Better to De-Google sooner rather than later imho and it’s fairly safe to assume corporate greed will continue to send it’s products and services deeper into the abyss. I think using alternatives now will make life easier in the future as Google becomes less useful with each passing day. Also, just using Google gives them access to personal data to harvest and ad revenue. I think we should try to be conscientious consumers whenever possible and use less evil alternatives. I don’t want to support Google’s enshitification of the Internet, censorship, anti-competitive practices, etc…

This is the first you’ve heard about Google/Youtube censoring people or altering search queries? It must have been a decade ago when they removed Kodi from autocomplete because “it was used by pirates.” Even when I disagree with the people they remove, which is most of the time, I am still uncomfortable with a for profit corporation like Alphabet Inc having that much power to decide what people can and cannot see in addition to manipulating search results.

Nearly every content creator I follow talks about not being about to talk about certain issues for fear of being canceled. That’s censorship, maybe not Chinese style putting you in jail, but it’s still corporate censorship. Google has plenty of defense contracts, as well as contracts with other government agencies. Their previous CEO now leads the Defense Advanced Research Agency (DARPA) and they work with the defense department on AI and robotics.

A company as untrustworthy and clandestine as Google will make it difficult to connect some dots, but corporation are legally structured to always act in accordance with shareholder interest and Google legally has the right to remove whatever content it wants as a private company. Of course they remove, alter or censor results and content in order to increase profits, their CEO is legally required to act in this way to fulfill the mandate of their position.

Windows 11 is also much better at collecting personal data with improved analytics and Microsoft spyware running under the hood. Not to mention it’s superiority at serving advertisements and embedding them in nearly every aspect of the UI.

It’s doubtful that Microsoft shareholders have meetings about how to improve the user experience of their OS. I think they are more concerned with extracting every penny they can designing the most efficient backend to harvest data and push ads, kinda like our friends at Alphabet, Microsoft is trying so desperately to emulate.

Google Videos was an alternative to Youtube in the early days, but since Google is too greedy to invest in innovation, it just buys it’s competitors, so we don’t see them unless we consider community alternatives that can’t be bought by Alphabet like Peertube.

Isn’t greed inherently evil? Google takes it to a new level as they aren’t only a greedy corporation, but a military contractor embedded into the military industrial complex. So, when the US gets involved in a conflict Google profits and they control the flow of information through their search and video platform monopolies. They remove content critical of US military intervention, not to protect national security, but their profits from the defense sector.

I’ll never understand corporate apologists that live to defend the billion dollar companies ruining the Internet. Google is an ad company, but you can’t believe they’d alter search queries to sell ads? How could you possibly trust Google after they’ve been caught illegally sniffing people’s Wi-Fi with their Google Maps vehicles, spying on kids in school with Chromebooks and destroying incriminating documents in a federal court case to hide their actions?

Sometimes moneygrubbing shareholders do us a favor by steering companies into implementing terrible policies. If Reddit wouldn’t have been so greedy with it’s treatment of third-party app developers most of use wouldn’t be on Lemmy right now. If Microsoft forces Windows users to pay a subscription I think it sends more people away from closed-source garbage and into the arms of the open source community. I’ve enjoyed watching Reddit implode, hopefully I get to watch a similar show from our friends at Microsoft.

In my experience the suffering of losing a romantic love is less intense the second time, but the falling in love and passion can also be less intense and take longer to build up as you’re more guarded with your heart after being heartbroken before.

Using an advertising company for anything and expecting objective results is a bit ridiculous. Use DuckDuckGo, Brave Search, MetaGer, anything but Google.

Sorry for the n00b question, but what does the =n,b stand for in the variable?

Please don’t recommend Google DNS 8.8.8.8 in the DeGoogle community. This would be the last service I’d use for privacy and security. Cloudflare isn’t much better for privacy. Mullvad’s public DNS offering is the best I’ve found that appears committed to privacy and supporting libre projects.

https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls/

Thanks for the tips in this post, very helpful!

Thanks for the civil tone of your reply, I have to agree that even if corporate personhood was abolished the oligarchs would just find another way to control the political system keeping rigged to favor their interests. Lobbying in the US started during the Civil War from what I understand, this lad to the creation of a Military Industrial Complex that continues to lobby US lawmakers into conflicts motivated by greed and not diplomatic interests. If you don’t believe me, please listen to the warning from President Eisenhower in his farewell address.

Do you think it’s in the people’s best interest to keep the current corporate structure in tact and legislate lobbying reforms instead?

It’s certainly “practical” for shareholders with controlling interests in these publicly traded companies, but very impractical for everyone else.

The word corporation may have existed before the 14th Amendment, but the legal definition was entirely different. The word “Country” was also used to describe the state a person was from in the 19th century, if asked about one’s country, one would would reply with the name of their state of residence. The meaning over a word can change entirely in a couple generations.

What criticism of capitalism is more relevant than the abomination of corporate personhood? Toss a few more right-wing Supreme Court rulings into the mix like Citizen’s United giving corporations the ability to spend unlimited and unregulated money lobbying (buying) the legislative system and you have a nation in decline with a failing economic system.

Legally only citizens are allowed to lobby congress, if corporations were no longer considered people, then real people would have more access to power than their corporate overlords.

I think it’s time to revisit the question of why these corporations exist as “people” under the law, when they clearly operate without humanity. The perversion of justice that granted them this right was taken directly from the 14th Amendment in 1886. That amendment was written to grant citizenship to freed slaves. What a coincidence that slavery ended, but was immediately replaced with a new structure called corporations.

Reagan should certainly be known as one of the worst people to occupy the Presidency, but I think for a bigger perspective on how we got to this place, the 1886 SCOTUS decision to recognize corporations as people is a good start.