
I fear Google's control of the web - smacktoward
http://scripting.com/2018/06/12/140329.html
======
pwinnski
People are going to dismiss Dave Winer as a crank right up until the day they
or one of the things on which they rely get "googled," and then they will wish
they'd listened sooner.

Google's power over the web today, already, is not healthy. There are a lot of
people within Google who care deeply about the free and open web, and a lot of
people who don't, or who define "free" or "open" in ways that involving
trusting a for-profit corporation more than anybody wise ever should. Many
people get upset when they see Google being attacked, because the part of
Google they depend on is a part that really supports the free and open web, or
because they themselves don't value the freeness and openness as much as they
should.

Google delivers a lot of value right now, and without people pushing back,
hard, that value will enable them to get away with anything.

Anybody who has been around long enough ought to understand that power you
grant to someone you trust inevitably ends up in the hands of someone you
don't. Political parties switch back and forth, CEOs and corporate priorities
come and go. Sometimes it's best to accept an option that is second-best today
in order to avoid giving too much power to the organization providing the
first-best for them to misuse tomorrow.

~~~
quanticle
I agree that Google has far too much control over the web. However, this is a
silly reason to argue against HTTPS. HTTPS is an open standard. Google doesn't
control it. HTTPS doesn't require anyone to use any Google product. You can
use HTTPS just fine by getting your certificates from LetsEncrypt and browsing
with Mozilla Firefox. Or Microsoft Edge. Or Internet Explorer. Moreover, the
security guarantees that HTTPS brings to the web benefit everyone, not just
Google.

More generally, Dave Winer seems to have an attitude of reflexively opposing
everything that Google advocates, merely because it is _Google_ that is
advocating for it. It reminds me of the late 90's and early 2000's when open-
source people talked about "M$" and reflexively opposed everything that
Microsoft did merely because it was _Microsoft_ that was doing it, leaving
aside technical merits or other considerations.

Corporations are neither pure good, nor pure evil. They are collections of
people with collective interests that they pursue. Sometimes, like in the case
of HTTPS, or net neutrality, those interests align with our interests as
developers and users. In those cases, we should ally ourselves with
corporations and use their leverage to effect change more quickly. In other
cases, such as with RSS, and vendor lock-in, our interests diverge and we
should oppose them with all our might so that we don't lose the free and open
Internet that we've become accustomed to.

In both cases, however, we should examine the issue on the merits of that
issue, and neither support nor oppose merely because the "right" or "wrong"
organization is pushing for it.

~~~
amanzi
> HTTPS is an open standard. Google doesn't control it. HTTPS doesn't require
> anyone to use any Google product.

The problem is that Google controls the most popular interfaces to consuming
HTTP and HTTPS, i.e. their Chrome browser and their search engine. And so
Google is in a position where they control how these protocols are consumed,
which is the crux of Dave's argument. Google is already discouraging the use
of HTTP through warning messages in Chrome and by adjusting search rank
algorithms for HTTP sites. Dave's concern is that Google will "turn off" HTTP
access in the same way they did with RSS after capturing the market share for
consuming RSS feeds and then shutting down Google Reader and removing
discoverabilty of RSS feeds in Chrome.

Dave Winer has been around the Web for longer than most and you'd be foolish
to write him off as a curmudgeon. Dave is to the open Web what RMS is to FOSS.

~~~
BryantD
It is immensely frustrating to me that Dave's excellent point about legacy
content is obscured by his characterization of the push to HTTPS. At the core,
the idea that security only matters for transactions is wrong. For example, I
want my blog to be served over HTTPS because I don't want anyone to be able to
edit my words between my server and the person reading them.

Now, Dave acknowledges this: "They tell us to worry about man-in-the-middle
attacks that might modify content, but fail to mention that they can do it in
the browser, even if you use a 'secure' protocol."

The rhetorical slip here is bad. "They" is _me_. I say you should worry about
man-in-the-middle attacks. I can't "do it in the browser." He keeps doing
this; he's acting like Google is the only entity that thinks the move is a
good idea.

It also fails to acknowledge that partial solutions matter! What, I should
give up on putting locks on my door just because the lock manufacturer can go
right through them? Further, right now I have a choice of three plausible
browsers, and I can switch between them freely. There's a significant
difference between the danger of man-in-the-middle attacks and the danger of a
browser level attack. (Both pretty low, to be fair, but still.)

And that's just the concern about attacks. Tracking is a whole additional
issue that he doesn't acknowledge.

So, yeah, he makes some good points. But since he won't engage in discussion
on the topic, they're not useful and they get drowned out by the noise.

~~~
davewiner
_won 't engage in discussion_ \-- it's been a long day, lots of discussion,
and most of it repetitive. The fact that so much discussion is needed is a
pretty good indication that the open web should not be corporatized. Google
should create a new medium, like they did with AMP, and make it opt-in. Stop
trying to be the dictator of the web. And you -- please stop saying bullshit
about me. Thanks. Tired.

------
microdrum
"[Google] talks to me like I have no idea how tech companies work internally,
but I do. After the next reorg they won't remember any commitments the
previous management made."

OMG this is so true in our experience. Google doesn't quite lie, but they come
very close. They are always changing people and policies, always in a downward
direction. Makes me think they won't be around for much longer. They're just
maximizing a monopoly, and everything they do reinforces that view.

~~~
rhizome
_Google doesn 't quite lie, but they come very close._

The telltale sign for this is a lack of true commitment in their statements.
It only counts when they draw a line in the sand.

------
crazygringo
> _" once Google has control of the web, they can turn off huge parts of it
> for whatever reason..."_

What does "turn off" even mean? Following the links, it looks like the author
is opposed specifically to Chrome pushing sites to migrate from HTTP to HTTPS,
mainly because he claims "the web is a social agreement not to break things"
and "we will lose a lot of sites that were quickly posted on a whim, over the
25 years the web has existed."

This is hard for me to get on board with. Standards evolve and improve because
major players push them. We don't use floppy disks anymore either. HTTPS
provides desperately needed privacy and integrity guarantees. And archive.org
continues to make historical sites available -- over HTTPS even if the
original wasn't.

~~~
post_break
Google could decide that it doesn't want to be associated with guns in any way
and not allow advertising for any type of gun related content and purge all
gun content on any of its platforms.

Replace guns with ________ and repeat.

~~~
martin1975
well, there's two ways to solve that. Regulate or invest in the competition ..
or create competition.

Which one would you like?

~~~
jessaustin
ISTM the best way to "create competition" would be to start using competing
services... which is what DW and others are suggesting in this very thread.

------
beaner
Ugh, Google Reader wasn't a "huge part of the web," it was a product offered
by a company. If GR and RSS were basically equivalent then Google was right to
conclude that RSS wasn't popular. RSS is an open standard and GR never had any
compelling competition even though it should have if RSS were used widely at
all. That people are still angry over this shows how out of touch many
developers are with the real world / average consumers.

~~~
Kalium
Google Reader was a huge part of the web experience for a small number of
rather vocal people. It was a social network for many of them, and they feel
like they lost something they built and owned.

Myself, I used google reader. But only for RSS. So I just moved to a different
reader and I've been fine ever since.

~~~
RIMR
I guess I just don't see the point of complaining when a company shuts down
their own product.

It was a free product. It came with no guarantee. Just because you liked it
doesn't mean you were entitled to it, and it doesn't mean Google did anything
wrong by shuttering it.

If you are still using RSS, you need to get with the program. RSS aggregators
are out of style for a reason...

~~~
jessaustin
What are you saying? That we should use Atom instead? There is no important
difference between the protocols. Or are you saying that we shouldn't use
"simple syndication" anymore? Why, so we can let Facebook tell us what to look
at? Yeah no thanks.

~~~
Kalium
I believe parent is saying that RSS became something publishers publishers did
not prefer to Twitter, Facebook, and real-time search. Simple syndication
might be preferable to users, but it is not for publishers.

~~~
jessaustin
Sure, but I don't see how that's a _criticism_ of RSS? "Nobody uses it because
users prefer it!" Besides it still drives e.g. podcasting; apparently _those_
publishers are still making money.

~~~
Kalium
Publishers of text, as a whole, do not prefer RSS to other options to serve
the same purpose. That's not a _criticism_ , just a _comparison_. It means
that given the choice, which publishers mainly are, they opt for things that
aren't RSS.

------
deklerk
> but capturing RSS and then shutting it off

... what? Ultra, ultra hyperbole much? I get it, shutting down reader sucked,
but seriously you can literally use any RSS reader to read feeds. Google
didn't "kill RSS".

Seriously, voicing opinions is one thing but fear mongering and hyperbole is
another and this article leans far too heavily towards the latter.

~~~
Clubber
I'm not a big RSS guy, but when I read an article on that before, what I
understand happened is:

1\. RSS readers everywhere

2\. Google comes out with one

3\. Other RSS readers wither on the vine b/c everyone uses #2

4\. Google decides to sunset their RSS reader.

5\. ???

Is that wrong?

~~~
deklerk
Yep, not what happened. Google didn't make one; they acquired one. Google
sunset that reader (I'll agree that in retrospect it was the wrong move, but
regardless), but at no point did RSS readers stop existing. Two notes:

\- RSS readers are _dead simple_ to build. If you're an average programmer you
could make an MVP within 2 days.

\- Many of the RSS readers are/were free. I don't think Google having Reader
caused any great migrations, but even if it did I doubt it would have caused
other readers to implode or anything like that.

I _believe_ what happened is that Reader had a small but vocal user group who
were (understandably) upset at the sunsetting, and caused a big hubbub about
it. I _suspect_ many of today's Reader complainers have never actually used
Reader, and are just piggy-backing off some low-hanging Google bashing fruit.

Again, I'll happily nod at the badness of Google killing off Reader, but I
intensely dislike the amount of hyperbole in the statement that Google "killed
RSS". It's a thing that never took off. That's all that happened. It's still
accessible, there are many clients you could use, and so on - it just so
happens that most sites don't bother creating an RSS feed.

------
systematical
Look at what happened with Google Maps recently. Was pretty cheap to use,
people flocked to it. Then they changed prices. We went from never worrying
about paying since we have a relatively small amount of traffic, to scrambling
to reduce our usage. Now it is their product, they can do what they want with
it, but how many sites are pretty locked into Google Maps?

This seems to be what Google does. They either kill off a free service that
people relied on or begin charging lots of money.

~~~
kanox
Non-web person here: No idea that Google Maps costs money for anyone, assumed
it was ad-supported like anything else.

~~~
spadros
Well, in this case it's if you want to use their API to show maps in your
application. If you're doing that, you're going to need to pay them in terms
of total requests to their backend. Their B2B service and advertising probably
funds the normal consumer app (ie just logging onto 'maps.google.com' to find
your local coffee shop).

~~~
systematical
I think they gave us 2 months, which isn't really enough time to adequately
look at alternatives given all the other things going on in an organization.

Had we had more time I probably would have looked at doing our own
implementation using leaflet and Open Street Map. But that is a pretty big
project to throw in when are in the middle of a year long roadmap. I assume
this played into Googles strategy. Give them enough of a heads up, but not
enough time for most to move away.

~~~
jacquesm
You could simply pay them for the little bit of extra time that it would cost
you to figure out where you want to move.

------
sarcasmic
Combine this with yesterday's ill-received-on-HN 'HTTPS Anti-Vaxxers;
dispelling common arguments against securing the web' [1], where Scott Helme
calls out Dave Winer on his past articles that bemoan the effects of browser-
makers' push towards HTTPS.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17287877](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17287877)

------
sofaofthedamned
Isn't this the guy that got a bone-on about https ranking higher on Google
Search?

Edit: Yes, yes it is
[http://scripting.com/2014/08/08/myBlogDoesntNeedHttps.html](http://scripting.com/2014/08/08/myBlogDoesntNeedHttps.html)

------
tomcam
> My fear is this -- once Google has control of the web, they can turn off
> huge parts of it for whatever reason

Ask Dennis Prager, Steven Crowder, Philip DeFranco. This is old news, not a
vague fear

> It's like when we change administrations in Washington. Very chaotic

Not at all the same. In the USA, we have a baseline of actions the government
cannot take: it is described in the Constitution and contains a well defined
appeals process, as well as a large set of tools to protect against tyranny.
Google offers its users and even its paying paying clients none of these
privileges.

------
ucaetano
> once Google has control of the web

How does this even make sense?

This is like saying "Once flying squirrels take control of the government...".

Sure, a government controlled by flying squirrels is something scary. But that
doesn't make any sense.

You should be scared of walled gardens displacing the web.

~~~
siteshwar
> How does this even make sense ?

Google is highly influential in how information is consumed and distributed.
People use chrome to browse web, google search for searching information etc.
If they have major control over how information is distributed, they have
major control over the web. Ofcourse there are other similar services that are
not provided by Google, but they are very less influential due to lack of
users.

> You should be scared of walled gardens displacing the web.

What if web becomes a walled garden ? Look at what Google did with DRM[1],
even Mozilla had to give up their efforts to fight against it[2]. How could
that be possible without having a major influence over the web ?

[1] [https://boingboing.net/2017/01/30/google-quietly-makes-
optio...](https://boingboing.net/2017/01/30/google-quietly-makes-optiona.html)
[2] [https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/05/14/drm-and-the-
challen...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/05/14/drm-and-the-challenge-of-
serving-users/)

~~~
milcron
Not to mention AMP on every news site, and Google Analytics on nearly every
page.

------
lev99
Google doesn't have any significant control over the web. Google wins big in
two categories. Search and Ad Revenue.

Google Search processes 2/3-3/4 of all searches, with declining market share.
Search is held hostage by user's expectations, if the quality of search were
to decline users would leave.

AdSense is in a commanding position, but it is under attack from a lot of
different directions. Facebook gives more targeted ads. Snap allows more
qualified ads. Apple is revamping it's ad system.

Google is in a strong position, but this isn't a case of them gaining more
control, and their power is defiantly under check by other interests.

~~~
cpeterso
Google has significant control of how people access the web with web browsers
(Chrome), email (Gmail), video (YouTube), user authentication, and mobile
operating systems (Android and ChromeOS).

------
RIMR
Okay, I'm not even going to finish reading this drivel...

Using the closure of Google Reader as an example of how Google could "turn off
huge parts of web" is ridiculous.

Google reader was just a web-based RSS reader. Its user base was dwindling
because RSS was falling out of fashion. Google alerted users well ahead of
time of the closure, and gave users ample opportunity to move their
subscriptions to another RSS aggregator.

Closing their own service is not a big deal. It's wasn't the first service
Google has shuttered, nor will it be the last. Every company does this to
services that no longer benefit the company.

No data was removed from the web.

No functionality was destroyed.

The Google Reader source code was made available to the public.

Competing services were champing at the bit to replace Google Reader (and
didn't succeed, because hardly anyone uses RSS anymore).

It seems like Dave Winner suffers from a lack of understanding of how the web
works, and an irrational distrust of large corporations.

~~~
ajross
Yeah. I think a lot of people tend to scapegoat Google for the death of openly
indexed content, when all they really did was jump ship well after it was
clearly dying. I mean, it's true that Google Reader was a better product than
the competition, and being free it probably did "suppress" the market for paid
readers, leaving an impoverished landscape when they exited. But if RSS was a
vibrant technology, would they have killed it? No, they'd have tried to
exploit it somehow. But it was going nowhere.

Frankly, if you want to point a finger for the death of RSS, blame Facebook
and Twitter.

------
donatj
I find this guys fears potentially coming from a place of fundamental
misunderstanding.

Personally I far more fear Amazon's literal control of the web and the
monoculture they've created. For us personally moving off of AWS would be a
_nightmare_.

~~~
dsr_
Perhaps you should be making plans to be multiplatformable _now_?

------
cautionarytale
Remember, _power corrupts_. If you're not worried about Google's power, you're
probably not paying attention.

------
tw1010
RSS didn't die because of Google. Other services took over once Google Reader
shut down. The same will happen when Google cuts off other arms of the
octopus.

------
swframe2
Slightly off-topic...

From The China Hustle, Dirty Money, and The Big Short, it is clear people are
putting a lot of trust in the "free market" across the board. Society seems
convinced that abusive behavior is acceptable collateral damage required for
"free markets" to work; that accepting white collar crime is better than
regulating a big company; giving a $1B fine to a company that made $40B in
profits is punishment enough to keep companies honest. It is not clear there
is a better way...

------
fjabre
You should fear ATT & Verizon much much more.

------
randop
All for-profit organizations employ "Boiling frog" [1] strategy depending upon
the market, consumers, and as their product goes through evolution. Whether
the end-goal of it is for good or not, it's hard to judge.

The fear of change expressed on this article is natural. Enforcing HTTPS is
good for consumers. But, we need to watch carefully with the market dominance
of Google Chrome.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog)

------
yesiamyourdad
I read through the comments on here and was reminded of Tim Bray's commentary
from almost 15 years ago:

[https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePl...](https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePlace)

"To mangle three metaphors, if you drink that kool-aid, you’re either locked
in the trunk like Dave Winer says or if you like my metaphor-ware better,
you’re a sharecropper. Either way, it sucks."

------
msiyer
The pursuit of profit kills society. All our social suffering exists because
we have been trying to merge two incompatible ideas. We expect our lawyers,
doctors, technocrats, politicians... to do the right thing. However, the right
thing is almost always detrimental to profits. Profit always trumps "right
thing".

------
JoshMnem
The post should also mention AMP (E.E.E. for HTML) and Material Design
animations (which appear to be applied to sites during rendering in Chrome,
even when the sites don't use Material Design).

~~~
itchynosedev
> Material Design animations (which appear to be applied to sites during
> rendering in Chrome, even when the sites don't use Material Design)

Can you support this claim with examples?

------
staunch
_" The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through
your fingers."_

Google is headed for a total crash on its current trajectory. Almost the
entire business is built on an anti-user model. At some point there will be a
reckoning. Their end will be triggered by technology trend that they will be
unable to compete with.

The solution to fixing Google is funding more startups with ideas on how to
take them out. Google's weapon here is keeping tens of thousands of good
technology people locked up with golden hand cuffs. That and strangling
startups in their cradle.

Microsoft's broken model got destroyed and so will Google's. It takes a long
time for these slow motion train wrecks to play out.

------
JasonFruit
Dave Winer's writing is concise and simple. Somehow, he doesn't sacrifice
beauty to achieve that.

------
8bitsrule
_But next year 's roadmap from Google will make the web more like AOL...._

And that's saying a mouthful.

------
mudil
As a small publisher since 2004, every day for 14 years, I am sick and tired
of Google's serfdom. Their monopoly on ads, their Panda updates, etc etc, do
not respect anyone else, but Google's interests. They will make internet into
a strip mall like entity with the same boring list of players, the monotonous
list of websites, all for their own profit and monopoly.

Internet is supposed to be about the content, ideas, journalism, etc. But
there is virtually no VC investment in the content. Nothing. That is scary,
and Google is single handedly responsible for it.

~~~
ucaetano
> But there is virtually no VC investment in the content. Nothing

Have you stopped to consider that content is a nearly-worthless commodity for
which very few people are willing to pay actual cash for?

~~~
mudil
No, it's not. Content makes billions and trillions, and has always done it.
From print to theater to radio to movies, since Gutenberg and Shakespeare and
first newspapers, content been generating the revenue.

~~~
ucaetano
Then I'm sure you'll have no problem finding people willing to pay to
subscribe to your content.

Take a look at the finances of content providers over the past 20 years. How
many publishers, newspapers, studios, etc. shut down? Why do you think that
is?

~~~
mudil
How about, for starters, that Google and FB control 85% of the ad market, with
the rest going to everyone else.

Also, I run a website for doctors. Google learns that my visitor is a doctor,
and next time displays a doctor related ad on Candy Crush, when she is playing
the game. So by invading her privacy, Google makes money and my website
literally competes against Candy Crush for the ad revenue.

~~~
ucaetano
None of that solves for the fact that your readers aren't willing to pay
anything to read your content.

You can remove Google and Facebook, replace by anyone else, or eliminate it
entirely. It still won't solve the problem: nobody wants to pay for your
content.

Maybe the problem is in your content...

~~~
BRAlNlAC
maybe the problem is that google allows the quick indexing of all content
produced on the web, including pirated content, and then uses a very opaque
algorithm to guide users to sites. This has the externality of making ad-
funded content easily available. Not very many people are going to pay for
something when you can get the exact same thing for free somewhere else, and
in a global marketplace it makes sense for someone to plagiarize paid content
and reproduce it for ad-revenue alone. $20/day won't support me in California,
but in India?

Removing Google and Facebook changes the game entirely. They have such a
strangle hold on the way the internet operates financially--by utilizing their
deep integration with users' usage of the web to feed them highly targeted ads
--that alternate usage models can't compete.

~~~
ucaetano
> Not very many people are going to pay for something when you can get the
> exact same thing for free somewhere else, and in a global marketplace it
> makes sense for someone to plagiarize paid content and reproduce it for ad-
> revenue alone. $20/day won't support me in California, but in India?

Exactly, content became a near-worthless commodity.

> Removing Google and Facebook changes the game entirely.

No, it doesn't.

But it seems that what you're suggesting is that ad-funded business models
should be outlawed, is that it?

~~~
mudil
You have no idea about the content, but you think you do. Somehow, current
deals for Warner Bros and 20th Century Fox are in the billions. And so is
value of News Corp, CBS, AIC and so on. Why do you think you can proclaim the
near worthlessness of the content or that people don't want my content?
Because you are an opinionated nobody? What do you know?

~~~
ucaetano
I'm not proclaiming anything in particular about your content, but you don't
seem to be able to fund anyone willing to pay for it.

------
bronlund
I'm a bit tired of the fear that Google or Facebook or whatever will ruin the
internet when the solution is so simple.

Just stop clicking on the freaking ads already!

~~~
codingowl
Like most IT guys, I block _everything_ possible: cookies (whitelist), CSS
history, ads, beacons, tracking of all sorts, http/s referrer, webrtc, browser
fingerprinting, DNS prefetch, and much more, passing all of this through a
personally-controlled remote non-US VPN that logs absolutely nothing. Ads?
What ads?

I pass all traffic through this, including mobile devices, so protection even
when away from home. Is it 100% foolproof? No. But I have yet to have issues,
and Google and others have zero profiles on me, as I have no accounts with
them or Facebook, et al. It's nice to be able to be relatively off-the-grid
while still taking advantage of what the Internet has to offer.

------
dnomad
It's a bit remarkable how quickly this sort conspiratorial thinking feeds on
itself. The victim constructs a paranoid fantasy where a single company can
"turn off huge parts" of the web. This is silly in itself but what's
interesting is how the fantasy completely diverges from reality. Here the
simple reality is Google single-handedly saved the web by introducing a
browser, Chrome, that actually implemented web standards faithfully and made
the web performant. And this is just one contribution: on the whole, including
everything from web fonts to HTTP/2 to Android's support for the web... and
it's clear that no other single entity has done more for the web than Google.
But note the dynamic where the truth reinforces the paranoid fantasy. Every
single contribution now becomes just more proof that Google controls the web
and will shut it down!

------
bitmapbrother
My favorites are the ones that never knew Google Reader existed, but use it as
a martyr every chance they get.

>My fear is this -- once Google has control of the web, they can turn off huge
parts of it for whatever reason, however thoughtless, and without disclosing
why.

This person has either been watching too many movies that depict the web as a
place where IP's can be traced by writing Visual Basic GUI's or doesn't
understand how the Internet works.

~~~
matwood
For many people the web is google. If google drops a site out of search it is
effectively turned off for many people.

Another point that he has been harping on is that lots of sites do not need
https, but Chrome will shortly warn on visiting those sites. It stands to
reason some future version of Chrome will block those sites outright. There
are parts of the internet that could disappear when that happens.

You may not necessarily agree with his doomsday scenarios, but I assure you
Dave Winer[1] understands how the internet works.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Winer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Winer)

~~~
filleduchaos
There is no site I know of - or to be more accurate, there is no user of an
internet application I know of - that does not need transport-layer security.

~~~
jessaustin
I don't need it when I'm reading sports stories, when I'm researching a
technical topic of interest, or when I'm reading out-of-copyright literature.
If someone else does need it when doing the exact same things, that's fine,
but my unsecured reading does not impose a cost on them.

~~~
filleduchaos
Correction - you _think_ you don't need it when you're reading those things,
which indicates a serious misunderstanding of HTTPS' problem domain.

Unless what you're trying to say is that you're totally fine with third
parties (governments, ISPs, the person whose WiFi you're connected to, some
random script kiddie):

\- snooping on your browsing habits (you can intercept and read off an entire
HTTP request plain as day, including headers such as User-Agent strings, the
specific URL that's being visited, etc, allowing you to build a profile
of/digitally fingerprint the unsuspecting user; these are encrypted in an
HTTPS request)

\- maliciously handling your requests, returning whatever response they please
instead of forwarding it to the intended remote, allowing them to not just
censor the content but straight-up lie to you without your knowledge

\- tampering with responses - injecting a cryptominer, tracker, script that
adds your computer to a botnet or other malicious/non-benevolent script into
the response before it reaches you or even just fucking around with the CSS or
throwing in porn for the lulz

~~~
jessaustin
Why do I trust the host at the far end of the connection more than those in
the middle? In fact HTTPS has done little to prevent any of the things you
mention, especially through e.g. ad networks.

I wouldn't mind if they were to "throw in some porn for the lulz", but that
has never happened for me...

The point is that for this sort of web use, my brain is already turned on, and
there's nothing at risk. If someone rewrites a page to mislead me, I'll notice
eventually, whether that someone is running a TLS site or MitMing a non-TLS
site.

ps. your first sentence is pretty obnoxious; there's no need to personalize
this.

------
craftoman
Google is just another big corporation with many shareholders from all over
the world. They can't control or predict what's upcoming cause technology is
shaping rapidly. I've seen companies go bankrupt because of this type of
stagnation but I think the major problem of Google is that they dangerously
centralizing everything (including open source) and they had privacy concerns
in the past so yeah. In terms of innovation, stability, performance, or
security I really trust them BUT in terms of privacy, spying and how they
handle big data or how they shaping internet I think they will always suck.
IMHO if not Google then X would actually have exactly the same plan.

~~~
clarry
> In terms of innovation, stability, performance, or security I really trust
> them

Just wait till their automated algorithm suddenly (and mistakenly) blocks your
account for "suspicious activity." (I've been there)

Maybe there is something "innovative" to using such algorithms but I'm not
sure it's all good. What's bad though: stability, for you as a user.

