And since you won’t be able to modify web pages, it will also mean the end of customization, either for looks (ie. DarkReader, Stylus), conveniance (ie. Tampermonkey) or accessibility.
The community feedback is… interesting to say the least.
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What the fuck is happening to the internet recently?
Twitter and Reddit CEOs completely losing their minds, and now Google of all companies wants to lock down the whole internet?
This isn’t even close to being okay. It’s 100% bullshit.
The enshittification of the internet shall continue.
We will fight and we will lose, as depressing as it sounds. The vast majority of people just don’t and won’t care.
We’re on Lemmy. We’re already winning!
- demystify ( @demystify@lemmy.ml ) English34•1 year ago
We may win a battle or few, but not the war.
Then i’ll scrape the songs i currently watch on youtube with jdownload and stop using the page otherwise.
All they do is make the internet less attractive. Now that works to increase profits for a while, but eventually the content creators withdraw, the platforms become worse and eventually uncool and people stop using it, or use it less. Facebook is on a decline in western countries. We went through multiple video snippet apps already and tiktok and instagram too will be declining eventually.
We dont have to win the war because the war will never end. We just gotta make the best out of the battlefields we win.
But a small minority of really determined people is enough to change the world 🙌
I love to see how people nowadays find easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism… That’s how they’ve been brainwashing us till now.
You’ll finish your enshittification and you’ll like it!
Google has already been a worthless pos for years. Impossible to get relevant results, even with operators. You just get ads and irrelevant SEO sites. And adding “reddit” at the end of the query will probably not work so well in the future either, seeing how that site has also gone to shit.
And they have already tried monopolising the entire internet with their amp bullshit.
So this is just in line with their vision of making the whole internet into a pile of burning shit under their total control.
Hello from Kagi. It’s better over here.
Yeah I’ve been a little interested in trying Kagi, but it is quite expensive… Are the results that much better?
They give you a couple searches for free each month (I think it’s 10) - go try it out!
I know, right? It’s so weird. In every single instance of some bullshit happening it’s easy to brush it off as incompetence or an attempt at profit maximization, but overall it feels a lot like some kind of targeted disassembly of whatever made the internet great and facilitated open discussions.
I don’t think it’s coordinated, I think it all starts from the same root cause: Silicon Valley Bank failed. These companies all need to do something they’ve really not done much of in the past: turn a profit. But these companies are not run by the business geniuses we were once convinced were running the show. Most of them live so far removed from a normal persons life that they don’t understand what motivates us, what we want in a platform, and as soon as we provide feedback after they’ve already made a decision, they decide it’s because we don’t understand the squeeze they’re under to make money.
- Twitter: Elon Musk thinks he could make more money from subscriptions than advertisements. The whole thing’s a disaster because that’s really dumb. This case may be a little different though because there’s some evidence Musk just wanted more people to see his tweets and to pay people to be his friend
- Reddit: Spez fails to see that he has multiple revenue sources available to him so long as he keeps his users around. Somewhere, there was the right balance of charging for the API at a reasonable price, performing better market research on his user base to provide a better ad platform, and keeping the Reddit coin system in place as the base liked it because the user base paid more for that than most similar online payment schemes.
- Google: this is the scary one. This is the one that seems like they know exactly what they’re doing. They’re ramping up their enshittification following the fall of SVB, but the way they’re doing it is both malicious and a minor enough inconvenience that the majority of their users will stay. And they’re doing it in small quiet ways. A little bit of tweaking how YouTube bans users here. A little bit of RFCs about DRM on the web there. Some PRs to chromium and android no one will notice. All to squeeze more ads into peoples online experiences. Their search product has been utter shit for about 6 years now, but people still prefer it over Bing or DuckDuckGo (which is a wrapper for Bing). They’ve learned the following lesson: if you’re big enough, the citizens of the web will let you do it
That’s a good write up, thanks. I don’t claim it’s coordinated, just that it feels more and more that way.
Also, I switched to DDG a year or so ago and I haven’t heard that it was a wrapper for Bing. So I went to google it (I can’t not use this verb when talking about online searches, lol), and it seems like it’s not really the case. It gets some results from bing and utilises their ads to make profit, but it seems like it’s a small part of their output. Is that incorrect? Do you have some more info about it being a wrapper? I’m kinda curious now
I’d be happy to hear that’s true. They were originally an aggregator until Google changed their api
DuckDuckGo is not a wrapper for Bing, but is in fact a distinct and independent search engine. DDG does grab some results from bing. but it also grabs from other sources and it’s own crawler.
It can be a combo of several objectives:
- make a shitload of money
- stop people from realising we’re making a shitload of money off of their backs
- keep people poor so that even if they do realise there’s nothing they can do about it
Nothing about this is recent, those who pay attention to the standards process have been screaming for ages about the Google problem. It’s just that now between interest rates being what they are and them having a monopoly on the browser market that they’re cashing in on their investment.
Recently? This is a long time coming. Users have been accepting all kinds of shit from big players without complaint. Even if they protest it’s usually just performative and they keep using the services, sites and software that violates all kinds notions of user and privacy rights. Most people unfortunately are (understandably) not equipped to really even understand the kind of shady shit these companies pull on the daily. The internet is going to shit and its users will gobble it up and ask for more. It has been frustrating watching this happen, but there’s really very little that can be done.
The main problem with us users is that we are god damn lazy. We want everything to be the most convenient it possibly can be.
Remember when Apple updated iOS to allow users to stop cross-app tracking, which severly upset the Zuck, that absolute manchild?
Turns out that if you actually inform people and give them a clear choice to make, the overwhelming majority of users do in fact not agree with being tracked, as an example.
Luckly we still have free platforms like lemmy, browsers like Firefox, networks like tor or i2p, torrents, monetary system like bitcoin.
We can step out of the world of and we are the ones who have the most intruments to do so.
I haven’t read the replies but there was a very interesting episode by Derek Thomson’s Plain English podcast which I found incredibly interesting.
Derek made the conjecture that we were on a cusp of a big paradigm shift in the Internet.
For the last 20 years, it was essentially about building a consumer basis. So companies like Netflix and Facebook and Amazon did not care about current profits. The point was to just get consumers, drive out the competition, and commandeer the monopoly. What you cared about was consumer growth.
Now and especially post Covid companies like Twitter are realising that this isn’t going to work. The next movement is going to all be about paying models. This is what we’re seeing with Twitter. This is what we’re seeing with OnlyFans or Patreon.
So in light of the above comments, none of this is surprising. The next era will be about paid models of the internet. This is what we’re seeing with content creators moving off of free content (paid with ads) and moving to platforms like Patreon where there is a smaller group of paid customers.
I need to find that episode as it was extremely prophetic. It might have potentially been this one https://open.spotify.com/episode/2zRha9y46btKdAfwfHpvQ5?si=_jkP3iX7TXOesHLsoY9Vxw
What do you mean, Google of all companies… It’s a company that makes 90% of its money from ads and all of its products are made with the express purpose of enabling them to spy on you or creating technical dependencies so you can’t quit their services.
Plus they’ve already tried to lock the web into proprietary formats (AMP, PWA etc.) and have maneuvered so they have 90% of the browser market and the smartphone market but can’t be actioned for it.
- argv_minus_one ( @argv_minus_one@beehaw.org ) English2•1 year ago
Since when was PWA proprietary?
This happens when something, in this case the Internet, is a monopoly or oligopoly.
AI happened. The promises, benefits, opportunity for massive financial gain, and the clear and present danger of how transformative it can be have all caused internet-bases companies to throw out the rulebook and lose their collective minds.
A race to the bottom with who can come up with the next dogshit idea on how to ruin the internet and make things actively worse for the people who use it
One comment mentions possible incompability with article 22 of the GDPR, and I sure hope the EU will stand their ground on this.
I can only imagine noyb letting all hell break loose. We need more people like him, dissecting corporations legal bs to find every last little thing we can possibly hold against them.
Obligatory use Firefox
Let’s hope there’s already a law that the EU can find to apply (since they already don’t like the non-EU dominance of big tech), or that they make one in time.
I was just thinking that I’m sure Google will lobby the US government to get this model enforced as law, making it illegal for anyone to create workarounds, or alternative browsers. And the US legislative government being what it is, will hand Google whatever legislation it wants to turn their nightmare into a reality.
It is imperative to make as many people as possible aware
What legitimacy does the U.S. government even have anymore in light of not only this, but everything that they’ve done in the 21st century? Why do we keep listening to them? Why don’t we build our own networks and design our own chips?
because that would cost a rather large amount of money, which us working-class peasants famously don’t have
What legitimacy does the U.S. government even have anymore
The Constitution of the United States of America, the Bill of Rights, and the Supreme Court.
Why do we keep listening to them?
Democracy, loyalty, nationalism, trillions of dollars, global power, the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, National Guard, FBI, CIA, local and federal police, the largest surveillance network in the world, thousands of prisons, and a million other reasons.
Since this is something that can be used as a DRM solution, hacking it might be already illegal under the DMCA. IANAL though.
Obligatory use Firefox
No way. Why should I feel obligated to use something I feel has inferior UX and UI than the browser I’m using now? For Mozilla’s CEO to rais her wage (again): https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html ?
You people are really delusional if you really think that Mozilla are the only good guys (or good guys at all, for that matters).
Inb4, unimaginative people downvoting just because they can’t stand different opinions.
There is a huge difference between mozilla and google. That’s quite obvious to most. The ceo raising his salary is a problem for you, and you prefer Google, where they have enormous salaries and incomes? It’s one of the richest companies in the world.
Firefox doesn’t have inferior UX at all. It has more functions and features than chrome. It also has very good default privacy and the plugin system is amazing.
And it just became faster than chrome as well.
Keep being delusional, It’s free, after all.
The ceo raising his salary is a problem for you
It’s not for me (anymore). It should be for you. She was raising her salary while firing devs… But whatever. Mozillians are seldom rational.
I feel obligated to raise awareness about these topics. I won’t prevent anyone from choosing Chrome, but at the very least it’s important for people to know what their choice can entail, and base their decision on that.
We also need to raise awareness about what giving google hegemony over defining what the web will be means.
I won’t prevent anyone from using FF, either. I just think that the “obligatory use Firefox” is quite arrogant, to say the least. And, to be honest, I’m quite happy it’s not going to happen until FF is managed by Mozilla and their poor choices.
The obligatory use Firefox has been a running gag in the FOSS community for ages now. Nothing arrogant about it, though it does come across as a bit blunt and brazen, to be fair.
It’s just that letting a single entity be the ultimate authority on how the internet (or anything, for that matter) should look like is objectively a bad idea.
Especially when that entity is widely known for being insidiously self serving, malicious and manipulative.
That being said, enough people have explained this already, so I’m gonna leave it there.
Have a nice day
Dude, look, I’m sorry Firefox killed your dog (or whatever). But please stop spamming your irrational hate-boner for Mozilla all over the thread.
UX is not worse than Chrome, please shut up.
use Firefox
been doing that since I left Internet Explorer, aeons ago
The EU is rapidly becoming a neoliberal hellehole resembling the US. I no longer have any hope for existing institutions resisting corporate encroachment. Best that can be done is the support of initiatives like the fediverse and foss in general but if the current trend continues even that is in a precarious position.
The EU is so utterly out of whack right now.
You got the proposal of chat control on one hand, and stuff like replaceable batteries on the other.
Like, make up your mind already, do you want to help your citizens or not? It’s almost like they do it on purpose to keep our expectations in check.
That’s a good way for me to never visit your website again. Honestly, this kinda sounds like the death of the internet if I’m being honest. This would transform it from a free medium into a full blown corporate dystopia. It’s really scary to see the digital (corporate) development over the past couple decades. Would be really cool if we don’t move further towards some cyberpunk like future where megacorps control everything.
Google taking some ideas from Cyberpunk 2077 and NetWatch.
It’s already owned by corporations.
- argv_minus_one ( @argv_minus_one@beehaw.org ) 6•1 year ago
That’s a good way for me to never visit your website again.
Good luck with that when all websites do this.
We’ll start our own websites, with blackjack and hookers.
That really is the solution. We desperately need to make our own websites again and boycott the shitty corporate controlled ones. If we can replace Reddit with Lemmy, we can replace every other piece of shit site or app they come up with too.
Bring back web rings!
Once this sort of shit becomes normalized enough with websites, I’m sure it’ll come to ISPs themselves, too.
So it’s come to this. The end of the internet.
Fuck DRMs and fuck these turds
And they went ahead and blocked comments now - “An owner of this repository has limited the ability to comment to users that have contributed to this repository in the past.”
Fucking cowards
EDIT: I went ahead and reported the distro as malware. Also, it feels like the internet is about to split in a open internet (basically just like tor) and a corporate internet where if you don’t pay the big tech you can’t access anything.
Given how much I miss earlier versions of the internet, when almost all content was created and maintained by early-adopting pioneers, I would personally encourage a clear split from site-powered corporate shenanigans.
Mountains of objective, factual resources have found themselves drowned out of public mindshare by an endless firehose of intellectual junk food produced by SEOs, bots, AIs, and anyone else on the hunt for their daily clicks. I have trouble even finding good examples anymore thanks to today’s endlessly-manipulatable search algorithms.
Inb4 you can only browse the internet with Chromium.
Well, the engineers say it themselves: nothing would prevent websites developers to prevent access from browsers that do not support this “Web DRM”.
My biggest fear though is that it becomes a standard which all browsers will have to support to stay relevant. And with Google building the engine used by the vast majority of browsers, they can force this upon other browser engines (ie. Safari and Firefox).
It’s such a potent example why everyone who cares need to stop using Chromium based browsers before it’s too late. Stunts like this would be much harder to pull if there wasn’t a de facto browser monopoly.
It’s such a potent example of why we need antitrust laws to actually be applied to tech companies.
But our government here in the US is both run by geriatric idiots who don’t even know how to use a computer let alone regulate one and also is bought out by these companies.
This is a blatant, out in the open anti-competitive action that is suggested in this article and it shouldn’t legally be allowed to stand, but our politicians understand so little about how technology works that they’ll blindly accept Google telling them that it isn’t monopolistic rather than actually try to understand it.
All they need is a few major sites and tools requiring it to domino everything on the internet. Suddenly it’s standard.
Most businesses all use either chrome or Microsoft. And they’re both Chromium.
Literally just applying it to YouTube would send tremors throughout the internet. If YouTube stopped working in Safari or Firefox, anyone using those browsers who don’t really care and just liked those browsers for other reasons will give them up and go to a chromium based browser.
Google is fighting an apathy battle. One they know they can probably win because they own the Internet’s favorite content hub
It makes sense that they have YouTube in their sights for DRM lockdown.
Google will just say that pages with DRM will rank higher in their search and it’s all done.
It’s time to fork the community internet off the corporate one. Set up our own DRM-free sites and our own search engines, run by open source software. With blackjack and hookers.
We kinda have the small web (Gemini & Gopher), but it is a different, much simpler format than html (Gopher is literally plaintext)
I remember gopher but I haven’t used it for about 30 years. Does anyone still use that?
Doesn’t Firefox support DRM? I know on netacad.com it prompts me to enable it, or rather on a CCNA course. Or is it something else?
What you are mentioning is media DRM (think Netflix, Spotify). This is something entirely different: a mechanism to ensure the entire content of a web page is not tempered with.
Oh… thanks.
Please drink verification can
ERROR! Piracy detected!
I have exceeding low expectations, but I would hope that would be grounds for an antitrust lawsuit against Google as Chromium browsers account for roughly 70% of all users (based on numbers I pulled from Wikipedia)
Subscription-based, restricted to verified accounts Chromium, that shares your personally identifiable public key with each website you visit.
ShuddersIt makes such complete sense for Google and Microsoft that it’s a wonder we didn’t see it coming sooner.
- argv_minus_one ( @argv_minus_one@beehaw.org ) English8•1 year ago
Not just Chromium, but the proprietary binary Chrome. Chromium can still be modified to block ads.
How can the smartest people be so dumb?
Please, please, PLEASE… if you care about a healthy open internet, donate to Mozilla, Thunderbird, and/or the EFF, at the minimum, if you’re able to.
I liked to subscribe to Youtube Premium to support my favourite channels but this kinda stuff turns me off.
Mozilla, Thunderbird, and/or the EFF,
Do you know that donation to Mozilla don’t (and can’t legally) fund Firefox development, right? (opposite to what happens for Thunderbird, actually).
But, hey, you can guarantee Mozilla’s CEO a better retirement:
Thus, your money are better spent donating to Thunderbird or EFF or whatever other foundation that does something actually useful.
Yeah, you’re gonna have to cite your sources on that one.
Mozilla income went from $78m to $497m. It’s a much bigger organisation to before. Also if you inflation rate the 500k pay, it’s now worth $710k
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Affiliations
The web changed, and complexity increased and even staying in there against a larger adversary is hard. Unless you run a company that is competing with Google, I don’t think you’re really qualified to comment.
Edit: Just realise your description has “Fuck Mozilla!” and you’ve been bashing it since you started on Lemmy. Looks very shilly to me.
Most 9-5s are dumb as fuck
Are you something else? What’s your work schedule?
8-4, he’s an early bird. He gets so much more worms than those 9-5 dummies.
Pffff, who does anything but 7-15? ;P
I said what I said and I am a business owner so my work schedule is 24x7.
Why are you so aggressive? Lack of sleep? I was just asking
Outside of some government jobs, 9-5 is all but dead. Most of the Western world is [at least] 8-6…
8 to 8, more like.
[sad crying noises]
How can the smartest people be so dumb?
Who are you talking about exactly? Because I doubt that everyone working at google knows everything thats going on, even while working on it.
It’s not doing something dumb. It’s another power grab. We passed the stage where giving the benefit of the doubt is a reasonable thing to do well over a decade ago.
I wonder how much of the money would go to the creators themselves rather than YouTube though. I’d rather use adblock and give money directly through patreon or something. Fuck Google.
This is exactly the kind of thing that demostrates why DRM shouldn’t be part of the web standards. It’s very existence is abuse and this use even more so.
DRM needs to be illegal.
I feel that rather than DRM being illegal, Google and Chromium browsers having monopoly on the web is what allows these crazy ideas to have any room.
If the browser market was more evenly spread and there were more parties involved, these ideas woldn’t fly so easily.
The push/money/dark-force behind this was more Disney and co. Tech only really cared about killing Flash and all the other extensions used to do DRM. If DRM wasn’t allowed in the first place, none of would have existed.
Google is hindrance to open web, like IE7 was with ActiveX.
Only difference is that IE7 wanted developers to develop for IE7, while Google also want to fully control the web and bend it according to its needs
And there’s zero chance of some other company dethroning Chrome like IE was. The only way that happens is with government intervention to protect the free market.
But of course antitrust enforcement is dead in this country, so that’s not happening. Just look at the obviously anticompetitive Activision acquisition that went through recently. Too many politicians slept through their economics classes, and they think that giant corporations are good for consumers.
Too many politicians slept through their economics classes, and they think that giant corporations are good for consumers.
They just think that giant corporations are good for politicians.
This is super fucked up. I use Stylus extensively to customize the UI on so many sites. Not even for adblocking or that kind of thing, but for accessibility. I actually learned to code many years ago specifically so I could write my own userstyles so that popular websites would be more accessible for me. This is not just predatory on an ads and money level but on an accessibility level too.
I reported him on github, for all the good that will do.
I’m afraid that reporting him to another big corporation(Microsoft owns Github) is rather futile.
You’re right, why are we allowing the internet be be monopolized like this? it is futile because we’re basically giving up all control and forming a dependence on these few select tech companies.
Same
Having thought about it for a bit, it’s possible for this proposal to be abused by authoritarian governments.
Suppose a government—say, Wadiya—mandated that all websites allowed on the Wadiyan Internet must ensure that visitors are using a list of verified browsers. This list is provided by the Wadiyan government, and includes: Wadiya On-Line, Wadiya Explorer, and WadiyaScape Navigator. All three of those browsers are developed in cooperation with the Wadiyan government.
Each of those browsers also happen to send a list of visited URLs to a Wadiyan government agency, and routinely scan the hard drive for material deemed “anti-social.”
Because the attestations are cryptographically verified, citizens would not be able to fake the browser environment. They couldn’t just download Firefox and install an extension to pretend to be Wadiya Explorer; they would actually have to install the spyware browser to be able to browse websites available on the Wadiyan Internet.
Once you get to that point it’s gonna get back to dark web or some other nonstandard communication form to bypass the traditional http/https protocols for “web browsing”.
🤔 People could just make a new protocol and build a separate internet from the ground up.
But they’d have to do it on free Linux computers, because the ones with Windows and Mac OSes (and the specially made chips) can be accessed directly by those companies. In principle, they can see into everyone’s hard drives and add or delete shit to their whims. So a way around that would have to be found too. Scary…
Basically in those situations people find new ways to be connected. For example, while satellite dishes are banned in Iran they are pretty common in that if you don’t have one you propably know someone who has. Mesh networks are currently being used in Sudan and have been in other countries where government has shut down internet. Usually shutdowns and restrictions don’t happen without warning so people have usually started to smuggle in satellite internet devices. But there are two huge issues. One. you need certain level of technological literacy and there is often some financial cost applied. If you asked my mom what is dark web she would look me weirdly. Partially as her English is not great but I have never heard anyone actually using the Finnish version but mainly because she has no idea what it is. Majority of people are somewhat priced out of satellite internet globally. And no one has heard of mesh networks unless they are techies, activists or people who have experienced government severely limiting internet access.
I am always astounded about how big of procentage manage to stay connected. Need really is mother of inventions. But if you put my mom, stepdad or stepmom in these situations, they would have no idea where to start. The rest of my immediate family would figure it out as we are more or less techies.
So soon we’ll need uBlock Origin FitGirl Edition?
Hopefully we won’t have to deal with a uBlock Origin Empress Edition
It doesn’t seem to be targeting ad-blockers in particular (or other page customizing extensions), although that may result eventually. What it does do is let webpages restrict what web browsers and operating systems you are allowed to use, just like how SafetyNet on Android lets apps restrict you to using an OS signed by Google. That could end up with web pages forcing you to use a web browser and OS the big players like Google, Microsoft and Apple, blocking any less restrictive or less used competors like Firefox and Linux, thus creating a cryptographically enforced oligopoly. And even if they signed e.g. Firefox, it would only be certain builds of it. That would make it impossible to make a truly open-source browser that can access pages using this API. Quite concerning.
It literally lists countering ad-blocking as a use case.
Users like visiting websites that are expensive to create and maintain, but they often want or need to do it without paying directly. These websites fund themselves with ads, but the advertisers can only afford to pay for humans to see the ads, rather than robots. This creates a need for human users to prove to websites that they’re human, sometimes through tasks like challenges or logins.
That section isn’t about ad-blockers, it’s about botnet ad fraud; using bots to inflate ad view counts to make advertisers pay more.
Unfortunately what’s going to happen in reality is that any non-standard ad consumption (including non consumption) will be flagged as fraudulent. “We cannot verify your activity, please disable your add-ons to continue”.
Possibly, it’s quite nebulous at this point
Yeah, this goes way beyond adblockers.
This is straight up 3E for web browsers - it’s a short road from this to forcing everyone onto apps and chromium, and good luck explaining to a politician why this is a big deal.
This year is going to show up in a lot of history books… Assuming we still make history books when all this is over
And they try to demonise Tor and I2P… At this rate, the dark web would soon be the only place to go.
stop using their services
Yeah, I’m about to the point where I’m just going to buy a domain and host my own email server.