Google’s Plan To DRM The Web Goes Against Everything Google Once Stood For

I would settle for “broken”

I think the X is already taken

I can't wait for the "D Corporation" to be born out of it

I feel like at this point it should be obvious but because they have their fingers in so many pies a lot of people don't notice.

Google is an ad company and basically everything they do at this point serves that. They should have changed their name to doubleclick.

When you need to please shareholders, this is what happens.

I think the Don't Be Evil motto was true up until they decided to go public. That was the start of the end, basically.

Cory Doctorow is usually pretty interesting. Here is the essay where he talks about enshittification. Not some huge revelation, but truth nonetheless.

I hate, hate, hate that you're making me defend Google here, but they're the only smartphone, desktop/laptop oem that open source their os. They open source the browser, arguably their most important software. They continue to release their code under open licenses. Now compare this to how Microsoft was (and still is) in the 90s when Google started coming into prominence.

"Don't be evil" was a direct response to companies like them.

Too often people comment as if the last five years of their experience with a company is all they need to know when remarking about something that was coined over twenty years ago. Context matters.

Ever used email before GMail?

Ever had one of those in-dash or on-window outdated GPS units that cost a pretty penny to keep current?

Ever had online storage and file transfer/sharing before Google Drive?

Ever searched before Google itself presented their search engine?

Ever had a "smart"phone before Android?

They may suck now with the increased enshittification of services... before they came along the web was a very rough place. And expensive as hell. Don't discredit Google because you weren't around to see how they improved things. Before it became about appeasing the stockholders, what Google bringing to the web was a -really- exciting time. Getting 1GB (and an ever increasing quota) for free webmail was fucking astounding, absolutely unheard of... and that was with the best spam filtering anyone had ever seen. Now everything that wasn't done before Google did it is taken for granted.

That said. I have to admit there's a sense of sadness within me when it comes to all of this. Google HAS gotten worse. And it's compounded by the fact that I remember how much better they used to be. Now I've come to have to accept that I'll be retiring my (singledictionaryword)@gmail address and start using Google services less. I'll still be using Android, but exclusively third party roms and without dependence on GApps as default... and knowing that it has come to this fucking sucks.

1999-2009-ish was a fun time online. Endless possibilities. Google was a big part of that.

Hard disagree. Back in its early days, Google was genuinely decent. They competed by building better stuff than everyone else, and that's it.

There was no decent free email and no free maps before Google. You used to have to pay hundreds for decent mapping software.

The good old Web 2.0 days, when companies were falling over themselves to provide free APIs and see what people could do with them.

Google started going to shit when they brought out Android and everybody started trying to build walled gardens, and went full evil when that moral vacuum Pichai took over.

"Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around--nobody big, I mean--except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff--I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy."

Google's a phony!

all their services are shit

Many of their services are quite good. Their management and business operations have been turned to utter shit (for consumers). They've been told they need to make more money every quarter and they've run out of easy things to make money on, so they're now looking at their entire catalog with the sole focus of revenue generation and profit growth rather than merely being an impactful internet resource which is sustainably profitable.