I'd rather ignore some ads which are less intrusive than places like Amazon than pay a subscription fee to use search, gmail and docs which are funded by ads.
There are other options. For example, funding a publicly-owned search engine with $1 billion a year in infrastructure and development costs would be 50x cheaper than what the US spends on foodstamps. It'd be 1/10th the NSF's annual budget.
Not that that's the best option, but we could consider some new ideas.
A publicly owned search engine, that will absolutely not be used for propaganda purposes by, say, the Department of State, or by a megalomaniac elected representative.
Need to build consent for a war with <Country>? Give me access to the search index, and a few weeks, and it'll be done.
Lol if you think that isn't happening right now. Google made a change to its algorithms sometime in the past 5 years to surface "authoritative" sources, meaning sources that toe the state department line. For example, the World Socialist Web Site, which has a consistent anti-war line reported being demoted.
"Google blocked every one of the WSWS’s 45 top search terms" (8/2017)
"In a statement before a Senate hearing on October 28, Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet, admitted that the dominant online search company has censored the World Socialist Web Site.
At the Senate Commerce Committee hearing, when asked by Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah to provide the name of one left-wing “high profile person or entity” that has been censored by Google, Pichai named the WSWS."
"Google refines its search results to curb fake news" (4/2017)
(the comments below this article are funny because it's full of liberal-aligned comments on the disproven Trump-Russia conspiracy theory that is still given life in mainstream outlets)
Sure, but there are no shortage of top level generals and intelligence people that identify with Democrat agenda, now that democrats finally gave up on things like freedom of speech, privacy, individual liberty and such.
I didn't say it was the best option. But wow, you just trust a billion lines of closed source written to satisfy ad optimization criteria with zero transparency? I mean, we can subject things to public oversight.
> But wow, you just trust a billion lines of closed source written to satisfy ad optimization criteria with zero transparency?
I trust that a multi-national serving multiple markets is going to give me less nationally biased information than the government of a superpower (with political ambitions that span the globe.)
It's why I generally don't turn to the Voice of America for news.
You think Google search doesn't adjust its search results based on your geography? It absolutely does, and that's just one of hundreds of inputs into its completely inscrutable machine-learning driven tangle of a ranking algorithm. Your trust is very badly misplaced if you think that Google can't be/isn't already corrupted by the corrupt governments it must deal with to do daily business.
A government owned search engine is 100% bad idea, it will cost a ton, it will cost more than equivalent business developed one, it will be abused by governments and law enforcement, your traffic will be combined with government data to make a last century dictatorship police state weep for joy
be a money maker for people you very much don’t admire
most of all there is no public value for it when the government can legislate operators
