ViktorRay•1h ago
morkalork•1h ago
bigyabai•1h ago
parineum•54m ago
Why?
bigyabai•14m ago
echelon•8m ago
They turned this into "search".
Every brand or product has to competitively bid for its own identity in a monopoly competitive bidding market.
It's downright evil.
Look at Google's AI rivals having to spend hundreds of millions just so customers can find them. Google Anthropic or OpenAI and see what you get.
The next admin needs to break Google up horizontally (not vertically) into competing browsers, clouds, and search products. They all need to fight. Healthy capitalism is fiercely competitive. Not whatever this invasive species that preys on everything else is.
pixelpoet•53m ago