I would like to follow up with your statement about what was in that article. I was searching for some obscure song earlier, a weird joke metal track that made me giggle like ten years ago (the long story doesn’t really matter here) and when I was doing my search in private, I managed to find it within a couple searches because Google’s intuition read me, even though I am using a private browsing session.
That’s scary good stuff. And I cannot deny the results. Even when searching for illegal things, Google will always put the results front-and-centre if it’s in the clearweb. Alphabet will cater to people who break the law and media corporations hate it but they also have YouTube, and Alphabet has media corpos by the horns because of YouTube, a loss leader who never achieved profitability but has such a large and synonymous presence with domestic clearweb video sharing, so to take it down would really be taking down an institution most people stand by.
Honestly I think if video sharing was limited to less popular websites like DailyMotion, MetaCafe, LiveLeak, Albino Black Sheep and eBaumsWorld there might be a strength in numbers thing for restoring net neutrality, but none of them bear the same weight as YouTube. Then you have Facebook and Facebook Video. Then you have other lesser-known, but still major outlets like Vimeo. And Twitch covers the gaming segment, which is now owned by Amazon. I am most certain if strong institutions that had been stalking us all this time on the Internet hadn’t existed, NN wouldn’t even be talked about. A web which treats traffic equally wouldn’t even be considered because a bunch of puny people whining about it wouldn’t have the same significance as big brother saying to big daddy But the people want their Internet cheap and easy!
While we know in the back of our minds they want it so more money goes to them, as Amazon by no means wants to punish people for Trump’s trade war tactics with his recent tariffs against China (as they ponder how their add-on items could be justified with a 25% markup) some of the big Internet corporations, while putting their best interests forward also double down on consumer protection because some government policies are outright punishing the end-user.
So I see it, at the end of the day as a game of give-and-take. You’re giving up privacy to help them, absolutely but these people stealing your privacy also give a damn about the health of the Internet because that’s their turf. They don’t want that messed with, and while we hate anti-privacy tactics, we should be supportive of their efforts to ensure the Internet at large continues to be a place for information to be distributed freely.
Those we talk about already know they do evil things which is why they don’t bother to censor us, but like us they don’t want to spend more money on the platform we share with them.