I'd add that we've seen how the leadership/reputation of different AI leaders, and with 2 decades of history with Larry and Sergey, they seem to come up on top as the most respectable.

Did they ever really abuse the power Google could have wielded? I could be missing something, but for the most part they seem to just get down to building and pushing technology/science forward and avoid drama rather than welcome it.

They're literally not upstreaming Android security fixes:

https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117282080803799576

> Google should not be gatekeeping security patches to the standard Android platform code from Android OEMs but that's what they've started doing.

The whole Android developer verification program controversy.

These 2 are the recent things that come to mind that are most adjacent to "power-abuse".

I wonder if AI could analyze a kernel diff, extract the doctor fixes, and apply/transfer them to an older Android kernel that's out of support.

> Did they ever really abuse the power Google could have wielded?

Plenty of times. Perhaps the worse is pushing Manifest v3 with no support for real ad blockers in Chrome. Not to mention no support for ad blockers in Chrome mobile.

Also, their stealing of newspaper content.

Their new push for AI summaries instead of actual search in their search product, stealing even more clicks from sites that actually produce information.

YouTube pushing Shorts to everyone, and now the weird text posts that you can't hide.

In general their gigantic push for ads everywhere all of the time.

Google, with the help of Facebook, destroyed the independent online publishing business. They made it impossible to maintain an honest publication and tunneled users to low quality websites until there's not much left of respect.

> Did they ever really abuse the power Google could have wielded?

The "Do no evil" never being an official slogan and people saying it's no longer true for the last 10 years or so, they're just really massive. They do mess up a lot, but when you're Microsoft, Apple or Google sized, its nearly impossible to get everything right all at once.

They are a search and ads monopoly, so there is that.

> Did they ever really abuse the power Google could have wielded?

Is this a sarcasm?

What are you talking about? They've literally contracted with the DoW with no red lines.

That's "trustworthy" to you?

Both founders are in the Epstein files, with Sergey Brin visiting Epstein's private island.

There are pictures of Sergey in the files, but they are rather milquetoast. He's just sitting next to David Brooks of the NYTimes. I don't think there's any evidence he's engaged in sex abuse.

The main reason Google had masseuses in the early days was that Sergey used them as his personal harem

Which tells you of the poor moral character (if not outright participation and complicity) of many people who seemed respectable.

Eh, people are pretty upset about the ad-driven nature of the internet which was largely spearheaded by Google.

However, I don't think the alternative would have made people any happier (and frankly they probably would be justifiably even more angry)

Can you give any hypothetical examples that you have in mind. World without google and how (even more angry)

The alternative would have been paywalls galore with subscription tiers for everything. Only rich people would be able to afford having subs for everything, while the poor would just get the most dirt tier scraps and wouldn't be able to afford many platforms.

Nothing would be "free", so google sub, news source subs, reddit sub, youtube sub, discord sub, instagram sub, FB sub, app stores are full of paid only apps, podcasts are all paywalled, all the ad supported stuff is subscription supported. Everything would feel like constant nickle and dime'ing you.

On the bright side, there would be no ads, and relatively robust privacy.

Ehh, the internet was worse before Google. Google actually became popular for having a nice blank page with only the search bar. Even the ads they had later were much cleaner compared to yahoo, altavista, lycos, aol and other firms of that time.

I am not rooting for them, I don’t own stock from either just that like GP I was sure by now Google would have eaten others’ lunch. I was expecting a Gemini 4 before Mythos/Fable and Astra just from what GP pointed out: a cash hose, data centers, good engineers. But I underestimated the investment others would keeping absorbing so started to lose confidence in my Google prediction. Let’s see how Gemini 4 holds up. Are we going to see a flurry of scientific and mathematical breakthroughs from it?

Please check Gemini's t and c, as the last time I checked when they had a good pro model (3.1) you couldn't turn off training on your data with a paid account .