For months, Google has maintained that the web is “thriving,” AI isn’t tanking traffic, and its search engine is sending people to a wider variety of websites than ever. But in a court filing from last week, Google admitted that “the open web is already in rapid decline” (with regard to advertising, kinda-sorta)
Yeah it is, and it’s their fault that it is.
Google has no right to say the open web is in decline, when they’re the main cause of it, this is basically them saying, ‘Yeah, we won this stupid war that we started, screw you, peons,’ this comes off like if MS broke WINE and then admitted no one uses desktop Linux anymore, it will have been their faults that hypothetical scenario happened, this is what Google saying the open web is in decline when it’s largely their faults that it is comes off as to me.
Well they don’t get all the credit. Oh, wait, they control how much of the market? Ok, nevermind.
(the DOJ says 91%. Google somehow claims it’s only 10%, to which I literally LOL’d).
That difference is so large, they must be quoting different numbers. Something like DOJ is looking at Advertising providers or search providers alone, while Google quotes a number for percentage of all websites visited or something.
This is the nub of the issue. Markets need effective competition. Without it, you get fiefdoms and serfs, and shit products. Antitrust laws have been terrible for decades. Thanks to broken political thinking. Smash up the tech monopolies and not just tech will improve.
It’s not entirely their fault. The AI companies share a good portion of the blame too.
The AI companies are doing something different and possibly worse by stuffing all of the open sites full of AI slop and then re-training their models on said slop.
Wasn’t there some mythological figure that was doomed to eat its own excrement or something?
A bunny?
Ouroboros
Human Centipede
Jon Stamos?
Google is an AI company, even if that’s not all they are.
google went from one shiney thing to the next, much like microsoft. at first it was thier chrome browser, then its youtube+chrome+(failed ventures) and now AI, in between all of it pixel phones which they largely given up on.