On Fri, Feb 23, 2024 at 07:33:11PM +1100, Kim Holburn wrote: > https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/ > > How Google is killing independent sites like ours,And why you shouldn’t > trust product recommendations from big media publishers ranking at the top > of Google > > > Fascinating article about how bad google search is becoming, as large > publishers game or pay google for top spots. > > > Too long and with too much detail to reproduce here, worth a read though.
Yeah, well, the net was corporatised and taken over by Wall Street and marketing corporations decades ago (with all the fuss about "Big Tech", everyone's ignoring the fact that "Big Tech" was taken over by "Big Propaganda" way back in the 90s, long before they even had a chance to be "Big" - the problems caused by "big tech" aren't new, they're the same problems caused by big marketing accelerated and magnified by faster/better comms tech). They've been squeezing out everyone and everything else ever since. Once again, publicly funded advances are privatised and stolen to enrich and empower private corporations. For one small example, APNIC are about to null-route and steal my /24 network addresses which I was given by AUNIC back in the early 90s. But it's totally OK because they had a vote (plutocratic, not democratic - more network blocks = more subscription fees = way more votes) and invented a policy that says it's completely legit. This will take down my DNS and the domains I run, web, git, mail, and other services I run for myself. Only corporate services are tolerated on the modern internet. DIY will be exterminated. They've been trying to extort me into joining their organisation, accept their terms and conditions (esp. for my IP addresses which are "historical resources" **NOT** subject to their T&C) and pay their outrageous annual membership fees ($575/year to refrain from deleting my whois records)...and after much back and forth about how they have no right to do that, they're saying "F You, we're taking them anyway. Sucks to be you" dressed up in corporate bland-speak. They'll be stealing my addresses at the end of this month. Anyway, more generally, I once (very naively and very stupidly) thought that the net would be a force for good in the world. I couldn't have been more wrong - it's just enabled a totalitarian surveillance and brainwashing nightmare, whether that's used in service of so-called "communist" state-capitalist slave regimes, or for corporations and the oligarchs who own them to reproduce the worst excesses of slave regimes in allegedly democratic countries. Different plutocrats with different approaches in how they control the serfs. Back then, I imagined that there would be a billion alternatives for every kind of service - both commercial and hobbyist. Something for everyone, there's no shortage of "space" in the virtual world. I guess I was stupid enough to still have some small belief in free market ideology, or the "marketplace of ideas" at least. I'm thoroughly cured of that by now, I've been watching the total enshittification of the net for decades. craig _______________________________________________ Link mailing list [email protected] https://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
