Interest rates going up means investors are demanding more profit so all the tricks web companies have held off on till now are coming 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.

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.

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.

and now Google of all companies wants to lock down the whole internet?

Of all the companies, Google always seemed the most likely, both to want to and to be successful. They’ve tried before, sometimes in small ways, sometimes in larger more obvious ways (AMP, the implementation of content filtering in Chrome etc.).

They’re the world’s largest advertising and data harvesting company. It’s their business. Of course they want to lock the internet down to serve their goals of learning as much about you as possible and using that data to shove ads in your face.

Whenever using any Google/Alphabet product you have to ask yourself, “am I ok with this thing I’m about to use being built by the world’s largest advertising company?”. The answer should be “no” more than it is “yes”, particularly for things that have access to lots of your data, like web browsers, phones, home speakers etc.

What the fuck is happening to the internet recently?

Capitalism is spreading further into the dark reaches of the internet.

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.

And we saw this was going to happen at least 5 years ago. But since the majority don't care, we get what we deserve I guess.

Let's just hope this doesn't go through.

Wait, is Google in the process of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish on the free internet?

Hopefully we won't have to deal with a uBlock Origin Empress Edition

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).

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.