Props to Brendan! Firefox and Brave are have put their foot down. Now they need our support. I’m hoping that nobody here is using Chrome (or anything else Google for that matter). We the users are what gave Google their power. We wanted free shit and look where that landed us. Time to turn things around.

Yes, the Pixel is a very good piece of hardware once you remove the crap software. If not the Pixel, there are plenty of other phone manufacturers around the world. Purism is another interesting option. Android is an open source project and Google cannot shut it down. There will always be ways. The majority are actually pretty smart and capable, just afraid of change. They wake up at some point though.

The asleep will continue to feed those big corps with their blood. The rest of us will move to other solutions. That is life.

I think they are pretty good, and return some stuff that is censored out of Google and Bing. And if I don’t find what I’m looking for, its very easy to use Bing which is pretty similar to Google. Microsoft is no better than Google, but we can let them serve us when it suits us, rather than the other way around.

iPhone is far from the only alternative out there. There are plenty of de-Googled solutions for Android like LineageOs. If you are more technically inclined, Graphene is superior to iphone in security also. These solutions can make use of the playstore or proxy it through Aurora depending on your personal preferences.

Its the other way around. Startpage uses Bing.

Duckduck is definitely a good start, but keep in mind it just anonymizes Google search for you. Brave, Quant, Mojeek and more have indexed their own databases. We need entirely different setups to get around Google’s massive censorship and opinion shaping algos that Duckduck cannot bypass. Searx is also interesting as it allows you to choose from a large list of different search engines.

There are already several projects based on Chromium that are very well established such as Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, and Opera. The project will continue just fine without Google if need be. If they all resist the changes together, Google will have a problem. I’m not expecting anything from Microsoft, but the others might.

Neutral like electricity. It is a force that can be used for good or bad. Google is trying to harness that energy for its own profit and control. I wasn’t referring to the structures created to administer it. That is another can of worms.

At his point it’s like saying stop using the internet. No it’s not, there are plenty of very good alternatives. I know because I haven’t used anything Google in years and I fully engage with society. People just have to put in some effort and stop being spoiled babies and whining all the time when everything is not given to them ready to use and free.

My preferred option would be total nationalization of big tech platforms and handling them as public utilities. Sounds good, but you forget that governments in the West are simply employees of the big corps and banks. It would be the same shit, probably worse because now they wouldn’t have to pretend.

Fully agree, I was just trying to keep it relevant to Google. All that shit needs to be dropped. As people realize that rather than free, all that shit is really expensive, maybe they’ll make a move.

the 10% sounds like bait. Once they’ve got everyone on board and things are running smoothly (for them), it will be muuuch harder to resist.

I like your tude dude!

Everyone is whining while still holding on to big corps balls.

And what happens when they decide to revoke that 5-10% after they got everyone onboard?

Not the Internet, that is neutral. It is only one large corp that is trying to control the Internet. If everyone boycotts them, then they will fail.

Well I was referring to keeping the good that comes out of Google and discarding the bad. Firefox, actually librewolf is superior but has nothing to do with Google.

It is ironic, but the Pixel is good piece of hardware. So you discard the crap (Google software) and keep what is good (the hardware). That is the way forward. Discard chrome, keep Chromium or Brave for example.

I think they are too big for that. They are more powerful than many nation states.

Google controls way too much. People need to stop using their products. Many people complaining right now are still using Google stuff. If everyone concerned stop using Google stuff, that would cause them to reconsider very quickly.

I assume everyone is spying but i use a vpn so I don’t care. Censorship here is difficult for a server as people can very easily change to another one, and money grabs are pretty hard here 😉 Nothing is perfect, but I like this place a lot more than reddit. I don’t use anything Google and am enjoying that also.